Me too, how about you?

There is a "me too" thing going around Facebook right now. The idea is that if you are a woman who has been harassed, accosted, stalked, or attacked by a man, you should post "Me too." Out of this, hopefully there will be a new awareness of how many women confront this and have experienced it.

I thought about it, and I did not post my own "me too," even though yeah, of course, me too. Every woman I know has been threatened or harassed in some way. Or worse. I'm not being complacent, or accepting. It's awful.

I just didn't want to be a statistic. And I worried that everyone had already gone numb on seeing "me too" by the time I thought I should come clean and admit that I have been through it as well. Plus, I saw that various discussions had started, and worrisome issues were emerging that sometimes happen when members of a tribe all feel really righteous or painful feelings about the same thing. People were talking about definitions of harassment, for example. Are a cat call, a touch, and a spank all harassment? Some think so, others not.

Instead of adding the millionth "me too," I thought I would just go ahead and tell some of the stories. Without the stories, I feel in my gut that it's so easily reduced to numbers.

So, this one time when I was living in my dorm at my tiny college in Oregon, a high school friend came to visit. He was one of the most upstanding, squeaky clean human beings I had ever met. He was funny and nice and clever and good looking. During senior year in high school we were in student leadership together, and we had a hilarious flirty thing going on, and of course it meant nothing at all. It was all in good fun. But he remembered that flirting the next fall after we had gone off to our separate futures, and when he came to my dorm room where I was unfortunately completely alone, our fun flirty thing turned into him trying to take advantage of me. He was much bigger, stronger, and more willful. He had things in mind. I did not have those same things in mind, and I told him so. I might as well have said, "I'd like to read long passages to you from War and Peace," because what I said bored him and he tuned me out. He wasn't interested in what I thought or felt. He was very focused. Finally, and I am not necessarily proud of this, and am also not recommending it, but I just stopped resisting and went cold fish dead on him. That's when he gave up, apologized and went home.

A few years later, on a college trip to Greece, my friend Mary Jo and I were walking down a dark street one night on the island of Rhodes. We had both been harassed a lot on our travels there, but it was much worse for her because she was blonde. The Greek men were wild for blonde women and just assumed they were loose and easy. So whenever I was with Mary Jo, I would experience what she did and it was unbelievable. She could not walk down the street in peace. We felt safe that night walking down a street in Rhodes, because there were two of us. We were pretty sure we could protect each other. As we walked from a taverna in town to our hotel on that dark and lonely street, these two guys started walking along behind us. We had about a mile to walk to the hotel. We picked up the pace. They did too. They began trying to make conversation. "Where do you sleep?" they asked. "What are your names?" I intended not to answer but Mary Jo turned and shouted at them to leave us alone. Then we walked on. They didn't stop. They walked on too. The chattering continued. "You are so beautiful. What are your names? Where do you sleep?" Mary Jo turned and shouted at them, again, to back off and leave us alone. I said nothing and we walked on. They had been walking several yards back, but suddenly they were closing the gap, and finally I felt not just annoyed but scared. We still had a half a mile to go and there wasn't another soul in sight. If they decided to catch up to us, we were in danger. If we yelled, no one would hear. Finally, I turned and socked one of them upside the head with all my strength and a big dose of adrenaline. And they stopped. We ran the rest of the way to our hotel, never looking back.

Some years later I was living in Washington, D.C., young and right out of college and completely unworldly. I used to bike all over the city to get exercise and explore. I was sharing an apartment with what seemed like 20 people, even though I'm pretty sure it was only four. But there was no peace in my apartment, so I went biking. This one day a couple of guys passed me in a truck and cat-called to me out the window, "Hey baby!" Really? You pass a sweaty person on a bike and you shout "Hey baby"? I won't mention what I called back, but I was really offended. And really pissed. Okay, I will say it because you kind of need to know what it was, for effect. I said, "f you, I'm not your baby!" Which, naturally, made them decide I needed some form of very harsh punishment. I had been on a trajectory in the same direction as they were headed, and as I came up alongside them, the driver shouted "Hit her!" and the passenger swung his door open in an attempt to slam it into me. Well, you'll be happy to know that I was extremely agile on my bike. Plus I knew the roads, having biked all over that area. So I veered away, and then went down a side street. They followed. And of course a truck is much faster than a bike, so I couldn't get far ahead of them, but the advantage I had was that we were surrounded by a maze of one way streets, and after a few turns heading the wrong way on this road and then that, I lost them.

I'll never forget a work incident that happened several years later after I started my first high tech job at the now extinct Sun Microsystems in California. Actually, it wasn't an "incident" at all because it happened over and over and over again. There was this one systems engineer I had to talk to all the time. I was working on a book, and he was one of my content sources. "Tom" (very possibly his real name) would forcefully flirt with me. No matter how many times I told him I had no interest, he would grab ahold of me and pull me onto his lap if no one was looking. I would try to get up, and of course I was very polite about it (this was 80s, and there wasn't the awareness of harassment that we have now), but it seemed like he had ten pairs of hands to prevent my escape. Plus he worked out and was physically built, and I was like a little stuffed animal. I remember years later thinking that I should have done something, should have protested more, should have talked to someone in HR. But I was afraid he would dislike me after that, and might do something to retaliate.

There are more stories - many more - but I'll only tell one more. Another time, after I had moved to Minnesota, I attended a lunch meeting downtown. When I headed to my car, which was on the far side of a sheltered parking structure, I noticed a man in the parking area. I instantly had that prickly feeling you get on the back of your neck when something is just not right. And it wasn't. For one thing, he was watching me. For another thing, he was very clearly mapping his route across the parking lot based on the direction I was heading. I picked up my pace, walked very rapidly to my car, jumped in and locked the door. And when I turned to look out the window to see where he was, he was standing exactly next to my car window, close enough to deliver a take-out order.

Before my daughter left for college, we took a self-defense course together. One of the first things they taught us was to listen to that prickly feeling, because our subconscious mind can sense things before we are consciously aware of it. Because women are very often accommodating and nurturing, it can go against our sense of self to perceive others as a threat. So we tamp that feeling down.

Another important self-defense tactic is to be aggressive - to shout if we feel threatened, and physically hurt someone - quickly and with force - if they are trying to harm us. It can be a matter of life and death. It was one of the most freeing things I ever heard because all these years I have felt the terrible weight of guilt for socking that guy upside his skull on the island of Rhodes. I did it because that night, on that dark stretch of road with Mary Jo, I suddenly realized what she had been living with and listening to, every single day of our time in the country. My hand landed on that man's ear with such force that I am pretty sure I broke his ear drum. But who knows what might have happened otherwise. We may not have come out alive.

Image credits
Picture one: Pixabay
Picture two: Pexels