Skimming the post Harvey Weinstein tweets with the hashtag MeToo inspired me to tell my own story in my own way.
I was 7 years old the first time I was violated by a male. But he only did it once and I survived with relatively few emotional scars. So, I didn’t mention the uninvited touching to anyone until I was a teenager. However, the idea that I was somehow responsible for every male’s inappropriate behavior toward me must have been a part of my subconscious. I accepted many more verbal and even physical violations since that evening when I was a 2nd grader in elementary school, including an attempted rape in high school that I did not report.
Decades later, as the mother of a young girl, I question if I am communicating the right messages to my little one. I want her to know unequivocally that unwanted behavior from men isn’t something she must endure. It was NEVER my fault even though I always responded as if it were.
As I have these difficult discussions with my daughter, I am reminded that women are often afraid to speak up about sexual assault. Men feeling entitled to women’s bodies seems par for the course in Hollywood — akin to a fraternal pledge process. When I worked as an executive, two assumptions were repeatedly made: 1) I was my boss’s personal assistant and 2) I was hired because of my looks. The first assumption was insulting because it made it seem as if women were incapable of doing anything in the entertainment industry other than serving men in an administrative capacity. And the second I found laughable because I never considered myself to be particularly attractive. I grew up as a nerd. Smart was what I did. I was the kid who at 17 years old applied for a film grant with no help from any adults. After I was awarded the grant, I shot my first documentary film. I repeated the same process in college and that film received an honorable mention in a local festival. This was back when we literally cut film and spliced it together. That was tedious and complicated work that required a certain level of technical knowledge. Reading and evaluating comedy scripts did not require as much. Yet, I constantly had to prove I could perform work much less complex than I had done early in my career. I continually overheard comments about me to colleagues like, “you hittin’ that?” or “that you?”
As a woman working in entertainment in the 90s, I was told by one producer he could “rape” me, I was groped by a professional athlete during a development meeting and I was told by a film exec about his sexual escapades during a pitch meeting. I habitually ignored men staring directly at my chest while I talked to them or their dismissal of what I said altogether in meetings. My ideas were often treated as if they were extraneous. I recalled some of this recently in a Facebook post — the notion that women are sometimes made to feel unequipped to do the “genius” work men do. That is not to say there isn’t brilliance happening in the workplace. But even when there isn’t, women are often made to feel our skills are somehow remedial and we’re discouraged from calling out the micro aggressions we experience regularly.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I was assaulted by an acquaintance. I never bothered to report it because the situation looked bad. I knew what I was wearing, what I had been drinking and whether or not I was a virgin at the time, etc. would’ve been a part of the evidence. I was wearing a mini skirt. I had two drinks. I was not a virgin. I also knew my father would have assaulted the perpetrator and then who knows would have transpired. At 22, it hardly seemed worth it. Just as it hardly seemed worth it to report any of the dozens of times I felt verbally violated just showing up for work throughout my 20’s.
A degree in Communications didn’t prepare me for how to handle gender bias on the job. I simply did what most women have done for generations — pretended the groping, the touching, the leering, never happened. I laughed off comments that made me cringe, or in some cases, never addressed unwanted touching or propositions. I suppose in some demented way it was a compliment to me that men assumed I had opened my legs and in exchange someone hired me to write a script (which someone once joked to me) or gave me a job running a production company. But just because we choose not to address sexual harassment, doesn’t mean we don’t experience it or that it doesn’t sit with us in some way.
I pray my daughter knows that she is better than the assumptions people make about her. I pray that she won’t feel like she needs to be silent in order to play ball in any professional arena. Mostly, I pray that she will never have an experience that compels her to type #MeToo.
