I found a hideout cafe in Da Nang, the first one in, seeking refuge from the heat and the noise. The food was good. The silence was better.
Then the hive filled up. Western women, none of them a day over thirty, draped in loose cotton and yoga pants, branded with the Om symbol on their ankles, seeking enlightenment or maybe just cheap avocados.
I watched them. Not with the hungry eyes of a creeper— I am too old for that, I am a father, I am a grandfather to the world— I just watched the energy, the youth, the vibrant, impossible color of them.
Then the door opened. Another girl walked in. And the air in the room changed.
It wasn’t the men who looked. It was the sisters. The yoga tribe. They looked up from their lattes like construction workers on a lunch break, eyes drilling, scanning her up and down, assessing the meat, judging the fabric, weighing the soul against the bone structure.
It was raw. It was a silent, visual assault. The new girl felt it, her eyes went dead, the “fish glaze” stare, pretending she wasn’t walking through a gauntlet of knives.
Women are rough. I remembered them tearing Hillary to shreds, not for her policies but for her pantsuits, for the way her hair wouldn’t sit still.
And I laughed into my coffee. Because these are the same darlings who invented HR, who wrote the bible on DEI, who preach safety and kindness.
But if a man looked at them the way they looked at that girl, he’d be in handcuffs. He’d be accused of mental rape.
It made me realize the great cosmic joke of the modern age:
They don’t actually hate the “Male Gaze.” They just hate the competition. They want the monopoly on cruelty.
And watching that girl shrink into her seat, I thought, Christ, I’d rather be ignored by a man than “seen” by a woman who thinks she’s saving the world.
