When I was 16 I started working my first job at a pretty crappy movie theater. Since there was a bigger, nicer, less creepy one in the mall across the street, I basically got paid $6.25 an hour to do homework and deal with the very rare customer. This job was also my first real experience with workplace sexual harassment, both by customers and coworkers. I’ll always remember one experience in particular, when a guy from Coke was sent to fix our drink fountains. He was in his late thirties, and walks behind the concessions stand, grins at me, and kneels to do some work under a counter top. After fiddling for a few minutes and occasionally glancing at me (I was required to be there in case the odd customer came looking for some overpriced, oversalted popcorn or some Goobers) he looks at me and says, “is this how you want me? On my knees? Begging for you?” To be honest, I was shocked and scared, and so I looked at my feet, chewed my bottom lip and didn’t respond, a reaction that made him chuckle. He went back to work and said some other things to me that I can’t really remember, mostly because I was trying to block him out. When my boss, a 23 year-old guy, came down to check on his progress a little while later, the Coke machine repair guy gave him the “we’re two white dudes and we get each other” nod and pointed to me and said, “I begged for her, but she apparently didn’t want me.” My boss looked at me, didn’t seem to get it, and didn’t say anything. Including the most obvious thing, which would be “she’s 16, back off.”
Now, maybe what happened was my fault. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked so damn good in my regulation AMC baggy polo shirt and ass-magnifying pants. But I’m pretty sure that what I looked like had nothing to do with it. In fact, the only relevant thing about me was my gender, and possibly my age. Because he clearly thought he could say whatever the hell he wanted without fearing repercussions, since as a woman I don’t belong in public anyway. Having been a woman in the work force for three years now, I’ve grown pretty used to sexual harassment. This summer I had a customer come in and request that “the blonde” (aka me) be the only one to make his sandwiches. At a past job an old man, a regular, would blow kisses at me (still in high school) and ask me to refill his sugar bowl, calling me sweetie. A former boss would always offer rides home, which may not seem like harassment, but he was pushy and overbearing and his tone made me uncomfortable. An old man kept referring to me as “beautiful,” another one commented on my “attractive smelling perfume,” and I feel like I’ve been winked at and leered at work more times than I can count. At a school job my boss constantly told me that I seem so much older than I actually am, and how similar I am to his girlfriend. Again, these comments may seem innocuous, but would he say them to a male colleague? Would he have spent his whole shift flirting with a freshman while a male coworker served basically all the customers and did all the cleaning? I suspect that a male coworker would have been the recipient of far more respect than I was given.
There hasn’t been a single job, classroom (except for maybe a women’s studies one), conference, meeting, or so on that I have attended where I haven’t felt uncomfortable because of some either exceedingly overt or thinly veiled gender harassment. And what’s more, I’ve never done a thing about it. I feel uncomfortable, recognize that as the norm, harbor feelings of anxiousness and resentment, and move on. Often I feel powerless and like there is nothing I can do. Many women I’ve talked to feel the same way. It’s how things are, and there’s little we can do to change it, so we just repress our anger and/or let go.
Back in 1991, however, Anita Hill decided to do something about the constant sexual harassment she had put up with under Clarence Thomas. At the time the Senate hearings were occurring, I was only a few months old, and yet her courage in making this harassment public is still exceedingly relevant for a bajillion reasons. For one, almost 20 years later, she’s being harassed by Thomas’s wife, Ginny. Seriously, though. It is almost 20 years later, and once again someone is trying to make Anita Hill apologize for the “damage” she allegedly caused. Yet is anyone bullying Thomas into making a public apology? No. Not at all. Did he ever apologize? I’m pretty sure you can guess the answer to that one. Once again we blame the victim and pity the perpetrator, who is apparently being falsely accused by a wicked, slut of a woman (despite evidence to the contrary). And any other woman who complains of sexual harassment today is normally branded with the same dismissive, misogynistic response that Anita Hill got: you must be “a bit slutty and a bit nutty” (thanks, David Brock, womankind is forever in your debt). You’re lying, you’re crazy, you asked for it. And that’s probably why I’ve never spoken up about being sexually harassed, and why so many other women haven’t either. Although Anita Hill’s groundbreaking bravery allowed for dialogue about sexual harassment to occur on a nationwide scale, women are still blamed for it or accused of fabricating it. Because clearly we all must by crazy, hypersexual liars who have never faced a day of discrimination in our lives. Really, that’s obviously the only answer that makes any sense at all.
ShoutOut! James Madison University 