Trumped

Yesterday, for the first time in my adult life, the outcome of a federal election brought me to tears. Not tears of joy, but rather tears of disbelief.  How could this happen? This is not the country I thought I lived in. When I woke the Boy up for school, I could not utter any words other than "he won." before my voice left me.

I spent the day in a fog, trying to wrap my head around the outcome, trying to understand where the road leads next. In the midst of that, I saw the first reports of hate crimes against those that the president-elect vilified in his campaign:  Muslims, non-whites, women...  and trying to decide how to explain my emotional reaction to my child.

Last night, alone with him in the kitchen preparing dinner, I told him that I needed for him to understand why I've reacted in such a way. I told him the stories that I've kept buried away - the stories I hadn't ever found reason to tell his father, or even my friends.

I told my son that as a woman who has worked in male-dominated fields her entire life, I have lived the groping, the leering, the violation of personal space and the fear.  How at my first summer job, I was taken from the assembly tables where I worked near my mother and moved to an office because they found out I was studying mechanical drafting. In that office, I was alone with an adult male in his late thirties or early forties.  An adult male that I frequently caught leering at me, and who found every excuse to lean across me, brush against me, accidentally touch my breasts.  I told my son that in that era, society had taught me that I was somehow to blame for this man's behavior. That I must have done something to make him think I was okay with it or that I deserved it. That my voice, raised against him, would have no weight. So I did what society taught me to do:  I avoided him. I became wary.  I made sure I faced him at all times so he could not sneak up behind me. I learned how the rabbit feels with the hawk circling overhead.  I was 16 years old.

I told my son how in my second full-time job, as a young woman in the spring of her career, I worked with a number of young male engineers. For the most part, they were wonderful supportive people - we grew up together in many ways, and we treated each other like siblings.  For the most part. Until one day, one of them came up behind me in my work space, where no one else could see, and slid his hands over my shoulders and down my shirt. And again I did what society taught me to do: I wondered what I did to make him think that was okay, and I studied to avoid him. I stopped choosing work packets that would cause me to interact with him. I made sure I wasn't alone with him as much as possible, and I understood that as a woman who had chosen to work with men, my voice had no weight.

I developed a thick skin and a self-deprecating sense of humor. I learned to let off-color jokes and comments roll off me and to return them in kind, because anything less made me appear weak. I was striving to no longer be seen as prey.

In 1991, Anita Hill stood up for all of us at great personal cost to herself and started us all saying "Enough." As the years passed, society improved. Sexual harassment training became more prevalent, and companies learned the risk of ignoring bad behavior.

I shared all this with my son, so that he would understand what the world used to be like, and what I was afraid it would become again.Through tears of frustration and grief, I told him I never wanted his cousin to be treated that way as she pursued her career. That I never wanted anyone else's daughter to wonder what she did to deserve being violated, groped or raped. How I believe that all women have the right to occupy space without fearing for their safety.

I told him that we have made so much progress as society - or that I thought we had - and that I feared for those that had been singled out as villians in the candidate's rhetoric.  I feared for my gay friends, my non-white friends, for young women everywhere. I feared for the loss of civility and the empowerment of bullies.

We talked for a long time, I cried a lot and he did too, at seeing me upset. I explained to him that he was the beneficiary of white privilege - with his sandy hair, his blue eyes and his ability to pass as a Christian; that it was his duty to use that privilege to defend and stand up for those who did not have it. That he had the power to be an agent of change and to refuse to accept the negativity and vilification of anyone who didn't look like him. 

And ultimately I apologized to my son because we couldn't do better than a xenophobic, misogynistic, racist narcissist as our next president.