In the early years of my professional life, receiving unwanted and unprovoked groping and kissing was not unusual.\u00a0 It was the story of my life, and now we are discovering that it is not unusual.\u00a0 It is many women\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n
How many times did I speak out?\u00a0 None.\u00a0 We don\u2019t speak out.\u00a0 The most ambitious, careful women never speak out.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it\u2019s too hard to get into the room in the first place to complain about men\u2019s behavior once we are there.<\/p>\n
To wit:<\/p>\n
I was chased around a desk (literally) by my first modeling agent when I dodged his gropes and kisses.\u00a0 I was 18, he was 50.\u00a0 I was completely caught off guard and ran out of his office.\u00a0 I had just started modeling and at the time, he was the only game in town as far as agents went.\u00a0 I never went into the agency again.<\/p>\n
A few years later, I moved onto bigger markets.\u00a0 Every time I did a runway show, men who remind me an awful lot of Donald Trump bullied their way backstage immediately after the show so that they could catch the models in states of undress.\u00a0 When I did print work, the client would often do the same thing. \u00a0Did I make an issue of it? \u00a0Of course not. \u00a0It was too hard to get those coveted jobs in the first place. \u00a0Would I risk being seen as a troublemaker or complainer? \u00a0I have to say, though, that the disrespectful treatment hastened my exit from the profession. (Note that it’s the women who have to flee, leaving behind their careers. \u00a0The abusive men stay in place, moving on to the next set of victims.)<\/p>\n
As I think about these humiliating incidents these many decades later, I feel the old fury rising inside of me.\u00a0 How dare they confront me while I was half naked to tell me \u201cwhat a great job I did.\u201d\u00a0 How dare they look me up and down while I was virtually nude and couldn\u2019t cover up?<\/p>\n
As a young woman working in the film industry, I had men grab my zippers and pull them down (yes, more than once; I finally quit wearing my favorite front zippered tops).\u00a0 One man, after offering me a job, pushed me onto his desk and tried to pry my legs apart.\u00a0 Another backed me against a wall and with one hand, grabbed me between the legs, and with the other, grabbed my breast.\u00a0 \u201cThe right hand\u2019s for you and the left\u2019s for me,\u201d he said.\u00a0 I was bilious.\u00a0 Needless to say, I didn\u2019t take the job, even though I really needed the work and the money. \u00a0Who lost out? \u00a0Not him. \u00a0He had his high-paying position until the day he died (good riddance).<\/p>\n
I always dressed modestly in work situations to try to avoid situations like this but it didn\u2019t seem to matter. \u00a0After a business breakfast meeting, one man (married; twenty years my senior) offered to give me a ride.\u00a0 When I got into his car, he turned to me, pulled up my shirt, and saw through my bra.\u00a0 He exclaimed, \u201cWow! Your nipples are amazing.\u00a0 I can\u2019t wait to tell _________” (my then boss).\u00a0 My then boss, I later heard, went around the office asking the male employees, \u201cyou hittin\u2019 that?\u201d about me. \u00a0Yeah, I felt great when I heard that too.<\/p>\n
To address the Trump defenders who point out that he hires and promotes women, including his \u201cgreat piece of ass\u201d daughter, let me make this clear: all of these gropers and assaulters hired and promoted women.\u00a0 All of them wanted to hire me or keep me on at work.\u00a0 All of them would profess to value women\u2019s contributions in the workplace.\u00a0 In fact, many of the great promoters of women are also the biggest abusers.<\/p>\n
The horror for women is that there is no equivalent these assaulters could experience that might give them an idea of the humiliation, anger, self-doubt that they inflict upon us.\u00a0 They will never know how we check ourselves to make sure we\u2019re not being provocative; how we mention our husbands or boyfriends to try to discourage the predators; or how we try, with anxiety in the pits of our stomachs to deflect their advances because we know that they can hurt us way beyond what they do to us when no one is looking.<\/p>\n
These predators know that they have the power.\u00a0 They know what damage they can do to us.\u00a0 They know that they can turn around and call us liars and fantasists, and who can dispute them?\u00a0 They know that a significant percentage of people will say that we did something to deserve it, that we asked for it, that we must have been wearing provocative clothes.\u00a0 They know that in a \u201che said, she said\u201d situation, we maybe have a fifty-fifty chance of being believed.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump told us on tape exactly what he did to women.\u00a0 Then women came forward to validate what he said.<\/p>\n
Every time I hear Trump\u2019s boasting words of what he can do to women and hear Billy Bush\u2019s chilling little laugh, and then watch as they make an unsuspecting women give that creep a hug, all the memories of abuse and of being violated come back to me. \u00a0The humiliation. \u00a0The loss of income because I could not subject myself to that kind of treatment. \u00a0I get nauseated.\u00a0 I feel fury.\u00a0 I have to relive it all once again, though it happened long ago.\u00a0 It\u2019s an automatic response.\u00a0 And there\u2019s nothing I can do about it.<\/p>\n
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In the early years of my professional life, receiving unwanted and unprovoked groping and kissing was not unusual.\u00a0 It was the story of my life, and now we are discovering that it is not unusual.\u00a0 It is many women\u2019s stories. How many times did I speak out?\u00a0 None.\u00a0 We don\u2019t speak out.\u00a0 The most ambitious, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,12,3,4],"tags":[141,64,65,142,86,20,140,68,69,143,175,58,59],"class_list":["post-1268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-power","category-sex","category-women","tag-donald-trump","tag-female-sexuality","tag-feminism","tag-groping","tag-karen-essex","tag-sex-2","tag-sexual-assault","tag-sexual-politics","tag-sexuality","tag-unwanted-advances","tag-women","tag-women-in-business","tag-womens-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1268"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1273,"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1268\/revisions\/1273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karenessex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}