Random Old Memes and ✨Stuff✨

You know, when MeToo came out, I thought I'd been lucky because I'd never been harassed.

And then I thought about it, and I remembered:

Walking through the mall and a guy making the "big jugs" gesture at the male friend I was walking with, congratulating my friend on his date (it wasn't a date).

The older guy who tried to pick up noticably-underage me at the town fair, then followed me around, and how I literally had to run into the woods to get away from him.

The kid I went to school with who tried to finger me in the football stands.

The senior manager at a large programming firm who thought it was appropriate (very visibly in his company office) to hang a shadow box with a bunch of little medallions in it. Except when you looked closely at the medallions, you found out that they were actually hooker tags from quite a number of brothels.

The greying mechanic my mom had come over to work on her car while she was at work, who wanted 15-year-old me to kiss him.

The multiple coworkers who deliberately kept making crude sexual jokes, and if you ignore them or join in, they take it as permission to keep going, and if you're uncomfortable or say something they take it as a challenge and escalate, and if you report it you end up getting fired for something else in the next month or so.

Slapping hands away, so many times.

And even in the context of MeToo, I thought I hadn't been harrassed, when in reality I'd just normalized the harassment and ignored it. Because it wasn't that bad, it wasn't 'abuse', it wasn't constant.

But while it may not have been constant, it was persistent. There wasn't a single place that I was ever safe. The carefree town fair, the local shops, school, work, my own home when the mechanic came in to use the bathroom. There's literally no place in my life where intrusive men haven't tried to insert themselves, without invitation, without even asking.

And I look at this meme and it's "every woman knows someone who's been harassed", and I think over my own experience, and that of all my female relatives, and friends, and schoolmates, and coworkers, and I think that meme is wrong.

I think pretty much every woman has been harassed. It's just that, like me, they learned to ignore and then forget these things, because they weren't as bad as the really bad things that have happened to some of the women we know. But - and not discounting the really bad experiences some people I know have had - these experiences were all bad enough.

MeToo.