MP

I was travelling home after a particularly hard day at work, and trying to prevent a headache turning into a full-blown migraine, so chose the quiet carriage for my 2 1/2 hour ride home. A man got on, took the seat in front of me, immediately put a call through to a friend and was talking very loudly to him (one could tell from the conversation that he was talking to a male friend). I let it go for a couple of minutes in case it was to be a short call of the “I’m on the 4.55; pick me up at 6.30” kind, but he soon settled in for a long chat so I said “Excuse me, you may not be aware that this is the quiet carriage. Would you lower your voice please.”

His response was to start telling his friend that ‘some bird’ had just told him to ‘shut up’ and then have a conversation about how I obviously ‘needed a cock up me’, that judging by my looks I’d be grateful if he and his mate ‘sorted me out’, told his friend to bring some others to the station in case I got off at the same place so they could ‘take care of me’, but to warn them that I was a ‘dried up c#@t’. There was more along this line. No-one on the carriage (including me) said anything to him, and there was no guard to whom I could report it. It left me feeling threatened and shaken, but also angry that he thought that this was an acceptable response to being politely asked by a women to speak quietly. If a male had made the same request, would the response have been to make sexual comments and threaten (albeit, one hopes, not seriously) sexual assault?

When I got off the train (not at his station), a woman came up to see if I was OK and said that she never asks men to be quite on the quiet carriage as it is not worth risking such a response. In other words, it was my fault for not being a good woman and letting a male behave in any way he chooses.