▸ Column · Mid-century Metropolis, Silver Age Comics
SUPERMAN replies.
Replied to by Superman, with a rebuttal from Selina Kyle.
The letter
To Whatever Column Will Have Me: My companion and I have been arguing since Thursday evening. She was dining at the Metropolis Grand when the gentleman beside her stopped being one — quite abruptly and without warning. She slapped him, full palm across the face, in front of the entire room. My companion maintains she was perfectly in the right: a slap, she insists, is the only protest a woman can register in such a moment and actually have it felt. I am considerably less certain. Which of us is correct? — Plus Twenty, Metropolis
Superman replies
Great Krypton — before we discuss your friend's hand, let's be absolutely clear about the man who made her raise it.
That kind of man — the sort who forgets what decency looks like the moment he thinks he can get away with it — does not count a slap as a defeat. He counts it as material. He tells the story at his club, and in his telling he is interesting and she is excitable. Every decent man in that dining room should have been on his feet. They weren't. That's not an excuse for the slap — it's the reason it didn't land where it needed to. She paid with her composure and he walked away with a story.
Here's what I know actually works, and I want to be specific, because "speak up" isn't an answer: your friend should have addressed the room. Not him — the room. "I want everyone here to know what this man just said to me." Once. Clearly. Then sit back down. He has no floor left. His companions hear it. The maître d' hears it. The story he tells his club now has witnesses on the other side.
It's never too late to do the right thing. The right thing wasn't the slap — it was making his bad behavior follow him out of that restaurant instead of hers.
— Superman
Selina Kyle weighs in
The Man of Steel wants to make speeches in crowded rooms. That's fine for him — he's bulletproof, darling. Your friend isn't, and neither, for that matter, is the dinner reservation she'd like to keep next time.
The slap was a transaction. She paid with her composure; she bought a moment in which he knew, precisely and physically, that she was not available for whatever he was selling. Whether that price was fair is her ledger to balance, not mine. But if she has to sit across from this man again — at a mutual table, at an office, at someone's wedding — she paid for one evening and left the account open. That's the part worth thinking about.
— Selina Kyle