The Warm Fires of Umbrage

If you're a woman hunter or shooter, you've probably heard some condescending comments. I know I have. But were they intended as such?

I have stories I love to share with other women hunters so we can enjoy a good laugh and a little empathetic outrage.

My favorite is this one: I was walking out of the marsh at dusk one day with a full strap of ducks around my neck. My friend Alison was walking about 20 steps behind me, similarly laden. Coming toward the same parking lot from the opposite direction was a man and a boy of maybe 10 or 12 years.

“How’d you do?” the man asked.

“Limits,” I said, casually.

The man paused for a second.

“By yourselves?”

I’m not blessed with the gift of clever retort, so all he got was a “yes” and I’m sure an annoyed facial expression that also betrayed my inability to play poker. But when I shared the story later with Alison, who hadn’t heard him, and every other woman hunter I’ve told since then, I let my sarcasm soar in an imaginary response.

“Yeah, because miraculously, you don’t need a penis to kill ducks, you moron!”

Women who’ve been hunting for just about any amount of time have encountered this assumption that we are all beginners. There’s one place I hunt pretty regularly where staff has assumed twice that I was there to watch birds on the auto tour route, not kill them in the hunt area.

Me (on the left) at the outset of an afternoon hunt with some girlfriends in 2009.

And on my last visit to that place, a male hunter asked as I walked to my car with my hunting permit: “First time here?”

I would love to do a stealth video of me running around saying to male hunters the things some of them have said to me, just to capture the confused and/or insulted looks on their faces, so I could say, “See?” It would be pretty damn funny.

But that’s a lot of effort to go to just to stoke the embers of my own umbrage. And I’m getting really tired of the outrage machinery of modern times - not so sure I want to become part of it, even if it would be funny.

The thing that really holds me back from doing that, though, is an encounter I had in the marsh in the first season of the Covid pandemic that knocked my indignance back a bit.

I was hunting in the same place where I’ve been presumed to be a bird watcher. It was a nice afternoon with just enough ducks coming by now and then to make the trip worth my while. When I heard two hunters sloshing through the marsh in my direction, I got up and waved to make sure they could see where I was and not set up too close.

They waved back and changed course. Then I yelled to them, “Hey, there’s a spot over there where I’ve seen ducks and you won’t be close to anyone else.”

One yelled back, “Thanks!”

Then, “You’re a woman! Here alone?”

I laughed and said yes, and he responded that he was there with his wife, who was a new hunter that year.

“Cool!” I yelled. And then we ended our high-volume conversation and got back to the business at hand.

A couple hours later, we ended up all leaving the marsh together at the same time, and on the walk back to the parking lot, the man immediately apologized for what he’d said, because he knew it might have sounded condescending.

“It’s not the worst thing I’ve heard, really no big deal,” I told him (sincerely), and he, his wife and I chatted all the way back to our vehicles. He’d been trying to get her to hunt for years, but she hadn’t seen the appeal, until the pandemic had robbed her of everything else she did for fun. Now she was INTO IT.

I was really struck by his instant contrition. I can relate to it, because sometimes stupid things have a way of flying out of my mouth, leaving an aftertaste of regret, and a lingering fear of having done harm. And it made me wonder how many people who’ve said dumb things to me have experienced the same thing.

There was one time when I went to shoot skeet alone, and a guy invited himself to shoot with me. Not seeing a polite way out of it, I said OK. When we were shooting, he started offering me advice at one point, then cut himself off, “Sorry, I can see that you know what you’re doing.”

“Thank you,” I told him, smiling.

True, the men who don’t catch themselves outnumber the self-aware. But I have to think at least some of them mull their words a bit after the fact, and wish they’d chosen different ones.

Not gonna soft-pedal it: I despise the assumption that because I’m a woman, I’m a newbie at shooting and hunting, especially given that I’ve worked so hard to develop the expertise to help new hunters. I mean, I’ve got 660,000 views (and rave reviews) on my videos about breaking down, assembling or adjusting shotguns, and shooting skeet. I was the editor of a duck hunting magazine for the better part of nine years. When I talk to fellow hunters about things like gun fit and the interplay of waterfowl population dynamics with hunting regulations, it’s clear I know a lot of stuff most don’t know. I’m hardly a rookie.

But the fact is that many of us women are newbies. And I do, in fact, see many women at the wetlands I hunt who are there with their boyfriends and husbands. I can count on one hand the number of women duck hunters I see who hunt without a man. It’s actually one of my biggest motivations running a Facebook group for California outdoorswomen: We want to help newbies be able to hunt independently. Nothing wrong with hunting with your man; the world just has a lot more possibilities if you don’t think that’s the only way you can hunt.

So I’m trying to tamp down my annoyance when people say stupid things to me, because all they know is what they’ve seen and experienced. They don’t know what they haven’t seen. Ignorance is not a crime. It’s not even an insult. It’s just ignorance. And people getting their heads bitten off for expressions driven by genuine ignorance, not condescension or malice, is getting old.

It’s been less than two weeks since I shared a tale of male assumption with fellow women hunters, and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop doing that. There’s comfort in the expressions of solidarity that follow.

But I am looking for more productive reactions as well, perhaps a gentle way to let people know when they’ve made a mistake about me. I don’t know what that looks like just yet. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.