“The Hunt of the Unicorn,” Cloisters tapestry
Thursday
Julia and I are on our way to attend her mother’s memorial service so I’ll be away from my computer for a couple of days. Fortunately, my novelist friend Rachel Kranz, who is currently participating in the poker world series, is allowing me to post an essay she wrote recently on women in poker, unicorns, and the Stanford student recently found guilty of raping an unconscious woman (and then receiving the mildest of sentences).
Rachel remembers encountering the myth of the unicorn–how it can be tamed by a virgin–in the horrifying incident in T. H. White’s Once and Future King. There three boys tie a virgin to a tree to lure a unicorn and then cut off its head.
The article is the first of several that will be appearing in Adventures in Poker, Rachel’s blog which she is resuming again after a lapse of several years. I’ve read several of these forthcoming essays and they are superb. It doesn’t matter whether or not poker interests you as Rachel’s essays go far beyond the game. Make sure that you check them out.
Taming the Unicorn: Can We Make a World Where It’s Not Necessary?
By Rachel Kranz, novelist and poker player
The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.
–Leonardo da Vinci
The other day I was sitting at the poker table and had occasion to ask a male opponent to arrange his stack in such a way that I could see his big chips. The man was wearing earbuds and when I asked him the first time—I was sitting right across from him, 6 seat to 10 seat—his face didn’t change, so I asked him again.
He glared at me. “Settle down!” he said disgustedly as he slowly began to rearrange his stack. “Just settle down.”
Startled, I found myself responding before I could stop myself. “You don’t need to be rude—I thought you couldn’t hear me.”
From the other end of the table, another male player burst out laughing. “Settle down? Who says that?” His laughter was the perfect way to diffuse the situation, the play went on, and eventually someone else busted Settle Down Guy.
After he left, I thanked the man who had laughed. Other players agreed—Settle Down Guy had overreacted. But a man to my left took issue. “Look, if the guy who told you to settle down didn’t do any other bad thing, maybe we should all give him a break.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s hard being spoken to that way.”
“Well,” said the second guy, “maybe there’s something in your aura that attracts that kind of treatment.”
This is a great example of the kind of no-win microaggression that women face at the table—the niggling little incidents that so often keep you from being able to devote 100 percent of your energy to poker. I’ve tried a range of responses—silence, arguing, explaining—and none of them are terrific. Talking back can easily escalate an incident, but silence often invites escalation, too, until you finally give them a response.
This time I laughed and said, “Wow, what a terrific compliment! Thank you!”
“No,” the guy insisted. “It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Oh, so it’s an insult? Should I be insulted?”
“No, it’s just an observation.”
“I think I’ll take it as a compliment then.”
“Are you being sarcastic? It sounds like you’re being sarcastic.”
Cue a new burst of laughter from the original laughter, and we all went on to talk about something else. I did what I could to ignore the hostility now emanating from this second guy, lost a race, and left the table.
Fast-forward to another tournament in a different casino, when a table change put me and Aura Guy at the same table once again. Before I noticed him, I’d already started joking around with two guys at my end of the new table, so my mood was light and happy. And when the whole table started gossiping about a famous prop bet, Aura Guy and I both joined in.
Then, on break, he came over. “I really enjoyed playing with you today,” he said. “I know we’ve had unpleasantness in the past, and I’d like to get past it and just move forward.”
“That’s terrific—me too,” I said, holding out my hand. We shook on it, and that was that. I thought, taming the unicorn.
A few years ago, I was at a table with a drunk, angry guy who was in the big blind when I was in the cutoff. He started yelling at me for “picking on his blind every time” until finally I said, “I’m not picking on you, I’m playing. Stop it.” He settled down into a sullen silence, and life went on.
Fast-forward to that summer, when I ran into the guy at a WSOP tournament window. “I’m so glad to see you again!” he said. “I’ve been wanting to apologize to you ever since that time I yelled at you in December. I was drunk, I was out of line—and of course you were just playing, not picking on me. I’ve thought a lot since then about losing my temper and how I act when I get drunk. I’ve stopped drinking while playing, and I’ve really been working on keeping my temper.” I thanked him warmly for his kind words, and we shared a hug.
Taming the unicorn.
