Do I wake or sleep?

Okay, let me start off by saying I do love Griffin. He is a dear friend, a wonderful person and I love him. But he can be quite tone deaf sometimes, and right now I'm pretty annoyed with him. He came to see the show Saturday night and joined us afterward when we went to an Irish place nearby for food and drink. The subject of The Verdict came up. Griffin started off by saying "I haven't been following this case that much"--okay, right there you need to just stop talking then. You don't know much about the case, so you probably don't have that much to contribute to this extremely sensitive subject. So since he doesn't know that much about the case, he just repeated his brother's opinions. (Griffin's brother is a lawyer, and when I first posted on FB about The Verdict, initially responded with a long mansplanation about Why He Agreed. I posted back "you are seriously misjudging your audience and the timing." To give him credit, Austin immediately agreed, took it down, and apologized, both on my wall and via private email.) Griffin kept saying "it's terrible, but..." and "you need to respect the law" and "our law says..." GAHHHH!!! What does that even mean, "you need to respect the law"--how does that possibly contribute to the conversation?! I'm not standing in front of the guy's house with a pitchfork, I'm airing my opinions! Saying "you need to respect the law" is just another way of saying "you're overreacting, calm down, settle down" which is what women hear ALL THE EFFING TIME. MOST OF THE CITY, *including lawyers* think the jury got it way wrong! It's not just us emotional wimminz with our irrational, overreacting wombs who think this way--I have been monitoring every media message board I can find and nearly EVERYONE thinks this is bullshit. There have been several articles about the so-called CSI-effect, how juries seem to think you HAVE to have DNA now to convict. How do you think they got a conviction with Abner Louima?! Broomsticks don't have orgasms, you know!

One especially enraging thing about the "it's terrible but--" was that I specifically said to him "do NOT rationalize this. I don't want to hear 'but.'" Partly this is because I think the verdict is indefensible but also partly because this is not some sort of theoretical discussion in a law school classroom--this is LIFE. This verdict is real life for every woman in the city. It is personally offensive to me, here and now, to hear you or your brother trying to rationalize this. Maybe at some point in the future, but not now, when I'm still so angry about it. I said this to him several times--he wasn't even listening, he just kept giving me his opinions. Griffin, if you don't know anything about the case--maybe you should just listen. What is so hard about that? Why do you think you have something to teach me about this? I've served on a Manhattan felony-crime jury, I know what they're told, I know the parameters. Griffin has this blindness where he thinks he needs to teach people--last fall he got into some kind of FB argument after seeing The Social Network and posting "Is it so hard for people to understand that just because you show misogyny on screen, it doesn't mean you endorse it in real life?" Quite understandably, a female friend of his, who'd also seen TSN, was irritated, and responded. At the time I could only respond to Griffin's tone since I hadn't seen that movie yet, but I told him "when you start off 'Is it so hard for people to understand...' right off the bat you're dismissing everyone who doesn't agree with you about a subject [a movie's subtext] which is impossible to quantify. Don't be surprised if people take offense to that." Having since seen TSN, I want to say to him--Griffin, you are a young man in his twenties. I think I am safe in saying that there is almost nothing you have to teach me or any other female about misogyny. Stop trying to teach other people about this sort of thing and just start listening.