I wasn’t quite sure how to write this one, I just knew that it had to be written.
When I was 19, I volunteered as a front desk receptionist for a non-profit. This same guy worked the shift right before me and every time he would stay and chat. Sometimes he would stay a little too long. Sometimes he would talk about things I didn’t want to talk about and sometimes he even made comments that pissed me off a little – one day when we were talking about the video games we played, he asked if it was true that girls can’t shoot and aim at the same time. One time I came to my shift after work wearing my restaurant uniform and that same week, he came into the restaurant I worked at even though I had never seen him eat there. One time I called the front desk from my personal phone to let them know I was sick, he then started texting me from his personal phone number.
I never went to management about it, I never called him out on his behavior. Why? It didn’t feel like he was doing anything wrong, he was just doing things that made me a little uncomfortable. My instinct was not to feel bad for myself, but to feel bad for him! I felt bad that he didn’t understand social cues, I felt bad that he had no one to talk to but me. After too many texts I finally blocked him and quit volunteering, and yet I still felt bad for him.
I used to love my restaurant job. After about a year of working there we hired a new bartender. Once again, he didn’t do anything wrong, he never touched me, never yelled at me. He just made me uncomfortable; he would text me too much, he would comment on how I looked too much, he would offer me drinks knowing I was 19. I almost wished he would cross the line, I wished he would try something so that I would have a strong argument for firing him. I said something nonetheless, I went to my manager and expressed how uncomfortable I felt working with him. She told me I wasn’t being a team player, she told me I couldn’t always get my way, she told me that I was being difficult to work with. She made me feel bad for him.
I stopped giving much thought to the older men around me who didn’t do anything wrong but just made me uncomfortable. I thought I couldn’t gain anything by challenging it, so I might as well put up with it.
My friend told me a story about her personal trainer who was almost 20 years older than her. He would text her so often, invite her out after sessions, and make weird comments on her body. It got to the point where she stopped going to the gym all together because she was scared of seeing him. I told her that she shouldn’t let some creep scare her away from the gym and that if he tries anything she should report him to the management. She went back, he saw her and started blowing up her texts again. She went to the manager and he was fired immediately, she knew that from the millions of texts he sent her after being fired. And you know what? She felt BAD for him. She felt like it was her fault he got fired, she was worried she overreacted, she tried to justify his actions by saying “maybe he was just really friendly”.
It took me hearing it from someone else to realize the severity of the issue at hand. Looking back on it, I can think of countless houses, classes, or events that I didn’t want to go to because someone’s brother, dad, uncle, cousin, teacher, or coach would make me uncomfortable.
Why is it that we as women feel bad for men when they do something to make us uncomfortable. Why do I feel guilty, why do I feel like I don’t have the right to be uncomfortable by the things men do and say? Where do we draw the line between wrong and uncomfortable?
Women have been making excuses for men since the beginning of time. Boys will be boys, I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way, he comes from a different generation, he is just physically affectionate, he is just friendly. These excuses get passed around from mother to daughter, sister to sister.
The manager at my restaurant passed them to me. I could have passed them to my friend. We live in a new age, women are enabled to speak their minds and make real change. This is me speaking mine. I encourage my male readers to treat women with more respect, not sexually harassing women is the BARE minimum, we need to raise the bar to ensure that women not only feel physically safe, but they feel comfortable. For my female readers, no more excuses, no more feeling bad or guilty, and no more making other women feel alone in this. We are stronger together, by validating the experiences of other women we can create a better world for our daughters and sisters.