Harriet’s Sordid Past

Dear Harriet.

What happens when the state one used to reside in during the shadiest period of one’s life has an online database wherein one can (if inclined) look up the criminal offenses committed by ex-friends?

Love,

Harriet

 

Dear Harriet,

An excellent question! In said situation, one will likely discover details of ex-friend’s lives that one did not wish to know and are yet unsurprising in any given way. One then spends the rest of the night feeling all gross in one’s tummy.

Love, Harriet

 

Dear Harriet,

Why didn’t you tell me this before?

Love, Harriet

 

Dear Harriet,

Because you NEVER ASK ME IN ADVANCE, DO YOU? You and your GOOGLING.

Love, Harriet

So, back in college, Flint and I were friends with a pack of boys. Each of these boys were HORRIBLY FLAWED in one way or another, which was presumably why we were friends with them. A side note: if you ever look around at your friends and think, “Good lord, how did I get involved with such a pack of losers?” it is likely because you are kind of a loser yourself, dude. At the time, we all pretended we had created a friendship based on fate, a shared love of dinner parties, and the practical need to develop contacts with weed dealers. In retrospect, it’s incredibly obvious that the real glue that held us together involved several serious drug problems, misogyny (I gave as good as I got), and a fierce denial of crippling and dangerous personal problems of a looming nature. Oh, we were such friends.

We met this group of boys through Nero. Flint and Nero were on the same Greyhound one day, both of them fiending for a joint and awash in the brutal unfairness of a world that does not allow you to smoke a joint on a Greyhound, and only allows you like one five minute stop, seriously, you can’t smoke that quick and like enjoy it, which is a crime against fucking nature. Nero introduced us to his dealer, and also to the pack of rancid boys who hung around his dealer’s apartment CONSTANTLY, and this is how I made friends in college. This is also, by the way, why I think kids smoking pot is a bad thing: LOOK AT WHO YOU MAKE FRIENDS WITH, JUST LOOK AT THEIR FERRET FACES AND STINKFEET.

Not too long after that, Nero fucked off to a farm somewhere to live in a tent and get over his high school girlfriend (Nero was always and forever getting over his high school girlfriend, and it was, by the way, his sophomore year in college). But Flint and I had already made friends with the other dudes, so we spent that summer getting really high, watching shitty pirated movies, and talking about what a loser Nero was, seriously guys look at his hair does he think he’s a hippie, which is how I learned that boys are way more of gossipy shits than girls have ever been.

When Nero came back, I ran into him, as I always did, on our dealer’s couch, stoned out of his mind. I asked him how his trip was, and he blathered on for a while about how CLEANSING it was to be out their in the woods, not HIGH AND STUPID AND WASTING HIS LIFE like all of us had done all summer. Then he picked a fight with Flint about how Flint was bogarting the bong, and it’s not about weed, man, it’s about RESPECT and FRIENDSHIP.

Ugh. Those days.

I hadn’t known Nero very long, but one day I looked at him and just had this overwhelming feeling, the kind of thought that hits you fully formed and without doubt. Nero has a serious drug problem, I thought, and someday he’s going to need help badly. Then I looked around at all the other boys, including Gregory, who was Nero’s best friend. And nobody here will help him, I thought with that same calm sense, because everybody here has a drug problem, too.

Way to sober up the party, Harriet! I didn’t mention my little Premonition of Obviousness to anybody, because I also (psychically) had forseen really bad reactions to this little bit of information. But I made a silent note of it, then spent the next several months quietly reading books about drug addiction and interventions on the side. I wasn’t going to be caught unawares like all these other assholes (it’s okay, you can laugh).

Predictably, Nero got worse. He used a copious amount of drugs in social settings – all the boys did — but I had the feeling he was using far more in private, because his behavior was becoming more and more erratic. If he had a fight with one of the boys, he would get on his bike and ride circles around the house in the rain, sobbing and shouting gibberish until he fell face down in the mud, where he stayed for a while burbling. He pretty much stopped wearing clothes when he could get away with it, even though he lived with roommates. I don’t mean he went around naked, but I do mean that he went around – unwashed – in the same ratty half-closed bathrobe with nothing on underneath. He arranged all his classes for Tuesdays and Thursdays so he could plow through the crates of Wild Turkey he had on standby for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes, when he spoke, he didn’t make sense. Not “I don’t understand the concept you’re trying to explain” sense, but he wasn’t actually using real words anymore. You could see him plaintively trying to communicate, and it was like he was speaking in tongues. I pointed this out to him once, told him that he wasn’t using real words, and he got so upset he started hysterically sobbing. All the boys rolled their eyes and started riding him, because it wasn’t the first time he had tried to 1) monopolize the only woman in the house with obscene prattling, 2) failed to actually use words, and 3) broken down into hysterical sobs.

Without consulting any of the other roommates, Nero purchased a snake. Oh, god, everybody confided to each other. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Nero won’t be able to take care of the snake, because he’s GONE FUCKING INSANE, the snake will die, and then it will be one more thing for Nero to lose his mind about. And that’s almost exactly what happened. The snake refused to eat frozen mice, but would eat live mice. Nero couldn’t bring himself to feed the snake live mice, so several frozen mice carcasses just built up in the cage while the snake wasted away. Nero lost the snake in the house for an exciting period of time. And, eventually, the snake just died. And Nero went off the deep end.

