I've decided to confront my sexual harasser
It's taken me a long time to get here
Beware this letter includes a frank discussion of sexual harassment. As always, please ‘like’ this post by clicking the heart below if you get something out of it. It helps more people find these stories.
It’s Friday after work and I’m sitting across the table from a man who sexually harassed me. I do this almost every week because we’re part of the same group of friends that goes to the bar at the end of the week and I’m unwilling to give up this part of my social life. Most of the time I can keep enough physical and emotional distance to feel fine. This time he’s too close.
He’s not doing anything wrong. Not exactly. But he wants too much. I can feel him tugging at my attention. He talks too much and looks at me too much while he does it. He makes a few too many jokes about genitalia. He’s a little too eager for one-on-one conversation. It all feels a little too much like the time he sat next to me in the back of a van, cutting me off from the rest of the group and propositioning me because his wife wouldn’t care since “she does her own thing anyway.” When I look out the window instead of responding, he is irritated with me, huffing and aw-c’mon-ing and glaring. He asks if he can touch me. I hold out my arm mechanically.
Here in the bar I rely on the same strategy: I communicate disinterest with my face, the emotional equivalent of playing dead. But my refusal to give clear emotional feedback in return for his efforts just seems to make him more desperate. He asks questions about my vacant expression. Do I not understand the reference? Am I put off by something?
If I look surprised at his boldness, he says “sorry, it’s just your face…”
I want to tell him not to talk about my face, and, while he’s at it, not to talk about my appearance at all ever. I want to explain that a woman’s disinterest should be enough to make him leave her alone because if he doesn’t, she’s forced into the impossible choice between tolerating attention she doesn’t want or mustering the energy to confront him directly yet diplomatically in a way that protects his feelings lest his embarrassment become the main issue for which she is held responsible. I want to tell him that because he sexually harassed me a couple of times, all of this stuff kind of just ends up feeling like harassment too.
But I don’t.
I do, however, spend a lot of time thinking about why I haven’t confronted him, and about whether or not I will. I have decided I will. It’s time. Not least because he’s appointed himself to protect women at a conference by following around a known sexual-harasser (presumably to make sure he doesn’t do anything to make women uncomfortable). This has finally pushed me over the edge. By using other women’s experiences of harassment - the kind of experience I have had at his hands - as an opportunity to bolster his image and hide his guilt and fashion himself a protector, he’s just instrumentalizing women in another way. If I don’t speak now, then when?
But making this decision also confronts me with the fact that it’s taken me years to get to this place. Besides the fact that it’s just easier not to rock the boat, experiencing sexual harassment is confusing. In the stream of time, events sort of flow into one another seamlessly. There’s no sign that appears saying “what you are about to experience is sexual harassment” to distinguish those events from what happens before and after them. The events that make up an incident of harassment are sort of weird, but they’re also just sort of part of whatever happens around them.
And, let’s be honest, a lot of what happens around the events is sexism or misogyny or already some kind of low-grade sexual harassment: off-colour jokes, men treating you like a mirror for their egos, ways of insinuating that women are bitchy or untrustworthy, women who are publicly destroyed for talking about harassment. If this is just the air you breathe and if you’re not accustomed to opposing and resisting this low-grade misogyny, then it can be hard to pick one particular incident out as different and unique and deserving of the label “sexual harassment.” If an event is just a slightly more intense version of the ways that you’re accustomed to being treated, then is it really a big deal?
My fidus Achates and I used to just talk about it as “that inappropriate thing that guy did,” until one day he said “I was reading a definition of sexual harassment, and I think what you experienced was sexual harassment.” The label gave me a more objective place from which to view the events, a locus in shared public understanding beyond the stream of my own private experience, and this allowed me to integrate additional aspects of the experience, things that, before I had the label, I just didn’t want to look at because they confused me.
(This has a terrifying implication for those experiences that do not yet have a shared public language through which they can be named, because this means that, in a sense, they cannot exist, not in the way that enables recognition and communication).
As I said, it has taken me years to get here.
I’ve continued to exist in this man’s orbit the whole time, albeit not with the enthusiasm he would prefer. I’ve seen him go through some hard shit. I feel bad for him sometimes. I think he thinks we’re friends. Maybe we are. I don’t really know. Regardless, it is also true that there was a moment when he became angry with me for being disinterested in his advances while I was trapped with him in a van. And it is also true that he’s seen parts of my body under the cover of an accident that I have good reason to believe was not really an accident. It is time for those truths to be part of our relationship and part of his own self concept, rather than a private experience that I manage myself.