by Meghan Daum
My roommate and I were afraid to even glance in the other’s direction lest we make eye contact and collapse into fits of laughter.
Suffice it to say we were not offended. We were worried about offending him with our reflexive mockery. Was this because we were too blind to our own oppression to fully register his chauvinism? Hardly. It was because his chauvinism utterly disempowered him. He stood before us as a pathetic creature, a human-shaped dust bunny being swept, before our very eyes, into the trash bin of history. This had nothing to do, by the way, with being an adult in his thirties and needing to live with roommates (there is nothing remarkable about this in New York City). It was because his cluelessness rendered his attitudes and opinions irrelevant. He was totally not our problem.
If this had happened in 2015 rather than 1995, I suppose my roommate and I might have reacted differently. Maybe one of us would have made a beeline to her laptop and composed a rage-filled Tumblr post replete with hashtags like #FuckWhiteMen and #SmashThePatriarchy. Maybe we would have given our guest a steely reprimand, bid him adieu, and then retreated to the kitchen to pour vodka into our “Male Tears” coffee mugs. Surely, we would have been talking about this guy and his pitiful overture for days to anyone within earshot. After all, this was no mere microaggression but sexist piggery in its purest form, a scene from Mad Men come to life.
As it was, Mad Men was a decade away from appearing on our television screens. More importantly, decades had passed since this sort of behavior would have been commonplace, at least in our circles. Which is maybe why my roommate and I were essentially unfazed by it. We may have been caught off guard, but it was more like bumping into a relic of the past. It made us appreciate the present that much more.
We’d heard about men like this before, of course, mostly from our second-wave feminist mothers recounting what life had been like before the women’s movement. As I think about this now, it occurs to me that our mothers would surely have been enraged at the idea of cooking for a male roommate because it would have seemed so plausible. Put the whole scenario in 1975 and it might look something like a pre-internet version of the 2015 scenario; there would be lecturing and fist shaking. There would be heavy emotional processing at a political action group.
Our mothers’ mandate would have been to try to root out this kind of chauvinism and set history on a better course. In 1995, our mandate was to laugh it out of the room. Our mothers had yelled, but we would snort. Men like these weren’t threats to us. They were embarrassments to themselves. Their aggressions were neither personal nor political. They were just moronic.
This seems to me an entirely natural response to boorish male behavior. Strange as it may sound to say in today’s climate, the concept of male privilege was largely alien to me at that time. From my earliest memories, the general vibe around boys was that they were inferior to girls. Boys couldn’t sit still in class, couldn’t read as well as girls, got in trouble more often, matured later, and, even then, never really seemed to catch up. Insofar as teachers called on boys more often than on girls in elementary school, my impression was always that the teachers were grateful that any boy had anything to say and called on them out of desperation. This was no doubt a product of my own blinkered upbringing. From an early age, I’d gravitated, or been pushed by my parents (there was always a fine line between my interests and theirs), toward arts-oriented, female-dominated pursuits like theater and orchestra. Boys here either existed on the sidelines or, in the case of high school theater, were in such short supply that simply showing up for an audition was enough to get a boy cast in a leading male part.
This pattern continued as I went to a female-dominated liberal arts college and then worked in the women’s magazine business. My first job was at a fashion and beauty magazine, and though I scoffed at the essential shallowness of the enterprise, many of the women were absolute killers, sharks swimming in raging seas of haute couture and chemical facial peels. There were men sprinkled here and there, yet even the physical posture of these men suggested they lived perennially under the thumbs of women, like moss beneath toadstools. The women were buying their own apartments, trading their own stocks, out-earning their boyfriends and husbands. They also screamed at their assistants and threw small office supplies across the room. They connived, they berated, they mistreated their subordinates. There may have been more men than women at the very top of this food chain, but their presence felt almost symbolic, as if they were artists’ renderings that just happened to be walking around in the world instead of confined to picture frames.