For women players who trigger unwanted responses at the table—which is just about all of us—the fantasy is strong that if we could just find the right way to respond, we could somehow transform the environment within which we play. This is certainly a fantasy shared by many good guys. I can’t tell you how many of my male friends have told me, “Maybe if you just ignored it,” “Maybe if you made a joke out of it,” “Maybe if you tried being nicer,” “Maybe if you projected a tougher image,” “Maybe if you projected a softer image,” and my personal favorite, “Maybe you misunderstood.”
And so, when a man does seem to get that he is the one who’s behaved badly—or at least, that there’s another way to handle his feelings about me—it feels like a miracle. Look, I want to tell myself, you did it! You must have a terrific aura, because you have actually tamed the unicorn.
The myth of the unicorn—a hypersexual, violent beast with a huge phallic horn—goes back millennia in Western culture. With all other humans, the unicorn is a dangerous monster, his horn a powerful weapon. With a kind and gentle virgin, however, the wild beast becomes sweet and submissive, laying his head in the maiden’s lap and going peacefully to sleep.
I’ve thought a lot about this myth, especially when I read the story of the Stanford college student who was found raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. The rape was interrupted by two Swedish grad students on bicycles, who chased the man until they caught him and called for help. One of the Swedes was sobbing so hard by the time the police arrived that he could barely describe what he had seen. (You can read the story here, the man’s father’s response here, and the woman’s extraordinary courtroom statement here.)
The woman had gotten drunk at a party and passed out. Then the man had taken her behind a deserted dumpster and raped her. These facts were not at issue. The only issue was whether the sexual act—witnessed by the Swedish students—was consensual. After the defense lawyer’s usual attempts to discredit the woman and her sexual history, a jury found the young man guilty. The judge sympathized with the young man’s youth and inexperience, however, and sentenced him to a mere six months in jail.
It’s so hard, in talking about this horrific case, not to use the language of balance, to create parallel sentences linked by that seductive phrase, on the other hand.
“He shouldn’t have raped her. On the other hand, she shouldn’t have gotten so drunk she passed out.”
“He shouldn’t have raped her. On the other hand, he had been drinking.”
“He shouldn’t have raped her. On the other hand, maybe he really thought she wanted it.”
On some level, if you’re a woman in this culture, you have two choices. You can take as default that the world is basically safe and welcoming, enough to allow you to loosen up at a party or sit down comfortably at a poker table. Or you can take as default that the world is hostile and dangerous, so that you never, ever let your guard down.
The first strategy leaves you unprepared for the kinds of extra precautions that, as a woman, you have to take. A guy can get drunk and pass out at a party—you can’t. A guy can ask to see another guy’s chips without provoking an incident—you can’t.
But the second strategy leaves you defensive, angry, and likely to miss out on a lot of great opportunities. The guy you meet at the party that you actually do want to date. The guy at the table who really wasn’t insulting you, just offering you an opportunity to joke around, tease him back, be one of the guys.
The fantasy of taming the unicorn seems to resolve the two. You think, If I can just be good and sweet and gentle enough. . . if I can just project the perfect combination of vulnerability and toughness . . . , if I can just rise above insults and hostility, completely impermeable and yet invitingly open. . Then the dangerous beast will turn into a sweet, gentle creature who lays his head in my lap and goes to sleep.
Obviously, it’s not always a fantasy. Sometimes we emerge from the situation with new possibilities.
Obviously, too, there is an on the other hand for me. “Maybe I could have waited a little longer before asking that guy to show his stack?” “Maybe I was a little too anxious—a little too controlling—a little too nudgy?” “Maybe there really is something annoying in my aura which does attract that negative energy?”
The problem is, you don’t always want to tame the freakin’ unicorn. Sometimes you just want to go to a party, have a few drinks, flirt with a few guys. Sometimes you just want to see the other guy’s stack so you know how to size your bet. Sometimes you just want to play poker.
So here’s to the Swedish students, who heroically intervened in a horrific assault. Here’s to the guy who laughed—twice—intervening in a much less serious but still draining and demoralizing situation. Here’s to the men who believe me when I tell them these stories, and to the women who share their own stories with me. Here’s to me, on the days when I can be my best self with my clearest view of reality, and to me, on the days when I just don’t handle things well (but still—he should show me his stack!).
Here’s to a world where we don’t have to tame the unicorn—where all our mental energy is free for strategy and bet-sizing and thinking about ranges and frequency and game theory and odds. I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime. Still, I can hardly wait.