Later we learned that the snake hadn’t “just” died, but one of the roommates – the roommate nobody liked and nobody could recall how he ended up living there – had purposefully killed the snake by spraying chemical cleaners on it every day. This was a bad house for anybody, much less a drug addict, to be living in. These were bad men.

After the snake died, what I suspected was Nero’s more hidden drug use started to make its way onto the public social scene; he just couldn’t hide it anymore. One day, I arrived at the house to see Gregory, and Nero handed me a pipe. This was pretty normal – we were all potheads. Just before I smoked it, one of the other roommates stopped me and told me it was full of opium. “Jesus, Nero,” I said, “You know I don’t do hard stuff. What the fuck, man?” Nero just shrugged, not an “I don’t care what you think” shrug, but an “I didn’t even hear you because I am on another planet because I have been smoking opium all fucking day” shrug. Gregory told me that Nero was plowing his way through coke (Gregory with him, because Gregory had a crippling drug problem, too), and had started talking about how cool it would be to go live in Thailand.

I finally brought up my premonition. “Nero is a drug addict,” I said. “He can’t stop using. He is destroying his life. And when he goes to Thailand, he’s not coming back. He’s going to start with heroin and then he’s going to die. We have to confront him.” At first, everybody was super excited. Yeah! Let’s do it! There were some really good conversations as everybody related things they had seen Nero done and never discussed, and how it made them feel. I started contacting interventionists in the area. All the boys worked at the same place, and Nero’s problems had become apparent to management, so Flint discussed with the manager the possibility of his sitting in on an intervention, to add some consequences to the weight of the confrontation. The manager was very good-natured and agreeable, and worried about Nero.

One day, I was getting ready for class when our dealer came over to smoke with Flint. He mentioned casually, “Oh, that intervention? Yeah, we totally had it already. We just had a talk with Nero last night about how maybe he uses too many drugs and should cut back a little. He cried. It was really good.”

“Did you tell him any of the things we all talked about? The different things he’s been doing that scare you guys?” I asked, trying to contain my anger.

“Nah, nah, we didn’t need to. I mean, he’s hurting enough. Why bring that stuff up? Anyway, it totally worked, so…” Shrug.

I tried to collect myself and speak as calmly as I could. After all, this was our dealer, and if I pissed him off, Flint would be all over me – and yes, I understand how creepy and ridiculous it is to try and have an intervention with the dealer present. But our dealer was the social hub of the entire wheel – he paid the most rent, he organized the social events, he dispensed advice like a kingly lord. Nobody would get together without him, and Nero probably wouldn’t have respected anybody’s opinion as much as his. ‘Cause, you know, he was the gatekeeper. “I understand why you did what you did,” I said, “But I think it was the wrong decision. If Nero is an addict – and I think it’s obvious he is – a nice chat won’t make him better. He said whatever you wanted to get you off his back, and now he’ll self-destruct even faster.”

“Nah. He won’t. He’s better now,” our dealer persisted.

“I have to go to class, so I can’t argue,” I said, “but I think Nero will prove my point for me soon enough.”

I didn’t realize quite how soon it would be. When I came home from class, Flint was curled up crying. Nero had come over and beat him up. Apparently, during the fake intervention, the boys had let slip that Flint had spoken to their manager – I’m guessing this was a detail that made the intervention too real for them, and part of what made them sabotage it. Despite the fact that the manager really didn’t care (he had a drug problem, too, did I mention?) Nero considered this an unpardonable offense. He knew Flint had recently had his wisdom teeth out, so he came over, threw Flint up against a wall, and smacked him around his jaw. There wasn’t any serious damage – I don’t think he even bruised – but obviously that wasn’t the issue.

There were a few huge red flags that I wish I’d recognized at the time, as they could have saved me a few more years of grief. When I saw Flint curled up crying, I didn’t care. I honest to god felt nothing. I can’t imagine feeling nothing if somebody hurt my bear, and I acted the way I knew I should – outraged, angry, comforting – but deep within me, I felt nothing at all, no sympathy, no protectiveness, nothing. Hey, Harriet, maybe YOUR MARRIAGE SUCKS, did you think of that?

After making sure Flint was all right, and hearing what happened, I had only one thought. “We have to get to an Al-Anon meeting,” I said. “Our lives are crazy. We can’t do this.” Flint, who had been a whimpering sad sack a moment before, suddenly became aggressive and overbearing. “ABSOLUTELY NOT,” he said. “That’s not the answer.” We argued back and forth. Finally, I told him, “Fine, but I’m going to an Al-Anon meeting.” “JUST LEAVE IT ALONE, HARRIET!” I was shocked to discover he wasn’t just against going to a meeting himself, but seemed poised to actively restrain me from attending one. I laid off the argument for a while, then told him I was going out for groceries. At the grocery store, I used the pay phone to call the local chapter. It was a voice recording. As I listened to the recording, I realized two things: I had really needed somebody to pick up, and this was something abused women do. They call for help from pay phones after escaping on the pretext of domestic chores.

