Weekend post-mortem, 1

Phew! Paper (or at least the draft required) is done. It was a pretty intense weekend of work, but I did manage to have a bit of fun as well. On Friday night, I rewarded a solid day of writing by going to the Akufen-Cabanne [LINK] back-to-back all-night-long mega-set at La Scène Bastille. It was actually a bit disappointing, although there were some high points to the set. What was memorable to the evening, however, was when a bouncer caught a girl trying to light up a joint on the dancefloor (not a good idea now that there’s no smoking in clubs). She was obviously already a big drunk/high, and her reaction to him grabbing her arm was to flail frantically, sending other people’s drinks crashing to the floor, and yell loudly, “Let me go! Let me go!!” What you didn’t hear unless you were standing closer to her was an additional phrase just as the bouncer finally secured both her arms: “I’ll suck you off.”

Really?? Does that work? And—to be ruthlessly pragmatic—if it might work, how likely is it now that you’ve started the negotiations in public?

The scene elicits a whole series of conflicting reactions in me. At first, incredulous laughter. It’s not like there’s no precedent for people trading sexual favours for other kinds of favours, but the business is usually conducted in the more indirect registers of flirting, innuendo, and knowing glances. At the same time, there’s something profoundly saddening about the fact that, as this woman saw the rest of her night evaporating before her, she reached for this as her next resort. But not her last resort. That’s what’s saddening: whatever her logic, she came to the conclusion that offering her mouth to the bouncer’s cock (and presumably his subsequent jizz) was the best of available options at that moment. And, like most bouncers in Paris, her interlocutor was black, and the intersection of racial sexual stereotypes and this (white) woman’s decision to offer sex as a bribe made the whole situation all the more fucked up.

So there ya go, my odd moment from the weekend. I’ve got another story from Sunday night, but I’ll save that for tomorrow’s post.