It’s a Saturday afternoon on the meadow at Fort Mason. The sky is a sharp beryl blue. On the grass, boat-shoed bros congregate in clumps, either drinking and laughing or pairing up to send volleyballs and footballs and beanbags arcing through the air. The balls create invisible sine waves as they pass over the heads of girls who have to gently lift up their giant Kentucky Derby–style hats to sip from their flutes of champagne. Several frequencies of Justin Bieber gyrate out of portable-speaker systems. I count at least eight French Bulldogs, three Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” snap-backs and four man-buns. Near the statue of Phillip Burton, two dudes with the sides of their heads shaved shotgun cans of Coors Light, spiking them to the ground like Rob Gronkowski in the end zone as they finish.
I’m sitting near the top of the meadow on the side of the hill that leads up to the old military houses, sort of looking down on the whole scene. The Golden Gate looms in the background. The white masts of the sailboats on the bay look like folded napkins on a thick blue tablecloth. The girls look like extras off the set of The Hills. The sun is dangling above it all like a giant, slowly descending stage light, casting the afternoon in a glimmering, sepia-toned sheen. And as I sit, I’m thinking to myself, “This is it, the ’roided-out stereotype that rears to life when you tell most San Franciscans, ‘Oh yeah, I live in the Marina.’”
San Francisco’s geographically motivated stereotypes are on my mind because of a conversation I’d had with an acquaintance at Tempest the night before. We were there at a work-related happy-hour-event thing. We’d been discussing Internet writing — specifically, how the proliferation of blogs and online mags and, of course, social media outlets had given far too many writers way too many avenues for venting ill-articulated opinions that neither the world nor San Francisco, for that matter, really needs. But then, near the end of our exchange, after I told my acquaintance, “Yeah, I live in the Marina,” the discourse devolved.
“Oh, ew,” he said, recoiling slightly, eyeing me like I was suddenly contagious. “You live in the Marina? Are you a total douchebag?”
Although I don’t typically take offense to the reactionary things I hear people say or see people post — or I try not to, at least, but being drunk certainly doesn’t help — here’s an approximation of what, in the moment, I wanted to say in response:
“Yes, you know what? I do live in the Marina. And you know what else? I happen to own a pair of Sperrys! And my girlfriend shops at Lululemon. You know why? Because Sperrys are perfect shoes to wear when you’re anticipating that you might want to take off your shoes at some point, but you don’t really feel like going all in with flip-flops. And from what my girlfriend tells me, those leggings sound really fucking comfortable. And, yes, I do happen to really enjoy the new Justin Bieber songs, but that’s because those songs are really fucking catchy. Does this make me a douchebag? I don’t think so, but that hardly matters, does it? Because you probably made up your mind as to whether or not I’m a douchebag as soon as I told you my ZIP code. I could be a world-renowned coffee farmer who recites Voltaire and collects used vinyl, and you’d still think I spent my weekends head-butting old fraternity buddies. Which I don’t. So fuck you.”
Alas, I said nothing of the sort. But in the hours that followed, I found myself caught in a kaleidoscope of uncertainty as to whether or not I maybe should have. Was my taking offense to being incorrectly stereotyped justified, or would my response have been unjustifiably rash?
It wasn’t until the next day that I arrived at something like a conclusion: taking offense to neighborhood stereotypes is a waste of time. Here’s why.
First, in the moment at the bar, I neglected to remember that offensive San Francisco stereotypes are not reserved for occupants of the Marina. Indeed, to think so in earnest would only reinforce the conception that the Marina is full of self-occupied douchebags. It’s pretty easy to imagine a different conversation taking place among different people ending in similarly presumptuous fashion after someone says something stupid like, “Ew, OMG, you’re from the Mission? Are you a hipster?” (As this essay published in 48 Hills a few months ago points out, the Mission hipster is dead.)
Of course, such simple-minded and sometimes obsolete judgments can be made about the residents of pretty much any San Francisco neighborhood. Just take a look at this map, which highlights just about every negative San Francisco stereotype you can think of, along with where they’re most prevalent.
More pertinently, perhaps, this proclivity for stereotyping and categorizing people on the basis of where they live is by no means a San Francisco–specific phenomenon. What happens in the Marina and Mission districts of San Francisco happens in the more polarizing neighborhoods of big cities all over the country. The Marina is to the Mission as Chicago’s River North is to Wicker Park, or New Orleans’s Garden District is to the Bywater.
The point is that these stereotypes are not personal. Yes, they’re born from an ugly tendency that our species has acquired over time, and that now unfortunately permeates every aspect of our collective social consciousness — imperturbable across generations, unmovable across time — but they’re not personal. Even if stereotypes like that of the Marina douchebag are statistically, objectively justified (which, from my perch on the side of the hill above Fort Mason, seems pretty clearly to be the case, and which, as alluded to by Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, is actually likely the case), they’re not personal. In making my way up and out of my kaleidoscope of personal uncertainty the night before, grounding myself in this perspective proved useful.
And so now, as I sit looking out on the people on the grass who’re drunk off their moments, floating atop their temporary infinities, I can’t help but smile, because it seems more and more clear, the more I think about it, that no one here is actually oblivious, as the stereotype that’s often used to categorize them (ahem, us) might suggest. Well, maybe some of them are. But maybe they’re hyper-aware. Maybe those guys spiking their Coors Lights to the ground engage in such barbarically ebullient behavior because they know exactly how it appears to people ready to judge them, and they know how little the opinions of such people matter. Maybe their actions are a unique, even ingenious example of douchey, ironic self-expression.
It’s at this moment, from my position here on the lip of the edge of a continent, protected by the Victorian swells of Russian Hill to the west and Pac Heights to the south, cradled in the palm of this palatial peninsula, that I find myself reflecting back on why I chose to live in the Marina in the first place. I moved here to be close to the water. To the Golden Gate. To Moscone, where I play softball, and to SusieCakes, where the tastiest cupcakes I’ve ever tasted are baked. Do some people think I chose to live in this neighborhood so I could keep living like I’m in college? Probably. I also have relatives in Texas who think I moved to San Francisco because I’m a bisexual communist hell-bent on replacing gun stores with kale farms. Maybe next time I talk to them, instead of trying to convince them I’m not a hippie communist, I’ll show up in rainbow Birkenstocks with an “I’m with Bernie!” campaign pin fastened to my shirt.
After a few more minutes, as I’m preparing to leave, a rogue Frisbee comes floating like a UFO to my feet. One of the dudes wearing one of those awful Donald Trump snap-backs comes jogging up to retrieve it. I don’t hesitate. I bend and flip the Frisbee back to him.
“Thanks, bro,” he says.
“No problem, bro,” I reply, feeling not one iota of guilt or shame.
