Finding the Moral High Ground

We just lost a great advocate for the American people because he did some stupid things when he was a comedian and even, allegedly, when he was a senator. Senator Al Franken is resigning in the wake of fellow Democrat John Conyers’ resignation, after Conyers’ staff levied allegations against him. Seven women came forward to report Franken groped and/or kissed them without permission. Some, including my husband Ronald, say his actions cannot be thrown in with the likes of Roy Moore’s actions or Donald Trump’s actions, and I agree with that. But I believe his resignation was the right thing to do.

Men have to learn that touching a woman in any way when she has not given you express permission, is wrong. Only acceptable social touching such as a handshake is right.  Even if you think it is funny, or you think she might like it as much as you like it, you can’t make that call. And, besides, there are rules of conduct in the workplace that cover just these situations. If you don’t know them, it would be prudent to find out what they are.

It’s worse in the entertainment industry because there may be touching or nudity as part of the job or role. But it is still a workplace, and we have to make sure all workplaces are safe and interactions are respectful and equitable.

I was a drama student in high school and for one semester in college.  I’ve been grabbed in the crotch, had a few students suddenly grab me and stick their tongues down my throat, and been felt up during a scene in a play in which we were stuck in an elevator on set while the show principals sang a duet in front of the closed doors.  Each time I reacted strongly and told them it was unacceptable behavior and they’d better not do it again, but the act had already been committed and it didn't stop the next high schooler from trying it. And it wasn’t funny; it was disgusting, unwanted, and violating. They started calling me “ice queen” in high school, trying to shame me for not playing along. I can only imagine what young girls go through today, and it hurts me to think about it, because we fought so hard to end this kind of misogynist treatment.  You can read more about my personal experiences with sexual harassment in my blog post Not Okay.

I remember sitting in a labor union meeting in the early 1980s with a labor attorney who introduced us to the concept of sexual harassment.  There was a name for it and something we could legally do about it.  That knowledge was empowering.

The Equal Opportunity Commission defines sexual harassment this way:

It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.

Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.

Both victim and the harasser can be either a woman or a man, and the victim and harasser can be the same sex.

Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).

The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.

But many women are afraid to report sexual harassment, and that goes double for sexual assault and abuse. The reason they are afraid is because the public tends to question their credibility and their motives, and, instead of looking at the character and intent of the perpetrator, they often scrutinize the character and intent of the victim. What was she wearing? What did she say?  What did she do to cause it? And it makes women ask themselves those same questions even though they might have been taken completely by surprise and never acted in any way open to a sexual overture. Because the only thing that they could do to cause it would have been to say, “Please grab me and force your tongue down my throat when I least expect it,” or “Make sure you expose yourself while we are working on that report.” And I doubt many women or girls say that.

It’s about who does and doesn’t have control of your body. No one does but the person inside of it. In an egalitarian world, women would be safe in the workplace, on the street, and at home.  In the unequal world we live in, women’s bodies are sometimes assigned government oversight, and some men, the ones they know and the ones they don’t, believe women’s bodies are sex objects or baby vessels to be owned or manipulated. It is unconscionable and wrong.

Women fear retaliation, too, in the form of social and economic oppression and through violence. Some are so afraid of a confrontation or retaliation, they silently comply while waiting for their moment to escape.  That doesn’t mean it is any less disgusting, invasive, unwanted, illegal, or violent.

So when women step forward and report sexual harassment, abuse, or assault, we ought to consider them sheroes for standing up to public scrutiny.  Their stories cause other women to remember their own experiences of being harassed or assaulted and the attendant trauma many suffered from such experiences. Let us women (and other victims including children, men, and gender fluid individuals) work our way through the emotions these stories elicit, because those memories are difficult to process.

And men (and all potential predators), while they sit and wonder who in their past might come forward to report an incident of harassment or worse, need to support these women, too, and learn from what they are hearing.  We are not condemning all men. Nor are we condemning all behavior. Under the right circumstances, flirting or other sexualized behavior might be welcome and returned, but it must be consensual. And it’s okay to make mistakes because sometimes you think one thing but it’s another. However, repeated attempts or the inability to understand that no means no is a clear indication that boundaries have been crossed.

