#MeToo, page 8
We would pretend it wasn’t happening and any customers within earshot would eventually continue eating their carbonara or talking to friends. Sometimes a pan would fall, or be thrown. But the owner always came out smiling and joking, his head cocked to one side, ready to share a too-hearty story with a diner of his choosing.
There were members of staff who walked out and never came back; who threw their aprons onto the floor, collected their bag or coat and keys and left. And when this happened, it was as though they’d never been there – scraped away like leftovers. The show went on.
I stayed and I learned to fit in. A new waitress was hired after me. She wore the same uniform, less make-up than I did, and stockings – even in the heat. The owner would tease her as soon as she arrived but always call her back for another shift after the night was over. I heard she stayed for a while.
As I became more sure of myself, I carried three and four plates, large trays, endured burns to my hands and forearms from hot dishes. I longed to understand the clash and scrum of the kitchen, to be liked by the people who seemed to have been there forever. I wanted to be part of the furniture, but I still felt new.
And one night, after Christmas was over and the decorations were gone, as the last glasses were being polished and the dishwasher struggled behind the swing doors, it was payday again. And this time I was to get a surprise.
I had suddenly graduated from an envelope to plain cash – like everyone else. I watched the others collect their pay, doled out, fanned out, by the owner as he sat in the middle of the table just next to the kitchen door. I saw him laugh as he pretended to give it and take it away from the dish hand, and then he called my name.
So I went to him. And he pulled me onto his lap. I was much taller than he was, at least until that moment. And of course I laughed – we all did.
But I stopped when he stuck his tongue into my ear and then over it, and up and down my neck. I froze for a moment that seemed like a lifetime. Because it couldn’t be happening. It was only when I suddenly became aware of him underneath me that I jerked my head away and stood up.
And when I did, he half-grabbed, half-slapped my thigh with one strong fat hand and told me I was a good girl, and that I was getting the same as everyone else. I guessed that he was referring to my hourly rate, but I wasn’t sure and I’m still not sure. I looked at his feet as I thanked him and wished him a Happy New Year.
Off to the side, with my back to him, I knew my face was red hot as my ear and hair and neck dried off. Everything felt like slow motion as we counted our tips, and divided up the leftover pasta to take home. When I counted my money, I found that I was at last getting ten dollars an hour. The same as everyone else.
And my friend the waitress told me in the dark and quiet of her car on the trip home that he was just like that, and that dirty old men would be dirty old men, and that she felt sorry for him. I looked straight ahead.
In the days that came after I dreamed about hitting him. I banked my money and I felt like my own skin didn’t fit and I raged at myself for having thanked him.
I was there for another two or three shifts after that. Always at the opposite side of the restaurant. I took detours around tables to avoid him, put people between us, made myself too busy, except for once, when he grabbed me at the bar. Small breasts, according to him, he liked them bigger.
I stopped wearing make-up. I was no longer the same as the others.
I called one day from a phone booth to find out which shifts I was working. He answered, and told me he had no more work for me, that I was no good, that I was fired and that I should piss off. Then he hung up.
And as I put the receiver down after calling that number for the very last time, I felt a sick sort of shame, like battery acid rising in my throat, for my inability to stand up for myself, for my weakness and stupidity. It was a feeling that took a long time to shift.
I’m not sure what happened to him, but I well remember feeling a bitter sense of victory that I had at least outlived it all when I drove past one day to find that the restaurant was no longer there.
I often think of that experience, and more often than not am reminded that I’m not as different as I’d like to be from that younger self. That being fierce isn’t as easy as rote-learning the lyrics to Beyoncé’s anthems if your protesting voice squeaks. That for so many of us it’s often just easier to be lulled by a familiar, dangerous, ingrained mantra – a mantra that too often seems to have a woman’s voice – that it is our fault that we were not smart enough, quick enough or vocal enough to avoid having gotten into trouble in the first place.
But I try, and I go on trying. Because for me the most confronting thing about this story is not that it happened, but how completely ordinary it appeared to be. How normal it still appears to be. Because although I hope that things have changed, it’s everywhere for we women, this objectification, this loss of self to another, this shame, this complicity.
And it’s at this point that I become bolder. And angrier. And much, much more focused. For now more than ever, in the alchemy of transforming words into actions, our stories – and there are so many of them – matter enormously. They are forming a wave, rising in our face-to-face conversations, on social media, in (some of) our newspapers and (some of) our parliaments. Stories that will, if momentum continues, make it harder for this behaviour to remain the everyday for those of us who live beyond the torchlight of public scrutiny or a viral meme or a story so shocking that it warrants a prime-time interview, though only until that attention fades and wanes and all the teller is left with is the permanent imprint of their own scandal and search results.
