How many women here have dealt with sexual harassment or something similar?

This is tangentially related to the campaign.

.. and I have to say that sexual harassment
is very ugly and demeaning.

It's horrible.

You know why? Because in every instance that
it happened to me, the authority figures and
my colleagues did everything they could to make
it appear less, or other, than it was.

S c r e a m !!!!!!!!!!!!!

:hug:

And I understand.

It happens every day, and if I don't see it happen to me, I see it happen to someone else.

But it's never once stopped me or even slowed me down. If anything, it just made me more determined.

when she had to re-enter the work force after a divorce in 1957. She got a part time teaching job, but wasn't paid as much as men teachers doing the same work because, she was told, "Men have to support their families. You women just go back to work to buy hats."

I've been called "honey" and told that I can't do "man's work", but somehow it wasn't as demeaning and disheartening as what happened to my mother.

That will be interesting to see.

One of them was another man. When you sell or starve, people can sense the power they have over you. I'm convinced that half the time sexual harassment (like rape) is more about power than anything else.

Yeah it really sucks.

Another time I was stalked by a co-worker... and after he was fired for harassing me, we found caricatures he'd drawn... most were of himself, chasing me with a bomb. I've had several jobs where a male co-worker did the exact same tasks, but was paid nearly twice as much.

seriously.

somebody wanna start a poll up for men ?

I loaned her my tape recorder for a day, and it stopped the harassment immediately. As a nice postscript, the bitch "resigned" after being hauled onto the carpet, losing every cent of what would have been considerable retirement benefits. Mom, meanwhile, later retired with full benefits. Thank you, Panasonic!

IMHO, the tape recorder is sometimes a better weapon than a gun...you can conceal it without fear of arrest, and when you have someone on tape, you have their ass, because there's NO denying who said what to whom.

It was years ago, but a bunch of middle-aged women sucking on penis-shaped suckers on Valentine's day when you're the only (18-year-old) male in the office makes for a really ugly memory...

...as I said, it's a traumatic thing for me (not "I'm scarred for life" traumatic...more "There's an image I really never wanted in my head" traumatic).

What's stopping you? :shrug:

Worthy topic of discussion, yes. But not exactly GD-P material.

EDIT: Just a variation on what Clinton-supporters like to say: female Obama supporters are "naive" and "inexperienced" and "lack self-respect".

effectively pushed out of line because she's not a dude.
Some have tried to make the case that this perception may highly correlate with personal experiences of sexual discrimination or sexual harassment.
I don't want to offer my personal opinion here, because correlations be damned, I'm not going to insinuate that someone votes out of revenge or gender sensitivity or payback or whatever else. And even if someone does vote for a woman just because their boss mistreated them, well, I say why not?

it would go in the lounge area? It is certainly worthy of discussion.

one stands out in particular when this guy kept bumping up against me "accidently". I kept moving but it didn't matter cause he would move too and continue with it. I was too young and scared to do or say anything. I felt powerless, like I was nothing. It still pisses me off, if someone were to do this today I'd tell to them "BACK OFF". :mad:

:evilgrin:

Sad statement about our society, isn't it. <..sigh..>

Shows we don't know how to respect each other.

I know some men who have also experienced this, but I don't believe it is as prevalent.

About power mostly.

Has experienced it. When your money depends on customer approval if you're a decent looking guy it's going to happen.

Not saying it happens to more men than woman by any means. Simply that I think most people who havent worked in sales would be very surprised.

The more expensive the thing that you're selling the more prevalent this becomes. At least that's been my experience.

when I was selling cars I had one women drive me back to her apartment on a test drive and invite me inside for no stated reason except a wink. I told her that I would stay out, I had to call my wife heh. The implicit message I think was "Sleep with me and I'll buy a car" heh. No thanks.

customers think of you like you're a beggar, & they can treat you as they please because they have "bought" the right. And there is a proportional relationship to price of item & frequency of harassment.
Rich SOB's think they can "buy" anything they want!

I was on the first-wave of female saleswomen in the South & BOY! did we really get the harassment! I think a lot of it was to try & run us out of the profession. Didn't work, but we took our licks & have the scars to show for it.

