A woman who recently started taking the ferry to work says she’s now dreading the possibility of running into an employee after an innocent conversation took an awkward turn.
Mylee Bartz (@mylee_bartz) recounts an encounter that happened several weeks earlier, when she decided to commute by ferry instead of driving. Her video has gotten more than 45,000 views.
The ferry ride
Bartz explains how it was her first time taking the ferry. With nothing else to do, she began “walking around aimlessly” out of boredom.
At one point, she says she “had walked to the back to see if there [were] any dolphins in the wake,” noting that the other passengers seemed to be families and couples. That’s when she noticed a ferry employee watching her.
She says, “He was sitting down on his phone, kind of looking at what I was doing.”
She tells her audience that as she was walking around, he struck up a conversation. He asked her if she was “trying to get her steps in.” She explained she had been trying to spot dolphins. He replied, “Yeah, we see dolphins all the time.”
Bartz says the man was around 40 or 45 years old and that the two had spent “probably 15 minutes or so” discussing their jobs.
She explains that due to her job, she makes “conversation with strangers all the time.” But the man interpreted their conversation differently, and eventually asked if she wanted to “continue this conversation.” He suggested they exchange numbers. Bartz says she panicked.
“I did not want to,” she says. “One, I was just not interested. But also, he’s, like, 20 years older than me.” She says she blurted out the first question that came to mind: “How old are you?” Bartz explains that she immediately regretted it, calling it “so evil of me.”
“Like, why did I say that?” she asks. “I just panicked.”
The conversation continues
She lied and told the man her age was 21, hoping to underline their age gap, and then proceeded to make their interaction even more awkward by giving increasingly unnecessary and self-flagellating explanations for why he wouldn’t want to date her.
“I was like, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Like, I’m kind of a mess. … You probably don’t want to talk to me. Like, I’m. I’m just not someone that you want to talk to,” she recalls saying to him.
The man responded, “Okay.” But Bartz kept going. “I made it so awkward,” she says, explaining how she tried to revive their small talk by telling him, “I’ll probably see you again. Like, I think I’m gonna continue doing this.” Again, the man just replied, “Okay.”
Thankfully, the ferry reached its destination, and Bartz was free to leave.
‘Maybe he quit his job’
Looking back, the content creator says she wishes she’d simply told the man she had a boyfriend. But then, she says, that would imply that she shouldn’t chat with men who are strangers.
“If I did have a boyfriend, it would have been fine for me talking to him like that,” she says. “We’re both working, you know, like, it was just small talk.”
Now her convenient new commute is riddled with another layer of anxiety. “Now I’m taking the ferry, and every time I take it, I’m afraid that I’m gonna see him,” Bartz says, adding that she hasn’t yet and joking that “maybe he quit his job.”
Why do women feel the need to be super polite?
One aspect of Bartz’s story that might resonate with most women is her concern with hurting the man’s feelings, even though she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in him.
Social theories posit that women are socialized and taught to be polite from a young age. Robin Lakoff, an early linguist pioneer, published the study Language and Woman’s Place in 1973. In it, she claimed that “women employ a distinct style of speech, ‘women’s language’, which comprises linguistic features that demonstrate and reinforce women’s inferior position in society.”
Included in her labeling of “women’s language” are speech patterns such as hedges and qualifiers (like Bartz saying “you probably don’t want to talk to me”), tag questions (adding a question to the end of a statement), and superpoliteness. Bartz employed some of these strategies as she tried to move the conversation back to small talk.
According to Lakoff, these speech patterns “contribute to the oppression of the ‘woman’s personal identity.’” Lakoff’s core theory is that “women’s language” helps them navigate an inferior position in a male-dominated society.
If women are viewed as “rude,” they “open themselves to a wellspring of social discord, dissention, and antagonism.” In some situations, hostility can escalate to violence.
Is violence against women common?
Researcher Sylvia Burrow notes, “Violence against women is an inevitable consequence” of the power differences between the genders “because it serves essentially as a means of demonstrating power over women.”
As she points out, the World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed violence against women a “major public health and gender equality problem,” noting that about 1 in every 3 women in the world have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime.
Bartz’s impulse to smooth over her interaction with the man can be described as “fawning,” a trauma response which RAINN describes as “appeasing or placating the threat to reduce harm,” which can include “laughing, complying, or trying to ‘keep the peace.’”
Obviously there’s nothing about her account that establishes what she was experiencing was a trauma response, but every woman who has been in an uncomfortable situation with a strange man can probably relate to her reaction.
‘You don’t owe him anything’
Viewers of the TikTok chimed in with advice for Bartz, with some pointing out that at least the man was nonthreatening.
One commenter wrote, “Sounds like he was respectful and was ok with the no. Don’t worry about feeling bad, he probably gets it. And it’s totally fine to just say no thank you.”
A self-identified “older guy with a younger wife” recommended saying, “‘Oh, it was nice talking to you, but I’m really not interested like that.'”
But others reassured her that she had nothing to worry about and should stop stressing about having to see him again.
“You don’t owe him anything, and he should not put you in that position,” wrote one viewer.
Another added, “Men like that need to hear it. They think they’re attractive to younger women and dog out women their own age. They’re delusional.”
Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with a person shooting their shot, or with politely declining when they do.
@mylee_bartz
Subplot News reached out to Bartz via TikTok direct message.