Well, that wasn’t me, I thought. Flint is right. I’m overdramatizing. I’m not one of those women. And I hung up before noting any meeting locations.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that Flint was an avid, obsessive, frighteningly addicted role-player. Like, D&D style. The weekend after I left him, his game was still on. The day I told him I was in love with another man, his game was still on. Nothing stopped his game. There was a game scheduled that day, and when I came home, it had already started. So it was another five hours before I could even talk about what had happened.

After the game ended, Flint mentioned what had happened to the boys. I remember having this palpable sense of relief, thinking, “They can’t possibly pretend Nero is okay, with what he’s done. He’s obviously out of control. Out of his mind. He needs help. They can’t possibly deny help now.” Everybody agreed, grumblingly, eyes downcast, that yes he sure needed some help. I told them I’d put together some information on addiction for them to read, so they understood it more, and I’d call the interventionist I’d found.

And then we didn’t see or hear from our friends for a month.

During that month, Flint decided to quit smoking pot. The whole thing had shaken him up pretty bad. I was ecstatic. I had quit smoking pot as soon as I’d started talking intervention, because I knew it was a goddamn laugh to try and tell somebody they had a drug problem while you were high. And I’d discovered that when I quit smoking, I lost all my friends. Nobody wanted to hang out if I didn’t want to smoke, even though that didn’t stop them from smoking. So I was overjoyed to have Flint quit and join me, so I wouldn’t be so alone.

The first time he quit, he asked if I could buy him some comic books and role-playing books to distract himself with. He worked min wage, and always spent all his money on pot and books and movies, so he had to ask me (or steal my credit card) if he wanted anything extra. That was always a source of stress with us, so we were both happy this time to have me go out and voluntarily, excitedly, buy him everything he wanted.

A week later he swiped my credit card to withdraw money and buy from a different dealer, one who didn’t care who we were interventioning.

Then he quit AGAIN. In celebration, and to show him I had no hard feelings, I took him out for the fanciest dinner. I remember how proud and preening he was, having the waiter give him the wine for approval, look to him for orders, and hand him the bill (though he handed it back to me when the waiter was out of sight).

A week later, Nero had left for Thailand, and the imposed ban on our company had apparently been lifted. I came home one night to find the boys at our house, having a memorial smoke about what a good guy Nero had been. Flint had joined in whole-heartedly. This was the point in my life where I started cutting myself again.

Not long after Nero had gone, I heard a story from a girlfriend of mine who had also worked with those boys. If slut was a word with good connotations – meaning a sexually fulfilled and well-adjusted woman who knew her own desires and didn’t accept the status quo of relationships on face value – that’s what I’d call her. But since it’s a word with nasty connotations, I’ll call her free-spirited. All the boys wanted to get in her pants, but she had pretty specific standards about the kind of sex she wanted, and with whom.

One night, after their shift was over, Nero started badgering her to go back to his place and have a smoke. She said no, nicely, in a thousand different ways, but he kept on badgering, and eventually she went. Once there, he badgered her into a drink. Then he badgered her into a backrub. Then he badgered her about taking off her shirt, ‘cause that would make the backrub easier. She drew the line there, stopped saying no politely, said no firmly and unequivocally, and threatened to leave. He backed down, only a few minutes later to suggest that she take off her pants. She got up and left, and ever after, he treated her like shit in public, bad-mouthing her as a stuck-up skank and trying to convince the other boys to hate her (they hadn’t taken a chance and gotten shut down yet, so they didn’t take him up on the hatefest, still hoping for a piece). She was pretty glad Nero was gone, ‘cause she was sick of being treated like shit, and she was sick of hearing his endless diatribe about how no woman can ever be truly satisfied without dick, thus lesbians are broken human beings. Directly after turning him down, she had started sleeping with a woman, so I’m pretty sure that’s where that came from.

I heard bits and pieces about Nero over the years, while I was still in contact with the boys. After the fallout of Gregory, I stopped talking to any of them, suddenly realizing that disclosing my rape to the same guys who hung out with fucking Nero was just a bad idea from beginning to end. After the bear moved in with me, we were cleaning up some of my old things and found a 20 page manifesto Nero had left for me and Flint, after beating Flint up. It was supposed to be an apology, but was really a grievance list of every wrong Flint had ever done him, and why Nero was the saddest, most sympathetic person in the world. I had never wanted to read it, because I knew the mind that had written it was diseased. When he’d sent it to us, I’d flipped through it to find any mentions of my name, and then written him an 11 page manifesto  about how I was not his secret goddamn girlfriend, for reals. I brought a knife with me when I dropped it off (he wasn’t home), and yet still lived in a fantasy world where my life hadn’t become unmanageable.

I’d never read the rest of it. The bear did, and told me all the good parts, the only one I remember being that Nero was sorry to have “completely emasculated [Flint] like that, making you impotent by using my commanding masculinity.” Wowzers.

