A few months ago, I was having a cocktail by myself while I waited for a table at Izakaya Minato. I’d walked across the street to Hardshore Distilling and was happily sitting all by my lonesome, reading a book and enjoying some good people watching. I do this regularly — I love eating alone, and I often read overtly feminist works while dining so as to discourage men from talking to me. 

This particular night, as I sat there reading Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object, a book guaranteed to dissuade even the wokest of dudes, I was approached by a young woman a decade or so younger than me. She was bubbly and beautiful. Apparently, something about me had made me a target of her cheery gaze, and she’d marched up with swaggering confidence and proceeded to plunk herself down with a twinkle in her eye.