Last night I picked up a shift tending bar at a fairly popular pub in a local hotel. I haven’t tending bar in a loooong time, what with all hours I work in my actual day job, but I’m glad I took the shift because it afforded me the opportunity to do some serious people watching. Which, of course, is bread and butter for a writer.

So obviously I’m a person who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about sex and gender and bodies and the intersection of those three things, and also about how our perceptions of social status are shaped by gender and bodies. Last night, I got to watch all that play out, like a wildlife documentary.

Let me first describe the scene, so you get this right in your head.

First, picture low lighting, dark wood, and big TV’s looping ESPN. The shelves are all mirrored and lit from above, so that the liquor glows through the glass. The bar stools have cushioned backs. The tables are low and spaces tightly together.

Normally, this pub is a pretty even blend of locals and hotel guests, but last night felt different because there was like a million bikers coming through from Sturgis and they crowded the place in their bandanas and leather vests. They’re all sunburned and drinking heavy.

(Kay. Stop. Just to be clear. I like bikers. I’m not a biker, not personally, but I have friends and family who take it pretty seriously so I’m not trying to say bikers are assholes. That’s not what I think and not what I observed. All right?)

Then just before midnight, when the place is loud and people are getting rowdy, in comes this group of fucking magicians. 

Apparently they had a performance somewhere in town. It was like a burlesque/illusionist thing. I don’t know. And in they come wearing those belly dancer bells around their waists and embroidered pirate vests and quasi-Ren Faire garb and one of them has wrist bracers. That was the men. The women were large. And wearing corsets and long scarfy skirts.

They all come in, order Brandy Alexanders blended and start showing each other card tricks and slight of hand with rope.

So that’s the demographic of the bar. 80% biker, 20% magician.

And the bikers are disturbed by their presence. Because these magicians (who are obliviously chatting away about fire breathing and some Con they attended and are generally just being the dorkiest dorks ever) have completely upended the delicate social balance of the pub.

And the jokes start. And here’s the thing: every single joke was either aimed at the male magicians’ sexuality or the female magicians’ weight.

Consensus of the pub: the men must be gay and/or they must be virgins.

Consensus of the pub: who do those women think they are, dressing like that? Don’t they know they’re FAT?

Again, I’m not saying that these bikers are assholes. The fact that they were all bikers is irrelevant, really. It’s a group dynamic thing centered around status and I think it would have played out the same with any cohesive social group. So, not hating on the bikers.

What really fascinated me was that the high status males of the biker group was not as affected by the presence of the threatening magicians as was the low status males. And it was seemed like the low status females were less disturbed than the high status females. Obviously my methodology is flawed and I lack sufficient data to back any of this up, but from my observations, that seemed to be the case.

The low status males kept making gay jokes.

The high status females kept snarking about how fat the women were.

I don’t know what any of this means. It’s just part of a pattern that I see, that interests me, about how much we police each other in terms of gender and sexuality and bodies.

And I want to point out that the magicians themselves? Completely unaware or affected by all of this. They just drank their cocktails and had a good ol’ time. They tipped only so-so, but you can’t win ’em all.