A Year of Community
I was sitting outside the climbing gym on a lovely spring afternoon when a short black man and a lanky tall white man approached me with a flyer. "We are hosting a stand-up comedy show at our house tomorrow at 6 pm," the black guy said in a flat, dry tone. I took the flier and replied, "That sounds cool," but instead of following flyer hand-out etiquette and moving on, the two men just stood there. "So, will you be coming tomorrow," said the black guy, and his compatriot looked at me expectantly. Neither seemed funny or able to hold a conversation, but I agreed; I said, "Sure, I'll be there."
I was in a frenzy of meeting new people and making new friends back then. I mostly went to parties where people talked about libertarianism and Bitcoin and how Austin was somehow better than New York. There was an air of indefinite optimism about the city of Austin. Wherever I went, fellow tech people who moved here last week talked about how they were building a scene, a community, and remaking the city in their image. It was the type of thing that was easy to believe if you spent the two years before that scrolling Twitter, or if your idea of community was sharing memes on Discord. It also just happened to be that everyone who wanted to build a community was a single man in his thirties. A man who had enough disposable income to be in the same social class he was born into but not enough to escape the drudgeries of modern life - such as dating apps. The parties always happened in backyards and outdoor spaces that resembled the results of a chatGPT prompt that went something like "cozy outdoor space in Austin". The subtext of this community building, if it was not clear by now, was to meet women. Unfortunately, very few women showed up to these things.
I got my undergrad degree in Mechanical engineering, and the class had 140 men and no women. Safe to say, I was used to hanging out in spaces without any women, but there is something more sinister and desperate happening in spaces where men outnumber women by 25 to 1. There is that famous scene of Monica Vitti in L'Aventura, where she gets catcalled and followed by several strange men in an Italian piazza. These events were not quite that. They resided more in the uncanny valley, where the scarcity demanded primate-like behavior, but everyone was too self-aware and overcome by shame to do anything about it. The men just milled around politely and incessantly. Women who had become familiar with spaces like this exuded confidence and held court, and men paraded around them like a bird of paradise mating ritual. Plumes of feathers were replaced by plum opinions about how the federal government should be run or why AI is dangerous to humanity. The newer women looked like deers caught in the headlights and hid behind their friends or significant others. I was still going to these parties on the day the two strange men invited me to their house with the promise of laughter and good times.
I showed up at the stand-up comedy set the next day. It was in the living room of a two-story house that looked to be around 30 years old. The furnishings were drab, the couch smelled of weed, and the art on the walls was mostly cartoons, some violent and disturbing. The toilet I used later in the evening looked like one of Jackson Pollock's less finer works. I arrived 20 minutes after the time the comedy duo had mentioned and was surprised that the horizontal rows of chairs in the living room had filled up. I took a seat in the back row, right in front of the smelly couch. There was no light in the room except for a single spotlight set behind me that beamed a white-hot light into the face of the performer. I scanned the room to see who had shown up for a comedy show in someone's drab living room on a Wednesday night. Through dim light, I made out that the first row was all women, and so was the second. They contrasted with the living room the same way a good antique piece stood out in a thrift store. While I sat there enjoying the first performer, several more women walked into the room. It seemed to me that I had been living in some other dystopian society all this while, one where women were scarce and hard to find. The men had to fight over them, and the one with the most Bitcoin won. The two stand-up comedians were apostles to a new society, one that smelled considerably worse, but the women folk were plentiful here. I don't go to those other parties anymore.