All this leads up to the present day, wherein I stupidly put Nero’s name into the search database of criminal offenses in the state I used to live in. I’ve never mistrusted my perception that Nero was a drug addict with problems bordering on dangerous and violent. What I learned the other day was just how naïve those perceptions were. I had figured he was starting to go downhill, was getting near rock bottom. I hadn’t realized that he was in a mad spiral, already through bottom, and more dangerous than I had thought. Which is a good lesson to re-learn: whatever badness you sense seeping through a person, that’s only the badness they can no longer hide. There’s a whole pressurized vat of badness where that came from.

Nero has built up a series of charges over the years, getting more expensive and serious. Underage drinking, paraphernalia charges, speeding, reckless speeding. Assault. Intimidating a witness. Death threats over the phone. More assault. And finally, just before I left that town, sexual assault of a child. Then, a year later, a paternity suit.

Telling myself, “You know a rapist,” doesn’t have much of an impact, because, uh, yeah, I know my rapist. And hearing that Nero turned out to be a rapist isn’t much of a surprise, from the guy who tried his best to set up a rape of my friend, who thought no woman was complete without a dick, who harangued me for “flirting” with him and not being his bestest soulmate ever, who “apologized” for physical attacks by talking about his incredible manliness, who still obsessed for bitter long years over the woman who had left him. Who hung out with my rapist.

But I did stop to think about those bad, bad years that could have been much worse. I’ve sometimes wondered what stopped most of those boys from getting more pushy with me than they did, and I’ve always figured it’s because I was obviously somebody else’s property. That’s a really extreme way to say it, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. Gregory didn’t care that I’d been raped, but when his girlfriend told him she’d been raped, suddenly rape was evil and rapists should be killed. I knew then, and I know now, that if I’d fucked Gregory a few times, my rape would be evil, too. It wouldn’t be a violation until some other dick was getting what only his dick should.

I’ve said this before, but I never really applied it to my own life. Sometimes, the reason women stay with abusive men is because they assume they will always be abused, and they’re choosing their abuser. I am certain, had I been single, Nero would’ve made a move on me. And without the omnipresent threat of stealing another man’s girl, he might’ve felt perfectly safe about raping me. I don’t have any doubt that the other boys would’ve told me it wasn’t rape, which would’ve been part of Nero’s sense of safety. Granted, the only reason I was in a social group like that was because of my association with Flint, but being surrounded by people of his choosing did exactly what he wanted it to: It made me choose him as the best alternative. For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,” the second best solution was to find some way to protect myself from all of them by choosing one of them. Letting Flint rape me was insurance against anybody else doing it.

Those boys are still hanging out with rapists. God, that gives me a gross feeling in my tummy.

Street Luv

New List, everybody!

So, the whole street harassment blogathon of 2009 has got me thinking about a new list. (When I die, they will find me under a pile of lists, one of them being a list of improbable ways I might die).

On the one hand, goddamn I hate knowing that once I leave my house, I am fair game to have my space intruded upon. On the other hand, I can’t hold it against people for trying to fulfill the most basic human urge to connect with another human being. Straight men with good intentions looking to honestly fulfill that need have the deck stacked against them. No, I’m not saying “What about the men!!!!” I’m saying, sexism stacks the deck against everybody, and provides innumerable unnecessary obstacles between human beings trying to connect in intimate or basic ways. While I believe that women have disproportionately more obstacles (and less resources to overcome them with), and obstaclesthat are more likely to result in physical attack, that doesn’t mean that boys ain’t got their shit to deal with.

To wit: our current concepts of masculinity and manhood require a demonstratable ability to acquire the exclusive attention and sexual favors of women, and that requirement doesn’t get waived on the basis of context. That is, you don’t get points for trying; you get points for winning.”I don’t have a girlfriend because the girl I like the best right now just isn’t ready for a relationship and I respect that,” doesn’t make you a man, though “I wouldn’t leave this girl alone until she gave me her number and now I won’t leave her alone until we’re dating” does.

Our concepts of masculinity and manhood also require that concepts like masculinity and manhood exist. I know that sounds patently obvious. But the idea is, “man” can’t exist as a discrete concept unless “woman” exists as a discrete concept. “Masculine” can’t exist unless “feminine” exists. So the two concepts must necessarily be in opposition to each other; one is what the other is not, one is not what the other is.

So men are tasked with this impossible, crazy-making requirement: to be a man, you must acquire relationships with women, but you must not identify with them, or even like them all that much. You are not a man until you can get a woman to pay attention to you, but you can’t acquire that attention by being interested in anything that she is interested in. You must first treat women like aliens, to prove you are not one, and then you must find a way to make them enjoy that treatment.

There is no reasonable way to combine those two needs at the same time, while also fulfilling the very basic human need to have a companion. Which is how you end up with the wild shit women deal with every day when they get harassed on the street. A man is attempting to accomplish one or all three requirements:

1. establish that he is fundamentally nothing like her and never will be anything like her (which carries the implication that there is something wrong or undesirable about being like her)
2. attempt to get her to give him exclusive attention, deserved or not
3. attempt to acquire a positive human connection.