There are so many of us. Countless stories I’ve heard, that I continue to hear, that leave so many women feeling as I did, as I do, about the shame that comes from living on that continent we inhabit called ‘just shut up because it happens to all of us’. And how many untold stories lie underneath, scrawled in unjudging journals or whispered by families at the end of a lifetime.
What I needed, what so many other women say they have needed, was to name it. It’s fortifying and cathartic to realise that across almost every demographic imaginable, we can and do have something in common. And that the telling of these stories can enable us to forgive ourselves for the blame we all too often carry. What an awful, necessary commonality.
And once we realise that we are not alone in our experiences, that our stories matter, we need to know that this particular status quo is not acceptable, no matter how many times we’ve wondered blackly whether this is a female rite of passage that we are resigned to endure.
If my own experience is any barometer, like the women who have raged for the right to vote, to exercise control over their own bodies, to be educated, to be paid, and paid properly, to access healthcare and legal rights, to own property, and who continue to surge in a groundswell of indignation and determination, there is a resolve and a peace that comes from doing something active to turn shame into change.
What happened to me then in that frozen moment, and in other similar moments, has funnelled my anger and shame into what I do now in the world that I walk in and work in and try to change.
I’m now a politician in the Parliament of Victoria. Elected in 2014, I was staggered to discover that no other woman had represented this seat in this region before me. Fortunately, women in elected roles – at least in our caucus and our cabinet – are no longer a novelty, and the incremental work of improved quotas and affirmative action has (at least within Labor’s ranks) made a substantial, positive and visible change. It’s a counterpoint to the hopelessly unmodern idea still held in some quarters that women distract, detract from and reduce the important work of government to an emotional rabble that’s entirely hostage to hormones and the having and rearing of children.
Despite the growing public intolerance of a political environment which is criticised for being hopelessly out of touch with the world at large, the work to reform behaviour and culture is slow, and pock-marked with regular and often extremely public setbacks which show the world how much is still to be done. Those stories we’ve all shared or heard of groping, perving, sexual assault, sexual violence, gendered humiliation, persist within an environment that urges women to toughen up, harden up, grow a thick skin, get used to the rough and tumble of politics.
Alarmingly, many politicians remain unable or unwilling to see the difference between a robust exchange of ideas and misogyny, slut-shaming, harassment and objectification, in part because they occur in a culture where cheap insults are all too common within the broader definition of ‘banter’. It’s no wonder we continue to object to language that devalues or demonises women when the very notion of playing the man and not the ball (an oft-used metaphor in parliamentary discourse) literally excludes us.
It’s also a culture that frequently rewards or ignores bad behaviour, and is complicit in diminishing the work of women. Indeed, its history and engagement has been designed around and for men, such that women search for context and meaning in much the same way that we search our clothing for absent pockets that men simply take for granted.
But I am here; with an increasingly large group of women around me and my eyes wide open. In this job, it has been my obligation to name it when and as I see it, this politics of the other. Of not being a man in a chamber built by and for men, in an era when women were strangers in every house except for the family home.
When Parliament sits, I face rows of men every day (albeit now fewer on the opposite benches than before the election). I face them by drawing courage from other women across the state and around the world, who rail and persuade and advocate for change. No doubt I’ll continue to be branded with the special insults reserved for women – ‘shrill’, ‘bossy’, ‘emotional’, ‘man hater’. Because it’s easier to deride our voices than to challenge the binary assumption that women are either ‘ugly shrews’ or ‘girls who might go alright’ (both expressions I’ve heard from male politicians describing elected women).
It’s also easier for our male counterparts to discount the substance of what we have to say by invoking the (somewhat bizarre) shield of ‘reverse sexism’ when we call them out for constant interruptions and blithe or entitled mansplaining. In fact, it’s the verbal equivalent of a head buried firmly in the sand – a deflection of accountability. Add in a pun or ten about pussy hats and snowflakes and this narrative plays itself over and over again among a cohort that has never and will never understand how it feels to be told that you and your opinions just don’t matter.
But it cannot silence the voices of hundreds of thousands of women from all over the world who are telling the stories and driving the understanding, however glacial it may seem, that there is no good reason for a quiet that condones, language that demeans, culture that diminishes, or politics that discriminates. This understanding applies to the private and the public sectors, to our listed companies and our not-for-profit organisations. It applies in our workplaces and in the way we access services and advocate (for ourselves or on behalf of others) to be heard. It applies to the language we use when we debate and criticise and hold each other to account as politicians, such as the all-too frequent use of ‘hysteria’ to describe conduct in a woman that would otherwise be described as fortitude in a man.
