It's a man's world
At least, that's what we were told...
In light of discussions around the New York Attorney General’s investigation into sexual harassment perpetrated by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, this tweet stopped me cold. As calls for Cuomo’s resignation grow louder, let me give a little context here.
I am not excusing sexual harassment, nor do I intend to share the blame for bad behavior on the part of a few men.
But I am in my 60s, as well, and women my age were absolutely told to toughen up in the workplace because we were told, in so many words, that boys will be boys. Existing in male-dominated industries (which, back in the day, included most industries) meant we needed to learn to live with their baser instincts.
From what I can tell, this was advice given across the board to women in factories, in offices, and in newsrooms. And it was advice often given by the perpetrators of sexual harassments, themselves: C’mon, honey. Can’t you take a joke?
That was bad advice then, and it’s bad now. It didn’t take #MeToo for women of a certain age to name the discomfort they felt every single time a man overstepped his boundary in the workplace.
But what did we know? We toughened up and learned to bite back, or we suffered in silence around language and/or actions that made us feel crappy. We endured because we really needed the job and we didn’t want to be labeled a whiner. Or we left jobs we really liked because we couldn’t take the comments/actions/stupidity any more.
You know what was missing from that toughen-up advice? Details. So if I could have gone back to the first time it happened to me (1980 at the Baltimore Evening Sun, where I was an intern), I would have asked:
Do I let him flirt with me? How much? Can I shut him down when he starts talking about his wife, who doesn’t understand him? Do I let him touch my arm, my shoulder. What about my leg? Below the knee? Above?
What about if he tries to touch my face?
Do I accompany him on lunches? Dinners? Do I let him joke about my private life? My dates?
See how that advice to toughen up works? It doesn’t. In my case, growing up with older brothers gave me an ease with plain talk. I laughed maniacally at the most blatant come-on, and I never heard from the guy again, save for a St. Patrick’s Day card after I’d graduated and moved.
I didn’t answer, and I burned the card.
Here’s a primer on what constitutes sexual harassment. We are hounded by a lot of old dogs who need to learn new tricks. That includes older men who move through the world with an outsized sense of privilege, and older women who learned to endure comments out of some misguided attempt at Fitting In. What a waste of time that was.
I'm 70, did not grow up with brothers, and permitted far too many liberties when I was a youngling at my first job. I think I tried to complain once, but there was really no basis in company policy for handling such complaints.
These days, most or all private companies have policies in place to handle this sort of thing. I bet even New York State government has some policies in place, but Cuomo was being protected by his staff and friends. It's a shame, because he handled the pandemic well, and his daily briefings gave me a lot of comfort in the dark months of last year. But the harassment started long before the pandemic. It has to stop, and the only way to do that is if he leaves office. In the Olden Days, the women would have had to leave, but that was then, and this is now.
The first time I was touched was by a fake relative. I was 10. I cried. In college my professional told me if I wanted to pass my course I’d have to meet him “at the motel down the street.” Complaining to a fellow student. He did the same to her. We reported him to the school.
At my first job at The Herald. I was freelancing taking photos of/reviewing concerts. When I was told by a staff member (later I found out he was an alcoholic) that I had no talent in writing. I believed him. I stopped writing. When I was 40, I started again.