Men need to collaborate with women in creating a safe and respectful workplace, whether that workplace is in a corporate office, in a classroom, on a movie set, in a fire station, or in the halls of Congress. It is NEVER okay to assume another person wants to see you naked or wants to be touched or chooses sexual humiliation or interaction, especially if it is a work colleague.

So Senator Franken did the right thing, as I would expect him to, even though he still questioned the credibility of some of the charges against him by saying, “some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others, I remember very differently.” But just like a racist doesn’t see how his unequal treatment of a person of a different race is damaging to that person or he may not remember specific incidents of racist behavior, the sexual harasser won’t necessarily recognize or remember incidents either.

I allow that Franken’s resignation may have been too quick since the Ethics Committee barely had time to investigate and the investigation is incomplete, but it was way past time for the women who were victims of his actions.  In many ways I am saddened he had to take the fall along with civil rights advocate Rep. Conyers, in order to expose the hand of the GOP that voted a sexual predator into the office of president and is at the brink of electing a child sexual predator and proud racist to the Senate. Franken understood the incongruity of his situation when he said, “I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.”

But I am sure that taking the moral high ground is always the right thing to do. In the meantime, we need to figure out how to interact respectfully between the sexes, especially in the workplace. As it was in the 1980s, it will be hard to work out what is and isn’t acceptable and what the consequences will be for those who choose their own self-aggrandizement and wants over respectful, equal, and dignified interactions with colleagues and subordinates.

We are, no doubt, in the middle of redefining who we are as Americans, and we cannot shy away from the hard conversations, revelations, actions, complexity, and consequences needed to reach the high ground. At the very least, we need to press the GOP to respond and participate in kind by using our voices and votes in protest for their inactions. Their denial and disparagement of the women, who came forward to report abuse, their protection of sexual predators, and their inability to hold their standard bearers accountable are our obstacles to reaching the high ground. #resist #persist

Author in the role of Queen Guinevere in a high school play, ca. 1975

Legitimizing Women's Rights in America

The GOP has done it again. They’ve tried to marginalize women in every way possible. For the likes of Todd Aikin and Paul Ryan, both of whom have a long history of writing and backing misogynistic legislation, I wish upon them the chance to walk in a woman’s shoes, high heeled shoes, for just a bit, maybe a week if they’d even last that long.

I’m not sure what Aikin meant by legitimate rape in his comment that women’s bodies can’t get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” a non-scientific lie. But what it says to me is that he believes there is an opposing illegitimate rape in which the victim is lying or really wanted it. The proof would be if that woman became pregnant then it must have been an illegitimate rape. Sounds like a witch hunt to me.

He has since tried to worm his way out of the argument by saying that all rape is bad and that the perpetrator should be punished but the child should not be punished just for being conceived. He has not spoken about the victims of rape, the women the act is perpetrated against.

Ryan is also a strong anti-abortionist and supported a change in the definition of rape that included the word “forcible” as opposed to marital, incestuous, or statutory rape. He later said in an interview, given after Aikin’s ignorant statement, “Rape is rape.”

Ryan went on to say, “I’m very proud of my pro-life record, and I’ve always adopted the idea that, the position that the method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life.”

The life of the woman is expendable in his world. I don’t want to live there.

The GOP is drafting their platform to ban all abortions, no exceptions. I’m pro choice but that doesn’t mean I support abortion specifically. I support a woman’s right to choose. Given access to proper health care, birth control, and sex education, abortion would become less likely a choice when women clearly have other options. But they may not have other options in the case of rape or if a woman’s health is at risk. Sometimes abortion is the answer. But the GOP would like to keep women from having access to sex education, birth control, and proper health care. And they want to protect the rights of a fetus above the rights, health, and choice of the woman carrying the fetus. In the GOP world, women aren’t human beings. They are just baby vessels.

I hate that victims of rape are still stigmatized in our society. It’s difficult enough to be a woman. We still make less than our male counterparts in the work world. The burden of birth control and childcare is still predominately our burden. Many men have children with many different women and choose not to support them. Single parenthood is difficult in even the best circumstances. Women are sexually objectified, and in this day, more young women are turning to the sex industry to make a living because it’s hard to make a life off wages one would earn at a place like Wal-Mart or to pay one’s way through school to get a better job.  Men accept them into the sex industry with open arms and little compassion for how that life will diminish and marginalize the women. I can’t decide if the whole trend is further subjugation or a new kind of sexual freedom on the part of the young women. I lean toward the former.  Other young girls are dressing androgynously, perhaps to avoid any form of gender discrimination.

