Baby Boomer women vs younger gen women and how they view sexual harassment.

In My Humble Opinion
21

My mom was upper management in banking until she retired a little over a year ago. She’s told me some pretty harrowing stories of the sort of routine harassment that went on in that industry, particularly in the '70s and '80s. She used to have a lookout posted at the window for one particular guy, so she could make sure all the young, cute tellers were on break when he came in. Nothing she could do to stop him - literally nobody in the bank with any power cared. Until he was eventually arrested for drowning an underage prostitute in a hot tub, and died in prison.

Her reaction to all the people losing their jobs over sexual harassment now? “Those girls need to suck it up and stop whining.”

I think its sour grapes, more than anything else. She had to put up with this bullshit her entire life and nobody cared, so why should she have to care about it happening to someone else?

22

No, stroke victims and victims of dementia can’t control it - so they still get handsy. And you dodge them to do your job. So says my sister, the RN.

23

My mother hit a guy over the head with a Coke bottle circa 1964 to escape date rape.

I’m just post-boomer - my sexual harassment occurred in 1991. I did not suck it up.

The woman who sits next to me just retired from a legal assistant job. She thinks things have gotten a lot better, and her attitude was “you go girls.”

24

My Mom is actually thrilled. As she says “I was never strong enough to speak up when it happened to me, but my (youngest) daughter is…”

For some women, I don’t think it’s necessarily sour grapes, but sadly something like it. I see it in the military every day in the older guard still out there. Not all of them, but some.

25

This is why women don’t come forth. Guys are skeptical of their stories. :wink:

26

This. It’s a great temptation to sneer at someone getting HR after someone for telling a dirty joke, when you’ve had to put up with a hell of a lot worse through the years.

We older women were working hard to prove that we were tough enough to do men’s jobs. There was constant bitching that we were too emotional and weak, even for office work. If we complained at all about how we were being treated, the attitude we got was along the lines of “What did you expect girlie? You wanted to work, now you got it. If you can’t handle how the menfolk act at your job, go back home to the kitchen.” So we learned not to complain, and stayed silent for years.

But in my opinion, what’s happening now is waaayyyyy overdue. So, I try not to roll my eyes about sensitivity to offhand comments. Even if privately, the comments would make me shrug in indifference.

27

There is a difference between Boomer and Millennial women regarding how to deal with sexual harassment, and more generally how to have power over your own life in a world that’s not necessarily friendly to the idea of powerful women. But I think it’s more complicated than “suck it up” versus “do something about it”. I call the two styles “Ethic of Toughness” and “Ethic of Influence”

The ethic of Toughness is exemplified by the old '70s meme that used to go around: “A woman needs to be twice as competent as a man, to be thought half as good. Fortunately, this is not difficult.” In Toughness terms, you maintain and show your strength and power by not caring what some asshole bloke does or thinks, but keeping your eyes focussed on your goals. If he’s standing in between you and your goals (eg not promoting you because he doesn’t believe in women who work) then by all means attempt to roll right over him, but otherwise (eg if he’s a bum pincher or serial harasser) you reduce his effect on you by ignoring him and pretending he doesn’t exist.

The ethic of Influence is - you become powerful by influencing the people and culture around you, with the goal of reducing the general social acceptability of actions like bum-pinching, failing to promote women and making unwanted sexual advances. Generally speaking, you do this with other people, so as to magnify your own impact. The upside of this approach is that if it works it has a much more far-reaching impact and effect than the Toughness approach. The downsides are - firstly, “if” it works, also, it’s a hell of a lot of mind-work and effort. All the time you’re spending trying to change what other people do is time you’re not spending on stuff you actually yourself want to do.

The '60s, '70s and '80s had a few “big name” Influence people - well-known feminists who wrote books (Germaine Greer, Betty Friedman, Gloria Steinem, and so on) but for most women it made much more sense to be a Toughness person - there wasn’t an Internet, you couldn’t really live your own life AND be a social influencer, you had to pick one.

Now, however, we do have an internet, and it’s possible for quite ordinary people to have the amount of influence which used to be the province of only exceptionally articulate people with newspaper columns and book deals. So a lot of people are now Team Influence and spend a lot of their time working on the general culture - aka “what everyone else is doing in my society” versus their own behaviour.

