Archive | July 2017

Finding the Path Around Self-Created Obstacles

Prepping for For Love of Books and Florida on Saturday (Got your tickets?), working the day job, dealing with the boo boo foot…life has challenges.

The subtitle of this web space is “Finding Inner Strength.” As i see it, that includes overcoming obstacles of your own creation.

For instance, my lack of effective marketing for my books. All on me.

I’m rather pleased with myself tonight. I had 2 issues: bookmarks promoting my Susan Thatcher books that had no contact info and promotional items (chocolate lips) for Monique DeSoto that had no context. No contact info.

Enter QR Codes.

If you’re not familiar with the term, QRs are those boxy-looking abstract designs that you can scan and they’ll take you to a website or a coupon. One of these:

Susan Thatcher QR Amazon or this Monique DeSoto Facebook QR

Yes, they work. Try them.

With the purchase of Avery labels (8293 rounds), I was able to correct both issues – slap a label with a QR code onto the items.

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Chocolate lips become a marketing tool.

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Oh yeah, I made bracelets, too.

Mind you, I’ve been in a funk over the past few days. I haven’t made a lot of money at these signings (but they are fun and I make friends), some of the money that I’d set aside for it had to go to new brakes, my foot is bugging me; I wasn’t into it and was ready to stay home and eat the table fee as a sunk cost. However, with various friendly boots applied to my backside (and some well-timed praise for what I make, book and bracelet-wise), I found it within myself to string together those bracelets, go through extended nonsense with my printer to make those labels, and get out of my own way.

I feel better for having done so. I posted those pictures on the attendee group in Facebook and got an order for a bracelet. Those bookmarks have been bugging me; now they don’t. Scanning the code will take you to my Amazon page where you can buy books. The lips? That link will take you to Monique DeSoto’s Facebook page (and Monique got some inspiration for the next funnydirty short while in the shower).

A couple of Blackened Voodoo Lagers (by Dixie. If you’re not in Nawlins, Total Wine can help you) helped, too.

Sometimes, you need to grab yourself by the scruff and just do it, you know?

 

The Cracks in the Glass Ceiling are from Banging My Head On It

(Let’s be honest; I don’t have something profound to say every time I log in.)

I am a feminist in that “respect until proven otherwise” should be the default setting between the sexes, I believe there is more to me than my reproductive parts (including the breasts) and ability to please a man, that I should get paid the same (perhaps more. I work hard), that all women are capable of making their own decisions regarding their bodies. “All men are created equal” applies to women, too. Of course, the man who wrote that was boinking one of his slaves. Small power disparity there.

I graduated law school and while there, encountered some young men who believed that women were attending for husband-hunting. I shit you not. All the nights I spent locked in my home reading cases, writing papers, and time researching in the library, I should have had 3 husbands magically appear (I wish. They could have paid the tuition for me). Not so much. In fact, I know of only two couples who met at school. In fact, most of the women who attended went on to substantial careers (a few of us didn’t follow the traditional path). So much for that theory.

Is it a male ego thing that they believe women inhabit workplaces  or higher education primarily to meet a spouse (or partner)? Or when women show that they can compete on the same playing field, it makes their balls shrink? Back when I worked for Fidelity (which was  a pretty good place to work), the big deal was to take the Series 7 exam, to be a licensed representative. This is the golden ticket; you can sell securities with it. The guys I worked with would stand around and brag about their scores. “I got 75.” “I got 78.” Well, I took that exam and passed with an 88. The next time the guys were comparing scores, I said, “I got an 88.” They fell silent and one said, “The score doesn’t matter as long as you pass.” I never heard the score conversation again. By the way, another woman who took the exam at the same time got a 92.

I worked in a department that assisted customers with resolving issues. Phone-based customer service. A couple of times, I picked up the phone and had a male voice demand that I transfer his call to a man. When that happened, we were instructed to politely try to get the customer change his mind. If not, we had permission to tell him to hang up and call until he got a man on the line. One time, my friend Jack was sitting nearby and said, “Give him to me!” I transferred the call, and Jack made himself sound like a gay stereotype. “Turbo swish.” (his term) That man called again; didn’t ask to be transferred. We also saw letters. One guy wrote in to object to a woman managing a mutual fund because (and I am not making this up) “All women want to do is go shopping and have babies. They have nothing but babies and clothes on their mind.” The female head of our department was not only a clothes horse, but also pregnant when that gem came in. She handled it personally. No, we weren’t allowed to read her reply.

Another life later at another company, doing a completely different job (due diligence underwriting), one of the men completed 82 files in a strictly data-entry project (“file scrubbing”). I’m pretty good at data entry; consistently clocked at 9800 keystrokes per hour with 0 errors (I could go faster, but I’d make mistakes). The men were marveling at his speed. I was assigned to that project the next day. I completed 127 files. The men fell silent.

