Read This. Because I said so.

Here.

If you love me at all, you'll click the above link and give due consideration to the Rebecca Solnit essay that you shall find at the end of its rainbow. She's writing here about one aspect of life that I think is entirely fundamental to the female experience-- that of having one's body of knowledge-- and personal experience-- questioned and dismissed for no other reason that because one is female and females are, what? Prone to exaggeration? Untrustworthy? Remember things wrong? Can't hold onto facts? I don't know WHY it happens... I just know that it does. It happens to me. A lot. It's rare that I express some sort of political opinion or factual tidbit in conversation-- with a man OR a woman, really-- that the thought isn't prodded and poked and juiced for all its knowledgeable base. And even then, it's often dismissed, or deemed irrelevant. I suppose I can't say whether or not this happens to men as often as it does to me, I guess, but I do know that I've certainly had my fair share of men spew loads of misinformation at me, unaware or unable to admit that I might actually know a little something about whatever topic as at hand-- sometimes more than they do. And Solnit also addresses how we women often let it happen-- succumb to self-doubt about our own expertise and somehow abandon the grappling hook with which we've been attempting to stand our ground. And as such, I think her essay conveys a message that I'd love to deny, to hope we've moved past, but must ultimately acknowledge is still a clear and present concern.

Here's a personal anecdote that I hope will be illustrative: I went to a tiny liberal arts school in New Jersey to earn my undergraduate degree. There were a lot of kids with green hair. There were a lot of kids with dreadlocks. There were a lot of kids who made their own clothes and ambled across campus with joints pinched between their fingers. And, well, we also had our fair share of fat, pasty New Jerseyites. Ostensibly, however, we made up a "tolerant," "arty" and "liberal" campus. So, imagine my surprise when, freshman year, I found myself mixed up in a little sexual harassment snafu.

One evening, I was sitting on the floor of my dormroom with a kid who lived down the hall from me. He and I were peripherally friends. We'd made out a little one night a couple of months previously but neither of us had thought much of it. So, we were talking; possibly, it was flirtatious, but only half-heartedly so. He reached out and jabbed his fingers under my rib to tickle me. Now, at this point in my college career, I was already famously ticklish. Other friends had been known to throw me down in public venues just to generate the spectacle of me being tickled. It's not a pretty thing-- I hate it! I can't breath and, quite frankly, I make sex noises-- gaspy and screamy. I thrash quite a lot. I can't help it; it's utterly reflexive. (It's nice to be a grown-up now-- people no longer seem to feel the need to publicly humiliate me so.) Anyway, this guy knew all about what happens when I get tickled, and handily rendered me defenseless in seconds. But suddenly, he stopped and I felt his hands like lizards under my shirt. He shoved my bra up over my tits and just sat there, both hands sqeezing me. Mostly, I felt surprised. I was far more protective of my body then than I am now and I just could not fathom how this dude didn't get the rules. I mean, what kind of idiot doesn't know that you just don't have access to a woman's body in that way unless she gives you express permission? I shoved him off. But this audacious bastard came at me again! And I shoved him off me again. And I asked, "What the fuck? What on earth have I done to make you think I was into that?" He didn't respond. He slunked out of my room and down the hall. Lizardlike, again.

I mentioned the incident to a couple of friends-- and armed with our un-nuanced, 18-year-old liberalism, all of us were appalled. We just couldn't let some dickfuck MAN manhandle an innocent girl, such as myself, could we? Deep down, I didn't really think it was that big a deal-- he was stupid, he misread my cues. It was inappropriate and forward, yes, but I didn't ever really think he was malicious or seriously attempting to coerce me into a sexual snowball effect in which I wouldn't have been able to stop the progression if I so desired. But, in all my youthful self-righteousness, I decided that the best thing to do would be to contact our campus sexual harassment committee-- just on principle. Upon hearing my description of the event, the committee's faculty sponsor told me that the event constituted "sexual assault." She, apparently, felt strongly about the principle, too. Strongly enough to use such strong language. She got me good and fired up.

