The amount of labor women do each day
The thing about sexual harassment is that it makes a lot of extra work for women, and that’s
- not fair
- another obstacle that women face but men don’t
Sara Maurer at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
[T]he #MeToo movement has made visible the amount of labor women do each day when they show up at work and redirect the conversation away from their bra size, tactfully pull hands off their body, or repeatedly find new ways to avoid the male supervisor who wants to discuss his sexual problems. That’s work. We don’t get paid for it, we don’t get credit for it, and we don’t want to do it.
We also don’t want advancement at work to depend on labor not required of men. Did male comedians have to sit in a room and watch Louis C.K. jerk off in order to network? If they didn’t, why should female comedians have to do that work? Did any man working for or with the radio host John Hockenberryhave to deflect multiple obsessive email solicitations, unwanted physical contact, and declarations of love? Did male graduate students of David R. Marchant have to put up with barrages of sexual insults to do field work with him?
Why should women have to do that work to get the same results? Why should we have to pretend that we don’t mind? Why should we have to be the ones to get over it? Couldn’t men just as easily self-monitor? Why not make men responsible for that labor?
Spare us all the talk about women rising above things and being strong enough to survive things and not being fainting damsels about things, and just don’t dump extra chores on us.
H/t Vanina
And that doesn’t address some of the other work that women seem to have to do and men don’t: Make coffee. Plan office parties. Buy cards for employees with celebrations/grief in their lives. Water plants. Etc Etc Etc
My students see nothing in it to leave their station a mess, because they see a middle aged woman at the front of the room, they figure it will get cleaned up.
Plus we are supposed to be caring, nurturing, guiding, sympathizing, etc, constantly when people want to talk about their problems. We are supposed to be the mothers, the friends, the counselors in a way that men are not.
Plus we have to smile.
I have the teeniest, tiniest bit of personal experience with this. When I was 21 and fresh out of university, I was tall (6’0′), skinny (150 lbs), and had shoulder-length blonde hair. That is, apparently, quite an attractive look to a certain kind of gay men, and for several months I endured ongoing harassment at my first job. I ended up quitting that job, moving out of state, cutting my hair, and generally changing my appearance completely, thereby permanently escaping that kind of treatment. I cannot imagine the mental fortitude that is required to endure that kind of treatment on a daily basis, all the time, with no recourse or way to avoid it.
^ Yes. Sorry to mention it again but I was required to endure it when I had the temerity to spend a couple of weeks by myself in Paris at age just-18 (I turned 18 while there). It was relentless and awful – nothing remotely fun or flattering about it, I promise, just a trapped enraged feeling of being constantly pestered and harassed and having apparently no right to be walking around by myself.
Re #3 – OB, do you think it was worse in France than in the U.S., at about that time? It was time by yourself, and time in a different place, so there are two variables at work there from what you report so far; I just suspect you may be able to break it down further.
I’m all for sex positivity in itself – it’s just drearily common for it to be at the cost of rights and respect, it’s dubiously worth that price, and the price goes unacknowledged too often.
@ Jeffrey Engel – I had the same experience in Greece when travelling about with a woman friend. It was a total relief to come back to the UK where I was treated with ordinary indifference or friendliness. Of course I was an obvious foreigner in Greece, which in those days was like a Middle Eastern country with the women seldom seen in the streets.
Where I work now, mostly STEM people, there is not much day to day inequality, but there is (or was) harassment which I do not see personally, but it happens somewhere.
Many aspects of cleaning are simply personal: OCD and hygiene. I can not deal with dirty kitchen areas…so I clean them and so do others (50/50 female/male in my work group). And most people are just slobs. But with regard to landscaping, no one matches me. I cannot deal with crappy, aesthetically repellent rock work or lack of weed maintenance. I used to come in many weekends to my work place and do landscaping. No one else did this, but then again it’s my own albatross.
Jeff @ 4 – oh absolutely. It was utterly, stunningly different; I’d never experienced anything like it.
Even though I was only 17–>18 I did have a little sample to compare it to: I had done a fair bit of solitary wandering in Manhattan, starting around age 15, and a few months before the Paris trip I had spent two weeks wandering all over London on my own. Paris was radically different.
This is even with the fact that my elders had misgivings about my wanderings in New York, and that I absorbed them to some extent. I don’t remember anything in particular but I’m sure there was the occasional stare or remark. But in Paris it was MUCH more direct, and relentless and constant. Funnily enough I don’t remember anyone expressing doubts about London – maybe by then I was old enough.
