I’ve been writing and rewriting this for 3 days, and I’m still not sure if I’m saying it right, but here goes. The recent influx online of stories about workplace sexual harassment has been bringing back a lot of unpleasant memories. I worked in fashion right out of college for about 7 years. It was a female dominated industry with a lot of abusive men at the top. I’ve seen and experienced a lot. Whispered compliments at inappropriate times, bosses watching porn in front of employees without their consent, unsolicited shoulder rubs, public humiliations, being told publicly that I’m gaining weight and should stop eating, then told it was a joke and that I’m beautiful. Some say we ask for it, or that these behaviours are complimentary or flirty, but I’ve come to understand that what I and so many of my colleagues and friends experienced was never about sexual attraction or romance but always about power. Harassment was and is always about keeping us quiet and tame and ashamed. These behaviours are designed to make us compete with one another while hanging on to a fickle promise of employment stability. And more often than not we don’t speak up because we know we won’t be believed. Working in fashion was one thing, I expected the misogyny there, but later I also worked in very “progressive” art spaces and saw similar behaviour. It’s not always as overt as someone explicitly performing or suggesting sexual acts, sometimes it’s the small ways in which we are undermined and infantilized. Pats on the head, back handed compliments, suggestive jokes, intrusions on our personal life, comments about our appearance, gendered language, lack of trust, taking credit for our work, silencing us. It’s the way no one spoke up and no one believed me when I made a formal complaint about an employer’s sexist treatment of a female colleague and myself. The problem is not just in Hollywood, it’s not just happening to conventionally beautiful white cis women, misogyny is everywhere, it’s systemic. The men who are speaking up (finally) need to do more than just say: “I support women”. They need to believe us the first time. Being an ally shouldn’t be easy and comfortable. It’s not enough to tweet about how your mother/sister/daughter taught you that women are people. You also have to acknowledge the ways in which you were complicit, even if it was unintentional. You need to acknowledge that you were trained not to believe us. And while it’s amazing and important that a lot of people are feeling safe enough to share their stories, there is still a long way to go before it is safe for more marginalized people to speak up and be believed too. We have to keep expanding these spaces, acknowledging differences and intersections and encouraging conversations, but most of all we have to learn to believe each other. I’ll end this rant with an anecdote: after leaving a particularly oppressive job, I invited some female co-workers over to talk about our experiences working in fashion. We had always been encouraged to hate each other at work and weren’t really close, but sharing our stories allowed us to see how the different types of abuse we suffered originated from the same place. This meeting sparked new friendships and within a year all of us had quit.
There is power in supporting each other and it is starting to make them nervous. Believe each other, resist together.
stormborns
theartofmadeline
prguitarman
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turnnoffyourmind
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amandla
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