After that job, I went to a graduate school program where women not only outnumbered men but could be so ruthless in their critiques of certain men that, as in elementary school, the professors sometimes seemed to be favoring those men out of pity. Sure, a handful of my male classmates were the kind of patronizing, blowhard types that would now be referred to as mansplainers. Likewise, there were more than a handful of men in the publishing and media business—a world in which I was extremely eager to make my mark—that were more than happy to lord their influence over anyone they could, especially young women who could be taken out to lunches that, halfway through, began to feel strangely like dates, as I knew all too well. Beyond that, of course, there would always be men you crossed the street to avoid and men you didn’t give your number to and plenty of reasons (all of them having to do with the animalistic opportunism of some males) not to leave your drink unattended in a bar.
But feeling the need to take such precautions seemed to be a different thing from feeling that men had power over me. If anything, the precautions were further proof of the ways in which the animal nature of men made them a lesser primate. Men such as the would-be roommate were on the verge of extinction. There was no need to make a fuss about them. As far as I could see, they’d be gone soon enough.
But that was just my experience. As was frequently the case in my twenties (and even today, though I try to do better) I couldn’t see very far past the confines of my social bubble. While I was rolling my eyes at the pretentious ramblings of insecure dudes in my writing workshop, my good friend Eileen was in downtown Manhattan, at a Wall Street investment bank, cleaning semen off her desk. One morning in 1995 she arrived at work and discovered that someone had jerked off all over her workstation. She knew who’d done it. She also knew there was almost certainly video footage proving so, though when she went to security and reported that her desk had been “vandalized,” she was told that no such tape existed. She didn’t bother reporting it to a supervisor or anyone in human resources. In fact, she says she’s not even sure this company had a human resources department.
“The guy was a high-producing stock trader,” she told me. “No one was going to touch him.”
By way of background, Eileen and I have been friends since the sixth grade, though we were—and are—in many ways opposites. She was good at math and science, whereas I was so miserable in these areas that I once begged my geometry teacher to let me write a paper about Pythagoras of Samos just to get a passing grade (request denied: I wound up in summer school). Eileen, who would be the first in her family to go to college and knew she needed scholarships to get there, was focused on getting good grades and high test scores and, above all, setting herself up for a remunerative career. I, on the other hand, obsessively pursued the things that interested me (writing, drama, orchestra) and effectively ignored everything else.
Eileen and I both went to Seven Sisters colleges, she to Wellesley and me to Vassar. But whereas she majored in economics and secured herself a solid boyfriend from a neighboring university, I cultivated an air of bohemian pretentiousness that prepared me for little more than a life of the same. After college, Eileen got engaged to the solid boyfriend at what I thought was the scandalously young age of twenty-five. More than two decades later, Eileen pretty much has the best marriage of anyone I know.
There were framed photos of Eileen’s fiancé on her desk when the trader, shall we say, liquida
ted his holdings all over it. Along the way, the trader had knocked the photos to the ground and just generally ransacked the surface of her desk.
“He was a paranoid guy,” Eileen told me on the phone more than twenty years after the incident. (We weren’t in frequent enough contact back in the day for her to have told me about it then.) “He was in over his head, constantly thinking he was going to lose money. He probably had a crush on me. He never approached me directly or talked to me. My guess is that he had some repressed thing.”
I asked if she reported the incident to a manager or some authoritative body.
“I didn’t report it,” she said. “If you’re going to report that kind of thing, you know you’re risking your job. Not to mention your future jobs. No one wants to be known as ‘the woman whose desk got jacked off on.’ ”
Several things occurred to me during this conversation. The first was the girl-power bubble in which I’ve spent my career is perhaps not the most useful perch from which to make pronouncements about the death of the patriarchy. The exultant image of Melanie Griffith riding the Staten Island Ferry to corporate triumph in the 1988 film Working Girl may be permanently tattooed on my emotional memory card (and in a very positive way), but the truth is that Wall Street was and is a hostile place for women—much more so than I’d realized. The desk incident may have been the most egregious of the indignities Eileen endured, but there were also drunken boob grabs at parties and raucous (also drunken) parties where Eileen was publicly berated as though the subject of a roast.
