Post Punk Kitchen Forum

High-five

Ugh, T'lish, how awful! I'm sorry that happened to you and I hope something happened to that employee!

I contact the sexual harassment office at my university and they said they can help me file a complaint and figure out who to direct it to. Progress!

Good for you! Yay progress! I'm so glad you're able to file a complaint!

Well, the company told me they let the guy go, and they apologized to me, so I was pretty happy with the outcome. I was just happy to be able to do something. It just feels really violating when someone harasses you. Ugh indeed.

This is awesome! I'm glad you decided to pursue a complaint and that your university is being helpful.

When I was 15 I was sexually harassed by another student at my high school who constantly went out of his way to make rude gestures at me. I went to the principal on at least two occasions, one of those I remember my mom being with me. The principal kept saying he'd "talk to" to boy, but the harassment continued until the end of the school year when he went to another school. I later suspected (based on experiences of friends who'd been 'expelled' from that school) that, being a Catholic school, they just kept him on to the end of the school year so they wouldn't have to deal with tuition refunds. Seriously.

In that light, I'm really happy to hear couroupita's and tofulish's recent experiences and how when they stood up for themselves, they were actually taken seriously. It shouldn't be so exciting and unusual to hear that, and yet...

That is horrible Erika. There are so many stories about girls being harassed in schools, with the school officials not doing anything about it besides victim blaming, and it really worries me. A school should really be a safe space for girls to learn without feeling like they have to use their energy to keep deflecting attacks. And it just feels like it is getting worse with cyber-bullying etc, and I selfishly worry about having to guide my daughter through that unscarred.
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/h ... -in-school

Boys at my school would often grope girls' butts. They mostly got away with it because the girls were too embarassed or it would be waved away with 'boys will be boys' type nonsense.

In high school a "friend" once grabbed my tits as my brother and I were having a conversation. My brother incredulously said "did he just grab your TITS?!?" and I shrugged it off cause, well, it wasn't that foreign of an experience.

The same friend later groped my asparagus/vulva (you know, that solid palmful where they meet?) as I was getting on a bus on a choir trip. I felt uncomfortable about it, but it didn't really occur to me that I had a right to a) tell him off and/or b) report him to a teacher.

I wish I could go back to teen-dub and have a long talk about consent and feminism.

Yesterday, when walking home from work, I passed a group of (probably tipsy) guys trying to jump up and touch a sign above the sidewalk. As I walked by, one asked me, "You think you can jump up and touch that?" As per my usual, I just ignored them.
Now, as most of you know, this usually elicits the ubiquitous, "She's such a bisque!"
Instead I got, "She's...so hot!" (audible sigh)

I was floored I wasn't called a bisque, but also a little weirded out that this guy decided commenting on my attractiveness within earshot instead.

My step-sister is pregnant and today she found out she's having a girl. I'm very happy that she is so excited, but there has already been comments about pink, about having a "ballerina" and her husband's joking about being a "grumpy dad who chases away boys" and baby becoming an "instant wife" of their friend's baby boy.

Sigh. I'm just so damn tired of this played out shiitake. Can't you just gestate a fetus without putting gender stereotypes on your unborn kid?! Feminism = challenged.

A dear friend of mine is trying to get pregnant. She is a feminist as is her husband. However sitting and hearing their other friends talk makes me so sad.
One couple was frighteningly serious about how badly they want my friends to have a boy to keep their girl away from other boys. What?

What!

My best friend just had a little girl, and she is already their "princess." Groan. I comfort myself with the knowledge that most little girls seem to go through a pretty pink princess phase at some point but grow out of it eventually.

Objectifying the bodies of girls started early at my school. In public school (grade 6), the boys went around telling girls to see if they could touch their shoulder blades together, to which the girl innocently would try. When she did that, the boys would start laughing because she had pushed her chest out, and exclaim, "Nice tits!" and run away.

