Devolution is real

We're pinheads now
We are not whole
We're pinheads all

~~ "Jocko Homo" by Devo

I can think of no better music for today than Devo. 

I honestly don't know how to write about today's Senate Judicial Committee hearing. I watched the entire 8+ hours with disgust, fascination, and despair. 

I feel sick. I feel heartsick. I feel sadness and disgust. 

And I am so fucking angry that I'm not sure how to process it. I thought writing it down might help, but I don't know. (Listening to some Devo is helping more than I had hoped! It seems that devolution is the order of the day.)

My thoughts on Dr. Ford's testimony are that she was credible, sympathetic, and likable. This entire process was new to her and she didn't have much of an idea of how to handle this or how to contact her representatives. I cried with her today (and I'll get into that a little more in a moment). 

My thoughts on Judge Kavanaugh's testimony is that he was overly emotional, combative, and kind of a jerk. I'm not the only one of my friends to wonder if he is an alcoholic and even if he was drunk during his testimony. It was beyond weird. 

I also realize that I am seeing things along partisan lines. I went into this prepared to believe Dr. Ford and already thinking that Kavanaugh had issues. My mind was not changed. 

Here's the thing: one accuser can be denied and brushed off. Two can maybe be the same. But when you get to three or more accusers of the same type of assault, you've got a real problem. And Brett Kavanaugh obviously has a real problem, on multiple levels. Any rational person would wonder why Senator Grassley refuses to call other corroborating or exculpatory witnesses and why he and other Republicans are so reluctant to support an FBI investigation. In fact, when Senator Durbin asked Kavanaugh if he would support an FBI inquiry, he was so flummoxed by the question that he sat in silence. Great job!

Here's another thing: the majority of women (and certainly some men) have been subjected to similar assault and harassment. Dr. Ford's testimony was emotional for many of us for just that reason. Like pretty much every woman, I've experienced my own moments that have stuck with me over the years. I won't mention every single one here because I don't feel like revisiting it all, but Dr. Ford's experience made me remember one incident in particular. 

It was my freshman year in college and I was just starting to break out of my "shy shell" of high school. I was 17. It was a whole new world for me in which guys found me attractive. For a shy bookworm, it was a heady feeling! I was at a party off-campus and there was plenty of booze. It wasn't uncommon to have what we called Hairy Buffalo at parties—a drink that was made in a big cooler, with fruit punch and maybe some fruit slices, and tons of alcohol, usually some Everclear. That is grain alcohol, which is 95% alcohol. It tasted like Kool-Aid, but it would mess you up. 

I don't remember if that's what I drank at that party, or if I just drank beer. Most college parties had a keg, too. I also don't remember if I met the guy in a class or somewhere else and he invited me to the party, or if someone invited me there and that's where I met the guy. I don't remember where the party was, only that it in a house off-campus. 

What I do remember is that I got drunk, and was talking to this guy. We went into a bedroom, but I don't remember if it was his or someone else's. I remember that there were bunk beds just to the left of the door as you walked into the bedroom, and we were on the bottom bunk. I remember that we made out and at some point, he was on top of me and getting more aggressive than I was comfortable with. I told him to stop and he didn't. He had his full weight on me and I couldn't move or get out from under him. I started getting scared and got more forceful about trying to get him off of me and tell him to stop. 

I don't remember what I did or said that finally made him stop enough so that I could get up and get out of that room. I don't remember how I got home, but I probably walked back to my dorm. A couple of days after the party, he came by my dorm room and when I looked through the peephole and saw it was him at the door, I hid in the closet and my roommates told him I wasn't there. He came back more than once and my roommates always covered for me and told him I wasn't there. My roommates were the only ones who knew about it. It never even occurred to me to report it to campus police or anyone else. Hey, he didn't rape me, right? 

I don't remember a lot of things about that incident, but I remember the situation. I remember that he was fairly tall, maybe 6', and he had curly blond hair. I also remember his full name. And thanks to the blessing/curse of social media, after I thought about all of this, I found out that he is on social media and he lives in my area, maybe 15 miles from me. It looks like he has a nice family and a nice life. 

I have a nice family and a nice life, too. But I still remember how scared I felt when he was on top of me on the bottom bunk of that bunk bed in a bedroom in a house off-campus at Ball State University. I bet he has no idea who I am and has no memory of me, the 5' tall, 100-pound freshman. 

But I remember him. Almost 40 years later, I remember him. 

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Never ever touch that kitten, no, no, no

Now roll up your tongue

And put it back in your head

Wipe that silly grin off your face

It's gonna be more than

Just your fingers get red

Boy, I'm putting you in your place

~~ “Don’t Touch The Kitten” by Kitten and the Hip

There is so much to write about today that I had a hard time picking one thing. I’m really fascinated by the crazyass spy shit going down with Michael Flynn and other players but maybe I’ll write about that later this weekend.

What really weighed on my mind today, though, was everything coming out about sexual harassment and assault allegations against numerous men. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard all about them, so I won’t list them all here. I’d like to get to bed at some point tonight.

My feelings have run the gamut from disgust to rage to sorrow. It has also caused me to have some unpleasant flashbacks to my own experiences. Nothing that I experienced was as bad as what many others have experienced, but it left a mark on me nonetheless. So much so that I remember them quite well decades later. I think I’ve written about them before, but I’m going to write about them again, because there is a theme here, both with my experiences and that of others.

