This is a story I don’t tell very often, but the recent news about sexual misconduct among our leading(ish) class has made me feel like it needs to be told because it makes the line between a joke and an attack clear, and shows how someone can jump that line in an instant.
Some background: due to my interests in sci fi, comics, video games, etc., I have a lot of male friends. Some I’ve known fully half my life, and they’re like brothers I’ve chosen to have. In fact, I’m so very clearly just their friend that I’m able to retain those friendships even after those guys pair off and get married to other girls. In other words, I’m very comfortable with male humor.
About ten years ago, I was visiting at a friend’s condo with a group of about six guys. I was the only girl in attendance. A friend and I were sitting on the sofa, and we ended up getting into a tickle fight. Not a big deal. I’d known the guy for 20+ years, and had even roomed with him at one point. So, there we were, him and me in a roomful of guys on a sofa with him straddling me and tickling me while I crack up laughing.
At this point, there’s no problem.
Until…
Another guy, someone I barely knew, and who I’d previously told the others had a serious creep vibe, grabbed a cushion off the sofa and held it pressed tightly to my face. I started grabbing frantically at the cushion, but couldn’t get it off my face, and it very quickly made it hard for me to breathe. I panicked.
Almost as soon as the cushion got pushed onto me, it was yanked off — by the same guy who’d been sitting on top of me. In just moments, he’d jumped off and was now frantically asking me to tell him if I was OK.
My response: “No. I am NOT OK.”
Then I turned to my actual assailant, and angrily demanded he tell me, “Just what the hell did you think you were doing?!”
His response (with a confused look on his face), “I was helping.”
Me, “Never EVER ‘help’ me again. Never touch me again. Period.”
I then walked into the kitchen, grabbed a coke, and sat down at the table until I stopped shaking. He left the condo without having to be told to go. He hasn’t ever has touched me again.
And that’s it. I’m telling this story because it demonstrates how quickly the line of propriety can be blurred or outright jumped — if someone just wants it to be. My tickling friend wasn’t putting the moves on me. He presented no threat, didn’t even touch me anywhere inappropriate, and in fact when a real danger presented itself he came to my aid. On the other hand, the cushion guy was absolutely a threat. He was actively creating a hazardous situation for me. I’ve got no way to know what would have happened if I’d been with a different group of guys — ones who weren’t truly my friends — but I can guess it wouldn’t have been much fun for me. I was completely helpless, and if no one had come to my aid (or worse if they were interested in “helping” my attacker) I would have just been an outnumbered victim.
That’s just one of the times in my life where I’ve been physically or sexually threatened by a guy overstepping societal boundaries. There have been a lot of them of varying degrees of scare, and I absolutely know the difference between the threats and the bad jokes. As we deal with the situations involving D.C., we cannot allow the GOP to conflate poor humor with real threats and true misogyny. That’s what they want us to do, to lay disproportionately large blame on minor faults, and forgive or ignore real/repeat offenders. As woman who has had to deal with unwanted advances, I guess I feel like I should speak up here. IMO, Franken was at worst being juvenile, for which he has apologized and was forgiven by the person he offended. He has exactly one complainant who is also vocally politically opposed to him, and at the same time he has multiple other women from his work history now publicly defending him as someone who always treated them with dignity! Still, people are discussing whether or not he should retain office!?! Meanwhile, Moore and Trump (neither of whom accept any responsibility whatsoever for their actions) each have multiple complainants who were attacked in private and would otherwise be political supporters of them — and we’re being told to simply ignore all those women.
Don’t fall for this swindle, and don’t let the juicy gossip distract you from their tax plan, attacks on the ACA, Russia, or any of the other current very real threats to our country.