There’s something of a generational split on #metoo. I doubt my mother is the only Boomer who doesn’t think casual sexism is a problem, but rather something women just have to put up with. She also thinks some of the outed predators are being unfairly persecuted. I had to get a little mean with her because it’s the constant, pervasive harassment that breeds an atmosphere where sexual assault and worse crimes are minimized resulting in the perpetrators almost never facing consequences. We’re at a watershed moment in history where men have been put on notice that there will be consequences, and their unearned privilege is running out.
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OMG that was a brilliant piece of journalism.
The one thing she didn’t mention that I would have is the rolls look very nice, but they’re really not. Almost like they’re a metaphor for something.
ETA: I’m glad she commented about how the dough isn’t suitable for this kind of baking, because I’ve been wondering about that since they made the news.
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My Mom was born in 1940, so technically pre-boom, but she still got lumped in with them all her life. (We lost her in '97) She always said she missed the sexual revolution because she was a housewife with a baby in 1960. That all said…
She would have LOVED this moment. She helped organize Toronto’s first feminist conference. And she called out sexism and harassment as much as she was able to as a single working mom. She laid a lot of groundwork for me and didn’t laugh at me when I was a teenage idiot “cool girl”. #notallboomers? 
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Here’s what I think is the real reason: I would say that, on average, women of her generation endured MORE sexual harassment, abuse, and assault than the current youngest adult generation. Back then, it was 100% normal, so they had to sublimate their feelings. They had to pretend it was OK. Showing support for #MeToo means finally facing a lot of pain and ugliness in their own past. It’s a lot easier to just keep doing what they’ve been doing for decades: pretend it isn’t a big deal.
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My mum has to be, ah, reminded about the context, that most if not all of the women lodging complaints were not free to just walk away and ignore the perp without consequences. After a reminder or two she agrees.
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My mom raised me on Ms. Magazine, and she was an award winning career teacher, but she always felt hampered by the limited career choices of her generation. She has her Masters degree and has always advocated for education.
Yet yet, it has taken me so long to see how damaging the 50’s mindset was. How she really bought into the good girls don’t thing, the walk down the aisle a virgin thing.
Because her social life was so restricted growing up, due to the terror of pregnancy and all the social structures around that, when she started dating after divorcing my dad, it was like watching teenager make all the wrong mistakes. (She married my dad right out of college - in some versions of her history she says this is because by that time she was considered in her day and age to be getting long in the tooth.)
From what I can tell, my mom never had a #metoo experience growing up (except some story about a strange guy trying to grope her in a movie theater) because she was never ever allowed to be alone with any man.
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Oy vey! That joke.
Here is my mother’s revealing story about going to college in the 50’s.
She went to Newcomb, the women’s college at Tulane University. Now, I also attended Newcomb but by the time I got there the classes of the men’s college and the women’s college were all mixed together and the only difference was the piece of paper you got at the end of the experience. But in Mom’s day, the women’s college was separate and restricted to a few specific buildings.
The main reason Mom attended Tulane, AKA “Jewlane”, is that it has about 40% Jewish population. Back then, the reason a Jewish woman attended a college with a medical school was to land herself a good doctor husband and earn her Mrs.
She told me that on Friday nights, you could tell which lucky girl had a date that night, because the girls with dates would come to class with their hair rolled up around juice cans.
So yeah, college was different then, and dating was different for sure.
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A lot of jokes of the period are far too offensive to be told now because they depend on racism, sexism, homophobia - and their stereotyping is completely wrong. That one is offensive but I keep it as an example because there is too much truth in it.*
One of my supervisors, I may have mentioned, spent a year at the U of Texas. He was horrified near the end of the year when a woman student walked into his room and directly offered sex in exchange for a higher grade. He mentioned it to a colleague who said “Oh, plenty of guys do it. After all, the university likes to see good grades.”
Now that’s what I call Jewish self-deprecation!
*I’ve deleted the post, though, on second thoughts. My judgement isn’t good today.
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Yeah that’s why I went to Tulane, because Grandpa paid for it and the money came with strings, which was to go some place there were lots of Jewish kids.
The more I learn about my mom’s teen years, the more revolutionary the feminism of the 70’s becomes, with all its limitations.