She had me fill out a form, detailing my complaint. I took about two days to write my story. By the time I turned it into the appropriate dean, the dean took me into her office and told me that the guy had already filed his own complaint about me. Apparently, he'd gotten wind of the fact that I was planning on filing a complaint and decided to preemt me with some fantastic fabrications. He said that I had been begging him to go out with me and he kept turning me down, so I cooked up this cockamamie story about him shoving his hands in my bra in order to be vindictive and to ruin his reputation-- my complaint was nothing but an act of vengeance for being rebuffed.

And here's the kicker: this kid was of a different racial background than I. The dean to whom he'd reported the incident was of the same racial background as he. He called me a racist and claimed that I just wanted him off my dorm floor because I wasn't comfortable having a black dude living so close to me. The dean bought his story and I felt utterly helpless. I could hardly be indignant -- defensiveness is really no way to handle being accused of racism. You simply sound like Lady MacBeth. And nevermind that his story had about a million logical holes in it-- I was so desperate to date a guy who I wasn't comfortable living near? He accused me of seeking revenge BEFORE I'd actually "sought revenge"? It didn't make any sense, but that Goliath of racial politics has a way of raising hackles. And those hackles were no match for me and my sniveling little side of the story.

This kid had managed to completely undermine my authentic telling of my own experience in such a way that I did not know how to do anything but demure. I doubted myself. Had I overblown the incident in the first place? Had I imagined it? Had I actually sent cues I hadn't intended?

I dissolved into sloppy tears in the dean's office. She was minimally sympathetic. And who could blame her? She'd been told I was a racist and she had her guard up against this pitiful, confused kid who was far more mortified at being thought a racist than at having had her boobs groped.

I let the whole issue go. I decided not to pursue any further action from the sexual harassment committee. I didn't trust myself to stick to my story. I no longer even trusted my story in and of itself. His word, though full of lies as it was, had trumped mine. I didn't have the foggiest idea how to set it right and so I allowed my conviction in my own veracity to be derailed.

It no longer eats at me that he pushed me down, held me there and touched me without my consent. I let that go pretty easily. It no longer even really bugs me that that dean thought I was a racist. I'm not and her opinion really doesn't hold any water in my current life. But that I allowed his wholly fabricated story to become the official one irks me. That that dean looked me in the eye and chose to believe him over me means that I'm not the only one to blame, though. But he was active in campus politics and she knew him; she liked him. I was just another bratty freshman. But here I am, so many years later, blaming myself and blaming her. Not blaming the fuckwad who molested me and then lied about it-- not blaming the fuckwad who rewrote history just because he fucking COULD. Which isn't to say, of course that, had his story been true,-- had I actually been stalking and he rebuffing-- I couldn't have raked him over the coals with a fake rape story or something (I saw that happen in college too, actually). This isn't a story about the male account of an event being preferenced over the female. It's a story about the internal workings that prevent us from telling our versions of the truth. Clearly, the doubt of the authentic self runs deep. And it's not a gendered doubt, necessarily. It's just that it seems that way so often.

Hence, there are both spiritual and political lessons to be learned from Solnit's essay. It's so easy to ignore the tiny daily silencings that we endure. It's so easy to brush it off when a colleague tells me her husband, a person who works in some science-y field, would hate me because I so frequently employ "psuedo-science" in my writing and in my general conversation (nevermind that I'm a compulsive researcher and do everything I can to cite sources all over this damn blog). It's so easy to capitulate to some assumed authority who may or may not be talking out his ass, just to avoid the argument... and to avoid the stupid ego crap that goes along with having your body of knowledge mistrusted and questioned. Which it will be. But it's no fun at all to be reminded that I'm still subject to this sort of dismissive bias. I do forget sometimes that it's a fight not yet won.

So, read some Solnit, won't you?