Does that sound confusing? Let me put it this way:

Man on street: Heeeeeey baby why don’t you come over here (Need #2)
Woman who is trying to walk to the laundromat: No.
Man on street: Well fuck you, bitch, you fat bitch, do you think you’re better than me? (Need #1)
Woman: What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you have a mother who fucking raised you? If you talk that way to me again, I’m going to call the cops, you piece of shit.
Man on street: Oh, hey, no need to act like that. I just saw a pretty lady, I was trying to say hi to a pretty lady. I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just saying hi. (Need #3)
Woman: ????? (quiet determination to be aggressively and pre-emptively dismissive to all men who approach her in public in the future so as to avoid this bullshit)
Second Man: Is that a Firefly T-shirt? That’s awesome! (Need #3)
Woman: FUCK YOU GET AWAY FROM ME.
Second Man: Jesus! Women are psycho bitches! (Need #1)

The fact that men are raised to view women as completely separate and distinct creatures that cannot be understood by normal male brains doesn’t help boys any. The Second Man in that scenario probably viewed what he was doing as pure and innocent and nice, and his intentions probably were — he was trying to connect with another human being. But because that man has also spent a lifetime fulfilling Need #1 — the need to distinguish himself as separate and apart from women and their experiences — he entered into that interaction with no idea of how much street harassment women put up with, and how much they hate it. Because of Need #1, he has no idea how a woman wants to be approached, how a woman would be receptive to an approach, because if he were to learn these things, he would not be fulfilling the bargain of manhood.

So!

New list.

This is going to be the list of Street Luv. This is going to be a list of ways men can approach women that are not uncomfortable, dismissive, humiliating, condescending, privileged, ignorant, or generally sexist bad sauce.

Check it out.

Megan Williams

If you have heard that Megan Williams is recanting her testimony, and are wondering what the hell is going on, the short answer is: we will never know. There is nothing that will ever be particularly clear in any case with such a volatile mixture of racism, sexism, and exploitation. Or, let me revise that. There is nothing about the facts of the case that will ever be particularly clear in a case with such a volatile mixture. There is plenty about our social narrative and the public worth of different human beings that becomes clear in the ways we talk about black female victims of violence who have been sexually and financially exploited by authority figures. So we’ll probably just have to give up on ever knowing “what really happened” (unless you’re the police, judge, or jury, that is) and resign ourselves to learning a lot about public vitriol and our own internal prejudices, which is far less juicy and engrossing than a horror movie “sex” crimes case.

But if you’d like to know something more about the case than what gets repeated in the mass media, and if you’d perhaps like to read an analysis that doesn’t feel like it’s just smugly waiting for the chance to say FALSE RAPE ALLEGATION HURFL BLURFL, I’d suggest this.

Street harassment

I had an “all aboard the clue boat” moment yesterday.

I was watching an Asian horror movie last night (goddamn I love me some Asian horror, except now I haven’t slept all night, fuck). At some point, a badass lady cop was about to walk home alone. Her rookie partner was all, “Don’t do that! The horror!” and she was all, “Fuck you, I’ll fuck anybody up.” (This is my no-sleep summary). As she walked down the street, I waited for the inevitable creepy guy street harassment scene, which remarkably didn’t appear. The female main character of this movie was presumably too badass, and they didn’t need such a scene to remark upon her badassery — the fact that she walked home alone was supposed to be enough, I think.

As an aside, I am really conflicted about the sheer degree of rape in Asian horror films. Every time I feel like watching a horror movie (which is often), I first have to consider whether or not I feel like watching a rape scene, because I pretty much assume that’s what’s going to happen at some point in the plot. On the one hand, goddamn am I sick of rape in every fucking movie — seriously there are other horrible things in the world, can I see a cat get tortured for a change of pace, maybe? On the other hand, it’s seems contextually valid, and in some ways I appreciate the recognition that rape is a fucking outrageous horror. And I think it reflects reality (as much as horror films can): male characters in a bad situation can be tortured or murdered or outraged in plenty of horrific ways, but female characters in a bad situation are also going to have to factor in the very high possibility of rape in the list of potential horrors.

Most of these movies involve the haunting and eventual death of the rapists (and/or those who assisted, covered for, or encouraged them) in a ghost-vengeance scenario, which I see as an admission of 1) the horror and wrongness of what they’ve done, 2) the rightness of their being brought to justice in some way, and 3) the likelihood that said justice will not be administered by a judicial system. And, in my personal viewing, I find very few of these movies portray rape sexily, as a plot device that symbolically means “horror” but is actually filmed like porn. Usually the depiction of the rape is genuinely horrific to watch, if not one of the most horrific scenes in the movie, and does not seem created to facilitate boners in any way.

I don’t really find that the movies portray very much from the victim’s point of view, though Arang was kind of a refreshing change: one survivor got a chance to deliver her saved-up “fuck you” speech to her rapist at the end (though she didn’t get to deliver it to her rapist, but to somebody who offered to be a sort of emotional stand-in for the rapist she would probably never locate). I’d even give it an honorary Bechdel — the main two female characters didn’t speak directly with each other, but they obviously communicated in some very intense ways, and their relationship was a main pillar of the plot. Anyway, while Asian horror movies are usually using female rape victims as an object — a plot device — I still feel like there’s at least enough comprehension of the reality of the situation. That is, women get raped, and it’s truly horrific, and it ruins lives, while the rapists usually go on happily without consequence (until some vicious unstoppable ghost thing shows up).

