GROPING AND GRABBING IN THE HEADLINES

There's suddenly an epidemic of sexual harassment and assault!  Hollywood and Washington DC, especially, seem to be headline-blaring hot beds of lust-crazed men groping and grabbing.

Or...wait...maybe there is a slowly building, hopefully not short-lived, tendency (I can't make the parallel "epidemic" argument) toward people believing women (and some men) who are accusing men of harassment and assault.  It's been a long time coming and I have to wonder what caused the tipping point right now.

Could it be the collective disgust that our current president so brazenly bragged of the same harassment and assault and was still elected president?  Did the nation grow a conscience?

I swear, I don't know.  I'm stumped as to why, at this juncture, we are hearing of decades-long behaviors among prominent men and that there is some "news" in this.  Are we supposed to be shocked?

I'm not.  A handful of well-known men do not represent an anomalous cohort.  What's truly epidemic is the prevalence of this behavior and what any woman can tell you is, it happens all the time.  Studies show 1 in 3 women is sexually harassed at work; 1 in 5 sexually assaulted in college;  1 in 10 (fewer in some studies) raped in their lifetime, most often by an intimate or known partner.  So, yeah, there's that.

I did a little life review in light of all this recent revelation.  My journey of harassment and borderline assault started in junior high, grades 7-9.

I walked a mile to and from school and many times was whistled at, lured to get in vehicles, and followed by adult men.  My best friend encountered a man exposing himself sitting in a car near her home every day for a week.  We told our parents; they said to be careful and/or take a different route.

An 8th grade math teacher was known to leer and encourage girls to bend over in front of him to pick up an 'accidentally' dropped textbook.  We made a game of avoiding him.

A boy in my 8th grade science class leaned over one day in his stupid Madras plaid shirt and said "You're not much from the chin up, but from the neck down you're gangbusters!  Nice tits!"  I gotta think he heard or read this somewhere, but still, I took it to heart and from then on believed that my body was my only asset.  I can still hear him...and from that day I believed I was not pretty.

I was groped in the city swimming pool one summer almost every time I went.  I stopped going.

In high school there was more of the drive-by luring/jeering behavior (by adult males) as I walked every day to a friend's house after school to await my parent pick-up.  I don't even count the times teen boys grabbed and flirted and made suggestive comments and invitations, because that was so commonplace as to just be "normal" for the late 60's.  I started to feel like a target and started to feel afraid at times.

One school dance date night I found myself pinned to a sofa (after many, many rebuffs on my part) being told "I love you" and "let's do it" over and over.  I pushed him and kicked at him and he finally stopped, but was mad at me.  So, I apologized.  Then went to dinner, which I didn't eat, then jumped from his car in my driveway and cried myself to sleep.  I was disgusted, afraid, and furious.  I had no idea how to handle something like that.  I never told anyone.

At an after school job I worked in a small office with one older woman and three salesmen.  I typed and took dictation (poorly).  One day the woman was not there and two of the men wanted me to take dictation and laughed at me when I couldn't keep up.  When I stood up to leave they commented on my short skirt and "great legs".   I cried all the way home, embarrassed and ashamed.  I quit the job.

After high school,  I worked in a large office, as an assistant to a product buyer, where a man from a different department routinely walked around flirting with all the young women.  One day he came to my desk to chat, and asked me to stand up and turn around so he could see if my outfit would look good on his wife.  I did it, and then he laughed and said his wife wouldn't fill it out like I did.  I was humiliated and embarrassed, knowing the whole thing had been a ruse.  I avoided his future approaches.

I worked later in a small clinic where I learned to process x-rays in a darkroom.  The boss took many opportunities to supervise my work, leaning over me from behind, his body touching mine as I tried to squirm away.  I needed that job.  I put up with it.

At the community college I attended nights, I once found myself in a stairwell with a male student, who chased me down the stairs and grabbed my butt before running on ahead of me.

I recall going to a party with my husband where one of his medical school friends asked me to dance, then groped my breasts.

At the medical center I had a boss, an MD, who told me stories of his "open marriage", asked questions about my marriage and sex life (I didn't answer), tricked me into undergoing a bogus physical exam, lured me to a hotel room, and belittled me for rebuffing all his advances, then told me I should thank him for proving to myself that I loved my husband by not going along with him.  I told my supervisor and others, who were sympathetic but passively patted me on the back and shook their heads.  Nothing happened.  I quit that job.  (I've written about this in more detail in a previous blog post).

My mid-20's feminist awakening empowered me.  I was less naive and more savvy.  I learned to protect myself with street smarts and intuition.  But, still, too often I  felt like a target and I began to feel that any man was a potential rapist.  I was afraid too often, always searching for safety in my surroundings, how to get help if I needed it.  This is no way to live!

In my 30's, with motherhood and age, all of this seemed to calm down.  My life was lived mostly in groups of women and children and decent men who were respectful.  Later, my career in social work was in a female-centric workplace.

I guess I am lucky I was never truly physically injured in an assault, nor was I ever raped.  (I didn't go  away to college, but completed my undergrad degree over many years as an adult, so I don't have that experience to add to my story.)  But psychologically I was wounded just the same.  For much of my late girlhood and young womanhood, I felt like meat, like I didn't exist or have value beyond my body, that I was always in jeopardy, that my breasts were my best asset, that my sexuality was for the pleasure of men.  And that I was a prick tease, because flirting seemed to imply consent,  but I could not be promiscuous.  I still had a modicum of respect for myself, that finally feminism celebrated.   Feminism was such a relief.  And if I was angry a lot, and hated most men as a gender for awhile, that was a necessary part of healing the wound too.

So, yeah, I'm delighted all these guys are getting their comeuppance.  But it's a drop in the bucket.  Ask any waitress, Target checker, secretary behind the desk, schoolgirl, nurse, doctor, lawyer, teacher, writer, baker, executive....you get it.  Ask any woman anywhere.

We've all got stories to tell and there won't be any headlines or multimillion dollar settlements for us. And most of our harassers will never pay any price at all for the damage done.  They might even be elected President.

At least, that's the view from here...©

Photo Credit: REX.Shutterstock Harvey Weinstein.