I dropped in on the newly-started pro-choice club on my campus today. The leaders don't want to identify as a feminist club or do anything for women's history month because men will think it's a "she-woman man-hater club" (the fork?) and not want to join. One of them made very questionable remarks about people "wanting to be gay or transgender" and how she wouldn't have expected the woman she met to be a prostitute.

Sometimes I just want to crawl in bed and fall asleep so I don't have to think about stupid shiitake like this anymore.

Someone posted this on my facebook page:



My feminism is hardly challenged by this (my feminism generally doesn't care what people say on facebook), but there pretty much isn't enough facepalm in the world.

yeah, my feminism thinks that's a douche post. I always wonder what people mean by respecting ourselves in these instances.

Also, the not wanting the pro choice club to be confused with a feminist group.... Way to totally isolate an issue from its context.

I think i got turned down for a job because I'm a woman. The assistant manager told me that the owner was dragging his feet because he did not want to tell his wife that he had hired a woman.

Ew.

The glass escalator challenges my feminism.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/02/ ... ore-money/

The comments on that article are challenging my feminism.

Oh men. My company has a ton of female executives yet I still feel women are largely underpaid there compared to men. And in the nursing field, I don't know maybe because they are rarer they are recruited more heavily? It would seem that you should get paid similar for similar work.

As upset as I was by my review this year, a female friend who works in a large group with almost all men (like 2-3 woman per 20-25 men) told me her review was horrible, she was told she was lacking technical knowledge. She is someone I go to frequently to help figure things out. I think she is more knowledgeable than most of the guys in her group but I do think she was told that because she is a woman and they would've never told a man with her knowledge and experience that. And the group she works in is one I applied for and didn't get the job a couple years ago. Honestly, I think if I were a man, I would've gotten the job.

The comments are really awful in terms of their tone and overt sexism, but some of them actually pick up on some problems with the article (or maybe the study... I can't tell). The article states:



So the degrees, different shifts, and place of employment (hospital vs. doctor's office or school) probably contributes to the wage gap, and the article (and/or study) should have made this more clear and also made some clear apples-to-apples comparisons.

What I hate about the comments is that most people stop there instead of interrogating *why* men are more likely to have doctoral degrees or work evening in night shifts. What do these asymmetries say about what we expect from men and women and how we as a society reward or punish their actions? Are women still expected to be primary caregivers for children? Are men still expected to be the primary breadwinners and work themselves to the bone so their spouses can stay home and raise kids? The issue here isn't (necessarily) personal sexism on the part of administrators, but the structural limitations on and expectations for men and women that lead to position and wage gaps. One of the more thoughtful comments points out that "women tend to value certain non-monetary factors when choosing their careers" but doesn't ask *why* women in the US at this moment are more likely to value these things, and that's a really important question to ask.

But basically, all the commenters are trapped in the assumption that sexism is something individuals feel and not something societies do. Ugh.

ETA: Oh god, I posted a comment. I better *not* go back to check on it, because I've been in way too many internet wars this week as it is....

Unless they have hard facts, the more likely to have doctoral degrees and work late night shifts thing seems anectdotal to me. And there is no proof that a nurse with a doctoral degree would make more money because I believe that currently it is rare to have practicing nurses with doctoral degrees. I think they would either be teaching or doing research, 2 areas which tend to be paid not very well. But on the chart that would really only apply for the NPs I believe.

I followed the links to get the original data, and it does track education level and work hours.

If you go here and click on the "Selected Characteristics of Nurses..." excel link, you can get some of the raw data.

But the fact that they *didn't* find a way to separate out this info and do an apples-to-apples comparison doesn't mean that there isn't personal sexism going on in nursing administration... just that it's hard to spot definitively in this particular study. I think the structural sexism is clear, though.

The music scene in the UK challenges my feminism.

I was chatting with a female punk musician last night and we agreed that being a female in music can often be a double-edged sword, in that people can tend to overlook you for being female or like you for the wrong reasons (ie that you have breasts, rather than the fact that you're a competent musician). I haven't experienced "you're alright.... for a girl" personally. Yet.