Where you can get a problem is that you can’t really follow the ethic of Influence and the ethic of Toughness at the same time. Influence makers and persuaders often violate the ethic of Toughness in multiple ways. For starters, they’re spending a bunch of time thinking about what men are or are not doing, rather than persuing their own personal goals. And also a lot of the method of influence involves talking about things that made you feel bad and hurt publically, which is pretty much by definition not being Tough. Toughness women can perceive Influencers as “spending a bunch of time obsessing on murky future goals that they might never get to”, while neglecting the opportunity to simply get on with their own lives

I’m a Gen-X-er, so I can really go either way on this topic, but TBH I’m way more comfortable with Toughness than Influence. Influence is extroverty and talky - major minus from my POV - and frankly, Toughness has served me personally pretty well. Partly that’s because nothing very egregious has happened to me, but I also do come across people on the Internet talking about being groped, or flashed at, or had pervy comments made at them who go on to say “…and it made me feel crap, and violated, and worthless” and these are all things that happened to me too, and only make me think “well, he’s a bit of dick isn’t he. Wonder if there’s anything good on telly tonight.”

Also, you can’t forget the fact that the majority of people over 50 will always be more comfortable doing what they’ve always done, rather than adapting to new ways. Widespread Influencing is a new way. It’s highly likely that the “new” is what’s preventing a lot of Boomers from learning this trick.

28

I think this is a big part of it. The workplace in general was a lot more (for lack of a better word) “rude” when I was a young baby boomer. Bosses routinely bullied subordinates without regard to race, religion or gender, because that’s how they showed everyone who the boss was. Women employees in particular were often considered as disposable, because so many of them left the workplace or settled for the mommy track when they got married or had children. Women of my generation were groped as students, got whistled at on the streets and were considered fair game for anything at parties. It’s not surprising that a lot of them dealt with harassment by filing it away as background noise.

29

Fifty year old Dutch woman here, and I agree. Unwanted touching happened, but I have never experienced a taboo in defending myself. If my butt was grabbed when I was out dancing, I would, and could, turn around and either flirt with, insult, or throw a drink in the face of the grabber. We were supposed to be tough and clear about it, and to a large extent, we were.

On the other hand, in my opinion young women and young men alike these days put up with an insane amount of *economic *harassment. We would not have dreamed of working unpaid for hours, days, weeks, year, like is expected of young people nowadays. You all are afraid of being punished if you come and leave on time, if you don’t want to give up a free day for the office potluck…there will come a day when you think if such pressure as abuse of your time and your money.

30

Well, old lady checking in here. What on earth is date rape? Is it (a) your date roofies you and has his way with you, (b) your date tries to wrestle you into having sex with him, or © your date persistently requests sex until you give in?

(a) is rape, all right, and I don’t see why you can’t report it. You know who he is and what he did and you have some evidence. Get him put away for awhile.
(b) I have never believed it. On a date? Yes, I have heard of, and experienced, things like, “If you don’t want to put out you can get out and walk.” But the thing is, even back in the bad old days women were not so weak that they couldn’t fend off someone intent of having sex without their consent if they were conscious. There are two key things here. If the guy has a weapon, in which case what the hell kind of a date is it? And if they guy is willing to hurt her, in which case, again, she knows who he is and she can report it and, let’s hope, get him in a lot of trouble.
© Just keep saying no, he’ll get it eventually.

So here’s three harassment incidents.

I was a telephone installer and I had a little ID tag which I wore clipped to my pocket, which is where everybody wore them in those days before retractable lanyards and the line. So, I go into the main downtown office for some reason, and as I’m in the elevator a guy decides to take a real close look at my ID. Now the thing is, there was a number on there indicating, basically, your status, the higher the better. I was a 9. He was a 1. In examining my tag he managed to get a fairly good feel in on my breast. But being that I was a feminist at the time, and in fact was then (and am now) in favor of treating women the same as men, then, no big deal. No harm, no foul. I put my hand under his tag and gave it the same inspection, even though this was kind of a cheeky thing to do, given that he was a 1. And as soon as I did that, he backed off. I don’t know if it was because I was touching him back or because now I knew his name, but he backed off, and it was like we both sort of tacitly agreed that didn’t happen.

I worked in a marketing and PR office with mostly women, and we had one client, our best client, who was a little handsy. We all knew to stay out of arm’s reach. So our boss complained that we weren’t being very nice to Clyde, the representative of our best client. We gave our boss a really bad time. Asked him did he want to be a pimp instead of the CEO of a marketing firm, told him to let Bob be nice to the client, or maybe, MAYBE, this client could hire some other firm. And he listened. Not that he had a choice, we ganged up on him and there were more of us. It was a small enough office that being the point person for the best client wouldn’t necessarily advance you. (Or Bob would have been all over that thing before being drafted.)

