It’s taken me decades to realize how much of life I’ve missed out on because I was born female in a male-dominated society.
I’m retirement age now, born a decade and a half after the end of World War II, a paltry four decades after the 19th Amendment – the one giving women the right to vote, was ratified by Congress. Put that in perspective. Forty years ago from now was 1986. Music, fashion from that time is still popular even today. It’s the time period in which the hit show Stranger Things is set. Forty years passes in seconds.
Compared to today, women’s rights in the 1960s, just four decades after women got the vote? They were practically nonexistent.
The things that were considered normal behaviors in my childhood? Today you’d be arrested. I could talk about lots of things, but today I’m talking about sexual harassment.
I was in first or second grade at recess on the playground at my Catholic school the first time I was sexually harassed. I want to say attacked, but based on what I’ve googled, “attacked” might not be the right word. At the time, it certainly felt like an attack. I remember feeling shame and humiliation. I remember crying. The fact that I remember the exact circumstance almost sixty years later certainly says something.
While I don’t know the right term, I DO know this. If what happened to me back then happened today, there’d be social services involvement, parent meetings, court. I was six. I was six and I was sexually harassed.
Daily sexual harassment was the norm by the time I was in junior high, though there is nothing normal about gangs of boys following girls around the playground, making fun of their developing bodies., and giving them obscene nicknames. At recess, teachers ignored us when we complained about boys making games of lifting our uniform skirts to expose our underwear and snapping our bra straps. We girls had no choice but to either ignore what the boys were doing or laugh it off. If we didn’t, we weren’t good sports.
Sexual harassment was normal outside of school too. I clearly remember walking down the bustling main street of my city, book bag on my shoulder, heading to the bus or to piano lessons, minding my own business. There were cat calls always. I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. These were men ten, twenty, thirty years older.
This bothered me, yes. But this happened ALL THE TIME. To me. To my friends. We never talked about these things. Why would we? There was nothing to talk about. This was the norm.
“Today I breathed air.” Why would I feel the need to say that to anyone?
“Today an adult male told twelve-year-old me that he wanted to fuck me.” So what else is new?
High school and college, things calmed down. Maybe I wasn’t as appealing once I was legal? Who knows.
That’s not to say there weren’t stories. I have some. Plus, I heard all kinds of stories from other girls my age. Those aren’t my stories to tell though, so I won’t talk about them here.
Things heated up again after college. For one, I started running. Whistles and obscenities as I’m running the streets around my neighborhood. Every. Run. Normal.
I started working at a big company. My first professional job. It was the 80s. We women on the executive track had an unspoken dress code. To be taken seriously, you had to wear a suit. So every day: jacket, modest skirt, silk blouse, some sort of tie/cravat at my neck, heels, nylons. One day I wore a dress to work, not a suit. It was pointed out to me by a co-worker that this faux pas could cost me. A dress? Did I not want to be taken seriously?
My first day at work, my boss introduced me around the office. It was a forgettable experience except for the one gentleman who misheard who I was. He told me I was a lovely young thing and told my boss he had a pretty daughter. I laughed it off, good sport that I was. Yes, I know that’s not sexual harassment, but it absolutely is telling in terms of how women were viewed.
I’m writing this today because recently I read an obituary that brought all this back and more. “More” because I’m only skimming the surface here. I’m leaving out a lot.
The obit was for a guy who was a department supervisor at the company where I worked. I met him a few months into my job. I was one of a handful of folks who ran at lunchtime. He was a runner. Like me, every day he’d run two miles out, and two miles back. We’d wave to one another. Lots of us would wave to one another.
When winter arrived, the roads were awful. Some folks still ran outside, but I joined others who opted to run in the company garage, a huge, quarter mile loop. The garage was just a short stairway up from our changing areas. Running in the garage was boring, a little dark. But it was a safe alternative to the icy roads. Plus, we didn’t have to pile on the layers. We could run in just a T-shirt and shorts.
Sometimes I’d run alone. Sometimes I’d see others. This guy ran at my pace, and we’d often run together and chat. I found him a little irritating in truth. I was fresh out of college and had big plans to travel the world, explore new things. He was older, deadly dull in my opinion -- loved to drone on and on about his wife, kids, elderly dad.
He had a short stride. Though he had a good eight inches on me, his feet hit the ground at about twice my rate. The sound of his foot striking the cement floor drove me nuts.
I tolerated him because I had to. He was one of my boss’s friends. We would occasionally interact with him and his department. I tried to avoid him --running a little earlier/ later. He always found me.
It was still snowy and icy the last day I ran indoors with him. When we’d gotten in our four miles, as was his custom he gestured for me to go first up the stairs to the first-floor changing areas.
As I did so, he grabbed my rear end.
My response? Nothing. I did what was the norm. I pretended nothing had happened. I acted like everything was okay. Without saying another word, I went to the changing room, showered, put on my suit, and went back to work. I told no one what happened because why would I?
The next day I brought my outdoor running gear and headed out onto the ice. I never ran in that garage again. Thankfully, I was never alone with him again either. I honestly don’t know what I would have done. Our departments did have meetings together, but I avoided him. I don’t think I ever spoke with him again.
At work, I became increasingly disillusioned. I was bored. Fed up. I realize now that what I was experiencing was likely anger and disgust. The idiot guy was the only one who physically harassed me. But the whole male as dominator environment was just overwhelmingly depressing and I didn’t care enough or know how to fight it. I left that department a few months later. I left the company a few years later.
I learned from his obituary that he was 17 years older than me and that he’d been happily married for almost sixty years. He was also a faithful, active, prayerful member of his Protestant church for the last fifty years.
Raised an eyebrow at those factoids. He grabbed me forty years ago. Happily married? Religious too? His idea of do unto others doesn’t exactly mesh with my understanding of that Golden Rule. Wow. Hypocrite much?
This story about the asshole, supposedly deeply religious and prayerful, who grabbed at me? That’s a story I’m okay with sharing. Why? Because it’s so common. What I just wrote about happened all the time. Still happens all the time. It’s not super personal to me. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s wrong though. Doesn’t change the fact that that grab absolutely changed EVERYTHING for me, as far as wanting to stay at that company and totally annihilated any interest I once had in being part of a corporate environment.
And add to that that our nation elected to the highest office a loser proud of the fact that he can grab whatever he wants whenever he wants. I’m so disgusted with every single human being who didn’t think this should be a dealbreaker and went ahead and voted for him anyhow. It’s like being grabbed all over again, only now I'm not shutting up.
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