“It would start out as teasing me for being a prude, being a Goody Two-Shoes,” she recalls about the roasting, “but it would quickly escalate into outright hostility.”
Aside from being forced to reckon with my naivete, what really struck me about our conversation is the way Eileen talked about her . . . what should we call him? Second-degree assailant? Vandal? Walking biohazard? She spoke of him almost with an air of pity. He was paranoid, in over his head, repressed in his feelings for her and/or women in general. She did not talk, then or now, about rape culture or toxic masculinity. Not once did she say she felt unsafe. Though she was the only woman in her department who wasn’t a secretary, she was quick to point out that by and large she felt supported by her male colleagues. She worked in research, “where all the geeks were,” she told me. “They were kinder and had more camaraderie.” When she brought a coworker over to her desk to show him what had happened, the coworker registered sympathy with a roll of the eyes.
“He said something like ‘Ugh, that’s bad,’ ” she recalled, laughing. “He found me a new chair. He wasn’t exactly part of the male-bravado thing there. He said, ‘Just switch chairs and move on.’ ”
* * *
Just switch chairs and move on. That sounds like a reaction GIF in the making, perhaps a 2.0 version of that omnipresent “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster. Except it’s not the kind of sentiment that gains a lot of traction in this era of performed outrage. Talking with Eileen, I couldn’t help but think of Fearless Girl, the bronze statue created by sculptor Kristen Visbal that appeared in Manhattan’s Financial District in the spring of 2017. Depicting a spunky-looking, ponytailed little girl with her hands placed defiantly on her hips, the statue was commissioned by an investment firm and placed in Bowling Green in front of the famous 7,000-pound Charging Bull sculpture outside the New York Stock Exchange.
Instantly, that statue became a repository for every possible iteration of feminist and capitalist critique—not to mention art commentary. Since it had been installed overnight just before International Women’s Day (not that this holiday is observed by your average passerby), the surface-level message was one of female resistance to male authoritarianism. But despite the investment firm’s statement that the statue represented “the power of women in leadership,” naysayers almost immediately began pointing out that the company employed very few female executives. Furthermore, the company had recently settled a lawsuit admitting they had fraudulently charged secret markups for services. Therefore Fearless Girl amounted to nothing more than a conciliatory distraction device.
More controversy burbled up from there. Some adult women didn’t like that their achievements were being represented by a child. In yet another wrinkle, Arturo Di Modica, the artist who created Charging Bull, complained that the new visual narrative suggested that Fearless Girl was facing down the bull and that this subverted the meaning of his statue. The bull, he said, was meant to symbolize “freedom in the world, peace, strength, power, and love.” Others saw the bull as symbolizing the vigor of an upward-trending bull market. Whatever the case, the bull was never supposed to connote the bullying nature of men—at least not until it came face-to-face with a statue of a little girl.
There was also this: days after Fearless Girl went up, a young man in a suit, a prototypical-looking Wall Street bro, was caught in a photo rubbing up against the statue simulating a sex act. Naturally, the image went viral, and, naturally, an avalanche of outrage came along for the ride. “Man in Suit Humping ‘Fearless Girl’ Statue Is Why We Need Feminism” was the Huffington Post headline. My Twitter feed was a chorus singing in unison: Another day in rape culture. It just never stops. As if we needed more evidence that the world hates women.
The perpetrator’s face was blurry in the photo, but he seemed easily identifiable nonetheless. In anticipatory schadenfreude, I kept waiting for his name to be made public and for his incarceration in the digital stockade to begin. Amazingly, it never did. Meanwhile, I actually began to wonder if the whole incident wasn’t in some way another day in rape-culture resistance. The offending bro (who, according to people nearby, had been hanging off the bull statue with his buddies moments earlier) managed to defile Fearless Girl for only a few seconds before horrified bystanders shouted him off. Then he was forced into hiding by the angry internet mob. Not only was he castigated for his crime, he kept the feminist conversation’s volume on high for another day—or three. Is this evidence that the world hates women? Or just further proof of the infantile, psychologically impotent nature of Wall Street bros? Would an equally accurate headline have been “Outrage at Man in Suit Humping ‘Fearless Girl’ Statue Is Why Feminism Is Winning”?