I think what everyone is forgetting in this horrible debate about rape is that rape is an act of violence and subjugation.

I grew up thinking women are supposed to be beautiful and sexually attractive but are whores if they are too eager and frigid if they say no. One of my high school nicknames was “The Ice Queen.”

I never understood why Ma was always on my case when I was in high school. I thought it was because she didn’t trust me. Maybe it was because she was in her fifties and she felt that envy a woman of that age, like myself, feels, when she sees a young woman. Probably it was because she thought I might end up in a situation that I couldn’t handle and that would turn out all wrong.

I had two stalkers in college. Ronald took care of each one. Ronald offered to beat up the first man, who lived in my dorm, in the middle of the record store, but his friend grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the store before fists started flying.  The second man I had never even spoken to, yet he followed me in his green Volvo each morning as I left the apartment, that I shared with three other women senior year, and cut across the park to go to class or my work-study job. He knew where I lived. He knew my schedule. One day he stopped his car alongside me and asked me if I wanted a ride. I was polite. “No thank you,” I said, and kept walking. The next day his car slowed as he passed me but didn’t stop. A man on a racing bike flew past me a few seconds later, but he turned around and came back.

“Do you know the guy in the green Volvo?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Well, I think he’s waiting for you up around the bend. You better take a different route.”

I cut across the grass and came out a block up the road so I wouldn’t run into him. I called the police when I got to my work-study job.  My voice was shaking as I explained how this man always seemed to be around whenever I left my apartment.

“Take a different route,” the cop on the phone advised. The next day I stayed on the streets that circled the park where there were sure to be lots people, but when I turned my head, there was the green car slowly trailing behind me. I dialed the police again.

“Miss, unless he touches you, there is nothing we can do,” the cop on the phone said, exasperation in his voice.

“I’ll be sure to call you after the rape and my cold, dead body is discovered in the park,” I said, hanging up the phone. There were no stalker laws in place back then. I felt vulnerable and terrified.

A few days later Ronald and I were walking down Marshall Street, the street where the eat places, bars, and stores were close to campus, and everyone hung out there at lunchtime and at night. I saw the green Volvo parked by a meter, and the guy sitting on the hood of the car.

“That’s him,” I whispered to Ronald. “That’s the guy.”

Ronald started walking directly toward him. My arm was looped on his arm, and I tried to pull him back. He was only one hundred thirty pounds back then, but he spent his first twelve years in the housing projects, and I didn’t think anything scared him because he told me he’d already seen it all.

As he got closer he started pointing at the guy. “Is this the guy? You’re sure?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, still whispering, and still trying to steer him away. I didn’t want to be near that guy.

Ronald walked right up to the side of the car and poked his finger in the guy’s chest. He said, “Stop.” Then he looked at me and said, “He won’t be bothering you anymore.” I didn’t see the guy again.

Not everyone has a protector. We need laws that protect us, not laws that marginalize us.

In the workplace things just seemed to get worse. I ended up at JC Penney after I turned down a teaching job. See my post Rumble Jumble.

The managers treated the mostly female sales associates as their private harem.  They were all middle-aged, white men who were married with children. The one that audited the registers liked to sneak up behind young women and trap them between him and the register as he plunked his key into the lock, a decidedly sexual overture. I told him to stop when he did it to me, and he laughed. One day, as I was rushing back downstairs from taking my break, I turned a corner in the stockroom hallway and stumbled upon him with his arms wrapped around the receptionist and his tongue down her throat. I sucked in air and skidded to a stop. The receptionist took off.  The manager laughed. “If you thought that was good, you should have seen what she gave me for my birthday.”

She thought he loved her. I felt sorry for her.

Another manager asked me out day after day after day. Then he invited me to “skinny dip in his pool” with the promise that he wouldn’t be home. I asked him repeatedly to stop but he wouldn’t. One day he stopped at my counter and asked me to go camping for the weekend.

