What Can I Get You?

Misogynistic media that's nothing like Andrew Tate

She’s trying to get him what he wants, in the exact way he wants it, and she is being polite. But in the next minute and fifteen seconds he manages to mock, mimic and publicly belittle her, comment on her age and economic status, curse at her, imply that she’s mindless, tell her how she needs to change, and show great satisfaction in making her upset – all right before he runs out the door so no one can really respond to his attack. She’s not good enough to get him coffee, failing in her one capacity as his barista. She is trapped in front of him by her role as server, and he uses that.

This clip (also posted at the bottom) did not go viral as a spoof on difficult customers or male chauvinist assholes, although it is part of a comedy series about an asshole. It has become popular on YouTube and TikTok as a fantasy rage-o-mercial for men who dislike a certain way of speaking they attribute to women and girls, and which they feel should be met with a disgust and degradation that they don’t have the guts to dish out in public themselves. In case there’s any question as to the gender-specific nature of this unacceptable accent, there’s only one other woman in the coffee shop (also blonde) and she commits the same talking crime. One could only enjoy watching the scene by identifying with the verbally abusive man, and his demeaning victory over the female barista.

A problem with the video (one of untold numbers of its type I will never see) is its Trojan Horse nature. The first and most obvious conceit it hides behind is humor. Some humor is to misogyny and all forms of punching-down what claims of personal safety are to automatic weapon ownership in the U.S. The automatic weapon of bigotry protrudes from humor’s flimsy trench coat like an obviously dangerous and outsized overreaction to the boundary-crossing of someone knocking on your door or entering your driveway by mistake. Hateful domination is the real point of the firearm, demeaning and silencing the real point of sexist “humor.” The man in the video isn’t funny, he’s verbally violent in reaction to no violence or threat at all.

I said above that this is degrading treatment that most men “don’t have the guts to dish out in public themselves.” If the Coffee-Rager, heroic accent-policeman can accost a complete stranger trying to service him in a brief public interaction, what does he do in private when his girlfriend/wife is late or disagrees with him on a political issue or allows the kids to interrupt him while he works? He has enough righteous anger over inane transgressions of what he considers normative (and his right not to endure them) to share it freely, and infect viewers of the video with the courage of their shared aggressive convictions.

I have faced the warriors hiding – and then inevitably emerging – from that hollow societal horse. In When Loves Hurts, a seminal work about domestic abuse, the authors review studies that show that what abusive men have most in common is the belief that they and their needs are “central, superior and deserving.” Coffee-Rager exudes that belief system- but it’s just a video, and just funny, and just “fact” (as the person who I saw posting it said in his comment). We wish a ribbing could just be a ribbing, even I do. But I was beaten, strangled and knocked unconscious by a husband who suppressed that kind of irrational anger in a coffee shop, and then exhaled it by yelling at me, demeaning me, making fun of me in the car, long before he ever assaulted me. This is a viral comedy skit about the behavior that predicts intimate partner violence.

I was told by my partner in my own living room that he might kill me (with a lot of proof of concept), based on the exact values enacted and disseminated by righteous Coffee-Rager, so bro-relateable. It will be deemed tasteless to share these details of my experience of domestic violence. They are not generally supposed to be described in detail; to do so is considered gauche and dramatic, but then to omit them would translate into “didn’t suffer real abuse,” so I can’t take a step without tripping over a trope. What is important to say is that I went through a few years of the verbal and psychological degradation poured on our barista before I was ever hit, much of it in the name of humor or “truth,” but because it is all so normalized in our society and media I didn’t know it was abuse. Many of us don’t.

Even if the abuse does not become assaultive, anyone who behaves like the man depicted in that video should raise a lot of red flags of misery for everyone. Assultive abuse is always accompanied and preceded by verbal and psychological stripping of the target. At least one in four women suffer from physical abuse by a partner in their lifetimes in the U.S., Europe and Australia, and of course the statistics elsewhere can get much worse. In my small home state of Maryland in the U.S., 58 people were killed by domestic violence in 2022 – almost all of them killed by men. We have more DV homicides here than the UK, for example, because we have more homicides in general; mostly because we have more guns. Gun ownership is culturally accepted in the U.S., mainstreamed and justified, just like the sexism in that video. If we believe that proliferation of gun ownership leads to unwarranted deaths (and not just handsome firearms locked away and disarmed in a home safe), we have to also believe that the proliferation of misogyny will lead to the harm of women and girls.

Which brings us back to the Trojan Horse, that which sneaks itself past known boundaries in order to destroy you from inside your fort - or your home. There is much more openly misogynistic material on the internet, a sea of it apparently. Coffee-Rager is not Andrew Tate. Since I came too close to being literally killed by misogyny I try to carefully edit it out of my life, but I love podcasts and enjoyed listening to one called Decoding the Gurus, by a pair of psychology academics named Christopher Kavanaugh and Matthew Browne. During a recent segment on Oprah Winfrey (whom I believe to be a guru par excellence), Browne completely sidetracked the conversation into a content-irrelevant criticism of the basic American accent of a young woman interviewing Oprah in a clip they played. He found it irritating for this young woman to be speaking in public at all. When I wrote to question this, I was told that it was humor – something that Browne does not signal at all in the episode, and rarely seems to aspire towards on the podcast in general. A couple of days later I saw the Coffe-Rager video smugly posted in the comments as a compliment to Browne’s accent-complaints, and Browne’s endorsement of the video with a laughing emoji. They have since been removed. Maybe you don’t understand or care about the lethality of a specific firearm until it’s been pointed at your own head.

We women sometimes laugh at/overlook/excuse sexist media of all types, including podcasts, in part because the vast majority of cultural space is male-dominated, controlled or generated, and we don’t want to be sidelined or left out of an interesting topic. That’s how we end up with the listening-and-watching-while-female whiplash that I experienced so unexpectedly through Decoding the Gurus. But the answer is not for me to become inured to casual misogyny.

My 17-year-old American daughter works part-time as a hostess in an upscale restaurant, and is sometimes brought to the point of tears by the cutting and dismissive remarks of patrons. I am glad she’s worked through high school, in part because I hope that it will inspire her to continue with her education and not have to spend her life in service jobs, or any job in which she feels demeaned. But the reality is that now they spit cruelties at her because she’s a teenage girl, when she’s in university they’ll disparage her for being and talking like a young woman (as Matt Browne did on his podcast), after college they’ll say she’s too old to sound so annoyingly female (as expressed by Coffee-Rager), by the time she graduates from that stage she’ll be a bitter middle-aged hag, to be dismissed because she’s past her physical prime (that would be yours truly). There will always be a reason she should shut up, and no economic way out of it except by buying privacy and high-end noise-canceling headphones.

Your use of your platform matters even if you’re not an edgelord like Andrew Tate – or Hitler, or Stalin – a point frequently made on Decoding the Gurus, but missing from the mirror of one of it’s hosts, and that of so many “smart” men, because the silencing of women is funny, fun and – everywhere.