They're coming home from a Halloween party—three of them, all women, all in their twenties, all loudly drunk. They spend the trip complaining about the party they just left. One of them says, “I feel like I went through the seven stages of grief at that party,” earning raucous laughter from her friends. I’m pretty sure there are only five stages of grief, but who’s counting?
“That would be a good theme for a party,’ I tell them. “The stages of grief.”
“Oh my God!” one of them says. “We should use that as the theme for next year's party—the seven stages of grief!”
Everyone agrees, then she adds, “I always have the best ideas when I'm drunk!”
Her friends pat her on the back and concur that, yes, she really does have great ideas when she’s drunk. I stare ahead, grinding my teeth, and thinking that I was the one who suggested it as a party theme.
I have heard the word “hepeat” used in reference to the moment when a woman expresses an idea that goes ignored, then a man repeats the same idea as though it is his own, and everyone heaps praise on him. By that token, what’s happening in this car could be called a “shepeat”, but this is why using gendered language to attack behaviors that aren’t necessarily gender-specific, shall we say, chaps a lot of people’s balls.
Allow me to mansplain.
It starts with a word like “mansplain” entering the lexicon in order to call attention to men who condescendingly explain things to women. It has its value, but some of the people who latch onto it are misandrists who deploy it cheaply to dismiss criticism. This grates on many people, but misogynists are the ones who take exception most loudly, and along comes another new word: “femsplain”. Much like “mansplain”, accusations of femsplaining are sometimes fair, but sometimes deployed cheaply and derogatorily. So misogynists and misandrists get busy tallying up mansplainers and femsplainers in one of 70 million stupid arguments that make up the current war of words between the wokes and the anti-wokes. Meanwhile, condescending explanation crimes of the man-on-man and woman-on-woman variety go largely unremarked upon, their perpetrators unshamed. Thus, a rift becomes wider, a problem becomes uglier, and we probably could have saved a lot of heartache by just using “splainer”. Often at the heart of our squabbles, we are not actually as divided as we seem. Man or woman, woke or anti-woke, nobody likes a splainer.
Which brings me back to “hepeat”.
I don’t want to say this woman is shepeating me. I also don’t want to take off the gendered prefix and just call it “peating”, because that’s a little confusing, and possibly offensive to people named Pete. My father is a Pete. My middle name is Peter, and while I’m clearly being a splainer at the moment, I like to think I’m not a peater. We already fucked things up for a lot of Karens who probably did nothing wrong, and I’m not sure we’re going to be able to reverse course on that one, but let’s at least not do it to the Petes. Instead, let’s invent a new term.
I’ll nominate “idea-cucking”. That seems like a good way to describe the feeling when you have an idea that you love and cherish, and then some other asshole comes along and has their way with it right in front of you.
Nobody likes to be idea-cucked. And if the women in my car weren’t so drunk and loud and impossible to get a word in with, I might remind them that a Stages of Grief party was my idea, and then splain to them that there are only five stages of grief, but I don’t have the energy for that.
And anyway, they’re trashed. When they roll out of bed the next morning with their Halloween makeup smeared on their pillowcases, staggering their apartments in search of coffee and fried food, they really might go through seven stages of grief. But I would bet money on one thing: they are going to forget all about my (yes, my) party idea. And that gives me a happy feeling.
Male or female, there is a name for that happy feeling that I don't have to make up a word for. That happy feeling is called schadenfreude.
Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.