That was a long aside and not at all the point of my post.

The point of my post: the badass female cop dismisses any concern about street harassment — because she is too badass to care — and goes tromping off into the night. I thought to myself, you know, it’s been awhile since I got harassed on the street. I wonder what’s up with that? I’ve gotten lots fatter than I used to be, and I am no longer visibly identifiable as a high school student/college student/alternative girl with funky hair. But I don’t figure that matters a whole heap, as I have been harassed when dressed in full winter gear, with my long hair peeking under a cap the only thing that identified me as female. I’ve moved to a different section of town, where most of the men out on the streets during the day are walking with their wives, so maybe there just aren’t that many opportunities for the men in my neighborhood to harass me.

Then, suddenly, the clue boat came by.

When was the last time I walked home?

When was the last time I was on the bus?

When was the last time I was in a public area, alone, for a significant period of time?

I used to get harassed a lot. I also used to 1) not have a car, 2) not always have money for the bus, and 3) be dating a guy who didn’t really want to be around me all that much, so wasn’t out walking with me. I was physically unable to avoid being in public space if I wanted to move from Point A to Point B. And it’s no surprise that this is also the time in my life that corresponded to the highest level of harassment.

I had to take a moment to acknowledge — and honestly be grateful — for my privilege. I have the privilege of no longer being dependent on public transportation. I have the privilege of no longer counting on my feet as a primary form of transportation. I have the privilege of minimizing the amount of time I spend outside, in the public sphere, fending off leers, stares, insults, and aggressive come-ons bordering on violence. I considered my lifelong evolution of transportation to be sort of “natural.” Of course as a young person I didn’t have a car yet, and had to take the bus. Eventually I would get my own car and get to drive myself around. I never considered how much this would decrease the daily harassment I experienced, how much safer I would eventually feel, how much less thought I was able to give to my clothing choices. And I never considered that this is the “natural” path only for privileged people. There are many women who will never have the option of owning their own reliable form of transportation. There are many women who can never escape public harassment.

This also made me start thinking about my internal threshold for “acceptable” harassment, which has changed over time. I occasionally get comments (unpublished) about how insane I must be, thinking that the level of street harassment is so high. Obviously the commenters have had a different experience, and often I’ve wondered how. I don’t live in a “bad” city. I am in the heart of the Midwest, and while the people who live here like to think of themselves as metropolitan, when you stack us up to a big city, we look like a cowtown. And yet, as soon as I turned about twelve, I came to expect and accept a daily level of sexual harassment from strangers. I had a few scary experiences as a very young girl, with men trying to coerce me into their cars, or block my exits so I had to enter an abandoned parking ramp with them (I got out of that one by going completely unresponsive, and after a few tugs, the married old dude trying to drag me away decided it didn’t look too good for him to be yanking on the arm of a comatose-looking twelve year old girl). I had to learn, really quickly, to ignore men in public as if they didn’t exist. To respond to a single catcall — even if that response was simply just looking up to see what all the shouting was about — meant getting dragged into a battle of wills (and occasional physical grappling). I had to learn that “Hello” was more often than not the phony beginning to a catcall. And I had to accept that as normal. If I was going to leave my house, for any reason, I had to accept that this harassment was going to happen, even though I was (I thought) obviously and visibly twelve years old, even though I didn’t even make eye contact or acknowledge the presence of men. I didn’t think that kind of harassment was necessarily “okay,” but right or wrong didn’t enter into it. It just was.

When the bear started living with me, I came home from the grocery store one day and laughingly told him about the three separate times I had been harassed in the parking lot, the three separate times I had been called a bitch, slut, or whore. He was horrified. It wasn’t that he didn’t know women got harassed, and it wasn’t that he didn’t realize how prevalent it could be. But I think part of his horror was my reaction. I wasn’t coming home upset and angry, but laughing about it, because getting called a stupid bitch for walking past a “hey baby hey baby hey baby” with no acknowledgment was probably the tamest harassment I got. I think he was horrified because I acted like that was a normal, acceptable, unremarkable consequence of ever leaving the house. And to me, it was. Remarkable harassment was something that turned physical. Getting called a whore by strangers while going grocery shopping — that was just the absurd comedy of life!

I realized yesterday that my tolerance level has changed. Getting harassed verbally on the street would now bother me, a lot.  Getting hey-babied by a stranger I pass by in a parking lot bothers me, a lot. Getting unintelligibly yelled at from passing cars bothers me, a lot. Getting obviously followed in a supermarket bothers me, a lot. I don’t think these things bother me more because I am suddenly Ms. Sensitive. I think they bother me because they happen so much less. My level of “acceptable” harassment is now incredibly low, because I have the massive privilege of avoiding most of the public areas where that kind of harassment occurs. Simply getting leered at is enough to sicken me these days, because getting called an ugly bitch or having strangers demand I suck their cock doesn’t happen on every block anymore — when that shit happened, getting leered at was a kind of pleasant change of pace, because at least a leering asshole was polite enough to keep his thoughts to himself.

