We’re not even supposed to talk about this, I guess, because it proves we’re sexist. Too bad.
When the Flappers painted the town red in the 1920s, we were told women had achieved equality. When women hit the factories during World War Two, we were told women had achieved equality (see the trend yet?). When women burned their bras in the 1960s, we were told women had achieved equality. When the pill came out, we were told that women had finally achieved equality. Women’s suffrage happened somewhere back there too.
A hundred years of non-stop achievement of equality later, we’re being told how sexual harassment is a problem in the workplace, and it’s 99.999% men doing the harassing and women, still, are the victims. Because they haven’t achieved equality I guess. What’s the message to men with ambitions? If you’re going to be running for high office ten or twenty years later, you better keep women out of your workplace so they can’t come back when the time is right and destroy your campaign. Don’t hire women. Don’t work with women, because all it takes for a women to destroy you is for her to point a finger at you.
If men and women were equal, there’d be roughly the same number of men complaining about harassment by women as the other way ’round, or at least it wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly one-sided. A high school aged male I knew was getting rather steamy text message from a far older, married woman employer. It was fairly apparent that sex was happening between them. An experienced lawyer said that maybe he should count himself the luckiest kid in school.
That’s the double standard and it’s everywhere. At the same time we’re being told that women are strong, that they can not only take care of themselves they’re capable of doing anything a man can do at least as well as he can do it, we are simultaneously asked to believe that the slightest gesture can turn a strong, capable, professional woman into a quivering blob of dysfunctional, sobbing, frightened, victimized jelly that only huge sums of money, or certain political outcomes, or both, can cure.
When I was interviewing a college-age woman for a bookkeeping position at my small business, she asked if there was enough work there to actually keep her busy full time. Fair question. In addition to telling her that although the business was small, it was complex, and that furthermore, being small, there were a lot of other things she could do besides keep books. What I meant, and I expected it to be as obvious as the rather prominent nose on my face (she was a business major after all) was that total specialization is something a small business cannot afford, therefore we all have to pitch in with cleaning, stocking shelves, receiving shipments, answering phones, and hundreds of other tasks that are involved in keeping a business running properly that don’t warrant separate employees. Her response caught me off guard. I was accustomed to working in the real world, unaware of just how bat-shit insane the world of leftist political academia had become. Condition white;
“WELL…just what’s THAT supposed to mean…?!!” Gawd. She’d apparently been to one of those “How-to-know-when-you’re-being-sexually-harassed” classes they offer to women on college campi these days as part of the “Women’s Studies” curriculum. Interview over. Don’t call us, we’ll (not) call you. We have enough problems without having to deal with stupid shit like this.
Which is it, then, ladies? Are you capable of standing up for yourselves, strong, and proud to play a vital and dynamic role in all the action, or are you perpetual victims, bent on being perpetual victims for social, financial and political gain? Do you want to be taken seriously or do you want to be a poor little victim, ’cause it sure as hell can’t be both. This bi-polar premise is running rather thin and I for one quit falling for it sometime back in the 1970s.
Brilliantly written, or in other words, I agree 100%.
Since I was 30 years old, I was told I was a dinosaur, a professional white male. I was going to be replaced by a woman in the late 80s, then a minority in the early 2000s. I am still at my company after 33 years. The woman came, then left to raise children, the minorities came and moved on to get more for themselves. Me? I am still there, doing my job, each and every day. I hear from HR folks that I am unique in that I have stayed. “Most people only stay for 4.5 years”, I am told. I tell them I hired and fired people before there was an HR department.
Ask yourself this? How many woman cops are there? Truck drivers, electrician, plumbers, AC/heat, lineman, steelworkers, construction, carpenters?
Some? Yes, but always the exception in my world, they have not become the rule.
Equal? You’ve come a long way baby, but you got a longer way to go.
One of my first jobs as an innocent and very naive teen was as a technician in a dialysis clinic in the 1970’s. There I learned how to clean up blood spills, take patients’ pulses, record their blood pressures and respiration rates and how to clean dialysis machines. Also, I learned that middle aged female nurses are the most predatory animals on the planet, and have filthy mouths and dirty minds to match. So I learned all about harassment there.
One nurse found out I was extremely ticklish. She would wait until I wasn’t looking, then would goose me. I would usually jump involuntarily and squeal loudly, like the poor guy in Deliverance. One day I was seated at a desk, copying some machine’s readings down in the charts, when the nurse sneaked up behind me to goose me. She got me on both sides of my ribs. I jumped up and squealed, hitting her face quite hard with the back of my head. She got a bloody broken nose and two black eyes from it. And she had to lie to the head nurse, telling her that it was something that fell out of a cabinet that hit her nose. I never felt the need to apologize, and she never asked.
