Let's talk gender coding for a minute

[valarltd]

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So, while I was gone I took Mudd's big down coat. So Mudd wore my Schneider Award Jacket. It's like a letter jacket, has years of service velcro'd to the sleeve, says "Schneider" and has a name patch. Mine is half-folded over. This is important.

I am 6'. Mudd is 6'2" and slouches to 5'10". I am much larger around than he is. My coat is a 3X and he was lost in it.

Anyway, while he was out, people would ask "Oh you drive?" He would answer "No, it's my partner's coat." They would then take in the size of it.

A few of them looked at it and then at him. They came to one of two conclusions: his wife is an amazonian trucker (true) or he's gay and his lover is a big guy (false). The latter tended to edge away as if the gay were contagious. Far more came to the gay conclusion.

He found it an interesting social experiement.

Comments

That's great!

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of a few things...

Some years back, I was parked behind a laundromat in our area where people were known for parking badly. We were backing out of a spot with someone illegally parked behind us and gently TOUCHED their bumper. bbwoof got out and checked, and I hadn't actually hit the car, therefore there was no damage. We left.

The people, who weren't in the car but in the laundromat at the time, called the cops on us. I got a ticket for leaving the scene of an accident. Woof and I went in and explained that there technically WAS no accident. He had recently completed a course at the St. Louis County Police Academy and knew that was, by law, the case. The cop in question screamed at me that I was lying, in part because she didn't believe that I could have been driving the car. At the time, my hair was shorter than it is now, and Woof's was shoulder length. The people in the laundromat reported a MAN driving and a female passenger. We explained that we suspected the witnesses had mistaken my short-haired self for a man, and the cop got even more snippy.

We had to go to court, and paid for a lawyer. The other parties tried to claim there was a lot of damage to their car, which supposedly had been whacked into a concrete pillar behind the laundromat. Our lawyer went there prepared to testify there WAS no such pillar, which he knew because he'd done his own laundry at the laundromat.

We arrived, and the cop didn't even show. The judge looked at the case, and ruled that the cop should be reprimanded for wasting the court's time, because there HAD BEEN NO ACCIDENT. The other parties looked very guilty when our lawyer pointed out the stuff about the pillar. They're really lucky nobody got them for insurance fraud. To this day, I don't know if the cop ever believed that we were telling the truth about the "man" in the driver's seat.

In another case--before we were married, Moosie and I always referred to one another as "my partner", which sometimes startled people of my seester's generation, who would discreetly ask her if I was gay.

He also used to have a little trouble at work at first. Some of his elderly male patients, not used to male nurses, were flummoxed by a male nurse with a discreet stud earring and a long braid. They used to interrogate him: "Are you married, sonny? Well, then, do you have a girlfriend? Oh, that's her picture? Well, she's very pretty. Yes, you can bandage my butt now." For some reason, five years on, they don't seem to be as bothered by him. Either male nurses are more common, or Moosie looks more butch, which is odd, because his hair is longer than ever.