Ok so there’s been all this hubbub about Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that Brett Kavanaugh did something sexual to her 30 years ago.
If the woman was raped I’m sorry about that, rape is always inexcusable.
That being said, the fact that she’s so fuzzy about the event gives me pause.
Before you get your undergarments in a twist because after all “HOW COULD A MAN know anything about abuse or harassment?”
I can tell you I do.
I clearly remember being 18 years old. I was working my second job at a typesetting house.
The bosses wife was one of the head honchos. Her name was Carolyn. She smoked like a house on fire and always had the stench of bad booze about her. She was thin, almost skeletal. I remember her hair was never attractively styled and she called me “Dumbshit” from day one until day 58 when I walked out of that office never to return.
I learned some interesting things while working at that company, so it wasn’t a total loss. Some of those skills have served me well throughout my career.
But I have a very clear memory of her walking up to me about an hour before quitting time. She said, “Dumbshit, we’re behind so I need you to work overtime tonight.”
I said, “Sure thing,” and asked if I could use the office phone to call my mom to let her know I wouldn’t be at dinner.
The call made, I went about my work, I said goodnight to the other workers, and Carolyn’s husband, as they left.
I kept the machines I was responsible for churning out their galleys. Each galley I took over to the light table and cut into the appropriate lengths so that they could be mounted to photo boards.
I was also cutting and pasting edited lines into the completed galleys while keeping an eye on my machines.
Yes, we were busy and behind and I was happily using new skills and doing the best job I knew how to do.
Carolyn called me into her blacked out office. I knocked on her closed door and waited for her to tell me to come in. She often was doing titles on a small film system.
In those days we didn’t have scalable fonts or the ability to print a PDF and send it directly to a typesetting machine. You had to create a title, character by character by exposing a film strip. Then you used black & white photo development to create the title line. After that, you measured and manually pasted the title line into the galley.
So, if her door was closed, you knocked and waited for her to secure whatever title she might have been working on, otherwise you would incur her wrath because opening the door would destroy whatever she’d been working on.
There was a muffled “Come in”
I opened the door, walked in and asked her how I could help.
She said, “You’ve been catching on quickly Dumbshit. But not quite as quickly as I’d like. To make it up to me I want you to fuck me.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, FUCK ME or your FIRED.”
I very clearly recall my brain rebooting.
I also recall feeling humiliated, and embarrassed, I was deeply hurt because I had been doing everything she asked and was keeping up with her output.
We were behind due to several machine malfunctions on the other side of the house where the typists were doing the input. The IBM technician had ordered parts but they’d been slow to get to the West Coast.
Granted I’d made some mistakes but I’d always stayed late to rectify them so that we’d start fresh in the morning.
I was completely unprepared for this ultimatum.
And I was conflicted. Conflicted because I was an 18 year old male. A stiff breeze could make me hard.
I looked forward to getting home each and every night to stroke my dick. This condition of terminal horniness wasn’t helped at all by the fact that the company had taken on a big contract from a publisher called Penguin Press.
Penguin Press at the time published a lot of pornographic stories. Imagine an 18 year old male scanning the pages of graphic porn while at work and that was his job.
Needless to say I’d taken to wearing looser pants, not because I was ashamed of being hard (I was) but because tight pants were just plain uncomfortable.
So here I was, hornier than hell all the time and there’s this woman telling me she wants me to fuck her. That was the first time in my life a woman had ever said she wanted my dick. It wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s that I heard a woman I was dating tell me she wanted to get naked and have me inside her.
But looking at Carolyn, her cigarette ash hanging from the latest in the chain of cigarettes in her mouth, I thought, “I’d really like to fuck. I’d really like to get off, but with the bosses wife? Is that a good idea? What happens if he finds out about it?”
Then I looked at her again. She’d been pretty once, but that ship had sailed years ago. Now Carolyn looked haggard and her personality was throughly unpleasant.
The part of my brain that so wanted to fuck, whispered, “Do it, close your eyes and pound her, it’s a free pass, no dinner, no begging, no promises to respect her or love her. It’s just a pussy that wants to be plowed.”
The rational part of my brain said, “Whoa there cowboy. Down this path is slavery. If you do this once she’ll use the threat again. She’ll add the threat that she’ll tell her husband you fucked her and she’ll probably suggest that you were the one that initiated it. All in all, a bad outcome for you. Besides you can’t lie worth a shit. What are you going to say to your mom when she asks you how work was. What are you going to say? It was great mom, I fucked the bosses wife.”
The fuckhead part of my brain suggested, “Fuck her then quit, you don’t want to jerk off again tonight. you want to blow thrusting and hot and wet.”
The rational part of me asked, “What about pregnancy?”
That was the question that made my decision easier.
In my heart of hearts, I absolutely knew that I didn’t want to even risk having a baby with the nasty piece of work that Carolyn was.
I knew that I wasn’t paying rent, I knew that while I was living at home I had the ability to quit this job, I knew that I didn’t want to risk having a baby with this woman.
So I said, “OK then, Goodbye.”
I grabbed my backpack and walked out the door. I never looked back but was frustrated and angry. Too angry to wait on the fucking bus. So I started walking. a couple of hours later when I got home my mom said, “I thought you were going to call me when you were done.”
“Um yeah mom, I just felt like walking.”
My Mom is a wise woman who knows her children well.
“Okay, honey what happened?”
I related the story and at the end, my Mother was shaking with anger.
“Honey, you did the right thing. I put up with that shit while you were growing up. Here we are in 1979 and people still think they can get away with it. It was wrong when I was a single mom and executives thought they could bully their way into my panties, it’s just as wrong now that some woman thinks they can take advantage of you.”
My mom put a big pile of spaghetti on a plate for me, then handed me a beer. “Here sweetie eat something but don’t drink all the beer in the fridge.”
She left the room and I remember hearing the tires of her car chirp as she hit the pavement leaving the driveway.
I wondered at the time if she’d even catch Carolyn at the office.
I ate, drank my beer, rinsed my plate and put it in the dishwasher.
I went to my room, took off my clothes and jerked off a couple of times then fell asleep.
The next morning, I heard the normal morning sounds of my younger siblings being rushed to school.
After the house quieted, I got up. I was hungry, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and wandered to the kitchen.
There on the table was a cereal bowl, my favorite cereal, the newspaper and a check from the company for the week I’d worked and an additional 2 months pay.
I still recall the details vividly. Time has not diminished the memory of that humiliation and I doubt it ever will.
I was fortunate, I had someone who was in my corner. I had my Mom, she’d been through it. She knew what I was feeling and also knew there was very little she could do to make it better. But she got me my paycheck and bought me some time to get another job.
While my story is not nearly as sever or traumatic as rape. It is illustrative of the clarity that comes with some situations.
I recognize that women are far more likely to be abused than men, when they are abused, they rarely have a support system to fall back on. But the women I’ve known who have been raped, and or abused are never fuzzy about the details.
They’re very clear and they can tell you grizzly details of their assault 40 or 50 years on.
So you’ll pardon me if I’m somewhat skeptical of Dr. Ford’s allegations thus far. We’ll have to wait and see what her testimony reveals.
And just because Kavanaugh might have been at the same party, doesn’t automatically mean he sexually assaulted her.
Hell if being at a party where an assault happened is the only test, then I might also be guilty using the same broad brush strokes.
Shit happens, it’s bad, of that there is no doubt. But bringing up something that happened 30 years ago just because someone is famous seems a bit contrived doesn’t it?
After the bad shit happens, the best you can do is deal with it and move on. That’s what I’ve learned from rape and harassment victims that I’ve known in my life.
That’s what I’ve done.
