Monday, October 16, 2017

#MeToo again and again

I have to many stories of sexual harassment and/or abuse to post on FB so here are some more:


#MeToo again and again. Then there was the time my boss for my first full time job post-college, before heading to law school, asked me, when we had been working late, if I wanted to have dinner and he would drive me home. I said yes. I lived very far on public transit from downtown Chicago and I accepted more for that ride than dinner. But no dinner was offered. Instead he took me to a movie and I blithely went in, thinking 'ok, we'll see a movie and this place must sell at least hot dogs'. Downtown movie theaters in Chicago were fancy places. In those days (1975-76) new movies would only show downtown for awhile and move to neighborhood theaters after some weeks. I had almost never gone to a downtown movie theater and had not noticed that the one we entered was any different.

It was a porno theater, which may have been while almost no one was in it at dinner time. We sat in the middle of a long row. As soon as the lights went down and naked bodies appeared on the screen, I jumped out and fled. He ran after me offering, in his thick accent (he was German) "I will still take you home". As if. I demanded cab fare and demanded a lot more than the cab would have been. Then took the bus so I would calm down before I got home and faced my dad. I did not tell my dad about that porno theater interlude but I might have if I had gotten home fast.

Workplace harassment, right? I had been just about to quit when that happened, because it was time to move to MN to go to law school but Peter fired me. He had always been a jerk, blowing up in anger all the time. He once pulled the old time phones that were installed and hardwired into the walls out of the wall and threw it at me when I reminded him that we had agreed when I got hired that I would not do coffee. He was so furious when he learned that since he fired me, I got sixteen beautiful weeks of unemployment insurance. He even called unemployment and said he would take me back so he didn't have to pay but the unemployment people said no way. Unemployment asked me if I was only going to law school because I had lost my job -- another kind of misogyny, eh? -- so I sniffled and said "I don't know" because I wanted that sixteen weeks of checks. I also wanted payback to Peter, that boss.

memories. . . and then there was the time. . . . . once while house shopping, I spent a long evening looking at houses with a realtor. He was going to make a nice commission when I made my decision so when he said "I'd like to stop and guy you a drink", this naive dope and no longer a kid thought he was schmoozing to be sure I stuck with him for his commission because I was so clearly going to be buying a house. But, no, he thought my agreeing to the drink meant I had agreed to have sex with him, which he did flat out tell me as he tried to stroke me in that bar. I was out in is car and this was pre-Lyft life so I still let him drive me home. He did not get my sale.

and then there were harassments and assaults too dark to surface on FB -- yes, I do draw some lines.

I sometimes say, altho I almost never discuss my breasts these days, that my breasts went from a flat chest to a 36C overnight when I was in the sixth grade. Yes every boy in my world noticed and many of them ogled me or even commented. Worse, to child me, was when adult males would drive by as I walked to and from school and shout ugly stuff at me about my bosom and my sex appeal. This frightened me. Teenage boys did this too but the adult males were the really frightening ones. My breasts got bigger as I got to h.s. but I did go to an all girl school. Boys groped me at dances sometimes but not so much because these were always dances with nuns and/or priests as well as parental units chaperoning, eh? Once a boy, maybe 12, saw me in an ally near my home walking to church and he circled back just so he could grab one of my breasts -- for a three second grab. What did he get out of it? I was so ashamed, as if I had done something wrong. He circles around me, no longer having the advantage of surprise to catch, as he kept asking for, another feel. This was maybe 75 yards from our church and on a Sunday! I never took the ally shortcut after that!

And then .. . I could recount more examples of sexual harassment but I'd getting down to the ordinary shit virtually all women experience of oglilng, inappropriate comments . . like guys in law school would actually, loudly and openly discuss my body in front of me as if it was part of their commons and none of their beeswax. In line in our graduation robes, one pig law classmate said "You would be so beautiful if you just lost ten pounds".. . . . . Even after I got fat, which was not until my late thirties, some men, altho fewer as time unfolded, make comments, passes, even just demand sex.

It aint easy being green or female. Or human.

Speaking of green, I went out drinking on St. Patrick's Day just once in my whole life, in my first year of law. I went to downtown St. Paul MN to some Irish bar or another and while I was looking at the songs on the juke box because I was uneasy being in a bar, never was into bars and I was trying to fit in and failing, some male unknown to me came up to me and twisted one breast so hard that I seriously rushed to the restroom to see if he had broken the very tender skin of my nipple. I didn't see him either: he must have been quite practiced because he moved in and was gone so quickly that I didn't see him, only felt his sadistic attack.

This isnt' my story but a married female classmate in law school got pregnant unexpectedly near the beginning of our second year. The law school faculty, all lawyers so they knew the law, asked her to come to a full faculty meeting to discuss her pregnancy. She showed up with a lawyer who reminded those pigs - one female prof in my entire law school career -- of the law, assuring them the client would sue if forced to withdraw from law school, which is what the faculty had insisted she had to do. They said "No one can go to law school while pregnant". Needless to say, they did not force her out and she did just fine. Some of them had the poor judgment to suggest she abort. Lawyers! And, of course, several law professors were ally cats with their female students, sleeping with women students -- not all of them, just a few rotten apples. Once on a Moot Court field trip, where the school flew our Moot Court team to some city, put us up in hotels for the competition, once again I found myself in a bar with a bunch of males, including one law professor, the most noted Lothario on our faculty. He pitched his woo at me and draped his arm around me as we went up to the floor of our hotel rooms. Lucky for me, I was sharing with that one female law prof, there, I think, to chaperone me. She was asleep but I told Bill that I needed to get something in my room and he was so much older than me, he probably thought I meant my diaphrahm (sp?), and he did not know I never had one ever. Next day he pulled me aside to ask what happened and I lied to him. I concede he was very attractive, very charming.

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