This seems as good a place to start as any …
It’s past time we stop grieving the loss of those who are on our side — but not really. We need to start believing those with the courage to speak up.
What has me thinking about this is the revelation that Congressman (as of this writing) Eric Swalwell, a leading candidate (as of this writing) in the race to be California’s next governor, is the perpetrator of sexual harassment and assault, a matter well-documented by San Francisco Chronicle in an extraordinary work of journalism.
He and his defenders are already on the attack. The timing is “suspect.” Why didn’t she say something before now? Haven’t seen “how did she dress for work, anyway?” yet, but I am sure it’s out there.
It’s always the same: She’s lying. It’s an evil plot against him.
Neither is true. And for many of us, both the revelation and the predictable response is like slicing open a wound long scarred over. I am among those people, who are mostly always but not always women. Here’s my story.
***
I started my writing career as a sportswriter, covering high school sports for a metro daily. I wanted to move up in this world, covering college football, and then be a beat writer assigned to a pro team — football, maybe, but certainly baseball. I came from a family where the latter was everything, with a father who played in the minors and would have gone up to the show if not for … well, a lot of different reasons were given, at one time or another.
One of my uncles was also a minor league ballplayer, and my maternal grandfather’s older brother was Fred McMullin, one of the Black Sox.
The lore, the legends, the time spent watching my dad coach, the times when we’d go to Oakland for dinner with dad’s old pal, Frank Robinson … it just all added up to me feeling that I could, and wanted to, be sportswriter.
Turned out neither was true. At some point I realized that I was not interested in/not capable of dealing with the constant harassment — including but by no means limited to sexual — that job required of a woman at the time. And besides, I’d found my own interests, which were varied and more compelling to me in the bigger scheme of life.
But that wasn’t known to me then, back when I was struggling to deal with being a young writer as well as being a young woman in a man’s field. Did I tell anyone at the newspaper? Nope. Because whatever I told them wouldn’t be believed or would be mocked. And because some in the newsroom were among the harassers.
I knew at the time that my budding career would have ended. I could see that for myself. It was a time when prominent women sportswriters put up with harassment — a gift box with a live rat inside from a player, slashed tires and apartments broken into by sports “fans” who smeared feces on the walls. I saw when these women had had enough, who feared for their lives, and moved to the other side of the world to start over. I would catch a desk assignment now and then, at the time when the woman who got the rat was in the news. The caller would hear a woman’s voice, assuming that only one woman was working in the paper’s sports department, and immediate the vitriol would start: “You ugly cunt.” “You should be raped.” “I am waiting for you in the parking lot, bitch.” “I know where you live.”
My experience was nothing compared to theirs. But mine was enough. I took the first non-sports journalism I could, and my life moved on.
Or rather, mostly it did. Decades later, I still fault myself for not fighting back. I would now, but at 19, when I was hired as a sports stringer? No way.
My shame remains. I should have been stronger, for me and for the women who would enter the field after I did. I still feel anger, too. There were a couple of men that I now think I should have shivved to get their foul breath out of my face, their groping hands off my body.
But of course, that would have landed me in jail, just another lying, crazy bitch. The fact that I was by no means “attractive” would have been cited as “proof” that I was lying. Who’d want to fuck me? Of course, If I had been attractive, it would have been my fault, for bringing it on myself for looking so hot.
There’s no winning for us. Just look at the comments on any such story. I didn’t leave until I could do so without career disruption, and I told absolutely no one, for decades. This may be the first time I’ve ever suggested how bad it was at the time.
And how bad it still it. Swalwell, Chavez recently, all the others before, and of course, Trump, then and now. I never dealt with anything as horrific as what their victims went through, but what I did experience was still hard enough on me that I have shoved it down, down, down until I something like this comes out and I just can’t keep it down anymore.
This will never stop as long as “good” men tolerate it. Yuk it up with each other, or just say nothing. Probably not even then, but it should sure be a start if they spoke up and just said, “Not cool, dude.”
Too few do, even now.
I #believewomen. Did then, still do.
So should you.
We are not going back where you want us to be. Not now, not ever. Silence does not keep, and you will be shivved, metaphorically if not literally. If you feel “picked on,” well, here’s your “not at men,” but honestly if as a man you do not speak up in those spaces where men say things in the company of other men, and other men say nothing, you are complicit.
I don’t forget, and I am not alone.