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Expectations were so different. My mum had to fight with her parents to be allowed to complete her high school diploma – their expectation was that she quit at 16 and get a job (for context, my grandmother had been forced to quit and work at 14; my grandfather finished high school and went to trade school). My aunt was allowed to finish high school and go to university because she’d been a sickly child and wasn’t expected to marry because of ongoing health issues. She went part-time and at night so she could work her way through.
Everyone lived at home until they married. My dad was a friend of the family long before he started dating my mum – the only boyfriend for whom this was true and the only one my grandparents ever liked.
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I’ve told the story – I think at the Other Place – of when I went through the training to work with rape victims (legally in Illinois, rape victims have certain rights, including a trained advocate who helps them through the medical, police, and legal processes) and was almost through the entire 6-month program when something triggered a woman in her mid-60s (at the time, this was mid-1980’s) and it all came flooding back to her: how she’d been molested on a public bus as a girl. No penetration, if I recall correctly, but for a naive girl just having some stranger’s hands on her while openly masturbating was so frightening and shocking that she had blocked the memory for around 50 years.
Especially when you remember that most women are harassed/abused/assaulted by men they KNOW, the fact that women didn’t used to be as integrated into male society as they are now does not mean there were fewer chances that something bad would happen. They were just less likely to recognize the red flags, know how to defend themselves, and/or had no way to process what had happened to them without running the risk of whomever they confided in making matters worse by blaming them for what happened.
There are an awful lot of women (and some men too, of course) who have invested a lot of time and effort in distancing themselves from the terrible things that happened to them.
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My Baptist grandfather went to Tulane medical school. But he was philo-semitic. Man, did he hate Catholics though.
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Amazing. For contrast, my mom went to William & Mary for a BA, then got an MA at the Fletcher School, where she met my dad. She’d hoped to be a diplomat! But they were both born right after WWI, and so naturally, when they got married, and my mom had my sister in the middle of WWII, she followed the housewife model for the next 25 years or so. She took some library sciences classes later in life and got a job at the National Geographic.
I never heard any stories about harassment or abuse; we were all too uptight to talk about any of that kind of stuff. S_x education? Fortunately we had that at school.
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My Mom got accepted to the Ontario College of Arts on a full scholarship. They almost didn’t let her go. “What do you need more school for?” That was 1958. She had to quit school after two years because she couldn’t afford to go anymore and they refused to help.
Both her parents had started working at 11 years old. Because they didn’t pass their eleven plus exams. Cockney proud!
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Because I work in male-dominated Hollywood, I usually have had male bosses, though there have certainly been female producers and executives around for my entire career. Pretty Little Liars was the first show on which I worked for exclusively female bosses (my direct supervisor, plus the showrunner, the line producer, and fully half the writers and directors, along with all the network execs). And I tellya, rather than working the crews harder, those were the most collaborative, supportive, efficient, friendly, and no-bullshit bosses I’ve ever had. The absence of dick-measuring was notable on every level. So much time was rescued from being wasted with male-ego-driven competition and domination and harassment… It was rather a working paradise.
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Nice!
I feel like maybe because I work in an office environment in academia I have a skewed view of things…
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I know the mindset you describe. I think that was one of the problems that many people had with Hillary Clinton. She had always, her whole adult life, had to compete with very ambitious men in order to be taken remotely seriously. Along the way, she had to adopt some mannerisms and mindsets (all the way down to guzzling beers with voters on the campaign trail) to make herself seem just as tough and tenacious and reliable as any man, which may have led to a tougher managerial style (I don’t know, since I know nobody who ever worked for her), but certainly led to many of her detractors dismissing her as a ballbusting bitch. And yet, there was, as far as I’m aware, no supportive environment like the Pretty Little Liars production office for her, in which she could simply be smart and competent and brilliant and respected without donning some of the… I dunno, “ambitious” and “competitive” and “rough-n-ready” armor typically worn by ambitious male politicians since the dawn of time. It would be wonderful if women didn’t feel they needed to act like tough take-no-prisoners men in order to be taken remotely seriously. That PLL experience seemed utopian to me in comparison, and benefited everyone of any gender who worked there.
All that said, I recognize that I really have no business assuming why Ms Clinton is the way she is. Maybe she portrays exactly the persona she’s always assumed herself to be. I hope so. But it just seems to me that she’s always felt she needed to be (or seem) something other than what she sees in the mirror in her bathrobe at 5 am.
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I really really dislike the
anyone, especially incompetent ones overcompensating for lack of talent.
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The best thing this week has been an army general telling a BBC presenter, “We pay men and women the same.”
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