NO FUN GABY DUNN

Sep. 14, 2010 at 1:51pm with 56 notes

YOU DUMB FUCKS: Women don’t “provoke” sexual harassment by what they wear!

Once upon a time, I worked in an office in a place where it is not uncommon for it to be over 100 degrees out in the summer. In order to get to this office, I had a 20 minute walk. The dress code in the office was casual — it was normal for men to wear shorts or for everyone to wear flip flops, tattoos were visible, men wore baseball caps.

I, like everyone else in the office, wore tank tops (not spaghetti strap) and sometimes shorts. I saw nothing unusual about this. I worked hard and overtime and was treated respectfully by everyone I came in face to face contact with.

One day, my female supervisor and I were having our weekly check-in meeting, wherein she was praising my work ethic and productivity. I asked if there was anything, even something miniscule, that she thought I should change, just so I would know for the future. After a minute of hemming and hawing and being unable to come up with anything, she finally said:

“Yes, actually. The way you dress.”

I was bewildered. I’d been late for work (by about 15 minutes) a few days the week before so I thought for sure that’s what she’d say but my clothing had never occurred to me. I asked what she meant.

“You’re a young, attractive woman. You have to dress differently than anyone else would. If you keep wearing tank tops, men won’t respect you and women won’t like you, no matter how well you do at the job.”

I was crushed. I apologized profusely but maintained that everyone else in the office dressed exactly as I did because of how hot it was outside. I didn’t like feeling like I was Cerie, the oft-nipple and butt-crack showing intern on ‘30 Rock.’

“It’s not the same for you,” she said. “You have to be aware of that because you’re attractive.”

For those of you who don’t know what I look like, I am hardly a bombshell. I get compared look-wise to a mouse-y Natalie Portman, glasses-faced like Liz Lemon, a real Velma rather than a Daphne for you ‘Scooby Doo’ fans. I’m not ugly by any standard but I’m not going to be turning heads in an office any more so than anyone else would (unless your secretary is Giselle Bundchen or something).

I am young (turned 22 this summer). I naturally have boobs that are on the larger side and therefore harder to cover up but they mostly stay contained. My legs are pale and full of clumsy-time bruises. Seriously, this is not model material we’re working with here.

But even if it was, so what? Ines Sainzs, a pretty blonde female sports reporter from Mexico, was sexually harassed in the Jets locker room while she was trying to do her job. But rather than focus on how men should fucking know how to control themselves in a professional environment, the media is calling into question the clothes Sainzs wears when she reports.

Clad in a white shirt and jeans, Sainzs said she was “dying of embarrassment” as she tried to interview several players who catcalled her. Joy Behar, interviewing her on CNN, got her to say she did “nothing to provoke the players.”

But why the fuck is a woman being asked to defend herself when she was verbally attacked? For what other crime do we so easily blame the victim? I can’t think of one. I understand being responsible (locking your doors so you don’t get robbed, etc) but in a professional environment, a woman, no matter what she looks like, has a right to reasonably expect not to be sexually harassed while she’s trying to do her job.

The New York Post lead on the story reads like a bad romance novel:

Sexy TV sports reporter Ines Sainz slinked into last night’s Jet game in a black minidress with a plunging neckline and matching black stilettos — while insisting that she “felt very uncomfortable” when lusty Jet players made salacious comments about her in their locker room after practice Saturday.

In order to be on TV, she has to be attractive but in order to not get attacked while doing her job, she has to hide her looks? This kind of thinking does a disservice to men as well. It makes them out to be whooping coyotes with no self-control who can’t reign it in during what is supposed to be a professional encounter.

It’s depressing as fuck. Truthfully, even though it would look better with the outfit or even if I just bought some pretty ones and want to feel good about how I look, I sometimes don’t wear the heels I’d want to. It’s because I don’t have the strength on that particular day to flick off every gross dude who comments on what I’m wearing. (And this has been in regular jeans with a regular t-shirt.) Someone explain it to me. What is it in the male brain that just can’t fucking help itself and needs to literally ruin my day with some unsolicited comment?

I don’t think it’s there. I think men can help themselves and these Jets players should be expected to control themselves and the men in my office should have been able to handle a girl in a tank top — and women (my supervisor, Joy Behar) shouldn’t be blaming other women for being the victims of harassment.