I looked the two young men in Bryant Park in the eye and asked if they wanted to fight me.

I cannot say what I was thinking when I made this informational request; it crossed my lips unbidden, before I had a chance to even consider applying my already questionably functioning brain-to-mouth filter.

Maybe it was the heat. It was the summer after the first smoke clouds of northern wildfires had begun to regularly descend on New York City, and it was maybe the 20th straight day of over 90-degree heat with pitiless humidity. And in New York City, a low-90s temperature reading in Central Park can often translate in midtown concrete to an even 100F.

Maybe I had reached an age where I have, as they say, zero f@ucks left to give.

Maybe it was just poor timing, and these vapid little narcissists had happened upon me at exactly the moment I had had enough.

In any event, they tested my patience on the wrong day.

Once upon a time, it had been easy enough to get a seat on the lawn at Monday night movies in Bryant Park, where one could stretch out comfortably and enjoy the movie with a modicum of personal space. But the popularity had increased in recent years so much that blankets were often edge to edge, like a fireworks celebration on the esplanade in Boston on July 4th at 8pm. Not an inch of grass unclaimed, standing room only in the way back, there was nowhere to get away from someone annoying.

We were all trying to watch an old Audrey Hepburn story in peace, when the two European men with matching hipster beards broke into full-volume conversation. At first, one waits to see if they will get it out of their system and knock it off. When that does not pan out, one might make a subtle protest using the international language of incrementally escalated shushing. Undeterred, these oblivious or perhaps simply self-absorbed male audiences members continued their animated chit-chat, despite the fact that the sound does not reach a well towards the back, and people straining to hear were turning their heads to glare at our dynamic duo, hoping for a positive result, to no avail.

At this point, I decided it was time to intervene.

I turned and said in full volume, hoping to publicly shame them into compliance, “Could you please stop talking, or maybe just go somewhere else if you don’t care about watching the movie.”

They paused just long enough to look me up and down, and conclude I was a person not worth listening to, before returning to their conversation. I tried to discern whether their metrics of me were because I am a woman, a woman of a certain age, or not white-presenting. It is irritating to have to postulate at such things, because one rarely gets to know the real answer.

I made my guess, and persisted, “Everyone else around you is trying to listen, but you are making it very difficult with your loud voices,” gesturing to the people around us for emphasis.

There is certain breed of man who is consistently disrespectful around women, for one of two reasons. Either they behave badly in a certain kind of way when they want to f@ck a woman, or they behave badly in another kind of way because they do not want to f@ck said woman. In either case, fundamental courtesy and respect are not something such men consider to be in their personal manly job description.

Very ill with COVID and then long COVID a few years earlier, in tandem with the long approach to the end of my reproductive years, I had made a precipitous high-speed jump from landing as often in the latter category as in the former; I easily recognize the signs of both afflictions.

Some men can only perceive women with their lower brain stem filter, and their internal dialogue goes something like this: “If I conquer this woman and leave my seed, will it sprout, or no?” If yes, your value is to be used for such a man’s purposes. If not, you simply have no inherent value.

Having spent most of my life being teasingly told I have “childbearing hips,” while simultaneously exclusively producing miscarriages, while also harboring an intense internal dialogue of ambivalent misgivings about the damage pregnancy can inflict on a body, and the state of indentured servitude motherhood inflicts on the lives of many less-monied women, I find this variety of black-and-white cis-male thinking both pathetically ignorant and ironically naive. Yet, it persists.

These two self-congratulating conversationalists snickered at my request. Then they began to discuss loudly in their language what an uppity broad I was for expecting basic civility - which they maybe assumed I could not understand, but as I speak more than one language, they would be mistaken.

Perhaps it was their easy dismissal of me that brought the bile in my belly to the tip of my tongue. I could not prove in a court of law what was going on, but, as they say, I know their type.

“Ok. Do you want to fight me, then?” I queried in a conversational tone matching theirs, so that my companion to my other side continued to watch the movie and did not hear or notice.

It took a moment for them to process what I had said. I found it oddly satisfying to watch the ground under their feet shift ever-so-slightly. “What…?” one of them stammered. I felt emboldened. I locked eyes on the one closer to me.

“Do. You. Want. To. Fight. Me?”

The earth under them shuddered a bit more. I could see them trying to assess the level of this unexpected threat, as quickly as I was trying to assess the degree of danger my own behavior was potentially placing me in, while striving to keep my face impassive.

Them: “A woman, past her prime haha, a bit of gray in her hair, how strong could she be? Actually she does look like maybe she could be strong. Look at the muscles in her legs. And what if she is crazy? What kind of woman challenges two men to fight? Maybe she has a knife? Or worse? No, she can’t possibly, I mean, look at her. Or, could she?”

Me: “Two man-baby Euro-Millennials. Probably a lot of mouth and limited experience fighting.” Quick flashes of my own experiences with violence - A classroom fist-fight in the third grade with self-proclaimed tough guy and lover boy, Teddy Aransky; no memory of how it started, only a sensory recall of his fingers gripping my shirt to pull me closer so he could hit me repeatedly in the face, whispering taunts like a boxer in a clinch, no doubt appropriated from a merciless older brother’s abuse. Getting sucker-punched in the stomach by town bully Lisa Palmer (she had five older brothers) in the fourth grade at a friend’s birthday party. Years of brawls with my older sister that only ended when I grew large enough to defend myself and launch a respectable offense. A violent boyfriend in high school. Taking rounding backfists to the head from a higher belt with a habit of taking her personal jealousies out on weaker targets, when I was new at Tae Kwon Do. A partner many years later who surprised me with turning violent under pressure. Calculations of leverage: “They are skinny, and I doubt they know how fight well. I don’t think I could get a good punch in, but I bet I can wrestle either one to the ground and pin them. I doubt they have weapons, and there are so many people around, they wouldn’t dare.”

Yes, dear readers, that is really what passed through my middle-aged GenX mind.

One of them laughed nervously. “Do we want to fight you? Seriously?” He glanced at the other for help. If I had not been so angry I might have laughed too.

“Seriously,” I said, “Let’s go right now.” I made a move to get up, acting as nonchalant as possible, while simultaneously asking myself who was speaking the words coming out of my mouth. I had never formally challenged anyone to a fight in my life. Why them? Why now? I really did not want to drag my movie companion, who was still sitting in blissful ignorance, into a scuffle. But I just could not stop, and I did not want to, even if I could. Being a good girl had never once got me anywhere I wanted to be.

They started to match my movements and get up too, then caught themselves, thought better of it. I saw my opening and sought a route to diffuse the situation while maintaining the upper hand.

“Oh, ok, so you don’t want to fight, then? Does that mean you are planning to be quiet, now? If you don’t want to fight you then that means you will stop talking. Ok, then we agree. Good.”

I stared them down a moment longer, taking in the shock and confusion on their faces. I concluded I could risk turning my back on them, and made a purposeful display of returning to watch the movie, while remaining in prickly alert. I knew I had been both incredibly deft and incredibly lucky, and I had better quit while I was ahead. I still could not explain to myself my own behavior.

They sputtered a few confused pride reflex remarks loudly in their language, then decided they had better not, exchanging only low whispers after that.

About a half hour later, apparently too bored with the movie they could no longer talk through, they collected their things to leave. I turned to acknowledge their departure, and one of them vaguely waved me an awkward, amiable, nervous goodbye, in spite of himself.

As they threaded their way through the crowd, I called after them in their language and bid them a lovely evening. Facing the movie again, I did not wait to see their reaction. Amateurs.