Here’s another possible headline: “Man in Suit Humping ‘Fearless Girl’ Statue Is 2017 Version of Man Ejaculating on Woman’s Desk in 1995 and the Fact That He Was Shamed Instead of Ignored Is Why Feminism Is Winning.”
If something like the desk incident had happened today, Eileen told me, she probably would have taken photos. But of course that was in the days before smartphones effectively became extensions of people’s hands. Besides, even if she had been able to take photos and march into HR and somehow get the guy fired by noon, this would have done little to save her from a fate of being forever known as “the woman whose desk got jacked off on.” As it happens, years later, at another job, not in finance but a very corporate setting nonetheless, Eileen experienced sexual harassment and did attempt to report it. She retained a lawyer (a woman, incidentally) and was told she had no evidence and therefore no case. As much of a minefield as that work environment was, she says it still had nothing on Wall Street. She also says she wouldn’t trade the Wall Street experience for anything.
“I’m glad I did it,” Eileen told me. “All the stuff that happened to me, it’s all life experience. It has value, even if it was miserable at the time. That said, if it were my daughter in that situation I’d tell her to get the fuck out of there.”
I don’t need to have kids to know exactly what she means.
* * *
Much of life is a process of knowing when and if to get out of one situation or another. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking about where I went wrong versus where I was perhaps done wrong. It can be difficult to separate the two under any circumstances. But when you find yourself getting divorced and stepping squarely into middle age amid a cultural referendum on the treatment and value of women, you can’
t help but make a case study of yourself. Women are so aggrieved right now, I’d think while driving around with my dog during our weekly adventures in moving the car on alternate side of the street parking days. What are my grievances? What have been the times in my life where male privilege has blocked my way?
Maybe it’s my natural temperament (and maybe this is proof that my temperament is fundamentally narcissistic), but there’s no one I’d rather blame for my misfortunes than myself. In a pinch, I’ll blame the whims of the universe, but for the most part I’ll never pass up an opportunity for self-admonition. This is especially true when it comes to grievances against men and male privilege, which I take a special delight in quashing in favor of my own accountability. It’s almost as if blaming myself strips the men of their power by rendering them too insignificant to even gripe about.
In the eighth grade I ran for student body president against the most popular guy in the entire junior high school. One afternoon, as I was organizing my locker, my opponent’s football-player pals set upon me like a bunch of goons, encouraging me to run for student body secretary instead. The exact reason they gave now escapes me (probably it was something as convincing as “Steve really wants to be president”), but what doesn’t escape me is how easily I caved to their request. I did so not because I knew Steve would beat me (he wouldn’t have, because, as his goons were well aware, I would capture the “nerd vote”) but because I was an idiotic fourteen-year-old girl and wanted Steve to like me. And in fact I did run for secretary (my campaign slogan: “Vote for Meghan: The Write Choice!”) and won easily and served on the cabinet alongside Steve, who proved to be a very amiable and collaborative colleague.
An obvious narrative here would be that my eighth-grade political ambitions were felled by the patriarchy. It wasn’t just that Steve was exhibiting sexism by assuming, consciously or not, that he, as a male, was more entitled to be president than I was. It was that, in placing more value on winning Steve’s approval than winning the presidency, I was responding to culturally enforced patriarchal norms. So insidious were these norms that no amount of Zoom or Free to Be . . . You and Me or Jodie Foster fan worship in childhood could protect me. My feminist mother was undoubtedly disappointed by my capitulation. She registered her disapproval to me in measured tones before getting on the phone with her League of Women Voters friends and ranting about the backward nature of the whole school system and town. But this was not enough to throw me off my newly forged secretarial course. In my mind at the time, serving as class secretary alongside President Steve was a double achievement. It showed I was formidable enough to get voted into office but not so threatening as to be president or anything like that.