I finally left when I started a family.

Here's to hard-working salespeople everywhere!
:toast:

I don't know what it was like at your store, but salespeople are famously abrasive and hostile to one another. Especially in the car business. I think it's a natural super competitive behavior, as well as a release since you can't vent on the customers who pretty much invariably treat you like shit.

But I did see quite a bit of harassment from a couple of the managers at two different stores. Pretty disgusting :puke:

"in-house" competition. But, by the same token, I was alone on the road, which has it's own set of problems. Needless to say I bought a gun & mace. The country wasn't as violent as it is now, but there was still the possibility of running into "trouble".

I did have a competitor stop me at a restaurant at lunch one day & told me that I had too big of an advantage over him, because I had boobs! Little did he know these 36E's brought more misery than $! I told him he could get some too, if he thought it would help him! LOL

What did you sell?

Did PR for Red Cross Blood Services.
Then portion-cut meat, cigarettes, & finally industrial cleaning products (I was actually the "rag lady"! LOL)

I really loved being on the road, but after I married, hubby was worried about me & then kids came.
I felt I owed my kids a mother who could be there for them. Traveling & motherhood don't mix very well, in my estimation.

:thumbsup:

Or my political views.

IMO, the best approach is to take a stand immediately and then just brush it off. It's their problem, not mine.

just brush it off? :shrug:

I don't let these things escalate. If I think I'm being treated unfairly, I address it immediately, and in no uncertain terms say that it's unacceptable.

After that, yes, I let it go. I think that's actually a pretty healthy way of handling these situations.

I wont go into details but emphatically, YES, Ive dealt with it.

I do recall the issue of SEXISM flying around in the campaign, but I don't see where sexual harassment belongs in GDP. Unless Hillary groped Barack's buns, or Obama offered Clinton the VP nod in return for special favors when I wasn't paying attention.

on me spending the weekend with him. I turned him in. He was fired. This was in 1969. I submerged the whole awful thing until Anita Hill and then it came flooding back...sickening. BUT it has nothing to do with my vote in this election.I am for Obama and never thought of supporting Hillary because of that past experience.

:evilgrin:

I don't believe the "no" votes for a minute.

during the 70's.

I was both verbally and physically sexually harassed by an officer in the civil rights department of all people. While this was going on, I was told by one of my coworkers that she was a kept woman by a state rep she worked for and that she was scared to dead to leave him for fear that he would beat her or worse.

In another case I was told that even though I was the most qualified candidate for the job, that he wouldn't hire me because I would have to work overnight with "the boys" and that we would be too busy flirting to do our jobs. He picked up the phone and offered to dial the civil rights department for me and then laughed in my face.

I was also denied a job because I was a single parent and the bank manager didn't want to risk me missing work because of my kids. The bank I work for now, which has many women managers and total respect for its female staff (at least where I work), bought that bank a few years ago.

I was denied an apartment because I had children. The list goes on.

I stood in the front row when Geraldine Ferraro came into town and was so proud that a woman was running for vice president. I chased her motorcade down the road so I could wave at her. I had tears in my eyes because I was so proud and inspired.

I'm voting for Barack Obama because I think he is the best candidate. I'm not voting for Hillary Clinton not because she's a woman, but because I like Obama better. And Geraldine Ferraro has gravely disappointed me.

And any woman who even considers voting for McCain because they feel slighted by Hillary not getting the nomination should take a trip back down memory lane and asked themselves if this is the world they want to bring back to their daughters and granddaughters.

when there wasn't as much recourse for women to file complaints.

My company was having its annual meeting at an out-of-town venue. After an evening event I was carrying materials back to the room that was serving as our "office" and I didn't know that my boss was following me. He trapped me in a corner. I won't go into the details beyond that. Thing is, he didn't want me to quit my job. Why did he think I wouldn't quit? Shit, we went to the same church, I was friends with his wife... It haunts me to this day.

The last incident was about 13 years ago, and I have been with 2 very good companies for most of the time since then.

When I was 16-17, I had a coworker who used to repeatedly block the aisle in the kitchen, trying to force me to squeeze by him, and would say really vulgar things as I walked by.

I had a boss brush up against me in a situation where it could not possibly be accidental, and on another occasion, look wistfully into my eyes and tell me how beautiful they were. I was 19 and he was 58.

I had a coworker who used to look me up and down every time I was in the room, obviously focusing on certain areas, to the extent that I started hiding in the storage room when he was around. He even almost crashed the van one time because he was looking at me instead of the driveway. I told my supervisor about it, because he (the boss) had gotten mad at me for telling him not to invite the creep to my office birthday party (he was an off-site worker who did deliveries for us). My boss, instead of being concerned, YELLED at me and said that "Mike" was his friend and there is absolutely no way that what I said could possibly be true. I told the department administrator, a woman. One week later, Mike was transferred. She said I was not the first one who had felt very uneasy withh him.

I had another coworker who used to be a friend who I literally had to yell "Stop looking at my damned boobs or I will get your ass fired!" in front of witnesses to finally get him to stop... pleading and reasoning didn't work, but that finally did. His reasoning had been that I shouldn't dress nice if I didn't want to be noticed. :mad:

That was probably the last incident. I think the improvement coincided with companies beginning to really crack down on it. Now, I have had confrontations with men since then, but not ones that I would assume were related to sex/gender. Sometimes an asshole is just an asshole.

edited to add: Oh, and I totally forgot to mention the dozens of men over 6 years who thought waitress meant "prostitute."

1969, I was 19 years old. I had been working as a ward secretary on the surgical floor of big city private hospital. My job entailed quite a bit of contact with the surgeons who practiced there, and eventually a pair of them who were partners in an orthopedic private practice offered me a job as their receptionist for much better money than the hospital was paying.

Seemed like a great move up for me, and I was naturally gratified that the quality of my job skills had been given this kind of recognition. It was a great job, and I really loved it. The two surgeons were jocular and friendly with me, and I felt quite comfortable and self-assured in my new position.

Well, after about a month or so, there came an afternoon when one of them buzzed me from his office and asked me to bring him a file. No big deal. But when I entered his office, he jumped up, closed and locked his door and made a grab for me. I was utterly shocked. He starts in with this big rant about how I had been teasing him all this time, and it was time for me put out.

I was backing away, hugging the requested file to my chest, and it ended up with him literally chasing me around his desk. It was like a scene out of cartoon! At first I was just in a state of shock and disbelief. Then he starts sputtering out all these really mean and hurtful things like, did I really think they hired me for my typing skills? Telling me that I "owed" him.

I finally just got really angry and demanded that he let me out of his office. I told him I wouldn't fuck him even if he was the last man on earth. That seemed to take him aback. He let me out of his office, I went back to the reception desk, wrote out my resignation notice, grabbed my coat and went home and never went back.

It pissed me off for a long time -- I had really liked that job, and it's no fun to be suddenly unemployed. And I was really insulted by his assertions that I was only hired because they thought I was "sexy". But this was long before there were any legal protections for women forced out of employment due to sexual harrassment. I had to pick myself up and figure out what to do next all on my own.

Which I did, of course -- being a plucky and resourceful survivor. And because I have also always been a cynic and fond of black humor, my most enduring memory of that event has been the absolutely farcial scene of being chased around that guy's desk. It still cracks me up. I mean, how farking pathetic!

I'm no victim. I've preserved my personal autonomy throughout many ugly and disgusting encounters with this particular subspecies of idiot males. I've never stopped loving men, nor have I ever allowed the unenlightened faction of males get me down.

sw

My favorite is when I caught three of my upper level managers looking at a Playboy centerfold. I never saw three redder faces in my life. I was in management then (mid 1980's). I was embarrassed and they obviously were embarrassed.

Not so much in India, Spain or the United States, but definitely a lot of sexism...just not outright harassment.

As a lesbian, I have felt threatened a few times in the US (Texas and Pennsylvania). Its a scary feeling.

I was pretty closeted in the other countries.

John McCain wants to restore the status quo for women to the 1950's. He vows to support a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape or to save a woman's life. No thinking woman, whether she considers herself a feminist or not, wants to give up her economic and reproductive rights. As a result, I do not believe that the majority of women will follow Clinton's not-so-subtle suggestion to stay home or vote for McCain if she is not the nominee.

There may be young women voters who have not themselves been the victim of sexual harassment. By way of educating them about what things were like in the 1960's and early seventies concerning discrimination and sexual harassment:

In the early sixties, abortions were illegal. My 17 year old college room-mate got pregnant and needed an abortion. Through some other woman friends I found the name of an abortion doctor in Baltimore and my room-mate traveled there from our school in Ohio there with her $200, then a lot of money, for the abortion. She called me up crying the next day because the doctor had demanded to have sex with her or he wouldn't perform the abortion. This was after he had taken her $200.00. So, she let him. That what laws against abortion did in the 1960's, made women into victims of unscrupulous doctors. Many women died from botched abortions.

In 1968, I applied for a job in 1968 with a union that represented hundreds of female workers in the hotel and restaurant industry. Perhaps 90 per cent of this union's membership were female. During my job interview with the union's president, he asked me why he should hire me and train me for the job when I would probably just leave to have children. This was a liberal union president who did good things for his female membership, but when it came to hiring for his office, he wanted a man!

Thereafter I went to law school, where I was one of only 4 or 5 women out of the 100 man entering class. Shortly after I passed the bar in 1975, I was representing a defendant in a major drug conspiracy case which had over 30 male defendants and almost as many lawyers, all male except me. In the middle of my cross-examination of a police witness the judge called me up to the bench and asked me if I would spend the weekend with him and "boogey".

Then there was the time my male law partner and I were in the middle of a trial and the prosecutor asked for a recess to discuss a possible plea offer. He signalled us to go outside. My partner and I followed him out of the courtroom and he walked right into the men's room. He was rather disconcerted when I walked in right behind him.

Now there are almost as many women lawyers are there are men and there are laws prohibiting discrimination and sexual harassment and the law permits abortion.

McCain wants to appoint more judges to the Supreme Court like Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alioto, the judges who recently refused to let a valid woman's wage discrimination suit proceed as they absurdly re-interpreted a procedural rule. Those same judges want to reverse Roe v. Wade, the case that gave women the right to choose to have an abortion.

I do not believe that even the staunchest Clinton supporter will vote for McCain or not vote because Clinton is not the Democratic candidate, not when they learn what McCain has planned for women.

and for any woman that has doen either of those activites, there is nothing more to say;)

gender bias more than once. As a white female, I've also witnessed what some whites say about blacks when no blacks are around, and I can tell you that racism is still worse than sexism.

In my early twenties, I worked at a food packaging company. I weighed meat then placed it on buns speeding by on a conveyor belt.
I had the best record for accurate weight and highest number of sandwiches completed week after week. Two of the male employees had been harassing me. They kept hitting on me relentlessly, cornering me in the walk-in fridge, ect. I made a formal complaint to the owner. I was fired the next day.

I am an Obama supporter.

She was in the first wave of women professors at the university where I was a grad school, and while she was happy to be the "token" female (her words, not mine), she felt it necessary to be more masculine than the men. Swearing like a sailor, smoking cigars, all the stereotypical, over the top "male" things. She could hold her liquour with the best of them. The harassment I experienced from her wasn't unique to me-- she did it to all of her female grad students. Only the guys were allowed to do certain things that apparently required a Y chromosome, like running the slide projector (seriously), getting first authorship on papers, participating in certain high level meetings, etc. It was great fun. I got the hell out of that lab as soon as I could, and ended up doing my dissertation under a male professor, who was a hell of a lot more enlightened.

For the record, I'm an Obama supporter. I don't want or need a token president.

of my daughters were in it. He ended up marrying one of the students and another student committed suicide. Today he is teaching at a Christian College and got off scott free....

Here is one excerpt from when the story was printed online. *portion of whole story*

http://www.mlrmag.com/FullText.asp?year=02&month=02&day=12