Years ago, I was working as a security guard at a site where I was the only woman.
Pause for mansplainers to go, "Ruh roh! But she said she was in the Army! I caught her!" Put money on it now, punters.
The client hired me over my immediate supervisor's preference, which became clear when I first went to the office.
My supervisor was the biggest Gary Stu in the fucking world.
A "Gary Stu" is a term from fanfic, where the author writes a thinly-veiled but fantastically improved version of themselves into the story, to take the place of the canon hero. The female version is Mary Sue. If there's a love object, he/she will fall in love with the authorial insert. Gary Stus tend to be James Bond; incredible successes with the ladies, rich, famous, skilled, intelligent, whatever floats your boat.
So my boss' story was this: he was the grandson of an English duke. "Oh, really?" I asked. "Which one?" There are, after all, only twenty seven dukedoms in the United Kingdom, held by twenty four people. Whoopsie.
The boss' taste in employees became obvious if you spent any time with them. They were all a bit.....slow. In every way. They moved at turtle speed, and one could see muscles laboriously moving when they had a thought. They did not have a vast well of knowledge to draw from, and they made no efforts to improve that. They were awed by the boss, who told them stories about being ex-CIA, ex cop, ex this, ex that. He was uncultured, ill-read, had never traveled, and embraced arch-conservative politics and guns in a way that hinted at intimate fears about himself, projected on others.
There were thirteen versions of this guy there, plus me. Unlike them, I had actually traveled. I was in the Army, and a recent stint in Moscow had led to the memorable experience of arguing with a KGB colonel in the KGB's version of Scotland Yard's "Black Museum", complete with torture implements on the wall. I remember thinking, "I'm getting paid for this." On another occasion, I had climbed a volcano. By that point, I was casting about for ways to fly from Instanbul to Seoul; if I could just do that, I would have flown around the world and then some, all on the Army's dime. (For those eager to argue, it would be really great if you flew over this paragraph and then accused me of saying there's a volcano in Moscow. Start your engines!)
The boss, I thought, was essentially harmless. Then came the New Guy.
The company would hire somebody conditionally till their FBI background check came through. I was a quick hire: I had a security clearance, and I had the Army work ethic, where you get bored when there's no more work. My bosses adored me; I worked double shifts, extra shifts, and asked for more like it was some fantastic creamy layered dessert. The week of September 11th, I worked 118 hours. I got so much overtime that week, they shorted me twenty hours and it took them and me days to notice. The week after that, I worked 96 hours and it felt like a vacation.
The New Guy was very tall, very big, and very angry. At women. Not at men. This often shocks guys, or else makes them hostile, because it opens up a whole world that they're unaware of. When I later relayed the whole sorry tale to an acquaintance he was shocked. "You mean that kind of thing still goes on?" I couldn't even form words. Yes, asshole, it still goes on. Women have to live through shit because of men that you can't or won't imagine. Women get harassed, raped, stalked, attacked, beaten, subjected to a very intimate kind of terrorism, but guys like you sleep the sleep of the ignorant. I got a news flash: It never stopped.
The New Guy had attitudes toward women that were so hostile as to be shocking. He wouldn't take my orders; he refused to take orders from a woman. He flat out said he wasn't going to be ordered around by 'no woman.' Then for some reason when I was training him in, he decided to talk about rape. He was a good foot and a few inches taller than me, easily twice my weight, and he felt that women asked to be raped, that some women needed to be raped, and that I was asking to be raped by trying to give him orders as his supervisor. My boss just kind of whined when I reported this back to him. I had to ask repeatedly to get him to start the paper trail. I later found out he called this nagging.
The New Guy joked and laughed with the other guys, who of course had not been told they were asking to get raped. I'm sure some sap will self-righteously show up in the comments to angrily inform all and sundry that men get raped, too! And by women!(why are they so uninterested in talking about men raping other men, though?) but fear of rape has never led any man anywhere at any time to change his route to work, change his outfit, worry about making eye contact, cross the street, influence where he lived, or so colored his life that walking home in the dark is laughable, impossible.
The New Guy was a great guy. If you were another man. A lot of men are like this. They're great to other guys. Women are the designated punching bag, though, the piece of ass, the gash, the whore, the bitch, the ex wife, the slut, that bitch who tried to accuse your buddy of rape, abuse, domestic violence. No need to get her side of it, is there? You know her---and you know him. Fair doesn't matter when it's your buddy Joe, who's been your friend since forever. Women are temporary, but bros are forever. Women just cause trouble.
His FBI background check came in, and he was escorted from the building and told not to come back. His rap sheet consisted of pages of petty crimes---and a variety of assaults against women: rape, gang rape, sexual assault, domestic violence. He'd only been in Minneapolis for six months and in that time he'd been arrested six times, once for drunk and disorderly, and four times for domestic violence. And rape.
Our contract with that company ended, and one by one everyone else's was renewed individually. Mine was not, and I didn't find this out till I confronted my boss at the elevator. "You're a troublemaker," he said. "And I had you fired."
"You're a shitstain that walks like a man," I replied. "And if you had done any of the things you said you had you wouldn't have been such a pathetic, backstabbing, bar room bragger about this. I have the sort of things you wish you had, and you'll never ever be able to convince anybody with a triple-digit IQ that you're not so full of shit your eyes turn brown when you lie."
