That phrase can die in a fire any time now…
the 67-year-old enfant terrible of French letters
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“The number of intentional human-caused injuries just keeps rising. Every year, more and more Americans are hit, kicked, beaten or shoved so badly that the victim misses at least a day of work,” Van Dam also notes.
The burden of this atrocious behavior toward workers isn’t being born equally by all segments of society. Women, who are overrepresented in often low-paid customer service and health care jobs, have it much, much worse.
“Not only are women far more likely to be attacked and injured so badly that they miss work, but almost all the past decade’s increase in hitting, kicking, beating and shoving in the workplace has been targeted at women,” the article reports.
Psychiatric nurses and aides, bus drivers, elementary school teachers and teachers assistants, and nurses and nursing assistants are all among the professions most likely to be hit, kicked, or bitten at work. Almost all of those jobs skew heavily female.
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Guess who else gets CTE, but without getting paid the big bucks?
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Philly’s juvenile-justice system leaves girls out of programs that could help them, new report says
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“While Phillips was on assignment in Iraq — a high-profile gig that Lemon coveted — he vented his disappointment at being passed over by tearing up pictures and notes on top of and inside Phillips’ desk in the news pod they shared, according to two sources who worked there at the time. When she returned from Iraq, things only got weirder. One night while dining with members of the news team, she received the first of two threatening text messages from an unknown number on her flip phone that warned, “Now you’ve crossed the line, and you’re going to pay for it.” Phillips was visibly rattled and quickly enlisted CNN’s higher ups to identify the sender.
Remarkably, the texts were traced back to Lemon, according to those same sources.”
Why wasn’t he fired?
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Sounds like he’s a professional bs artist who knows how to kiss up to management. That management at CNN supports misogyny plays right into the privilege of bro culture. The fact that Lemon is a member of two marginalized groups probably has them more worried that he’ll sue or make counter accusations than they are about how his sexist, predatory, incompetent, and drunken antics reflect on the network. That says a lot about how toxic the work environment at CNN must be for staffers.
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In 2012, a team of population-health experts at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that white women who did not graduate from high school were dying about five years younger than such women had a generation before—at about 73 years instead of 78.
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Fuckery.
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FBOOK sucks, but good things sometimes still pop up there.
When I was a child, i HATED it when men enacted their power over me in supposedly affectionate ways.
“A grown man looms behind my three-year-old daughter. Occasionally he will poke or tickle her and she responds by shrinking. Smaller and smaller with each unwanted advance. I imagine her trying to become slight enough to slip out of her booster seat and slide under the table.
When my mother views this scene, she sees playful taunting. A grandfather engaging with his granddaughter.
“Mae.” My tone cuts through the din of a familiar family gathering together. She does not look at me.
“Mae.” I start again. “You can tell him no Mae. If this isn’t okay you could say something like, Papa, please back up—I would like some space for my body.”
As I say the words, my step-father, the bulldog, leans in a little closer, hovering just above her head. His tenebrous grin taunts me as my daughter accordions her 30-pound frame hoping to escape his tickles and hot breath.
I repeat myself with a little more force. She finally peeks up at me.
“Mama . . . can you say it?”
Surprise. A three-year-old-girl doesn’t feel comfortable defending herself against a grown man. A man that has stated he loves and cares for her over and over again, and yet, stands here showing zero concern for her wishes about her own body. I ready myself for battle.
“Papa! Please back up! Mae would like some space for her body.”
My voice is firm but cheerful. He does not move.
“Papa. I should not have to ask you twice. Please back up. Mae is uncomfortable.”
“Oh, relax,” he says, ruffling her wispy blonde hair.
The patriarchy stands, patronizing me in my own damn kitchen. “We’re just playin’.” His southern drawl does not charm me.
“No. You were playing. She was not. She’s made it clear that she would like some space, now please back up.”
“I can play how I want with her.” He says, straightening his posture.
