In a piece of
administrative bad luck, both the Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager and I took
sick days on the Monday that followed that Friday snit. The Store Manager was
out again on Tuesday so there was no meeting, no resolution. CPAM had clearly
been told not to talk to me about anything that wasn’t work related. Why would
this be a solution? Barring me from small-talk could only serve to further separate
me, not make me feel safe or included. I shouldn’t have to be ready to, for
example, confront a rape apologist in order to rate a slot in the cheery work chitchat.
I was scared when I came
in and in fact asked if I should leave, but CPAM became friendly again pretty
quick., joking about his unicorn-ness and bonding over the music. I even
wondered if Friday (and I guess the whole rest of his microagression-o-rama)
had been a fluke, just a snit. I felt sheepish to have been so upset.
But then, while we were
working happily together in the back room (that darn back room!) with a recently-back-from-vacation
grad student, he asked, apropos of nothing, if she had ever heard of the documentary
“The Red Pill.”
I
hadn’t heard of the movie, but my hackles went up. I knew that “Red Pill”
mentality was one of the Men’s Right’s Activist, deep-Reddit monstrosities that
has become the part of the toxic misogynist soup we’ve all been swimming in. In
their parlance, “taking the red pill” means realizing that (white) men are
actually society’s most oppressed category and that one of the ways to correct
this “imbalance” is…rape. I also knew that the Red Pill/ MRA movements are tied
intimately with white supremacist movements.
After
a few minutes of him summarizing the “documentary” and me saying “that’s
TERRIBLE” a lot of times, he continues to double down on men’s vulnerable status.
(NOTE: Men ARE vulnerable and harmed, but he wasn’t realizing it’s heteropatriarchy,
not rape survivors, who make the rules.)
I
asked him to change the subject, but he said “I’m not talking to YOU. This isn’t
work related.” And stalked away. I
walked right after him.
“I thought
we were going to get along,” I said calmly but forcefully, “But you CAN’T be
sexist at work. The people you’re talking about are rape apologists.”
“No, they’re not. You’re
just saying that because you disagree with them. No matter what I say, you’ll
hear what you want to hear. Besides, it isn’t work related.”
“It IS work related because I don’t
feel safe at work. This is a microagression, no, a MACROaggression!”
(As if he would know what
either word meant.)
I went back to working on
the books, but my body didn’t want to be there. After he evoked the Men’s
Rights Activists, the trauma of the 2016 election, the “Lock her up” mobs, the
way Trump had recently threatened to forcibly take “Pocohontas” Elizabeth
Warren’s DNA to test and mocked the #Metoo movement in the same sentence, it felt
like all of that was in the room with me, and it was. The store was presided over
by a giant photo of the college’s mascot, a white colonizer, rape and murder in
his puppet eyes. How does any woman get through a day on that campus, or in America,
or anywhere in all of history?
I went home. I called the HR hotline, called my
therapist, called (ex-wife, BFF) Sweetie. I felt helpless, scared, worthless,
panicked, but more than anything else, I felt angry—for the time theft, the
money theft, the ELECTION theft brought about by misogyny in general and the
MRAs specifically. I felt like I would never be safe anywhere.
Earlier this week, I
watched “To All the Little Girls: The Untold Stories of the Sixty-five Million”,
https://www.toallthelittlegirlsdoc.com/watch
Rebecca Morgan’s story of her work on the 2016 election and it’s aftermath.
After the election, Becca was diagnosed with PTSD, and in some ways, I think
the whole country has it. I know I do. It’s hard to shake the idea that I have
to fight and scrap for survival, that we all do. I don’t know what healing
looks like, but I do know that I’ll call out hate (and call HR) just as freely
as I call Congress. My heart aches for whatever genuine friendship was there,
for having left another thing I liked. I don’t know where we’re going, but I
know whose side I’m on: mine.
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