I don’t see why I can’t stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone and be accepted. I believe we are all created equal, and that we should treat each other as such, regardless of, well, regardless of anything. One the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma March, someone from the NAACP remarked at the frustration of still having to fight the same battles now because of attitudes that should have died out a half-century ago. It’s the same with male supremacy. That should have died out, probably with the passage of the 19th Amendment, certainly after World War II when women undertook war production (Rosie the Riveter, anyone?). We proved ourselves. And still do.

I still hear, “Don’t let men know you’re smart” or “don’t show the men you can work as well as they do.” My late grandmother, said that in the mid-nineties, in fact. “Boys don’t like it when you’re too smart,’ she said as we were driving somewhere.  My friend sitting in the backseat hadn’t been briefed on how to deal with Gram and blurted out, “That is such bullshit!” My sphincter snapped shut, my grandmother tried to backtrack (Another time, she had to backtrack from saying Tiger Woods had made golf less classy), and my friend is now a partner in a DC law firm (not married, but doesn’t seem to suffer from the lack of a husband).

“Take Your Child to Work” day started as “Take Your Daughter to Work” day. The idea was for girls to see women working and realize that their options were as wide open as their imaginations. But.. the men objected to it as sexist. “Why should only girls get this?” and the effort to show girls what they could be was watered down because men didn’t want women getting ideas. There is a parallel in Black Lives Matter being countered with All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. Dilute the power of the movement.

The attitude will continue as long as succeeding generations are taught these out-dated “truisms.” I daresay it played a major part in the outcome of the 2016 election. Not just who the Democratic candidate was (Sec. Clinton herself is not popular), but I believe a number of people, men and women, did not want a woman as President, regardless of who she was. It didn’t matter that England and Germany had both been lead by women, Margaret Thatcher being in the same hard-nosed conservative mindset as Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the modern GOP. Nope. “What’s going to happen when she has her period?” According to Robin Williams, “intense negotiations every twenty-eight days.”  Hillary Clinton has probably the best resume of anyone who has run for President in the last half-century. Foreign policy experience, legislative experience and relationships, activist First Lady (Arkansas and US), a willingness and capability to tackle the heavy, thankless work of governing. Had she been a man, the results would have been completely different. I know this.

I also know that a day will come where we won’t have this resistance to women as equals. After all, the glass ceiling has millions of cracks in it (3 million more than the current President). Who or what it will take for those cracks to finally merge and break that barrier, I don’t know. But I do know that it will happen.

 

 

 

 

Bitch

Now there’s a fraught word. Technically, a female dog. More commonly, an epithet lobbed indiscriminately at women and at men who are presumed to allow other men to dominate them. And especially men who”allow” themselves to be dominated by women. Aka bitches. “Make ____ your bitch.” Dominate it, with overtones of rape.

I had it thrown at me today, in fact. I went to enter a restaurant, and if you know me personally, you know I have a couple of small fractures in my right foot (tripped over a dog toy and hit my very solid bed frame with my right pinkie toe with enough force to cause not only the pinkie toe break, but also a “buckle fracture” a couple of inches down. If I was the Burgermeister, Meister Burger from “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” I would ban all dog toys from the house. That would cause sad dachshunds. Sad dachshunds are destructive dachshunds. They get to keep their toys. However, this is a detour)

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and a surgical shoe and a noticeable limp when I walk. (The plus side of this is that the plantar fasciitis in my left foot has said “I’ll shut up now.”)

As I said, I was entering the restaurant and a couple was leaving. I was trying to safely navigate past them and thinking that the man (Nope. Not gentleman. You’re about to find out why) looked like Sam Elliott. Image result for sam elliott

 

I got a couple of steps past them, and he loudly said, “You’re welcome” over his shoulder. I yelled back, “Thank you!” and then I heard it float back from him.

“Bitch.”

(The restaurant staff saw this and gave me extra special treatment because – their words – I had “been attacked”)

Not the first time I’ve heard, to be sure. Not the last, certainly. But the widespread use (and yes, I use it myself. I am no angel), I think, points to a thinly-veiled hostility towards women. And the veil is being drawn back.

While I was in law school in Concord, NH (Yes, I graduated and passed the bar in MA. No, I don’t practice), the first time my parents came by to “inspect,” as parents are wont to do, the man who lived next door came out of his house, introduced himself to my father,  looked at me, and proceeded to recite a list of how things were supposed to be done. A few weeks later, I was late to a class, and ran out the door. He screamed at me from his door about how I wasn’t supposed to slam my own door. I yelled back and heard, “Geez, I didn’t know you were going to be such a bitch about it.”

 Bitch: Woman who does not obey orders from random men.

