Today’s column
… is online here. I’m dealing with two hyper-controversial issues–one somewhat exotic and one mundane–this Sunday:
1. Polyamory, and
2. Toddlers in fancy restaurants.
Which topic do you think I’ll get the most response on? And do you think the angriest letters will come from:
A. Sexual conservatives
B. Polyamorists
C. Parents
D. Non-parents
ON ANOTHER NOTE: Loving your responses to my post about rudeness and powerlessness. Yes, you are right, I was only looking at one side of the issue, and more or less deliberately so. I didn’t mean that lack of balance to imply that I think the rudeness (and cruelty, and abuse) of the powerful does not exist or is exaggerated. The post was intended more as an evocation of a feeling than a full social analysis. Will write more later about this — but, seriously, you guys are the best. Great stuff.
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6 Responses to “Today’s column”
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I vote a tie bw sexual conservatives and non-parents. Part of me thinks that non-parents will slightly win because sexual conservatives don’t want to think about sex let alone write about it. At least the ones that I know, but those are usually because of Catholic guilt.
However non-parents are willing to scream from the mountains about their non-parenthood (whether by choice, circumstance, or the fact it hasn’t happened yet).
I think you’re going to get the most letters from C., parents. “How dare you imply that just because I chose to have children I should sequester myself in my house” kinds of things.
(My parents fondly tell of going out to a favorite restaurant when I was very small, and how the waiter would whisk me away into the kitchen at the beginning of the meal, where I would be coddled by the kitchen staff, and then returned with the check. Nice solution for everyone! They got a nice meal together, and the kitchen staff got a fun distraction. But then, I was a very phlegmatic kid.)
A and B seem to be winning, but it’s still early. :)
@GG99, free babysitting! Really nice, and a bizarre (to me, anyway) blurring of the boundaries between customer and vendor.
My mom tells a story similar to that of GG99′s — when I was a wee mite, my parents liked to go to a French restaurant where children were not frequent diners (this was the early 60s).
The maitre d’ couldn’t produce a booster seat, so instead wrapped two phone books in a linen napkin and sat me on that. He also told my parents that if I was naughty, they’d have to remove me. Apparently, I was so good that at the end of the evening the maitre told my parents to bring me back any time. (My dad was a Naval officer and my mom was a teacher. It would never have occurred to them that I should be allowed to misbehave in public.)
I think either parents or non-parents will win this one.
I think your answer to the toddler question was spot-on, and nicely avoided pillorying either the annoyed diner or the mother. It seems to me that no one was wrong here (well, decamping to the bar and being pissed off about it was not maybe the best course of action, but it wasn’t wrong), though of course it’s fun to project according to your biases and imagine a lousy parent ignoring bad behavior, or an uptight childless yuppie with no heart.
A squealing child of 2 or under may just be having a good time, and simply too young to understand requests to modify volume (we only have the diner’s estimate as to age; the child may have been significantly younger). The diner was well within her rights to want to move, and ought to have asked for another table, but that doesn’t make the mother and toddler wrong for dining out and being, well, a small child.
It’s unfortunate that these situations always seem to inspire blaming and shaming, and grim insistence on binary opposition.