Sent these out today… no, I don’t expect it to mean anything, but I feel like just posting on Facebook is whiny. Plus, I don’t actually care about football.
Dear Mayor Catherine E. Pugh and Police Commissioner Kevin Davis,
Baltimore has been my home for many years, and the more I travel the more I’m proud to come home to Charm City. I am proud to see effort and care put forth by our leaders as we fight hard for progress in making Baltimore a great home for people of all backgrounds, races and cultures.
In the past several years Baltimore has certainly had its missteps and
Huh – okay, there’s some sort of glitch in the Journal – I reconstructed some of it, but don’t know about the rest of that letter… – rob 12/27/21
I know no-one asked, and it was only after I wrote this that I noticed that the call for solidarity around sexual harassment had specified only women, but I figured I’d write it down anyways.
In response to the viral Facebook status of:
“Me, too.
If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
Please copy/paste.
Me too.
Though of course I didn’t know what to make of it at the time. But there was a woman who flirted with me. And then she was in a position to offer me a contracting position. And I took the job. And then she spent a lot of time making more and more comments about how I looked or implying that we could NOT wait till the morning to see one another… nothing big but enough that I eventually needed to say “look, it makes me feel weird when you say x y or z… no big deal, but it’s just awkward”. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but OUR bosses thought it was weird when she said things about my ass in particular pants during meetings… I sure didn’t wear those pants again.
And so I spoke up. She apologized and said she was quite offended that I would bring it up. How could I EVER think that she meant anything by it because “you don’t know what harassment is – that’s nothing”. And she was right, it wasn’t a big deal. But she followed up with “maybe we don’t need to see one another tomorrow”. As in don’t bother coming to work.
Because I spoke up she didn’t happen to have any hours for me that week. Or the next week. As a matter of fact I didn’t work much with that job again until HER boss, wondering what had happened to their graphic designer, fired her and hired me directly.
In the grand scheme of things not a big deal. And a happy ending, really. I worked with that new boss for a good number of years. But being without work for those weeks was a big deal for me at the time, and it was a shitty thing for her to do. We play gay bars where it’s ME who’s maybe playing up the flirtiness to get the extra tips, and I used to make a joke out of how I’d keep my wallet in one pocket and a thick book in the other back pocket “cause gay men PINCH HARD”. It was funny to me at the time, but only because it seemed like fair turnaround cause normally it’s Heather who has to be on the defensive in the bars.
It’s a fine line between acting one way because you think it’ll better your situation vs feeling like you HAVE to act another way to hold your ground. I DO believe that when someone makes you feel uncomfortable you’ve got to tell them. Some people genuinely don’t mean to make it weird and they’ll be embarrassed about it when you say that they have… and the people who are really exerting power over you are the ones who’ll get angry about it… but I think you should give everyone the chance to say “I’m sorry”. Once.
Me too.
(PS, thank you to the friends who realized that this wasn’t open to all and that it should be)
(PPS, and because all things are divisive, now there’s hate messages going around how men who’ve jumped on to this are taking something from women the way they ALWAYS take EVERYTHING from women, however… that’s why I’ve got my own Journal and not just a damned Facebook wall)