My mother lamented my unladylike demeanor all of the time our lives ran together, from 1961 to 2013. I didn’t like wearing skirts all the time (Mom, I know you won’t read this because you can’t and I know you wouldn’t believe me anyway, but I didn’t like skirts because I didn’t want anyone looking up them, which happened in second grade). I was and am direct (“You’re just like your father!”). I don’t step back and let the boys go ahead and certainly don’t do so with a pretty smile and “that’s okay.” I’m perfectly content with saying, “No” without frills or apology. And I’m perfectly content to enforce it.

Bitch: Woman who does not act soft and submissive.

“Smile more. Women should smile. You look so much prettier when you smile.”

Bitch: woman who does not smile on command.

“Resting bitch face” is a part of the current lexicon. It implies that even in repose, you must arrange your face to make sure you don’t offend or intimidate men. Even when you are working out a a problem (math or logic) in your head. If you’re familiar with the X Men, Mystique, who is a shape shifter, can make herself look like anyone else, but she has to focus and concentrate. When Mystique is at rest, she is blue with textured skin, golden eyes, and red hair.

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The “good” X Men around her prefer her to concentrate.

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Mystique would rather not. So, she’s a bad X Man. She’s a bitch.

I have dealt with office Romeos who stroll from desk to desk chatting up their female colleagues who are trying to complete the tasks for which they are paid. It’s the women who get in trouble. I was working in the branch of a financial services company when a scandal erupted at another branch: one of the salesmen had stalked and harassed the customer service representative, even leaving notes on her car AT HER HOME, making late night phone calls and essentially terrorizing her. When she complained, the company moved HER. Nothing happened to him. I got sent to that branch for a day to fill and I  protested the assignment. My boss, a woman in her fifties who had come up from the “Mad Men” atmosphere, told me to “Shut up. Maybe you’ll like it.”

I have been with other companies, including one very recently, where women were in mid to upper management and treated the women under them in the chain of command like rented pack mules: unreasonably demanding, forcing excessive unpaid overtime, dumping their assignments downward, communicating mostly with threats, insults, and denying opportunities when those women tried to move on. It’s insecurity run amok and about on par with the sexual harassment and discrimination some men dish out. They create a hostile work environment.

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This is a barrel of blue crabs.

If one crab tries to crawl out, the other crabs will pull it back in. Such is the case with some women in the corporate world. Those who have been subjected to the harassment, condescension, discrimination, and diminution for long enough will try to stop those who push back. “Don’t be such a bitch about it.”

Bitch: Woman who stands for her dignity.

We live in a time when fundamentalist Christians with political influence want to undo the progress on women’s from reproductive control (sovereignty over one’s own body), to equal pay, to the right to sue an employer who abides sexual harassment, and, in the middle of the 2016 campaign that stated Trump would lose if only women voted, wanted to undo the 19th Amendment. You know, the one that said women could vote. Yeah. I saw the tweets. They wanted that gone.

Bitch: woman who sees herself as equal to men.

Our current President notoriously talked about forcing himself on women. If women criticize him, he attacks them based on appearance. He’s not the only one. And when I have been attacked for not yielding for not giving pretty smiles and dimples when I’m getting pushed, the inevitable comeback is “Fat, ugly bitch.”

Bitch: woman who will not yield.

Years ago, I would hear “be a lady, be a lady, be a lady.” What I saw was ladies getting pushed aside, treated like dirt, getting their asses swatted by the men doing the pushing, and smiling through it. I know a lot of ladies with substance abuse issues. I got enough beatings growing up to know I don’t like it.  I knew, having been raised by strict, forceful father, that I did not want to yield my power, my authority to another tyrant (“I am the man, and what I say goes.” Fuck you, but that’s another word for another post) simply because of an XY chromosome combination. I like fundamental fairness, and that isn’t it.

It is now, 56 years on this Earth, that I finally see these individual acts coalesce and a pattern emerge. Thinking this should have ended in the early 70s when women marched for their rights. We roared, we made ourselves heard, we got some grudging concessions and three women on the Supreme Court. One Christian fundamentalist who believed women should not work outside the home, despite being a lawyer herself (the hypocrisy kills me), killed the Equal Rights Amendment.

Apparently, it was all window dressing.

Because when I was too preoccupied to acknowledge and profess gratitude to a man holding a door (actually for his wife to pass through), I am a bitch. Because I didn’t want a cranky, insufferable old man dictating how I was to conduct myself in my own home, I am a bitch. Because I don’t smile on command, say “No,” mean it, and don’t apologize for it, I am a bitch. Because I won’t get off a leg press because a man (who had been chatting up a woman on the other side of the gym before he came over) wanted it, I am a bitch.

You know what?

You bet your  ass I am.