The final countdown

After nearly three years living here, loving here, I can feel my egg timer ticking now, starting a few weeks back.

The things that I adore about Mexico City still exist in all their full-throated glory - the mooing gas vendors, the street vendors, the colour, the chaos, the life - yet slowly slowly all that good stuff is getting swallowed up in the bad stuff - the perilous bolt through speeding traffic that ignores red lights and pedestrians, the air pollution that is leaving me permanently sinus congested and/or infected, and, more than anything, the dripping, heaving, ridiculous, stupid, horrific and off-putting machismo that permeates everything.

My friend Lance, visiting Mexico City in November, posed the same question to all my friends: if you could change two things about your country, what would they be? The men's answers varied, but the women all shot back the same #1, without having to think: machismo.

I agreed at the time, although I picked my two things to change about Mexico as the labour culture (in which workers feel disempowered and obligated to work 12+ hours a day for birdseed because at least they have a job and they should feel lucky, damn it) and the pollution. (Regarding Canada, I picked our hesitance to have a strong opinion about anything and our rampant inferiority complex.)

That's all changing now. Now, as the morale at my office goes into a ruthless nosedive due to fear of layoffs causing a great fight to push others down to be the top of the pile of crap, I grow everyday more sensitive to the claws-out ruthlessness of a macho society.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, my office is one in which women are openly relegated to subservient, low-power positions purely on the basis of gender. I have been told that I will never be promoted because I'm "delicate" and because "you need a penis to be a consultant." I have raged against this message, tried diplomacy, tried calm commitment to the now in the hopes that the male managers will see potential for more - nothing. Still delicate, still without that all-important organ.

Meanwhile, the manchildren I work with (which is a group of them, not everyone in the office) continue to lumber in late, unshaven, sometimes olfactorily and visibly still drunk and/or stoned from the night before, and they continue to talk shit about management to clients and take three hour lunches and watch YouTube all day, and STILL they are the chosen ones while the female lawyer goes into her seventh year as a secretary and I listen to my Masters degree cry while I clean up the client database for the seven-hundredth time.

(Ironically, one of my professors from university used to call me out all the time for being a tool of the patriarchy for wearing skirts, for having my dad be the Dean, for not rallying in anti-male sisterhood against the oppression. It wasn't that I didn't believe it existed, it was that, having been raised by a father who is horrified by the idea that women could be considered inferior, I just never felt particularly held back by my gender. Sorry Dr. K, I hear you know. I was just extremely lucky in that it took me 32 years to get there.)

And then let's look briefly at my woeful attempts to date - my GOD! There was the guy who, after a reasonably good first date, called me to tell me that he'd been thinking about my past experiences with men (of which he knew nothing about, incidentally) and he was okay with them. There was the guy who tried to look between my legs to see if I was... erm... ready for it, yet apparently so ready for it that it would be visible whilst still fully clothed. The last date, and by "last" I mean both most recent and final, no more, done, who, fifteen minutes into the conversation, began detailing his porn expertise. There was the... do I need to go on? It's humourous stuff, I suppose, now that the moment has passed. Perhaps its value lies there.

Lance theorized that this performance of hypersexuality has to do with these poor little boys feeling intimidated by the vast experience and slutitude of this redheaded guera, and they attempt to make up the difference by posing and posturing as the great lovestuds they see themselves to be. I have not gotten past the second date with any of them, the vast majority of the time because, while I admit I'm far more openly liberal than most Mexican women, the fastest way to make sure I won't ever go home with you is to assume I will.

And, in my hypersensitive state, I am starting to resist that same aggression in all its manifestations. Now, in the mornings, when I am almost always nearly plowed down by a taxi while crossing an intersection with a walk light and a traffic cop, I will stand in the middle of the street and howl obscenities at the passing car. Now when a guy makes kissy noises at me, I have the fight the rabid urge to punch him. Now when one of the manchildren launches into his idiotic boy laughter - huh huh huh huh! - I seethe so much on the inside that I wonder sometimes how it is that my chest hasn't exploded yet from the pressure. Now when a beloved, smart, strong female friend says to me that she just isn't complete without a man, any man, even a man who doesn't deserve her, I react so un-friend-like that she and I end up having to have the "are we cool?" conversation weeks later.

I am tired, so so so very tired, of this ridiculous overcompensation for... what?... If Octavio Paz is to be believed, it's overcompensation for a permeating sense of powerlessness and shame. And I guess that, coming in as a Canadian, both sentiments are quite foreign to me on a cultural level, so I can't and I don't understand why these incredible people don't just say(warning: cultural arrogance ahead), you know what? this sucks, let's change it. (She writes, while acknowledging the irony of a Canadian advising another country to be proactive...)

Mexico has taught me so many important lessons and my love for the city and for the country has not dimmed. I'm just... Yeah. I'm tired.

Tick tick tick tick...