When returning to the classroom in a sexually hostile environment and while most professors quip, "I need to finish my syllabus, " or "my books aren't in the bookstore," my concerns were identical with theirs but went far beyond the normal anxieties. My genuine fears included sizing up the perpetrators, their alliances, and their silent observers, meanwhile teaching as though my days in the classroom were numbered.
I soon gained enough perceptual acuity and ease with omni-vigilance that I could soon see around corners and distinguish shadows by the figures that cast them. I could sense but not necessarily process these phenomenon as they occurred.
One by one any semblance of a higher moral authority, from "friends" who watched my mobbing without relinquishing any shred of protection or intervention, to state and federal authorities, courts, agencies, and ultimately a set of lawyers, all attuned to the sound of my misery, cruelly and sadistically turning the tables on me.
I became the target for a growing army of vengeful, angry, and undoubtedly weak moral characters. They covered their ears to the sounds of my misery, averted eyes at the sight of their colleague, neighbor, or fellow human being, never to consider what the toll might be on one so outnumbered.
Indeed, there were women who resented the "attention" I received albeit the attention a cow may receive while being fed to the slaughterhouse.
So too, there were men whose research had long floundered in the provincialism of a disciplinary trend torn asunder by the globalization of fields in which they perhaps felt they'd been antiquated. The brute competition for ideas, methods, and techniques had only a dulling effect on them, privileged as they were above women, by the masculinity they perceived they possessed as a natural outcrop of their biology.
Were I to describe it, this was a world where bench warmers festooned their dreary dilemmas with the avarice of wouldve's couldve's and shouldve's. If they only had a brain.
I soon gained enough perceptual acuity and ease with omni-vigilance that I could soon see around corners and distinguish shadows by the figures that cast them. I could sense but not necessarily process these phenomenon as they occurred.
One by one any semblance of a higher moral authority, from "friends" who watched my mobbing without relinquishing any shred of protection or intervention, to state and federal authorities, courts, agencies, and ultimately a set of lawyers, all attuned to the sound of my misery, cruelly and sadistically turning the tables on me.
I became the target for a growing army of vengeful, angry, and undoubtedly weak moral characters. They covered their ears to the sounds of my misery, averted eyes at the sight of their colleague, neighbor, or fellow human being, never to consider what the toll might be on one so outnumbered.
Indeed, there were women who resented the "attention" I received albeit the attention a cow may receive while being fed to the slaughterhouse.
So too, there were men whose research had long floundered in the provincialism of a disciplinary trend torn asunder by the globalization of fields in which they perhaps felt they'd been antiquated. The brute competition for ideas, methods, and techniques had only a dulling effect on them, privileged as they were above women, by the masculinity they perceived they possessed as a natural outcrop of their biology.
Were I to describe it, this was a world where bench warmers festooned their dreary dilemmas with the avarice of wouldve's couldve's and shouldve's. If they only had a brain.
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