“What? Chris, how many times do I have to tell you no? Besides, I’m engaged. You don’t want to get Ron mad, now do you? He will hurt you.” I hated using Ronald as my defense, but nothing else had worked.

“Don’t tell him. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him or me,” he said, grinning.

“That’s not what he’d be mad about,” I said, looking deadly serious.

“Oh? What would he get mad about?” he asked, hoping this meant he had an opening.

“He’d be mad about you, me, and him sleeping in the same tent.” I turned on my heel and walked away.  No one had heard of sexual harassment back then.  If you didn’t take care of it yourself, it didn’t get taken care of.

After Christmas everyone’s hours were cut. I needed full time hours to pay my rent and car payments, so I marched upstairs to the personnel manager’s office and asked him for more hours. He smirked and offered to put me in the men’s department. I lasted two hours. Men of all ages kept asking me to measure their inseams. The thought of getting down on my knees or squatting in front of a guy and holding one end of the tape against his genitals made me sick to my stomach. Besides, I was pretty sure most men’s inseams didn’t change from one pants purchase to the next. I marched upstairs again.

“I want more hours but back in women’s accessories,” I announced as I sat in the chair in front of the manager’s desk.

“Oh, and what makes you think I’ll do that?” he asked.

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” I said.

He got up and shut the door, sat down, adjusted his tie, and leaned forward. “Okay, you got it. Now you owe me something in return.”

I knew all about this guy. He had called my (married) friend a rabbit because she had gotten pregnant twice and miscarried both times, requiring time off work. He completely ignored how emotionally painful it was to lose two babies.

He fired another young woman because she requested emergency time off when her mother fell ill and had to be hospitalized.

I looked him square in the face and leaned forward, too. I knew exactly what he meant. “Have you ever heard the word “rape” screamed at the top on one’s lungs?” I asked him, my voice calm and confident. I wasn’t afraid of him.

He moved back a little.

“Well, you are about to hear it if you don’t get up and open that door in the next five seconds.”

He jumped up and opened the door.

“I don’t owe you anything,” I said as I walked out of his office.

That’s how it was back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. We fought for the Equal Rights Amendment back then, but when the prerequisite number of states willing to adopt it fell short, it died in 1982. See Wikipedia for more information on the ERA.

I had hoped for more change by the time my daughters grew into young women. But I see the backlash and the regression. There is no equality for women today, no more than there is equality for any minority in our country. Any stride we make is stopped by other obstacles, like unequal pay for equal work, unequal access to health care, limited quality child care options, and, worst of all, paternalistic lawmakers who think they know better about our bodies and morals than we do.

After I told the personnel manager off in his office, he was transferred to a new store. As he walked around the store saying his good-byes, he stopped at the costume jewelry counter where I worked.

"I just wanted to say thanks,” he said. “You kept me in line.”

“That’s because I’m your goddamned conscience,” I said. “Don’t you forget it.”

We need to stand up and be the GOP’s conscience. There is no louder way to make our message heard than to vote in November.

Work in Progress: Chain-blogging Ten Questions

Belinda Nicoll (My Rite of Passage) tagged me in this challenge to answer ten questions about a work in progress. Here are my responses.  Thanks for tagging me, Belinda!

What is the title of your WIP?

I don’t have a title yet. I’m not done writing, and a title hasn’t made itself apparent, nor have I concentrated on discovering one.

What is your WIP?

A book of short stories about women and personal power.

Where did the idea for the WIP come from?

I write non-fiction about race and culture, and I have always had a special interest in women and power or lack of power. Once a psychic told me I am a very feminine soul, and I believe that. I always felt very feminine.  I don’t consider that a weakness but a strength.

I am of the generation of women who entered the workforce in large numbers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I saw and experienced so much sexual harassment. One of my undergraduate professor’s wrote a reference letter that said, “Dianne will be a pretty addition to any office.” Someone in the career services department was smart enough and progressive enough to clue me in, and I had the letter tossed. We didn’t have a name for sexual harassment back then, but we knew it when we experienced it, and we persevered in spite of it.

I think about the power we own as women: the power of procreation, the power to choose what we think is right and best for us and those we love, the power to make choices about our bodies, and the power to make societal change. I think of feminism and what we hoped for, how we envisioned it, and I wonder how to interpret and view the backlash I see in a very sexualized, object-oriented culture where both women and men struggle to define themselves and their roles. I wanted to play with all of those concepts and see where they would take me.