I had a temp job, and the guy I was working for kept coming up and caressing my shoulder, and then he asked me how old I was. It was none of his business, so I took off a few years. He said, “Well, you’ve got a hell of a body for a woman your age.” I called the temp agency and said, “If you can’t get me off this desk, get me out of this firm entirely,” and not half an hour later I had a new assignment in the same firm, and found out the guy couldn’t keep an assistant. This man was married BTW to a fellow lawyer and you will not believe what she specialized in: Harassment and hostile work environment. I don’t know if that’s ironic but it seems like it. It was a very large firm so she was probably on the wrong side of it, if you know what I mean.

So, you know, today it would be dealt with by just complaining to HR and getting the 1 written up? Or firing the client…I guess? Or getting the senior partner married to another senior partner called before the ethics committee? The thing is that there were repercussions. Clyde had to deal with Bob, Mr. Nasty Lawyer couldn’t have his own assistant and had to deal with a quickly revolving series of temps. I sure wouldn’t want to be the one working at his desk after he was called out on it. (Or, frankly, at all, because besides being a nasty old man he had terrible personal hygiene.)

But my point here is that back in the old days women were not totally powerless. As a 9 versus a 1 I was only a little less powerless than a similarly numbered man, but I was cheeky ( and I had company-issued power tools).

There used to be a magazine called Ms., and for all you young things who don’t remember, it used to have what it called “click” moments. Moments when you realize you’re being objectified–by society, by your significant other, by your boss, whatever. My experience with this was, the clicks came along, and then as time passed they got lamer and lame, because they got harder to find.

The last one I saw was a woman under the sink, with a bunch of plumbing tools next to her indicating she was a professional plumber and not just an amateur under the sink. Her pants rode down, as plumbers’ pants will, and revealed that she was wearing a thong. I don’t know what this was an advertisement for but the click moment was, “Hey, cool, a woman plumber.” I mean, all their pants slide down. It’s how you know it’s a plumber–right? But maybe, to a younger woman, it would be hella sexist.

31

You seem to have overlooked the classic date rape scenario wherein she says no, and he rapes her. Because he can. They are alone together and he doesn’t have to take no for an answer.

I’m pretty sure that’s flat out rape. He doesn’t have to drug her, just physically overpower her, for it to be rape.

It’s interesting that you overlooked this on your list, I think.

32

What. The. Fuck.

Did you really just say that unless a man has a weapon, a woman can always fight off a rapist? What is wrong with you?

33

She didn’t overlook that, she said she doesn’t believe it actually happens.

34

I’m a boomer and I think part of it comes from figuring out basic human behavior over time and dealing with all sorts of people in different environments and different cultures. I’m a lot calmer now about the range of human behaviors that occur. It was much easier to get me riled when I was younger.

It’s an age and experience thing. You learn that some people are more jerkish than others. You also learn that even normally good people can act like dolts on occasion (surprise!), which may or may not have anything to do with sexual harassment. There are lots of jerks out there and you’ll encounter them here and there throughout your life.

Lacking violence, stalking, and/or batshit crazy behavior, which are entirely different matters, there is nothing wrong in dealing with an episode in whatever manner suits you. I prefer to handle these things quickly, directly, and privately when possible, giving the other person a chance to right the situation and save face. If that doesn’t work, then the gloves come off.

And, personally, the scariest moments in my life had nothing to do with sexual harassment, so that colors my perspective.

I grew up with, and worked with, lots of honorable and decent men. I’ve been a software developer since the late seventies. It was challenging being a woman in that field back then, but I have to say that most men I knew were fair people who were willing to take a chance and mentor women who demonstrated competency and enthusiasm. Most men did not try to do anything funny at all, so I find it difficult to apply my outrage too broadly and too casually.

Outrage can be tiring and is often overused, so I save it for the big stuff. I don’t find it particularly interesting or useful under most circumstance. That’s another part of age - you don’t want to die on every hill you encounter, you’re pickier about what constitutes a mortal problem, and you’ve hopefully developed some level of skill in negotiating with others. :slight_smile:

On the other hand, I admit that lots of my retired sisters and friends sit around and grouse and get outraged all day every day. Probably, when you lose touch with productivity and no one puts any firm demands on you, outrage gives you a much needed dose of adrenaline that you don’t otherwise receive.

While working, I sometimes have C-SPAN on in the background. It’s hard not to notice that most weekday callers are retirees and they are plenty outraged about numerous things. Many times I can’t even figure out what they’re upset about, but they are lining up to tell you about it.

So, if you really want to find offended and appalled boomers, they’re out there.