How to do Feminism like a French Girl
When I was a 22-year old music marketing person in L.A., the company I worked for had a big party for the release of our first print magazine (may both rest in peace) with an open bar. We invited all the interns, and one of them — an awkward, quiet, and kinda-weird dude in the office — got shithoused and nearly knocked me over when he stumbled into me with an unquestionable boner in his pants and slurred in my ear, “I’d get on anything right now.”
I was flattered to qualify as a “thing” worthy of him mounting, but I Cher Horowitz’d him back to the other side of the bar anyway and laughed it off with my friends. This is only a funny story because he was my intern and I was technically his boss. The power imbalance was in my favor, and if anyone should be humiliated, it was him.
I wasn’t so scandalized that I tried to get him fired or even talk to him about it on Monday morning. He was a blackout-drunk college kid with no social skills and had zero influence on my performance at work or bearing on my career. (I hope he’s doing okay these days and not bothering any colleagues with his boners, truly.)
If he had been my boss at that company, it would be a completely different story.
And that’s what the critics of this #metoo and #timesup moment are failing to grasp: Women aren’t demanding to be treated like fragile Victorian lady-flowers who need protection from an entire spectrum of male sexuality in the workplace. Women tend to know the difference between innocuous flirting from a colleague, an inappropriate gesture from a boss, and flat-out assault before they report it. If you fail to give women credit for that up front — that they know how to navigate workplace clumsiness as well as their own sexual agency — then you might think all these accusations and abrupt firings have gone too far, and sign a batshit letter denouncing it.
It’s not about sex, it’s about power (or work, as Rebecca Traister tried to remind us). When one person has power and the other has less, it’s the powerful person’s responsibility to keep it in check. When I had a male boss who would say “good girl!” when he was happy with my work (exactly what I say to my dog when she makes a poop), or when a male CEO would stare at my boobs when he spoke to me and called me “cutie,” I only got (silently, pathetically) enraged because it’s a type of gaslighting that makes you question your value in the workplace. Do these powerful people like me because I am doing a great job or because they think I am cute? I never took these questions to HR, btw. As a woman with even a passing interest in your career, you learn to pick your battles.
At the most basic level, when you’re trying to get ahead and prove your worth at someone else’s company for 10 hours every weekday, managers should be obligated to treat you with more respect than a clueless cab driver or a carnie at the San Gennarro festival.
I totally get the French-feminist fear of an extremist, puritanical, sexless culture as a response to workplace sexual harassment. It’s valid in a traditionally socialist and sexually liberated country like France, where they already have better protections for workers and at least aim to flatten power and class structures to an egalitarian ideal. But when you’re in capitalist, individualist, pull-yourself-up American work-culture, it’s tougher to be a woman. Especially when your government doesn’t accurately represent you (when they’re not actively disenfranchising you) and HR departments aren’t designed to actually help you, it’s easier to get angry, get fed up, and demand radical change.
