Me, too

Since women are sharing the fact that they've been sexually harassed and assaulted, here's a call-out list that's as direct as I'm willing to make it:

I'll start with the most timely story. At a past arts administration job, I was working a concert that was held in a college's concert hall. After the concert had begun, a man came into the lobby with a bunch of movie brochures he was setting out and photographing, and I swear to God he said he was FROM THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY. He started taking female staff members' photos without permission, when he shouldn't have even been there in the first place. I had to literally chase him out of the building to get him to leave. His face turned red, he was livid, and he yelled a stream of expletives at me in a stairwell, to which I yelled a better stream of expletives. (No one can out-swear me.) My fellow female employees and I, all very shaken up, told our male boss about it. He looked very uncomfortable, tried to make banter for a minute, appeared to consider whether or not he should be mad at *me*, said, "Well, alright..." and walked away.

When I was 17 and worked at a local music store, the coworker who was supposed to open the store with me was late most days—by late I mean really late—so I'd often be there alone for the first couple of hours of the day. Nothing says opportunity like an under-18 girl alone in a guitar store. When people came in and acted like creeps, I would go in the back office and get on the phone or computer until they left, which didn't sell many amps.

Freshman year of college a friend was doing police ride-alongs because he wanted to be a cop. Somehow he ended up with handcuffs, and when a group of us was hanging out in my apartment one evening he thought it was funny to handcuff my hands above my head and drag me around the floor while everyone looked on and laughed. I kicked him in the shin so hard I broke my big toe.

The next year my live-in boyfriend and I had a few friends over for a party. I got tired and went to bed. A guy we were friends with literally walked into the room and took out his junk, which I promptly told him to put away. A male friend who was (and probably still is) a really stand-up guy quickly walked in to see why the hell the zipperless wonder had gone in there, and the whole incident was over in under a minute, but I doubt it would have been without that friend coming in.

Then that same year my crappy boyfriend, who was a total mess psychologically and expressed that by constantly gaslighting everyone around him, got so pissed off at me that he shoved a chair I was sitting in across the room. (It was a rolling chair; he was too doughy to move a heavy chair without assistance...) 

Speaking of my college years, a college friend of mine who graduated a year before me moved to my hometown for graduate school. When I was home once for Christmas break we met at a jazz club to catch up. I had a couple of glasses of wine and went back to his apartment to drink water and sober up before I drove home. He did not want to take no for an answer and started to get physically threatening about it. I got myself out of there quickly before anything really happened, and then I sat in my car in the cold until I was sober and could drive away. He apologized a few days later and justified his behavior by saying he was lonely and depressed.

I worked at Home Depot one summer during college, too, in the outdoor garden department. I lost track of how many men had me hand-load pavers and concrete blocks into their trucks and stood behind watching me bend over to pick up each one.

I worked at a coffee shop right after grad school. On Christmas Eve we were open a half day, and someone came up to the door looking forlorn right after we closed. Filled with the Christmas spirit, I let him in (much to my coworkers' chagrin). He then ordered 10 lbs. of coffee beans ground into 1 lb. bags. It took 15 or so minutes for me to help him pick a kind, grind it all up, and get his money, during which time we had a friendly conversation. He'd just moved to Portland from the East Coast because he got a new job, and he'd come ahead of his wife so he could find them housing. I mentioned having gone to music school in Boston, said I played the flute when he asked. That was it. Christmas morning I had an email in my inbox. Said customer must have found my website by Googling "Sarah flute Boston Portland," and my email address was on there (which it no longer is). He said he'd really enjoyed meeting me and attached a photo he'd taken of some flowers. That's a special kind of invasive. I wonder how his real-or-imagined wife would have felt about that.

