Time's Been Up for Women who are Working Stiffs

Time’s Been Up, and this post is also on LinkedIn.

 

 

You’d have to live in a very, very subterranean cave to have missed the new stories on sexual harassment against women, particularly in the entertainment industry. Yet, some of us have been experiencing this type of behavior for years.  I’m not a movie start, nor am I a beauty queen.  Yet, I’ve had all kinds of negative occurrences with men professionally, or academically.  In junior high and high school, the pervading atmosphere was boys will be boys.  Complaining about being grabbed or having your bra snapped made you, well, “one of those.”  In fact, when I worked in California law firms, I was accused of being “one of those” because I complained another associate was looking down my blouse and making comments.  When I worked in the courts, I was starry-eyed and professionally impressed by the judges who were my superiors.  Then I found out about the behind-the-bench affairs taking place after hours.  My naïveté protected me; one of the younger, newer, good looking but very serious judges used to come down early in the morning to the law library, my workplace.  No one else was there yet, just me.  He said he wanted to talk about cases.  I found out later, well, that he was a case.  Marriage didn’t stop him from chatting up others in the court house.  He wasn’t alone, either.  

 

Then, of course, there was law school and graduate school.  We ended up having university rules about dating students because so many linked up with their profs. The rest of us actually had to study.  So, yes, the atmosphere of “romance” affected opportunities for me and the others who didn’t get invited to out of town “study” weekends, or who didn’t go to drinking parties that morphed into engagement parties. By the time I graduated, I had school mates who wanted to hook me up with one of our professors.  I declined, but many others didn’t.  It was one way to get a job, I guess.  We have legal clerkships and academic internships, while others have casting couches and auditions.

 

Back up a bit to college; another summer work study kept inviting me into his van.  I didn’t accept his invitation.  Thereafter, he was rude and standoffish. If I’d thought if it, I would have written a bad song.  Other men felt they had the right to comment about my figure, make up, clothes, ethnicity, “Greek girls are hot!” and my intellect.  I might have been an A student and in Phi Bet Kappa, but some subjects were too “hard” for me, especially in math and astronomy, or so one male co-worker explained to me. How very kind of him.

 

While I was a teacher, I had students who wrote strange love notes, some graphic.  I ignored them. If it got very bad, like the young man who followed me around trying to intimidate me over a grade, or the male stripper who kept grabbing his privates in front of me, I went to the dean.   I put off one persistent flirt with “don’t be weird.”  That seemed to work.  Colleagues were harder.  One young man had a reputation for asking out the women at the office, including me.  He also liked to pick up girls in bars. When he had a little too much to drink, he knocked them around.  We knew about his behavior; I complained one day.  He asked me to leave my office so he could go in to remove his pants. No kidding; he wanted to go roller blading in the middle of the day.   At least the senior partner took after him that time and chastised him, but that was rare.  The blue jokes were part of the office culture.  We also had one senior employee comment that the poster in the lounge explaining Title VII was “just the rule book.”  Later on, in schools, I had supervisors who would hunt out a woman to shout at whenever a man did something wrong.  Men were never screamed at or verbally abused, only women.  At reviews, we learned our paperwork had to be “sexier.”  Officers I knew and worked with made lots of fun comments about female victims in stalking cases and their dating preferences.  Men were allowed to demean women by calling them by their first names, even after the women requested they be addressed professionally, by their well-earned titles. Men were promoted over women unfairly; if a woman complained, she was told she was being too personal and emotional.  Male employees were allowed to touch and punch women.  One male supervisor, when confronted, stated we would just “have to get used to it.”   He also stated he liked hiring pregnant women because they looked so cute “waddling around.” Another male employee made comments about how many times women went to the restroom, or showed us pornographic photos on his phone.  We were told not to confront him; it might hurt his feelings.

 

These were the mild examples.  I, and the other women I worked with, suffered through more.  Others ended up in the news for domestic abuse and criminal assault cases and crimes all the way up to attempted murder and murder.

 

None of us had an agent or million dollar contracts.  The courts are full of cases dealing with sexual harassment on the job.  Ask me, and I’ll name some.  I would also recommend Larson’s treatise on Employment Discrimination if you want to read more. I have nothing against The Oprah, but all she did in her now famous TV diatribe was to state the obvious.   She was preaching to the Norma Ray choirs of women like me who have experienced sexual harassment and discrimination on the job and in the public sector for years.  When we complained, we were silenced, threatened, ignored, or forced to endure lengthy, expensive law suits.  We learned to deal with it, and to do our jobs.  I’m glad that light is being shed on this messy, painful issue, but it’s a shame that nothing really took off till a bunch of millionaires and billionaires became involved.