In my first job, in addition to working as a technologist in the lab, I had to go up to the floors and do phlebotomy. I was in the Cardiac Care Unit one evening shift to do a blood draw on a patient. The patient was a difficult stick and I didn’t get it on the first try. The cardiologist happened to be in there with the patient, and he put his hands around my waist—he really grabbed me and squeezed me a little—and moved me out of the way. He said to the (male) patient, “I bet it doesn’t hurt as much when they’re as pretty as this one, does it?” When I went back down to the lab, I was shaking. My coworkers asked me what was wrong and I told them about it. I eventually talked to the lab supervisor and apparently there had been other complaints from nurses who said that he behaved inappropriately with them. This same doctor would call the lab and yell at whoever answered the phone and on one occasion, called one of my coworkers a cunt. As far as I know, no disciplinary action was ever taken against him.

My ex-husband and I were out boating with his brother and his wife. I was heading back with my sister-in-law and my ex and his brother were joining us later. My ex leaned in the passenger window to give me a kiss and he grabbed my breast and squeezed it, right there in front of my sister-in-law. I told him later to never do that again because it was disrespectful, and he never did.

In my second job when I was working evenings, I was informed by one of my friends, a guy on the same shift, that another guy was going around telling people in graphic detail exactly what he wanted to do to me. I confronted the guy and told him to stop it, and if he didn’t, I’d go to HR. He denied it and I said deny it all you want, but cut it out or I’m going to HR and I’m going to file a harassment suit. I never heard about any other incidents where he was talking about me to the other guys on evening shift.

There have been various and sundry incidents over the years (getting groped in a club, for instance), but those three are the main ones that have stuck with me. As I’ve thought about it over the years, I realized that the common denominator was what I mentioned in the second incident: disrespect.

In two of the three incidents I was working as a professional, and their actions reduced me to nothing more than a bag of meat. I wasn’t a woman with a science degree. I wasn’t working to help patients. I was just a walking cock holster. What a diminishment of my abilities and of ME, Beth, someone who learned and went through a lot of training to do the job I did. As I look back, I am stunned at just how disrespectful and demeaning it was.

In one way, I was fortunate in having the profession I did, which was a female-dominated one. I had a couple of creepy male bosses over the years, but none that ever made any moves on me or made me feel threatened or made me feel like my job was threatened. Not every woman is that fortunate.

The other incident involved my own husband, which is appalling in its own right. He felt that it was okay to grope me in front of others, like I was a possession rather than a partner.

Aside from disrespect and diminishment, there’s another D (and no, it’s not DICK, although that obviously plays a part). Dominance. Such harassment is an obvious attempt to exert dominance, but it also happens in subtler ways. Interruptions, overtalking, condescending remarks. We’ve all experienced that to a certain degree. Sexual harassment is a more overt form of attempting to dominate.

So as I’ve been thinking about this stuff for the past few weeks, I’ve watched more and more women tell their stories. Talk about power in numbers! Just knowing that we aren’t alone in these experiences is empowering. I had a male friend on Facebook ask me this morning what I thought was going to happen going forward...that it seems that women are being believed now whereas in the past they weren’t believed or were demonized for coming forward.

I said that this feels like a tipping point to me. (I’m not the first to use that phrase about this subject. I’ve seen it used several times. It’s a good description, so I’m using it, too.) People like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Louis C.K. are experiencing major fallout from the accusations. I’m not sure their careers can be recovered or rehabilitated. My hope is that as we move forward, men will start to think about their actions and how it might impact their careers and think twice before acting on their impulses. It would be nice if they would think about how it’s just FUCKING CREEPY BEHAVIOR, but I guess we’ll take what we can get. That won’t happen overnight, but I think we have indeed reached that point on the teeter-totter where we are seeing inexorable movement.

I think it also means that women just aren’t going to take this crap anymore. I expect more women to speak up and speak out. I think that will happen in the workplace, too. When I look back on my incidents, it didn’t even occur to me to not speak up. I felt that the behavior was inappropriate, creepy, and unfair. It seems that even in my 20s and 30s, I had a low tolerance for bullshit! But not every woman has felt able to speak up, especially in male-dominated careers. I think we have seen a complete change in that in the matter of about a month, which is absolutely astonishing. We’ll see if it starts happening in the political world, too.

Speaking of that, I’ll mention one related thing. Back in January, a Republican legislator in Virginia made a sexist remark on social media about the women’s march. Something to the effect of “I hope they get done in time to get home and make dinner.” A Virginia woman saw that and it pissed her off. She decided to run for that guy’s seat in the legislature and damned if that nasty woman didn’t beat his misogynist ass! I raise my glass to her!

As I told Ken tonight, to use that line from “Network,” “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” A lot of us are feeling that way. And a lot of good men are stepping up and saying to the harassers, “No. This is wrong and it stops now.” Together we can change things. I believe that.

I’m not even going to get into Roy Moore tonight, because that walking slimetrail needs his own entry.

But I do feel like there has been a seismic shift in things. Don’t you? This snowball is only going to get bigger.