That also made me think about other places in my life where I used to have a different standard of acceptable harassment. When I was living with Flint, and hanging out with his friends, my standard for “acceptable” sexism was extremely high. I remember one dude having a Very Passionate Conversation with me one day about how he doesn’t think lesbians can ever be fully sexually satisfied, because they have vaginas, and vaginas need penises. I remember trying very hard to stay calm and convince him with facts and figures, and I remember his horror and utter disbelief when I told him that statistically only 1 in 3 women have an orgasm from penetration alone, so obviously our clits have more to do with sexual satisfaction than our vaginas, if you want to rank it that way. Today, if an acquaintance started that conversation with me, I would get up and leave the room and never talk to them again. If a friend started that conversation, I would shut it down, tell them it was a bunch of sexist shit, and recommend they actually learn something about vaginas before they spout off their half-assed dick theories. But back then, I assumed that all boys were like this, and you had to accept that level of behavior if you wanted to hang out with them. Now I just won’t hang with boys like that.

I’m sure most of you by now have visited the massive thread of doom over at Shapely Prose (shout out to Phaedra, what what), which also spawned the secondary thread of doom, wherein there was quite a conversation about what constitutes harassment. It reminded me of a conversation I once had with Swan. Swan is a social worker, and we were discussing how useful a social worker would have been in my childhood. She was trying to determine why I never disclosed my abuse to anybody. I explained that, at the time, I didn’t know it was abuse. Sure, I knew other people lived differently than my family, but I just thought they were intrinsically different people. My family wasn’t capable of lives like they had; we were unique. I didn’t deserve the lives my friends had, because I was inherently undeserving. I deserved the family I got. It wasn’t abuse to me; it was natural, logical, deserved punishment.

Swan understood that, but was trying to figure out how you could get a child to disclose abuse if they didn’t know they were being abused. She asked, “What if a social worker asked, ‘Do you feel safe at home?’ Would you have said yes?” And yeah, I would have. Safety, to a social worker, meant, “Are you reasonably certain nobody will hurt you?” But to me, safety meant “Is there food? Will I be allowed to sleep?” As I got older, it also meant, “Do I reasonably believe I will not attempt suicide tonight?” Before I could answer the way a social worker would have liked, they would have had to describe what they meant by “safety,” because we would be using two entirely different definitions. I was “safe” as far as my limited perspective of the world went; a perspective that included the assumption that my loved ones would not make concerted efforts to cause me intense emotional pain was some kind of comedic fantasy world. I couldn’t even conceive of a world like that.

Most people grow up with a general, unstated and unexamined belief that there are certain things everybody just “knows.” But other people, who for whatever reasons grow up slightly out of step, they realize that all these things are learned. Not everybody knows how to eat appropriately. Not everybody knows how to hug. Not everybody knows they shouldn’t be hit. Not everybody knows how to clean themselves. Not everybody knows what “safety” means.

I think about this every time internet discussions about harassment, gendered conditioning, sexism, etc. go awry. One person says, “Being taught to act feminine: it sucks!” and another person chimes in with, “But I was never taught that!” And, well, I call bullshit. I think the women who believe they have never been treated badly because of their sex are operating with a different definition of “badly” than others assume. The street harassment I once viewed as completely ordinary is now completely fucking unacceptable. If you had asked me, back then, whether or not I was being harassed, I probably would have said no. I mean, sure, guys yell at me from their cars and this one dude tried to kidnap me from the library, I’m pretty sure, but that’s not what harassment is, right? Harassment is something intolerably bad. And what I experienced was tolerable, because I didn’t believe there was any other way things could be.

Basically, I didn’t have a choice in whether or not to tolerate street harassment, so by default, what I experienced daily had to be tolerable, or I had to not leave my house ever. Once I had a choice — once I could absent myself from the street without absenting myself from the ability to go grocery shopping — harassment became intolerable. And yet, smart as I am, feminist as I am, critical thinker that I am, it took me about two years to realize I was privileged enough to have acquired this choice. It took me two years to realize the harassment had stopped, and that my current experience is not in any way a general experience. When leering is both a rare and disgusting event, that is not a general experience of the world; that is a privileged and wealthy experience of the world.

I’m very lucky to have that experience. I’m also very lucky to have the ability to recognize that such a thing is privilege, even though it took me years to realize that. Not everybody has the ability to experience different perspectives of the world, so that they can (potentially) recognize that their individual experience is not general or normal. As a child, I certainly wasn’t lucky enough to have that ability, and I’m incredibly blessed to have it now.

Still No Real Posts

My life right now is pretty much focused on surviving my job and looking for a job. When I’m doing good, I can usually count on a blog topic to pop into my head every few days. When I’m doing bad and/or not-so-good, I suddenly get what all those people mean when they talk about writing being work. I wouldn’t call myself overly spoiled in a lot of aspects of life, but as far as my writing goes, I always have been. I’ve never had to work very hard, I rarely get writer’s block, and the “work” I do always feels like fun. Which means when I hit a bad personal patch like this, I am completely unprepared to actually work. I remember my first grade teacher totally had my number after one semester. She told my dad, “Harriet is so intelligent, she is way above the other kids. But someday she’ll hit something that doesn’t come easily to her, and I don’t know if she’ll be able to deal with the frustration.”

