▸ Column · Gotham, post-war through mid-century noir — white-tablecloth restaurants, heavy silverware, and the social codes of old money operating under new pressure
SELINA KYLE replies.
Replied to by Selina Kyle, with a rebuttal from Lex Luthor.
The letter
My friend slapped a man across the table at one of those Gotham establishments with the heavy silverware and the lighting that flatters nobody past forty. She holds that a slap across the face is the only reliable method available to a woman who needs a man to understand he isn't a gentleman, and she says she was entirely justified. Was she? — Still Counting Courses
Selina Kyle replies
The word "permissible" is doing a lot of work in this note. Permission from whom — some social arbiter who files the paperwork on what women may do with their own hands?
Here's what I'd think about instead. The slap is a scene. It costs the woman something: her composure, at minimum, and the story that gets retold isn't always the one she'd choose. The man who's earned it already knows he's earned it — she's not informing him. She's informing the room. Which may be exactly what the situation calls for.
The question I'd put to your friend is simpler: what did it buy, and did it settle the account? If he left, or blushed, or at minimum understood that a line had been named — fine. A fair price for what he cost her.
But "surest way for a lady to register a protest" is an older deal than that restaurant. A man who is no gentleman doesn't necessarily operate by the code that makes a slap legible to him. The gesture assumes he cares about being seen, and not every man does.
The surest way to register anything is to stop being somewhere you don't want to be. Your friend's hand is her own business. Her chair, though — that's the one thing she can always move.
— Selina Kyle
Lex Luthor weighs in
"Permissible." You're asking a columnist to adjudicate your friend's hand, which tells me rather more than the slap does. You're either embarrassed by her — in which case your discomfort is the subject, not her method — or you need someone to ratify it so you can file it away as approved behavior for future reference.
The man earned whatever he earned. Your friend settled it. What you're actually asking is whose it is to decide. It was always hers. You've spent too long waiting for a verdict on a case that closed the moment her hand moved.
— Lex Luthor