Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on an MRA, Part Four

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.”

(FYI: https://dailyreview.com.au/red-pill-watched-dont/61240/)

            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.

Oops, I Accidentally Got a Crush on an MRA, Part Three

Yesterday would have been my first day back at the bookstore. Cute Pansexual Assistant Manager was transferring, so it seemed doable a couple of weeks ago. When the time came, though, it seemed too sad. I knew it would take a lot more transformation for me to feel safe there, and it felt like that would take more work than my 10$ an hour covered. I’ve been wanting to commit to my own business anyway, so I took the leap and declared myself bossless. I’m nervous about the change and still heartachey about what happened, but I’m proud that I put myself first.

Things finally broke down between me and CPAM while the Store Manager was off for a week. We were setting up the textbook department for fall rush, so there was lots of good getting-in-a-flow-and-moving-heavy-books-around—my favorite part of the job.

But on the Friday of that week, something curdled in CPAM. He was in a text message argument with his sister-in-law. (she and his brother had just moved back in with his parents, where he lived as well) He was sniping about her to another employee in the back room and when I walked back there to get more books, he looked at me with such deep contempt, like how dare I walk in there, as if I were the hated sister-in-law herself.

I kept doing my job and chitchatting cheerfully with him—I have that abused-kid bad habit of trying to nice somebody out of being a jerk, as if I can avoid being hurt by being well-behaved enough. It bugged me, though, when he talked about her “bitching,” when he said he was going to “put that bitch in her place.” I had been volleying back his low-key prejudices for weeks, but this outright misogyny was still shocking. I didn’t say anything about it, though, because I was sick of having to say something so many times.

But then he turned on me. Although I had been working with a textbook company on and off for fifteen years, he decided to explain how alphabetizing works. Then he explained it again and again.

“I know how to alphabet,” I joked to try to get him off my case, but I succeeded only in giving him a chance to correct my grammar. Just want to mention at this moment that I have a Master’s Degree in Education.

            I said calmly that I wanted to be treated like an adult, but he kept doubling down on the condescension. I needed to learn how to take constructive criticism, he said, because after all, he was my superior. Which technically he was, but nobody had ever put it quite that way to me before. In all my years of low-level and often-temporary positions, no one had ever talked down to me that way.

As I tried to stand up for myself, he poured on the gaslighting: He said I needed to “compose myself.” He said I wasn’t hearing what I thought I was hearing. I left early, feeling livid and shaken. I wrote to the Store Manager about what happened, and he wrote back right away saying that he would take care of it.

Next Time: He didn’t.