#YesAllWomen — and it starts early [#MeToo]
I’m rounding the clubhouse turn on a Big Birthday (clue: it’s the one that qualifies a person for Medicare), which puts me in a frame of mind to review personal history. This particular review will be of the drip-drip-flood of self-doubt and self-abnegation that became a central feature of my voyage to adulthood, and beyond. If it resonates with your own, speak up.
First blood
Sons of close friends of my parents, who I had known since I was a preschooler, suddenly seemed interested in me (they had previously avoided being seen with me) when I was 11. Turned out they just wanted to hold me down and take turns pulling off my underwear. I was both horrified and humiliated by this, and by my mixed feelings about male attention of this sort.
I was 11.
Also, when I was 11, the new boyfriend of the mother of a friend fingered me under cover of “helping me into the car” (which was a step-in van). I was horrified, confused, and told no one about it. I still know that friend, although we didn’t see each other or communicate much from 1967 to 2012. I have never had the courage to ask her if that “new boyfriend” abused her during that time.
The curse of curves
I sprouted boobs when I was 9.
I had my first period weeks after I turned 11.
By 13, I was curvy, tall, and told “you look like a streetwalker” by the nuns teaching my junior high school classes. All because I wore my hair up in a French twist when I was 12 and 13. I was wearing a hideous school uniform, so how that made me “look like a streetwalker” was beyond my ken. I had yet to learn about pederasty, or pervs who liked their sexual objects dressed up like schoolchildren.
Male attention — from adult men — was starting to be more and more apparent. I was still horrified, humiliated, and conflicted about it.
Who owns my feelings?
Took me more than thirty years to even start to figure this one out.
One morning in 1973, I was on my way to my office job in San Francisco’s Financial District. I had my shoulder bag packed with all the usual stuff, along with my tap shoes, since I was taking a tap class one night a week, in an attempt to stay connected to the me that still wanted to be an actor. Some rando suit-n-tie asshole decided that my ass needed fondling. We were both in a gaggle waiting for the light to walk across the street.
His hand grabbed my ass, and I just swung that shoulder bag at his face like I was swinging for the Green Monster at Fenway. He went ass over elbows onto the sidewalk. I looked down at him, realized I could be tagged with an assault charge, and hurried away toward my office. Face down. Grinning. And conflicted about my feelings about knocking down another human being (spoiler: I wanted to be fully delighted, but had to settle for 90% delighted, 10% ashamed).
After that day, every time I was cat-called or grabbed (which rose to a number beyond counting), I’d round on the asshole(s) with ferocity. I had highly tuned radar, and would avoid walking down a street if it looked “dude heavy” — i.e. a construction site — but the subway was a war zone. I took to grabbing the hand grabbing my ass, holding it up over the crowd, calling out “does this belong to anyone?”
The scariest one of these was a guy who followed me across three subway lines — from the downtown 4/5/6 to the 42nd Street shuttle to the downtown 1/2/3. On the downtown 1/2/3, I saw he was still with me, and counted off the seconds the doors were open at each station. When we arrived at my station, I counted to 2 seconds short of the average and sprang up and through the closing doors. I turned to see that guy’s face, screaming with rage, less than two feet from my own … still inside the subway car, now pulling away.
Don Draper in real life
My working life, until I by pure luck happened to become a television engineer (in 1980), was a series of gigs in which I had to fend off the unwanted sexual attention of a host of men, few of whom I remember beyond their forced attention:
When I worked at Mercedes-Benz’s service department in San Francisco, the guy who ran the parts department — my boss — repeatedly trapped me in the parts shelves, grabbing my ass while trying to kiss me, telling me “you know you want it.” I did not.
When I moved to New York, one of my waitressing gigs was at a place owned by two brothers who made sport of sleeping with their employees. These guys were power players — Donald Trump hung out at one of their clubs — and competed with each other over their pussy-pulling powers. One night, I was invited to a private party at the aforementioned club. At which they sold me (I didn’t know it at the time) to the guy who was the mayor of Syracuse, NY — I was 22 that very night, and thought that this handsome older man with wads of cash was interested in ME. Not so much. When I twigged to the reality of my situation, in a room at the Drake Hotel, I bailed out as quickly as I could, returned to the club, and flipped a table. I quit that job the following week.
When I landed my first gig in network TV, it was as a secretary in an ad sales department at a major network. The women in that office were told daily what our role was: be pretty, be quiet, be compliant, do your work. When the three sales reps I worked for discovered that I could prepare entire proposals with just the budget, and CPM (cost per thousand viewers), required for the campaign, these Don-Drapers-in-training would stagger back from their three martini lunches, drop a crumpled cocktail napkin on my desk with something like “7-Up, $2 million, 50¢ CPM” scrawled on it, and I’d get to work. They sold every proposal I wrote. When I asked for a raise, I was told I had a bad attitude, and I should look for another job.
Love kills (and wounds)
My first husband was (I thought) the love of my life. He was wonderful: kind, funny, smart, generous … until, that is, he drank. Since I too liked a cocktail, this didn’t seem like a big problem until I saw how quickly his rage would boil over, and how few drinks it seemed to take to trigger the HULK SMASH!! that was him while drunk. Unfortunately, I ignored the warning signs until we were married (10 months after we met).
My relationship history by the time I met him (at 29) was so patchy as to be non-existent. Plus, there was the whole “first time I had sex I got pregnant” thing in college, which gave me my map of the pre Roe v Wade territory, and a distrust of romantic partners (when I told the guy I was pregnant, he shoved me down a flight of stairs) that lasts until today.
My first husband got under that fence, and captured my entire heart. And then, over the next six years, he managed to turn my heart into a pile of ashes. He raped me on our wedding night. He beat me more than once. He emotionally battered me almost beyond saving. I ran for my life at the end, and am in some ways still running. I will never be able to fully trust a man again in an intimate relationship, so I’ve flown solo pretty much consistently since.
Other than another ill-advised marriage to a man who said “you can save me,” the same line HULK SMASH!! used years before. Yes, I see the pattern. I assume responsibility, but I was culturally conditioned over more than 25 years to “be a good girl,” so I was.
WHAT. AN. IDIOT. Don’t fall for the “good girl” shit. It’s cultural control aimed at making you obedient. Disobey to live, obey to be (figuratively, but sometimes literally) slaughtered.
From high-profile to invisible
Something women learn after 40 is the inevitability of invisibility. I don’t look my age, but I’ve never been the cultural-norm sort of “pretty” — I was always too tall, too wide, too loud, too much RBF, not enough subservience to male primacy, too smart, too uppity, and the beat goes on — to be able, or willing, to play on my looks.
How I wish that the paradigm had shifted from my generation to the one rising now, but I look out across the cultural landscape, and all I see is more proof of “you have to be thin and pretty to be heard” or “you have to closely hew to cultural norms to be heard” or “you’re fat, you’re old, shut up and go away.” That women’s bodies are primarily the property of the male gaze, and male desire, and only partially, if at all, our own territory to own and protect. That male desire is the sole purpose of feminine existence.
And now we have a pussy-grabbing, misogynist, spray-tan nightmare at the big desk in the Oval Office.
The only way I can not waste my life, and what remains of it, is to keep being loud in the face of the status quo.
Status quo kills: bodies, spirits, potential.
Check your landscape, and your privilege. If you have privilege — color, gender, cash — put it to use for the good of others, not just yourself.
I may be romantically/sexually invisible, but I still make an impact, and a difference.