Good times, good times.
I was once fired from a sales job because I refused to sleep with my customers. How bad were the customers? The worst one flipped off the lights in his office, took off his pants, then insisted that I remove my clothing. I was shocked. I insisted that he put his back on while I nervously walked out of the building. I went back to the sales manager and told him that I could no longer service that account. He fired me because he felt this was legitimately a way to increase sales. (Other things had happened, just the last one was the worst!)
@ubu52, It doesn’t sound like the customer was really interested in ‘sleeping’.
Poor attempt at humor aside I wonder if the sales manager would have thought it was a legitimate way to increase sales if he had been asked by the same customer to take off his clothes and “service that account”.
In my experience it seems that some women aren’t content merely to be equal. They must be more equal than men. For example, I had a female friend in college who insisted that any job done by a male could be done better than a female.
Meanwhile, on my way to work this morning, I hear a bit on the radio about sexual inequality in Saudi Arabia. It discussed how women in that country can’t drive themselves, enter a public place where males are present, or do pretty much anything in public without the approval of a male family member (in some cases their own son). I couldn’t help but think how much better the world might be if we could ship some of our surplus feminism to the Middle East.
Sexual discrimination and harassment are of course real. I for example have approached with unwanted requests for sex. By other men as well as women who had some financial power over me. Who hasn’t? (OK; don’t answer that) The difference is I don’t make a federal case out of it. I don’t lawyer up 15 years later, etc., to influence the outcome of a political race or to demand special laws or compensation. I can take care of myself. That’s the point.
Again; which way do you want it– do you want to be strong and independent or do you want to be coddled? It’s either/or. It’s a purely personal choice but for the fact that it has been made into a political issue. You have to ignore the political pressure interests and decide on your own, for yourself. The rest of it is crap as I detailed above.
Lyle,
I think it’s relevant if someone has already lost a legal case or had a settlement over sexual harassment.
We had a candidate around here who was kicked off the police force for sexual harassment. Was that relevant? Heck yeah!
ubu; Totally depends on the details. Did one cop says, “Nice shirt” to a female cop or did he try to rape a secretary? There’s a whole range there. If a male cop says to another male cop; “Is that a cucumber in your pants or are you just happy to see me?” is that a firing offense? I say hell no. They can deal with it among themselves, assuming thay have the wherewithall associated with being adults. If one cop, male or female, can’t handle some comment like that, one person to another, fire that person and not the one making the comment– it demonstgrates that a cop can’t deal with something very minor, and that therefore can’t be expected to deal with serious situations of life and death. Context is everything.
Besides; you’re changing the subject as usual. I never said nor implied that sexual harassment was a non-issue. Did you even read the post? I’m saying that if you want to seen as strong and capable, i.e. equal, don’t simultaneously demand to be seen as someone who needs special protection or automatic victim status purely because you’re a woman. One contradicts the other, see. It’s just plain logic.
Now I have no problem, as a man, treating women with some extra measure of politeness. I think that tradition is rather sweet. Some women however will purposefully become offended by it, because they’ve been taught to be offended. I figure it’s their problem. I sometimes open doors for men, too, and never has a single one been offended. The social movement responsible for the confusion is simply insane, bent on dividing people, so I try to ignore it.
The fact of the matter is; men and women are different beyond the obvious physical differences. Anyone who denies it is simply wrong. Many decades of dealing with people of all ages, seeing my neices and nephews raised, and raising my own kids tells me so. One example; every female employee we’ve had over the years, and there have been many, has ended up crying on the job for one reason or another, whereas none of the men have done so. Our business is stressful. It involves dealing with consumer credit on a very local level and things can get personal. It also involves us owners, who started the business at a very young age and have invested litterally everything in it, so that can get personal too. But the reactions are very different, and very much divided along the sexes. Some would blame our perceptions and expectations. Bullshit. That ignores the fact that we were very much products of the feminist movement going into this– we went for it hook, line and sinker.
Same with the race relations issue. I had the prescribed perception of the American indian too, big time. I figured they were noble and thoughtful and honest and all the rest, culturally speaking (there are of course always individual exceptions) ’till I learned otherwise– that getting someone living on a reservation to pay the bills is a fool’s errand. I didn’t make this happen, and I very much wish it were otherwise. But there it is, yet we’re never supposed to talk about it. We’re suppose to pretend, as though we’re insane, like it doesn’t exist. I’m just not going to act insane anymore. Sorry. I’m not playing the game.