Can I at least pee without being patronized, please?

Lately, I've been noticing a weird thing happening to semi-public women's bathrooms all over. When I first began my current job, the women's bathroom on my floor required that female prospective urinators enter a code into a little keypad on the door to the bathroom. This was not required for male prospective urinators. Fortunately, within a couple months of my employment, they removed the keypad from the door and now anyone can charge on thru as they please. I, for one, was kinda annoyed that the whole elimination process, at work anyway, required yet another step for girls that was not required of boys (ok, I'll admit, punching 4 buttons isn't a big deal).

But beyond that, I couldn't help but to feel completely patronized by the fact that it was deemed necessary for women to have this extra level of security surrounding the lifting of skirts/dropping trou that the men who work on my floor apparently do not need (when they, uh, also lift their skirts or drop their trousers!). I mean, heaven forbid one of the nerdy old guys who works for my company got a wild hair to furtively dart into the women's bathroom and then...what?...stand on a toilet so as to peer at our dimpled little knees over the partition? I suppose this is a POSSIBLE scenario, but it's HIGHLY IMPROBABLE, don't you think? Really, I do not fear for my safety at work, nor do I worry about peeping toms. At my last job? Where I acquired a few stalkers over the years? Well, that was a different story... but, even there, it was more likely that the nerdy old men (different nerdy old men, by the way) were gossiping about who'd seen my body parts rather than trying to capture their very own glimpse of them.

I bring this up because, while I'm in OH for work and working in rented office space, I couldn't help but notice a little green plaque underneath the picture of a skirt-wearing figure by the women's bathroom (in said rented office space) that read "Shelter Zone." Directly across from the women's bathroom is the men's bathroom, but there is no analogous sign underneath the pants-wearing figure's picture. There are no locks on either door and they're roughly 20 feet apart... so, I wonder exactly how sheltered a woman running into this bathroom might actually be, but that's kinda beside the point.

Why is it that there is this perception that women need all this sheltering to begin with? I mean, this is kinda the same concept as the "Take Back the Night" business, isn't it? Like somehow, we aren't able to function normally within a totally civilized office space without needing special hideouts and underground networks? Or maybe, there's an assumption that we need someplace to which we can run after a dramatic tearful exit? (Because girls LOVE to make dramatic, tearful exits at work, right?) Or maybe these shelter zones are like those menstruation tents of yore (yeah, let's send all the chicks to a smelly little room so we can get them off our hands while they're bleeding... and let's call it a "shelter zone!" Brilliant! They'll never catch on!)

In truth, I have a hunch that it's really a bunch of misguided womenfolk who are behind these little insipid security measures. I imagine they're probably very well-intentioned in that they think they're providing a safe exit to sad little girls who find themselves in sticky situations. But what they're missing is that, by assuming that women should not EXPECT to be safe in their own workplaces, they've instituted this entirely dis-empowering little practice of putting signs and keypads up in front of doors behind which women might be naked from the waist down for about 90 seconds at a time.

And I suppose these small measures are resulting from various and assorted workplace problems that have arisen and have since been categorized under the heading of Sexual Harassment. And sure, women (and men) should not be physically assaulted in their offices. Nor should women's (and men's) employment or promotional status or payscale be affected by their gender or sexual habits. Nor should women (or men) have to put up with anyone continually infusing the professional atmosphere with sexual entendres (OK, fine, I'll admit, I'm a little guilty of this one). But the fact that women (and men, but particularly women) should have an EXPECTATION of freedom from all these things should render the aforementioned keypads and signs unnecessary. And because they SHOULD be unnecessary, I can't help but feel that their presence is entirely condescending and infantalizing (oh, please, big, tough keypad! Take care of me, save me, for I am weak and cannot handle the mere threat of someone watching me pee! *simper*).

Can we all just agree that the first step to not feeling victimized is NOT assuming that women are, by definition or by nature, victims in the first place? Please?