When the ugly, arrogant, ignorant, aggressive dudes at work hit on you they hit hard. It's sex and nothing but sex that they have on their minds. After all, they are all married men, and one of them is married to my boss. But since I am brown, they see me as servant unable to refuse them.
The hellish images of their sexual appetites I tried to block from lodging in my mind were horrible enough on their own. When other women assumed the same gaze of compulsive sexual objectification toward me, the hellfire's flames grew more and more extreme. It was shocking that two female supervisors (both English professors) would do nothing but worsen the trauma of these indignities for me.
As a kid like many kids of my generation, I enjoyed watching a TV show called "Land of the Lost." It's mild horror sequences were about right for my level. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've actually watched a real horror film (without lifting one finger).
As a victim whistleblower, Pitzer College was a place of small, medium and large horrors. As previously when noting that her stature was at or below 5 feet tall, Laura Harris was despite or because of her physical height, a hardened victim baiter and Laura Trombley though unwilling to engage me directly, oversaw my abuse with supreme indifference even when it occurred at the hands of her own spouse.
While the dudes were rather frightening, the female onlookers were more vituperative and desensitized than I'd ever expected other women to be: Harris blamed her lack of humanity on her "blackness," and Trombley's actions might be chalked up to greed and convenience.
All in all my inability to comprehend and the dissonance resulting, came down to the fact of my own female biases. I didn't think other women were capable of doing this.
Dealing with the everyday chauvinist or superficial racist is bad enough but dealing with the trolls and trollettes at work is something much more adverse. She touted an extremist black-centric perspective she neither could attest to nor ever comprehend even intellectually.
I recall the day she said that when she lived in town, she was often mistaken as a Latina. She then suggested that I was probably enjoying unwanted male attention. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth--anti-immigrant hysteria was at its worst I'd ever seen in my life--and my daily life was everything but an experience of tolerance much less flattery or invitations to socialize.
"Do a lot of men ask you out around here?"
I found it very odd and even slightly disgusting that Harris would intone to me that being a Latina must mean something highly sexual rather than risk for abuse or mistreatment. Again, her preoccupation with sex was imbuing my work with a tinge of hellishness. And her cries of mad and insane oppression for her blackness were hard to stomach.
"Go back to where you came from!" I hear a man shout at me as I drop my kids off at school.
I suck it up. I drive to work. Then pulling up to a parking spot at Pitzer, I stop and gaze outside my window. I see a few students linger about or race to their next class. Normalcy seems to abound from all directions. It is not a scary and horrible day at all.
I reach for the straps of my briefcases. They contain my books, my notecards, laptop, audiovisuals, student essays, research bibliography, poetry sketches, and conference paper drafts. With the strength of my upper and lower arms, my wrists, and my back, I face another day in the hallways of my hell.
The hellish images of their sexual appetites I tried to block from lodging in my mind were horrible enough on their own. When other women assumed the same gaze of compulsive sexual objectification toward me, the hellfire's flames grew more and more extreme. It was shocking that two female supervisors (both English professors) would do nothing but worsen the trauma of these indignities for me.
As a kid like many kids of my generation, I enjoyed watching a TV show called "Land of the Lost." It's mild horror sequences were about right for my level. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've actually watched a real horror film (without lifting one finger).
As a victim whistleblower, Pitzer College was a place of small, medium and large horrors. As previously when noting that her stature was at or below 5 feet tall, Laura Harris was despite or because of her physical height, a hardened victim baiter and Laura Trombley though unwilling to engage me directly, oversaw my abuse with supreme indifference even when it occurred at the hands of her own spouse.
While the dudes were rather frightening, the female onlookers were more vituperative and desensitized than I'd ever expected other women to be: Harris blamed her lack of humanity on her "blackness," and Trombley's actions might be chalked up to greed and convenience.
All in all my inability to comprehend and the dissonance resulting, came down to the fact of my own female biases. I didn't think other women were capable of doing this.
Dealing with the everyday chauvinist or superficial racist is bad enough but dealing with the trolls and trollettes at work is something much more adverse. She touted an extremist black-centric perspective she neither could attest to nor ever comprehend even intellectually.
I recall the day she said that when she lived in town, she was often mistaken as a Latina. She then suggested that I was probably enjoying unwanted male attention. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth--anti-immigrant hysteria was at its worst I'd ever seen in my life--and my daily life was everything but an experience of tolerance much less flattery or invitations to socialize.
"Do a lot of men ask you out around here?"
"No," I answered with my head more than with my mouth as I heard a deeper question rise in my head, "what world does she live in? Does she even watch the news?"
"Go back to where you came from!" I hear a man shout at me as I drop my kids off at school.
I suck it up. I drive to work. Then pulling up to a parking spot at Pitzer, I stop and gaze outside my window. I see a few students linger about or race to their next class. Normalcy seems to abound from all directions. It is not a scary and horrible day at all.
I reach for the straps of my briefcases. They contain my books, my notecards, laptop, audiovisuals, student essays, research bibliography, poetry sketches, and conference paper drafts. With the strength of my upper and lower arms, my wrists, and my back, I face another day in the hallways of my hell.
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