My bear once told me that his mom told him about some books about gifted children she read while he was growing up. One book took the position that gifted children aren’t actually overly or unusually intelligent, but are especially intuitive and emotionally sensitive. A “gifted” child is extremely perceptive, can sense what parents and teachers want, and are too willing to provide it. That’s not necessarily intelligence – fulfilling other people’s needs isn’t the smartest thing you can do – but it is an overdeveloped ability to sense the rules of the game and play it.

I’ve been thinking about that lately, and another conversation I had with the bear about going to the gym. I’ve been trying to work out daily because it really helps release my stress, helps me sleep, relaxes my back, and gives me at least one thing a day that I am doing for myself. My bear is having a pretty stressful time at work right now. He wishes he was working out more, but because work is such a drag, every moment away from work is a moment that needs to be hoarded and saved, and not spent on other errands or chores. I was advocating a paradigm shift, where you don’t think of things what you do for your health as a “chore,” but as a worthy necessity. I talked about setting aside a time that is just for him, to accomplish something that benefits him (not necessarily working out, but that’s where the conversation started). I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about gym motivation lately, and keep hearing something I really like. That is, you have to stop viewing the gym as a thing you do if you have the free time, but have to prioritize it as a thing that nothing else gets to interfere with, the way we prioritize work, which is something we do for others and usually kind of hate. Viewing your health – physical and mental – and the time and energy that must be budgeted to maintain your health as inalienable rights that nothing else can take priority over is a good way to re-center your internal world, focus it on something that is about you, instead of having the main focus of your life be the thing that sucks your time and energy out of you.

So as soon as these words leave my mouth, I realize I am not really doing this at all. I’m trying. I’m doing the gym thing, and that’s good, it really has helped. But when I come home from the gym, all I do is sit around thinking about how much I hate my job and how much of a soul crush it is to try and find another. Sometimes I think, “I’ve got to distract myself, do something for fun,” and then I realize I don’t know what I do for fun. Usually I end up watching movies all night, which isn’t so bad, but feels like a real mind suck. Sometimes I pull out an Al-Anon book and try to find some peace. Oftentimes I sit around and beat myself up for not doing something productive. I’m doing what I always do, which is put my life on hold until I find a solution to whatever I feel is the predominant problem.

I know there are certain things you can do to increase your success on the job market. But most of those things seem like magic moontalk – brush your hair in this way! Eye contact! Smiles! Do the proper dance in the proper order and you will summon the headhunter! I feel, at heart, it’s mostly a matter of luck. Which leaves me sort of adrift. I’ve got no external cues for how I should be behaving. I’ve got no ability to discern the rules of the game and play it properly. If I did have those rules, if I could assure myself that I was doing everything I could as right as possible, then I feel I could set aside that extra time to be doing things that satisfy me. Because that’s part of the game, yeah? That’s part of the “I am a well-rounded person” game. I have a job I do well at and I work out and I take cooking classes and I am interested in 19^th century American history. I am a person that can be described in a short story. Instead of: I have a job I hate and I take out my anger on a treadmill and then I go home and watch 6 hours of TV and go to bed feeling bored. Oh, yeah, and I have a blog I don’t write anymore. Ugh.

I usually don’t like to write a blog entry unless I have some kind of conclusion I’ve come to. Something I’ve learned. I don’t have that. I just have a bad patch. I’ve stopped thinking about “one day at a time” and I’m moving “one minute at a time” now. Just one foot in front of the other, until I get to the other side of this. There’s not much else to do.

I do try and take joy out of what I can. For example, Mina is pulling out my favoritest power struggle in her little designer bag of power struggles. She sometimes pulls power struggles that are really offensive, derailing, bullying, and abusive. But this one is just pure entertainment.

She will eavesdrop around the office, skulking in corners, until my boss, Sherry, talks to me about some assignment she wants me to do, which has nothing to do with Mina or anything Mina has ever worked on. I take the assignment and head back to my desk. Ten minutes later, Mina comes by with an imperious swagger and says something like, “Yeah, Harriet, soooooooo Sherry wanted me to tell you to do (assignment Sherry just told me to do).”

“Uh, yeah, she told me that. I’m on it.”

“Okay, good, ‘cause I know it’s really important.”

“Uhhhhh, yeah. Okay. I’m on it.”

“Sherry just wanted me to make sure that it was going okay. I know she really wants it done. So if you could let me know how you’re doing?”

“I’ll let Sherry know when it’s done.”

“Yeah, great. Just, get on that, okay?”

“Still on it.”

“Glad we talked. Just keeping things smooth, you know?”

“Rock ‘n roll.” *throws devil horns*

I love this one so much that I sometimes go and talk to Sherry about my work, asking questions I already have the answers to, just so Mina will later come to me and ask how I’m doing with buying spray cleaner for the dry erase board, because she knows that’s really important to Sherry and Sherry has spoken to her about it before, you know?

And now that I am tracking everything I do all day, I get to add: 10:15 am – 10:20 am: Updating Mina on status of spray cleaner, at Mina’s request.

File that one under “Using a Solution With No Relation To the Problem.” Problem: Boss tells you to work hard and efficiently. Solution: Work hard and efficiently Pull rank on the secretary.