My chest tightens. The sun-bleached hairs on my arms stand at attention as this man, who has been my father figure for more than three decades, enters the battle ring.
“No. No, you cannot play however you want with her. It’s not okay to ‘have fun’ with someone who does not want to play.”
He opens his mouth to respond but my rage is palpable through my measured response. I wonder if my daughter can feel it. I hope she can.
He retreats to the living room and my daughter stares up at me. Her eyes, a starburst of blue and hazel, shine with admiration for her mama. The dragon has been slayed (for now). My own mother is silent. She refuses to make eye contact with me.
This is the same woman who shut me down when I told her about a sexual assault I had recently come to acknowledge.
This is the same woman who was abducted by a carful of strangers as she walked home one night. She fought and screamed until they kicked her out. Speeding away, they ran over her ankle and left her with a lifetime of physical and emotional pain.
This is the same woman who said nothing, who could say nothing as her boss and his friends sexually harassed her for years.
This is the same woman who married one of those friends.
When my mother views this scene, she sees her daughter overreacting. She sees me ‘making a big deal out of nothing.’ Her concerns lie more in maintaining the status quo and cradling my step-dad’s toxic ego than in protecting the shrinking three-year-old in front of her.
When I view this scene, I am both bolstered and dismayed. My own strength and refusal to keep quiet is the result of hundreds, probably thousands of years of women being mistreated, and their protests ignored. It is the result of watching my own mother suffer quietly at the hands of too many men. It is the result of my own mistreatment and my solemn vow to be part of ending this cycle.
It would be so easy to see a little girl being taught that her wishes don’t matter. That her body is not her own. That even people she loves will mistreat and ignore her. And that all of this is “okay” in the name of other people, men, having fun.
But. What I see instead is a little girl watching her mama. I see a little girl learning that her voice matters. That her wishes matter. I see a little girl learning that she is allowed and expected to say no. I see her learning that this is not okay.
I hope my mom is learning something, too.
Fighting the patriarchy one grandpa at a time.”
~ By Lisa Norgren
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I hope she understands that she can never leave her daughter alone with that man. Not ever
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I hope so too.
A broader issue for me is something like dominator culture, which condones dominant behavior from men who would never be overtly “abusive.” It includes a tacit understanding that it’s fine for men to “play” with children in ways that the children do not want. Things like tickling, squeezing, sometimes painfully, “light” pinching and punching, and so on. All of which continues when a child yells “Stop!”
“Aw, that’s just how he shows his affection.”
And kids can end up liking it, even while yelling Stop, because at least they’re finally getting what seems like positive attention.
It’s a fucked-up dynamic that I’ve seen many times, and endured as a child from several relatives, and from adult male “friends” of my parents. A kind of abuse that doesn’t get recognized as that.
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And doing this teaches children that “no” doesn’t mean “no.” It’s an insidious cycle.
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Yes. Totally agree. This man might not be a sexual abuser of children, though that is how many condition children and test parents. But he will do this again and it is absolutely abuse.
The description of this dynamic makes me feel physically ill. I had men do that to me as a child. I now have a kid. No one should allow this to happen in front of them.
I probably wouldn’t have been as restrained as the author. Family consequences be damned. Worth it to protect my girl
Edit to add:
This is absolutely true. For kids, it is important to nurture a sense of ownership in their own bodies and this does the opposite. So they have the strength to identify when a touch feels bad and say no.
This is particularly important for girls when they are older. Because of the way boys and girls are conditioned, it is easy for a girl to continue to allow a previously consensual encounter to get more serious even when she’s uncomfortable and also expected of a boy to push against nonverbal signals telling him to stop. My goal with my daughter is for her to have such a solid sense of her own bodily autonomy that it is instinctual to shut that shit down with extreme prejudice when she needs to.
It’s important for boys too, but society doesn’t condition them quite the same way en mass the way girls are
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That’s awesome. One thing we tried to do was when our boys said “no” to wrestling or rough play or any of that stuff, we made an over exaggerated show of stopping. