What?! Too angry? Do you feel the same about Black people who talk about the pervasive and systemic marginalization, denigration, and racism that they have had to deal with all of their lives? Because what you are doing here is pretty much the same thing.
Women have every right to be fucking enraged!! Little girls commonly start getting harassed on the streets when they are 10 and 11 years old - typically by adult men - and nobody fucking does anything about it. When girls complain at school that boys are snapping their bra straps, groping them, or otherwise sexually harassing them, the common response is "boys will be boys." When girls and women get raped, it's commonly blamed on them - still, today, in 2023!! Women get routinely told to "watch your tone" and to smile at work, a place where they still are too often disrespected and underestimated. Female doctors are often mistaken for nurses or treated as less competent and a few years back a study was done in Australia about what female surgeons have to endure at work - from their male colleagues. This included blatant disrespect, demands for sexual favors, pervasive harassment, etc. This takes place in America as well.
To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”
Fine, Cordelia. Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (p. 126). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
This doesn't mean that men have it easy or that there are no prevalent obstacles that men face, but they are overwhelmingly not on that level or on that scale. They are not built into the fabric of society in the same way and into the very laws of the land (up until just a few decades ago). This piece was very logical, evidence-based, and by in large measured given the absolutely horrendous things that she was describing. If you think this was unhinged somehow, it's because you are turning a blind eye to what it's actually like to be a girl and a woman in this culture. Shame on you, honestly!! If reading this makes you think that this author is too angry rather than that you ought to be doing something to contribute to a better culture, you are a huge part of the problem as well.
“Multiple women told CBS News that they filed claims of sexual harassment or assault as State Department employees that did not result in any repercussions for the perpetrator.
“There is a kiss up, kick down system,” explains a former State Department employee who says she was sexually assaulted by her boss, in two separate incidents, when she was working overseas. She formally filed a complaint, despite being encouraged not to rock the boat.
She was later told that her perpetrator was surprised when the allegations were brought to his attention. He kept his job and was later promoted. She says she received a negative review that she believes was a death stamp on her career.”
