Trump....I guess

The events of the last week or so have been very upsetting, as almost any woman can tell you. Some men would say that, too. Donald Trump has been openly exposed as a....what? Slimeball? Sleaze bag? Is there a more dignified term? I guess I'm looking for predator. More and more women are coming forward to add their stories to the voices of other women....on and on, a tsunami of women. The tsunami of women continues. It's not just women who were targeted by Trump, it's women who were sexually harassed, assaulted, abused, raped...on and on and on. It's a tsunami of women who have had their own bodies, their own sexuality, their own selves, their very self-worth, turned against them. On and on and on. It's depressing how common it was and is....but not, I'm afraid, shocking or surprising. We all have our stories. And the thing is, we don't just all have one story, we all have multiple stories. We have enough stories to fill Mitt Romney's binders full of women. He could have binders full of women's stories of assault, rape, harassment. How many stories would you like from me? Would you like the man who leered out of a car as I, maybe all of 12, walked down a street in Port Jervis, New York, and said, lasciviously, "Nice girl"? Will he do? Or let's go further back and you can have the truck driver at a rest stop when I was four or five, and away from my (vigilant) parents for a moment or two, and asked for a kiss? Or the ones you barely count or register, all the "you'd look so much better if you smiled, honey" men, all the catcalls, good or bad when passing construction sites. The African student when I studied in Germany who helped me carry my grocery bags home and then followed me into my room and kept putting his hand on my leg. I kept taking it off. I got rid of him by invoking my boyfriend. The subway humpers. The vice president who never, ever looked me in the eye. The men, who, when I was a secretary, would give me something to type and say, "Can you do this for me, sweetheart?" I am happy to report that I took the wind out of their sails by responding, "Certainly, darling, I'd be happy to," but fuck it all, why did I have to think that up in the first place? Why did I have to have a form of defense at the ready? How come? Huh? Or my boss, in a four-person office, who came on to me and came on to me and came on to me, and whom I resisted and resisted and resisted, even when he sneaked up on me when we were alone in the office and I was sending a telex (for those of you who don't know, a telex was a kind of teletype machine. It was loud and actually took a decent amount of strength to hit the keys and required concentration to get right, because it wasn't like a regular typewriter) and put his arms around me. I screamed, a real movie scream, but that didn't put him off. And finally...he wore me down. I acquiesced. Did I have a choice? Oh, why yes. I could have kept resisting. I could have looked for another job, but I was fairly specialized, I hadn't been there that long and I would have gotten funny looks from the woman at the employment agency....so I gave in. But, since I was over 21 and I said yes, I suppose it was consensual. Yeah, right. It was consensual. And there are parts of this story I'm not ready to write, even here, hiding behind my blog, but suffice it to say that the older woman, who was the other woman in the office, took to hissing at me when we were alone, "I know what you're doing. And if you acted like a lady, he would never have suggested it." So then there were two....him after me one way, her after me another. I started looking for another job when I started seriously considering drinking before I went to work in the morning, just a shot, just to take the edge off, so I could stand to work there one more day. I did quit the job, and he was angry at me for resigning...and last week, when all of this started surfacing, all the darkness tossed onto the shore by the tsunami, I googled him and I found out that he died four years ago. And I sat there, all grown up, married, children, grandchildren, a full and lovely life after I walked out of there the last time, and thought, he's dead. He's DEAD. He can't do anything anymore, not to me, not to anyone else. He's dead. The husband of a friend who told me he'd like to get his head between my legs. Who tried to hold hands with me when I was sitting between him and my husband on a couch. And when I told my husband this, he said, "Oh, you must have misunderstood what he was getting at." Again...yeah, right. So tell me again why women don't come forward? Tell me again why women keep all this bottled up inside of them for years, self-medicating with alcohol and food and drugs and shopping and even exercise and healthy eating. Tell me why no one, when something happens, goes to the authorities, speaks up, speaks out, makes a change. Why they don't quit those jobs that gradually become untenable. Why they keep resisting, or why they give in. Why we can't trust, why we're always guarded, why we have trouble forming good relationships with men, why we keep looking for the hidden depth charges. Or why we marry terrible men, even when we know they're terrible and why we stay. I am a very optimistic person. I try to see the happy outcome in all things. So I am hoping here that this will drag this topic out of the dark places its been hiding in, out of the corners and cellars and alleys offices late at night. It will drag it out, it will be discussed, and there will be a change. Men will know that we're on to them. Men will know that we are not putting up with this shit anymore. It will be like smoking, something that people will judge you badly for doing. There will be no acceptance, tacit or otherwise. Now, let me say, that after I left that horrible job, I found another in a much larger office. It was the 80's and all manner of things went on. It was the home of the VP who never got above a woman's chest. There was a lot of sexual innuendo and more there, and there were terrible men there too (but it was easier to avoid them because it was a bigger office). But even though it was very open sexually, there was a different tenor there. A lot was said and done, but it was different, so I can fairly say that I do understand the difference between sexual assault, predation, harassment, and normal, natural joking and flirting, because I experienced both. It's a lot like pornography--I can recognize it when I see it. But the bad parts, they cannot be acceptable. And if the good, fun parts have to go away so that the bad parts can go away, then so be it. As usual, a few (a lot of) bad apples ruined it for everyone. I will not vote for Trump and I do not thing Hillary is the devil incarnate, as her opponent has gone for far as to suggest. But maybe this will make a change in the public dialogue and in, to quote Alice Munro, the lives of girls and women.