“Free B — Jobs” and Nine other Signs of Sexism We Endure All the Time and Everywhere.
When Jimmy Kimmel joked that if we stop sexual harassment in the workplace, “women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go,” I laughed out loud. I watched the Oscars — pajamas-on, wine-in-hand — as an escape from looming deadlines and kids sports games. And I enjoyed the Trump jabs and all the women-power stuff. But Kimmel’s comment lingered with me and for the past week I’ve been assembling a list of my all-the-time and every-other-place moments of sexual harassment and gender inequity. There are 67 items on the list. These are the top ten:
10. A few months ago, “Free Blow Jobs” was carved into the dust on the back window of my car. I didn’t know if the writer intended this as an insult of me or one of my teenage daughters. It was unclear whether the young prankster meant this to be funny, but there was no denying its intent to shame. In one second I felt embarrassed, panicked and even scared. Then I laughed. I’m a middle-aged married women, should I be charging for blow jobs instead of giving them away?
9. In third grade, a kid named Joey send me a note which said “I want to hump you.” Those few words scrawled on a ripped piece of white binder paper shoved me into a state of fear I had not yet known. I hesitated to show my mom and step dad the crumpled note. I was embarrassed. Even at 8 years old I felt ashamed to have done something — of course I had no idea what I had done but it was something — to encourage a boy to make me do something so incredibly dark and disgusting.
8. Can I even count the times men shoved my hand or head down to their penises?
7. My class in law school was pretty much half women, roughly the same as the national percentage. But women comprise only 18% of equity partners at law firms (the real money-making positions) and about 27% of judges. When I worked for a law firm in New Orleans, women employees were asked to wear nylons and of course the men were not subjected to such torture. And we probably made less money! Female attorneys generally make about 11% less than their male counterparts. In a courtroom, as a Stanford-trained attorney in a conservative black suit, hair pulled back and those nylons on, I was called “Miss,” “sweetie” and “honey.”
6. My husband used to play for the NFL and the expectation was that I would dress up in tight, revealing clothes to attend the games while I cheered for my husband’s teammates to beat the shit out of the other team, all the while being amused and inspired by women wearing “uniforms” smaller than bikinis and getting paid less than minimum wage.
5. Our President is a misogynist and chronic sexual-harasser and I pay taxes that pay his salary. I must endure his tweets, his sexually explicit remarks about his own daughter, his public degradation of professional women, including international heads-of-state. The first president I voted for, Bill Clinton, used his position of power to have “sexual relations” (but definitely not sex) with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. In other branches of government, women are under-represented. There are only 22 women in the Senate (22%) and 86 women in the House of Representatives (19.3%).
4. I have to endure whistles and cat calls. Even yesterday in the parking lot of Target, a guy yelled out “I’ll buy you a coffee!” “I’m good, thanks,” I said. “No really,” he insisted, “go out with me.” I’m a professional woman, with a wedding ring and three kids and I’m was just trying to get my shit done, yet he could not fathom that I was not constantly looking for a date.
3. I took some heat for writing about a sexual encounter with my high school boyfriend. I didn’t say I was raped. I didn’t say my boyfriend had forced himself upon me. I said the truth: I said no when he asked if I would have sex with him and a week later — after the Christmas Ball and a few wine coolers — we were having sex in a strangers bed. I had taken responsibility for my acquiescence for nearly 30 years and now I called for him to realize his part in it: the disrespect and the expectation of submission. In response, hundreds of men and women reached out to me to express their support and say “me too.” But I was also accused of a “disgusting” mis-characterization of my then-boyfriend. What I did was “at best wrong” and at worst “unethical.”
2. I have two daughters that are athletes. We rarely see female athletes on the sports page. Women’s professional sports hardly exist. The most successful women’s team in US history is the United States women’s national soccer team. Still, those players were forced to file a lawsuit against US Soccer over their dismal pay compared to the national men’s team, which sucks, btw.
1. Just last week at an educational event for a professional organization I belong to, the speaker said that when women work all day, expressing their “masculine side,” they need to express their “feminine side” by caring for others when they get home, if they want to be in balance and be less stressed.
Here is what stresses me out: the cat-calls, the unequal pay, the expectations of beauty and thinness and compliance, the notes, the pushes, the accusations of disgusting and unethical behavior for calling for consensual sex. What stresses me out is my daughters growing up in a culture where 23.1% of female college students experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation. A statistic dismissed by the attorney for a Yale student recently acquitted of rape who explained #metoo as “mass hysteria” because “[s]ex happens, especially on college campuses.”
So yes, I’m stressed. I wanted to escape the madness for a few hours, watch the Oscars with a glass of chardonnay and hope for Greta Gerwig to win for Best Director. Instead Kobe Bryant won. Make that #68 on my list of all-the-time and every-other-place moments.