Refining and applying written definitions of commonly used terms like harassment, bullying, fairness (and thus unfairness), is an added challenge for our courts and our parliaments, particularly when the law calls for a specificity that isn’t commonly deployed in the world at large.
Our words and experiences are nonetheless translating into actions, calling out harassment, discrimination, victimisation and sexual violence, and also reaching into those many stained corners of economic vulnerability, exploitation and abuse that women live in, live through and too often do not survive. It is hard work, requiring singular focus and discipline that I’ll admit I don’t always have. It is sometimes unrelenting, often exhausting, and always – always – important. It is work that builds on the hard-won achievements of women who’ve fought to take their seats as members of parliament, and who remind us now in acts of green and purple and white that we are obliged to continue their work to pass on to others.
I use this collectively shared and borrowed strength to tell other women that I have my own story, but one that need not, and should not, have happened. And that, if they persist and endure, it need not be this way for them or their children or their friends or for anyone else who ever wanted to reach back in time to summon the courage to speak out that, for one reason or another, was beyond our reach.
We raise our issues; from within and outside our parliaments; too often to ridicule and to criticism and to calls to ‘toughen up, sweetheart’ and ‘smile because you’re so much prettier when you do’. I take these angry and often resentful creaks of protest as evidence of a shift occurring – I know we’re getting somewhere.
And I know that for this work that others started and others will continue, my words and this contribution are a far better fit than my silence ever was.
Brother
He told me I was beautiful ‘an empress’ he called me
told me he’d always wanted a queen like me to be his
his eyes caressed my curves
his mouth pursed in a dirty grin
as he assessed all he could do to me.
He didn’t even know as little as my name
so he didn’t even know what life had made me
what was a part of me
what I was made from
he didn’t know anything about who I was he just knew he wanted to get in me.
I could ‘lead him to divinity’ his words not mine
I was just walking down a street in what should have been paradise
but his leer made it something much less.
If I could have talked to him and all the men who throughout the years
have used their eyes and devious grins as some form of weapon
through which hatred and aggression have barely sat beneath the surface.
If I could have talked to him as an equal
and not some piece of flesh designed for his pleasure
I would have said:
Hey brother
do you want to stick it in me?
do you want to show me what a real man can do?
do you want to bend me over, take me from behind, pull my hair and call me your whore?
Brother
imagine I am your mother
would you say the same things to her?
do you worship her for giving birth to you
for allowing you to sup your life force from her very body
leaving it less taut and less visible for the eyes of men like you
who would gauge all a woman’s worth only in her physique
as opposed to her mental capabilities?
Brother
imagine I am your sister
and some other brother is saying the same things to her
whispering them in her ear
calling it out to her
as she walks down the street, singing.
Brother
imagine for this moment that I am you
and that instead of breasts I have a chest
instead of curves I have no hips
could you love me?
Could you love me as another member of humanity?
could you love me and see me not as an afterthought of God
but as a being who hates to be seen through your eyes?
Brother
could you love me?
could you love me enough to know that to fuck me
would bring only you pleasure
and then care that such is the essence of what would be our only carnal
knowledge?
Brother
could you love me?
could you love me enough to know that when you talk to me in such words that reduce me to nothing more than something to fuck and be done with
you reduce me to something less than human?
Brother
without all these markings of woman
could you love me?
could you love me enough to call me your sister?
could you call me your sister and love me for the strength I have
even as I stare you down and dare you to step one fucking foot closer.
Brother
as your sister
would you recognise that in your country as in others
woman is synonymous with strength
and we need not wear the badge of anger and aggression to express it.
Brother
even as your sister
I cannot profess to understand all you may have lived through
and what makes you this man.
but know this
I would love you
I would love you enough to share my most inner thoughts
those secrets shed between brother and sister
to share the lows that we are laden with
enough to talk about the philosophy of how you, me, the sunshine, the trees
all of we (for there is no I)
are made of star stuff
that is: the same stuff.
Brother
as your sister
I would love you enough to tell you
that there is no woman on Earth who would knowingly
take your deceitful tongue as truth
to make her feel whole.
So brother
I cannot thank you for your compliments
for they are not laden with love
they smear me with your smarmy versions of sex and sexuality
and know that they do not make me feel beautiful