I went to the EEOC, but by then one of the road supervisors had made copies of my complaint and passed it around. I then wrote that up, and that supervisor accused me of....accusing him of sexual harassment. He showed up at my house, thanks to his access to the company's computers, but disappeared before the cops got there.
The EEOC asked me if I had videotape. See, it turns out that if it's thirteen guys against one woman, the guys win. It's kind of like any gang assault. And besides, said other people---what did you expect? After making trouble like that, and documenting it and stuff? Shut up and keep your head down. Let the men tell you what to do.
And that is the way things still are, in many places. The New Guy who's a rapist is not the Troublemaker: the person who complains about him is. As long as she keeps her mouth shut, there's no Trouble. It doesn't exist. What a beyotch, right? And all the guys who don't read what a woman says and then get angry when she calls them on it aren't the problem, it's always her for getting angry. It's always her for pointing out, your ignorance is your own excuse. And if you didn't want to get yelled at for not reading, why didn't you bother, you know, taking the strange step of, well, reading?
A couple of months ago a woman named Rebecca Watson spoke at an atheist/skeptic's convention about the problem of getting more women to attend. Like so many women, she offered men a glimpse at what it's like to live as a woman. She and other women talked about how they were condescended to, talked down to, harassed, hit on, groped, and propositioned. In other words, they were treated like what one MRA described a woman as: "A fucktoy with a pulse." (Here's another great opportunity to skim and then attack me for claiming that I attributed this to somebody at that convention!)
Watson's evening finished up at a hotel bar with a large bunch of people talking about the issue, with Watson the one speaking as the expert on the topic, of course. It should be noted that this took place in a foreign country (for Watson.) Watson expanded on the original theme to the group in the bar, then announced at four AM that she was tired, that she was going to bed. A man in the group got up and followed her to elevator, got on with her, and only after the doors closed, turned to her and said, "I know this is going to sound kind of...." and asked her to his room for 'coffee.' Watson described this later on, how she'd been talking about harassment and being hit on, treated like meat, then said, "Guys, that's creepy. Don't do that." Don't hit on women in elevators at four AM after they've just spent their whole day talking about being treated like meat. She'd just said on top of it all that she was tired and going to bed. This dumbshit didn't approach her and say, "Hey, I really enjoyed your talk, could we meet up tomorrow?" He didn't approach her in the bar, in the hall, or tell her she was interesting. He heard her talk, heard her say she was tired and going to bed, then he waited till she was in the small box with the locked doors before he indicated that he knew he was wrong by issuing a disclaimer and then piled on top of it the obvious fact he didn't give a shit about her, her wants, her opinions, or anything. On top of what my mom would have called 'being inconsiderate' he basically showed her that she was just somebody he wanted to fuck.
She never identified him, and he never stepped forward. Yet the Internet rose up in the form of hundreds of outraged assholes who probably view unconscious women as dates and not medical emergencies--- and accused her of calling him a rapist, of being a paranoid ball buster who just needed a good dicking, and of all sorts of things that existed only in the guilty consciences of the men who found merely giving the briefest of shits about women too onerous, too laborious, too strenuous, to be borne. Richard Dawkins also stepped in with the ever-popular, "Children are starving in China, you silly bitch," viewpoint, which is only slightly sarcastic, as he invoked the veil as only a rich white old dude can, and topped it off with a healthy dose of female genital mutilation. (Quick! Accuse me of claiming that this is what Dawkins actually said, instead of mockingly citing a 'viewpoint'! Extra bonus points!)
(I'm not kidding about the assholes who think unconscious women are date material, either. You see these slimey creatures in every rape discussion, basically trying to find out what they can get away with, as with obvious desperation they reveal that if they don't attack vulnerable women they have no other options, probably because women flee from them when sober. If anybody says here that women should not drink I'm going to crawl through the screen The Ring style, and turn you into a living version of The Scream. Go look it up. I'll wait. The terrifying thing about these guys who want to commit rape really badly is that few people notice. "But if she's wearing a short skirt and drinking, it's okay, right? Hey, it's like not being careful with your wallet, right?" (Comparing women to objects---it never gets old, amirite?) What it amounts to is, there's a large group of guys on the internet who see distracted women, happy women, tipsy women---as prey that they can take down. And nobody calls them on it unless it's women, who of course then get accused of hating men.)
Watson was widely blamed for being a trouble maker. Just for pointing out that if you don't read, don't listen, don't care, and don't want to give a shit, you will get called on it, and you will deserve it because all you had to do was read or listen. Women are entitled to be angry at men who not only refuse to listen to them, then bitch at them for shit they didn't say---stuff that these guys maybe even realize not only only exists in solelytheir brains whenever women talk, but which reveals really ugly stuff about them. There's assholes---and then there's Assholes, like the pharmacists who don't want to do their job and yet still get paid for doing their jobs. Or like the guys who don't want to listen or read what women say, and then expect women to stand around and just take it. Maybe even praise them for it. Watson's case made clear that nothing a man does to a woman is as bad as the human rights violation of being asked to be slightly less of an asshole about women. It's late at night, she just said she was tired and going to bed but by God, you have the God-given male right to hit on any woman around without a care in the world about her feelings and if she doesn't like it she can just shut the fuck up and stay indoors! How dare women demand that men devote one single iota of thought, care, or feeling to putting themselves in womens' shoes! Next it'll be castration!
Think about that the next time you get angry at a woman who points out that you're basically talking to her about using birth control when the baby's crowning. Welcome to the party, Sherlock. Get up to speed first.