She’ll Never Hear You

When I was a boy walking home from school or baseball practice, my first question at the door never changed.

“How is he?”

“What kind of mood is he in?”

Before anyone answered I was already reading the house. A shard of a plate nobody had swept up. The screen door hanging a little crooked from the last slam. The bedroom door shut with All in the Family TV show turned up loud. My father was sober by then. He was also a man who used words the way other men use their hands, and a kid in that house learned to hear what was coming in the first sentence.

Sarcasm was the family dialect. We used humor to wound each other and to avoid whatever needed saying. My brother and I could do our father’s tirades word for word, and we replayed them in our room until we cried laughing. I don’t come to comedy as a prude. I love stand-up. In New in Town, John Mulaney says having a girlfriend is like having a lawyer for everyday life. She notices the food should have come an hour ago and that the bus driver shouldn’t talk to him that way, and he realizes he never had a standard for how he should be treated. The joke lands on him, and the woman in it is the one with standards.

On October 10, Shane Gillis hosted Saturday Night Live for the third time since the show fired him in 2019. In the monologue he said he had been away from the gym so long he “didn’t know women just dress like whores now.” The studio groaned. Later that night the show ran a sketch selling a sneaker. Gillis delivered the pitch: “She’ll never hear you, and she’ll never catch you, thanks to sneakers.” A cast member cut in. They weren’t calling them sneakers. It was a creepy name.

When I brought the monologue up with other men, I got a shrug and a “Well, that’s just comedy.” We went back and forth for a while about where a joke ends and a permission begins. I knew the shrug. I had heard it from my father.

Years ago, my daughter came home from an afternoon at my parents’ house and announced she didn’t like Grandpa. He had been teasing her that she wasn’t number one. Her older brother was. He had done the same to my nieces and nephew. “He is my favorite,” he would say of my nephew, out loud, in front of everyone. When I told my father to stop, he waved me off. “I was just joking around,” he said. “You’re so sensitive. You’re going to raise a bunch of wimps.” On the next visit he did it again, and we stopped hosting holiday dinners for two years. When we started again, the table was different. Dad had learned something. It took a closed door to teach it.

My daughter is in college now and stands five feet tall. A young man she had known for two years, someone she passed on campus here and there, began asking to see her late at night and alone, and he made it clear what he assumed would happen when she did. She told him she didn’t move that fast and that school came first. He answered with an assessment of her psychology and a forecast. A woman with her standards would be alone for the rest of her life. She put him in his place. My wife and I had sharpened that stick for years, and she first used it on her grandfather.

A sharp answer can end a conversation. It does less for the walk home. When she heads back from campus, on foot or on her scooter, she calls and keeps one of us on the line. She thinks about whether she will run into him, and whether a man who took a no and responded with a diagnosis is the kind who would meet it some other way, with her or with anyone else on that campus, in a country where students now learn lockdown procedure alongside the syllabus. She doesn’t know. Nobody can tell her.

Most of the advice on this subject has been addressed to her. What to wear, where to park, when to leave, who to text when she gets there. Gillis’s gym bit was the oldest version of that advice, played for a laugh: what a woman wears explains what a man thinks he is entitled to say about her or even do to her. The young man on campus didn’t need to see Saturday’s episode. He already had the script, with her standards in place of her shorts. The name for the culture that writes that script and hands it down is rape culture. It’s the phrase I used in conversation. They shrugged anyway, the way my father once waved me off, and I am still waiting to see whether it will take as long for them to hear it.

In my father’s house it was the women who did the scanning. My mother kept the meals on time and the shirts ironed while the dishes flew, and I learned to read a room by watching her. My father changed only after someone in his own house stopped laughing along.