What genre would your WIP fall under?

It is feminist fiction.

Which actors would you use to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I love movies and actors – I could watch movies all day and not get bored.  I know because I’ve done it many times. It would be hard to choose amongst so many actors and I would be honored that anyone of them would choose to play one of my characters. I’d like to be in on the auditions. Maybe I could throw a few lines at them.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your WIP?

These are stories about women discovering their personal power and how to use that power to develop self-love and acceptance and to negotiate their way in life and society.

Is your WIP published or represented?

No, I have ambivalent feelings about the state of publishing, a capitalist endeavor. I think it’s become like reality TV.  It’s all about marketing and what sells, not necessarily about the writing or the message. I am strongly considering self-publishing. I’ve never been a joiner, and I can feel myself pulling away, feeling uncomfortable with the whole process, not wanting to compromise my personal ethics and values for a publishing contract, and wanting to have control of the process. Self-publishing may be the great equalizer for writers, but I'm not sure about that either. 

How long did it take you to write?

Literally years, because I wrote two of the stories a long, long time ago, took them out recently, dusted them off, and revised them. The other two are new, one still very much in the works and the other at the revision stage. I may write a fifth – a kernel of a story is germinating. My process is very “inside my head” and then when I am ready to write, the whole thing pours out as fast as I can type. Then I go back, revise, build, and restructure.

What other WIPs in your genre would you compare it to?

I hate to compare myself or my work to anyone else or his/her work. I’m too insecure for that, but I also think that we should not place more value on any one piece of art over another anymore than we should place different value on individuals. Every story is valid and has a place in the human collective. Writing ability varies, and so do personal aesthetics and the leanings of mainstream culture, but should those things make any one story less worthy of being told than another?

Which authors inspired you to write this WIP?

Surprise, I love detective, police, and mystery novels: James Kellerman, Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly, and James Patterson are favorite authors in that genre. I enjoy very visual and visceral writers, too. Toni Morrison comes to mind. I can read her books over and over. I’m reading Craig Johnson’s Longmire novels right now – I just love his characterizations, his word choices, how he is miserly with his words, but they are so rich, and how his writing is sensual. I like how he delves into cultural differences and how two different cultures interact, especially when they’ve had a violent, distrustful history.

Really, I enjoy just about every book I read, because I love being in the moment of the story, wrapped up in it, experiencing it through another’s eyes. I enjoy the unique way the writer has chosen to tell the story. All of the written and oral stories I’ve heard over the years have inspired me. Stories and reading were my ways of escaping as a child, growing up in an alcoholic, interethnic home where there were many arguments and lots of chaos.

Tell us anything else that might pique our interest in this project.

I think it’s time to assess how far we’ve come in this new age of feminism. In some ways, we have regressed, and I worry about young women.  In other ways, young women demonstrate strengths I certainly feel I never had.  We have a long way to go, though, in so many ways. We need to acknowledge that there are many ways an individual can live a feminist life. We need to accept and embrace those disparities that can arise due to class and cultural differences as well as individual temperaments and personalities. We need to be inclusive rather than exclusive. We have a long way to go, too, in the areas of access to education, career opportunities, childcare, health care, and reproductive rights. 

I also believe a lot of young men today are distracted and unmotivated, and maybe a part of it has to do with the fact that feminists did not consider in a meaningful way how to help men redefine and adapt to new roles as women changed or expanded theirs. I don’t think we did enough to help couples navigate and build relationships as equal partners. I don’t think we came to terms with the fact that it’s okay that men and women are different, whether it is nature or nurture that creates the differences, but we can still be equal. Equality does not mean being the same, and we need to root for equality and self-actualization of all people.

There is a long continuum of gender identification, and an individual can fall anywhere along that continuum from very masculine to very feminine. We can work to understand and change socially defined gender roles and embrace the complexity of gender individuality. That way, everyone, no matter how one self identifies, can feel comfortable instead of feeling societal pressure to change inherent traits in order to feel “normal” and accepted by others.

I'd like to tag:
 Angela Haigler
Sarah Meinel
Lacey Lyons
Heather Magruder
Karen Celestan