I’m sorry?
If you’re going to call me a name that relates to the prostitution industry, at least call me pimp. I mean, if you’re going to call me a pejorative term for someone who sells sex for money, at least let me be the boss of the operation.
When I’m put in situations where sexism is directed at me, I’m ashamed to say a lot of the time I’m too stunned to react fast enough to do much about it, and because I’m codependent, often what comes out of my mouth when someone else does something wrong is “Sorry.”
Once when I was ordering coffee at a café I never go to, I was taking a little extra time reading the menu. Trust me, I know there is nothing more annoying than someone reading a coffee menu at a coffee shop at eight in the morning and asking questions like “What’s in the mocha, exactly? Is it like a powder?” but I was very confused by all the witty pun-themed drinks. If something is called a “thanks-a-latte,” I’m going to have to ask what’s in it because I have no idea what thanks tastes like.
As I was asking about the “capuccin-ho-ho-ho!” (it was Christmastime), two burly men behind me began to loudly order over me. They projected their voices over my head on a cloud of garlic-and-cigarette breath. While I was still talking.
While. I. Was. Still. Talking.
And look, I’m the first to admit that most of the time I talk way more than I need to and don’t blame anyone who interrupts me when I’m getting redundant or boring. But this was not me bloviating in a conversation, this was me saying one pretty concise sentence to a stranger. They spoke right over me, as if I were the display case of scones between them and the barista. They took their money out, reached around me, and threw it on the counter before telling the barista to keep the change.
I was invisible.
You’re probably assuming that I went apeshit on them, roasted them, did something fearless and insane. Nope. The second they started talking over me, I froze. The barista was so confused that he froze, too. As lame as it was, I’m kind of glad I didn’t react because if I had, things would have gotten very Jerry Springer very quickly. Instead, I offered a permissive nod to the barista, giving him the go-ahead to serve them before me. He looked disappointed. At least twice a week I fantasize about handling that situation differently.
Like every woman I know, I’ve been made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe by aggressive men at one point or another, but this was the first time since my childhood that I felt literally unseen. These men didn’t harass me, they just ignored me completely. I realized that day that it’s very hard to defend yourself against someone who doesn’t know you exist.
If you’re asking yourself, “Jesus, how much attention does this bitch need?” let me reassure you, I just asked myself the same question. However, although this seems relatively benign compared to the sexism that makes news headlines, the reason I think this story is worth sharing is because the mentality of dismissing a woman’s existence at a coffee shop could be the same mentality that in drunken moments could turn into a mentality that justifies worse behavior like violence. Not to bring a super fun winter activity into a conversation about sexual assault, but tolerating a small behavior can enable it to snowball into a bigger one.
So now that you know how much guilt I have complaining about this stuff, I feel like now I can dig into the even yuckier things that have happened to me.
Over the last five or so years as I’ve gained some much needed mental clarity, I’ve become able to wrap my head around a few specific cases of physical abuse and sexual harassment I’ve experienced. To me, sexual harassment is like what our moms used to say about gum: “It takes eight years to digest.”
One experience was so bizarre that my reaction was to delete it from my memory for about seven years. When I was about twenty-three, I was jogging at night near my apartment in West Hollywood. I had my headphones on, my Discman pumping my go-to jogging soundtrack Now That’s What I Call Music Vol. 43. Despite my penchant for scary situations in my twenties, I tried to jog on safe, well-lit streets at night. In my neighborhood this meant running on a street called La Cienega, which is littered with trendy bars, clubs, and sushi places. I mean, what could possibly go wrong when there’s edamame topped with sea salt in the vicinity?
There I was, jogging along, jamming to probably Usher, and out of nowhere a homeless man lunged at me and grabbed my vagina. Hard. This was of course before the concept of vagina grabbing was trendy; before Donald Trump put it in the zeitgeist. And since I used to run in loose Adidas shorts sans underwear, this was a legit vagina grab, not an over-two-layers-of-clothing type deal like we did in the back of Nissan Altimas in the nineties.
Thankfully I didn’t get paralyzed by my freeze response the way I did in the coffee shop. I did the opposite. I just kept running—literally and figuratively. I don’t know if anyone saw the incident or said anything, because my ability to see and hear went offline for about ten minutes. All I heard was a piercing white noise, like a faraway scream. Maybe it was me screaming, I don’t know. A burst of adrenaline propelled me home like a spazzy Forrest Gump. I ran probably the fastest I’d ever run, yet my muscles weren’t burning and my lungs weren’t gasping for air. The irony was not lost on me that I raced past the infamous strip club the Seventh Veil, a grim purple building decorated with silhouettes of naked women. At least the women in there were getting paid for what I just suffered through for free.
Looking back, I realize the name of the strip club felt right on the nose, given I responded to the event with such a strong veil of denial. When I told the story to people the next day, I made jokes and laughed about it but nobody else thought it was funny. A couple of people even offered to take me to the doctor, which made me realize what happened wasn’t as harmless as my psychological defenses were telling me it was.