Apologies for double-posting, but I feel this deserves a separate post. Also, no takers on my devils advocacy ^there? Heh, I was actually pretty serious when I wrote that, but I was wondering if anybody felt it was too jaded.
I mentioned in the frustration thread, which took on the guise of the this thread for a while, that I had something to add to the discussion of feminism. But, ultimately I felt it belonged in this thread, since said "something" was very eye-opening to me in the same fashion that this thread has been.
I stayed in town for a couple of days this week at a very nice and very enlightened woman's ranch house. I say enlightened because of the kind of work she does, helping at-risk teenage girls get through school in order to make a better living for themselves. She was out of town, and she had offered a spare room to me if I needed to sleep after my classes so that I wouldn't kill myself driving back to where I live. While I was staying over, I met another woman who had been hired to feed and care for her animals. She had a remarkably steady air about her, something I picked up on immediately. Every time she came by to take care of the animals we would talk, and I mentioned to her that I was looking for a cheap place to stay in town. She told me that the apartment complex she lived in was the cheapest place in town, and suggested I look there for a space.
So, I went to the office and met the man in charge of the place. He seemed very eager to talk to me, and he mentioned that his wife had just died, and I figured that was why. Well, after a long time talking about this, that, and the other thing, he made a very strange remark about my hair, and then about me in general, in essence saying that he had never really wanted to marry his wife and would have rather married somebody like me. He had to have been at least, say, in his late 50's! and here he was telling this to me. Then it dawned on me that the whole time we had been talking he had been hinting at that, but I hadn't picked up on it until that point. After that I got out of there as quickly as possible, and the guy actually followed me out the door, asking me to come back and talk even as I was getting in my car. I drove back to the ranch house where I met the animal caretaker later that evening, and I told her about what had happened to me. "Oh yeah, he's very inappropriate," she told me, and I let her know that his remarks at the end of our conversation had been a deal-breaker for me, as far as my staying at his apartments. She asked me, "Ah, so you can afford not to live with that?" I was a little taken aback. I had never thought of it that way before.
Apparently the manager of the apartments behaved inappropriately toward her all the time, even asking her if she wanted to "have a little fun" on occasions when he came over to fix things. I reacted as I figure any person would react, saying it was awful and the like. She shrugged and said, "What can you do?" in her consistently steady tone. She told me that she had put up with similar things her whole life, giving me an overview of some of the jobs she had worked: Construction, mining, waitressing, and others all had her situated with men who sexually harassed her, to my astonishment, fairly regularly. At one of her waitressing jobs a cook would constantly touch her and hug her on the job, and when she brought it up to the other staff they thought she was ridiculous for letting it bother her. Heaven forbid she ask it to stop or anything. Well, this cook she was having a problem with also happened to be a drinker and, somehow, knew where she lived. One night he actually got drunk and broke down her door and almost forced himself on her. When she complained about this, SHE was fired, because the restaurant would have an easier time finding a waitress than finding a cook.
(Another tidbit I learned from her about waitressing: Apparently in Vegas most nice restaurants will only use male waitstaff for dinner services because waiters are considered to be more classy than waitresses. I thought that was pretty weird.)
She had to have been in her late forties, almost fifty. She didn't tell me her age. I didn't ask, but I got a sense of it from the life stories whe told me. She was born to parents who followed a really strict religion, and from what I gathered they were pretty emotionally abusive toward her. When she ran away, they apparently let the state have her because they didn't even want to pay to bury her. I guess she spent most of her teenage years in state facilities or on the street. By the time she was 30 she had been married twice, and both husbands had died. She really hadn't had any chance to get ahead by going to school, so she took low paying jobs oftentimes surrounded by men. I guess that her experiences had led her to just not be bothered by that kind of behavior (and I'm guessing this is why she seemed so emotionally steady), but I was sitting there thinking, god, how the hell would I live with that nonsense? And her question to me about being able to afford not to put up with sexual harassment really stuck with me, because at that moment it dawned on me that a lot of women are expected to put up with offensive crap on a daily basis just so that they can make ends meet. Literally, expected by co-workers and supervisors who would rather not put up with a harassment claim, even if their door gets broken down. If they make a noise about it, they're liable to get fired.
If I could see the feminist movement get behind anything, I'd like to see it expose more stories like this, to let people know that there is a very insidious and oppressive indifference toward low-income women in this country. This is the kind of oppression that arises from thinking we've done all we should do as a society, which is a tempting notion to become attached to. It would be comforting to think that, but rather than live with false comfort I wish we'd all be on the lookout for the sake of those who need looking out for.
I hope the woman I mentioned would not be offended that I recounted her story in this light. I'm pretty sure she'd appreciate what we talk about here.
