I was offered the job of personal assistant at 20 years old. I felt lucky for the opportunity. A small-town nerd and lover of the Marx Brothers and David Lynch somehow made it to Hollywood.

Male chauvinism was a foreign concept to me, having been raised by a strong-willed single mother and ambitious grandmother. Maybe this upbringing was damaging, for I wasn’t prepared for Hollywood’s gender divide and rampant sexism.

In my five years as a female assistant, I experienced:

-My employer asking me to give him a blow job.

-Same employer audibly and regularly using the term “cunt” when referring to a female work colleagues who disagreed with him.

-Different employer often talking to me about the size of my breasts. He’d regularly ask another female employee to lift up her shirt and give him a show.

-A married colleague, who was 30 years my senior, asking me to sleep with him when we were at a work conference.

None of these occurrences fazed me at the time. It was Hollywood after all.

That’s just the way it is.

That’s just the way it is, I kept telling myself. You didn’t make a stink, you didn’t say a word, because as a subordinate it would cost you your job. You played by the rules—rules made by the Hollywood patriarchy—or you got out. You don’t like the way we play? We have thousands of others waiting in line for your job! Yes, people in Hollywood actually like to say this.

Men will be men, I kept telling myself. And even when I got out, because I knew that Hollywood was dismantling my self-worth and creativity, I still gave them all a pass. It was my fault; I couldn’t cut it in Hollywood. I couldn’t play with the big boys.

I was young. I was naive. And it wasn’t until I gained years and perspective, in tandem with a handful of women in Hollywood speaking out, that I began acknowledging that the prevalent sexism in Hollywood is wrong.

In no other industry is it acceptable to ask your employee to show you her breasts, but in Hollywood it’s ok.

It’s more than ok.

It’s expected.

When people ask me about my time in Hollywood, I often preface it with “I’m going to sound completely jaded here...” (See? I’m still making excuses.) I’ll preface that here as well. All this might make me sound completely jaded, but even as an assistant in Hollywood for five years, I experienced sexism.

Imagine what top female agents, executives and actresses deal with on a daily basis and how they risk losing their jobs and connections if they speak out. You may see high profile actresses such as Jennifer Lawrence denounce pay discrepancies between the sexes, but you’ll rarely hear women, or men, speak out against flagrant harassment within the industry. Of course, there are men who do not abuse their power and women who may have not have been on the receiving end of improper behavior. However, to show that my instances weren’t isolated, a quick poll on my Facebook page revealed seven female friends in film who experienced harassment, which the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission classifies as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature” and “making offensive comments about women in general.” Several women told me they didn’t feel they had been the brunt of harassment because they hadn’t been physically attacked or had their jobs jeopardized by sex, but yeah, they experienced uninvited come-ons and inappropriate jokes regularly. One friend even said, “boys will be boys.”

Whether it’s in the form of casting couch (the trade of sexual favors between a subordinate and superior in promise of career advancement) or flippant use of advances or offensive humor, it is all harassment, and it continues to objectify and suppress women in a male-dominated industry.