A former boss at a university consistently made comments that crossed a line, and I put up with it and continued to hang out with him partly because he seemed like "a harmless guy in his 60s who wished male-female relations were still more like Mad Men," partly because I liked him otherwise, and partly because I was an adjunct faculty member with a meager income and no job security. Back when I was single, putting up with his line-crossing also got me some extra classes to teach so I could afford my house. And honestly, I enjoyed being friends with him in all ways except the harassing ways; he's smart and witty, we share a love of the outdoors and homesteading, and he has a fun, irreverent view of the world. I stopped talking to him when he sent me an inappropriate text about a dream he'd had about me, and when it was ignored, he followed up with an email asking if I wanted to have a martini, which I also ignored. My husband didn't really appreciate any of it either. The whole thing felt like a loss, because he not only robbed me of some dignity, he also deprived me of what should have been a great friendship. I have not spoken to him and don't intend to, unless I bump into him sometime and tell him off.

During the first class I ever taught at that same university, one of my students emailed me early on in the semester. He wrote (approximately):

Hey professor,
I was going to email you because I had a question about our assignment, but then I was searching for your email address and found your website and DAMN your photos made me forget what I was going to write. Can I turn this in late?

One of my bosses was an actual feminist and was great about it. The one above acted supportive and said the email was unacceptable and offered to have the student moved to another section, but he also said, "He does have excellent taste." I don't believe there were any repercussions doled out by the university.

I get catcalled, whistled at, and honked at a lot when I jog. The most annoying episode in fairly recent history involved a car pulling up at a red light while I was on the sidewalk waiting to cross the street. The two men inside commented on my physical appearance and asked if they could get out and run with me. It was broad daylight in a safe neighborhood with people around, and they didn't give a damn who saw them being jerks.

And for every incident listed above, there are countless times I've been yelled at walking down the street, been told to smile, or just felt unsafe. If I see a man walking toward or behind me on a trail or a sidewalk, I brace myself just in case.

I have dressed in miniskirts and feather boas and I have dressed in baggy, unwashed jeans and hoodies. I have been friendly and I have practiced my Resting Bitch Face. I have been around friends, colleagues, and strangers. I have been in seedy bars and in classy restaurants. It doesn't matter.

Sometimes I freeze, and that makes me mad at myself. Often I laugh along because it's an automatic response when I'm uncomfortable so I'll still be likable, and that makes me even madder at myself. Sometimes I ignore comments because giving a reaction to people who are trying to get exactly that really takes more energy than I have to waste. It's all just exhausting. Any time I've been physically instead of just psychologically threatened, my violent-but-almost-always-repressed temper has come out and made me me yell and swear and kick and be fairly frightening for my stature. Thanks to plenty of luck and good friends looking out for each other as well, I've so far come out of all of the above mad as hell but relatively unscathed. Thank God for my bipolar (literally) father and the temper he modeled for me; having it has helped me as many times as it has caused me trouble.

All of this happens to women. It also happens to LGBTQIA+ people, and yes, straight men, too. It's horrific when anyone experiences the demeaning, unsafe feelings that harassment and assault carry around in their sidecars. I only know what it is to be a woman; that's the testimony I can offer.

Plenty of women with mouths as foul as mine and much stronger muscles don't come out of any of this unscathed. I have no patience for any woman who doesn't stand with victims in sisterhood, whether or not one has experienced any trauma herself. Because, yes, #metoo, and whether in ways big or small, #yesallwomen.

I hope someday these stories won't be so common. I also hope someday the conversation will be reframed from "How many women are raped each year?" to "How many men are rapists each year?"

Love you, sisters.

EDIT: This is all normal, everyday shit when you're female. Anybody thinking, "Why didn't I know about any of that?" or "I should check and make sure she's OK," should know that I'm 100% good. None of this even seemed out of the ordinary—angering, but not at all unexpected—at the time, and I don't need to talk through it. 

The point of all of this is that the good people of the world should vigilantly watch for problems happening around you and jump in when you see them. Sometimes it's the little things: I would have *loved* it if someone had walked up at Home Depot and said, "Hey dude, how about you pick up your own damn concrete and quit looking at her ass?"