I’ve thought since that there must have been tacit Rules about girls going out in public that I had no clue about. I had a vague idea (see above) that girls needed to be wary…(oh yes I take it back about not remembering anything, there was that guy exposing himself on the subway that time)…but not at all that it was Improper for them to be outside alone. Yet I was engaged in a constant ongoing battle growing up over exactly this question of going out by myself. I think I thought of it as more a matter of getting run over than of sexual danger.
Also: I talked about it with friends a lot, and word was, Italy was like that x 100. I decided not to test it.
I’m not sure that is needed. I live in a small urban area in the midwest, surrounded by tiny towns. Women work hard here, just like everywhere else, go out and do the shopping, bike, jog, swim, and all the other things people do. Still, when I take a walk, if I happen to be by myself, young men in pickup trucks drive by and shout at me to get back home to my husband (though since they are not young men I know personally, whether I have a husband or not is an assumption on their part). A middle-aged professional woman who is fully capable of taking care of herself is being treated like a wayward child by a bunch of young men who feel entitled to decide for women what they should be doing.
There are no tacit rules here about women going out in public – it happens all the time. There are just young men who feel that no woman, no matter how mature or capable, is their equal, and they feel it is amusing to tell her what to do.
I rarely do my walks outside anymore, to my chagrin, because I love being out of doors. If I do, I make sure to go with my husband and my dog, both of whom would be fearsome if I were threatened. I should not need a knight in shining armor to protect me, but the reality is that a middle age woman with both shoulders replaced is not going to be any match for three large young men in the peak of their strength…though my feet do work. Instead, I joined a gym that is for women only, and I get my exercise on a treadmill instead of in the brisk clean outdoor air.
How many other women are driven inside by entitled young men? Keep in mind, these are not rich or powerful young men; these are the ordinary “forgotten men” who people the midwest.
Oh god.
Clearly living in one of those Elitist Coastal Cities has its advantages.
Then there’s this bit of trash, originally from the Telegraph (London)…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/life/100569874/how-the-metoo-campaign-threatens-our-right-to-a-grownup-sex-life
Especially this bit…
…and this bit…
Good for ANNE-ELISABETH MOUTET that she feels able to deal with molesters in that way, but why even have to deal with it? I don’t regard it as puritanical that I leave an unknown woman’s butt alone, sans any obvious prior signal that she wants it touched by me specifically.
Incidentally Ophelia, I know a number of young women who travelled in Europe without male accompaniment back in the 80’s. They described Paris as being a place where unsolicited comment and touching was overly personal and common, but in Italy keeping a guys hands off you was a full time job.
I so hate this trope…In a puritan world, women were often regarded as belonging to men, and they didn’t have a lot of say in who, when, or where they married. They were not given the option of refusing their husband once married to the person their parents approved. They were not allowed the sexual freedom to make their own sexual choices – in short, they were not allowed to say “yes”.
This is the opposite – the extreme opposite – of what the #MeToo and other feminist anti-groping crusaders are wanting. What most of us want is the ability to say “no” when asked (and not have to push away hands that didn’t bother to ask), but also the right to say “yes” if we are eager to be intimate with that individual. I see very little that could be more sex-positive than that.
What we are fighting against is not sex-positive behavior, it’s sex negative behavior. It makes sex a negative experience for women, and in some cases, may make them hesitate to ever say “yes” because their experiences with sex have been unpleasant, painful, forced, and embarrassing. And made them feel like a piece of meat.
Giving men the freedom to do whatever they want, and expecting the women to just deal with it (and be called sluts if they report any of it, or don’t fight hard enough against it) is going backward in time to a day when women were property, when they were bought, sold, traded, or bartered without any say in it, and they were vilified if some man took what they wanted, because it was assumed they “led him on”.
Now, I’m not saying these women are suggesting we should be bought, sold, traded, or bartered. They are just suggesting we should leave men alone to do what they want, as long as it is just something someone else might see as a petty annoyance, and as long as it isn’t a crime (and I suspect some of what they claim is okay actually is a crime, since touching someone without their consent in an attempt to make them do something they don’t want to do borders on assault and battery).
In short, empowering females is not Puritanism; Puritanism didn’t want to empower anybody.
Iknklast @ 12
That. Very much that. Can I quote you?
Rob – quote away. Feel free to beg, borrow, or steal anything I post here!
[…] a comment by iknklast on The amount of labor women do each […]
Touching someone without their consent is battery.
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/battery
A woman agreed to a date with actor Aziz Ansari and her story is disturbing, not only because of his behaviour but also when viewed against his public image as a supporter of the campaign against sexual harassment, which he spoke of when receiving his Golden Globe.
https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355/
@ KB Player #5
I want to ask what time this was, although I suspect it might as well be yesterday. There is a very toxic attitude in Greece with regards to women tourists, especially women tourists travelling alone or with no males.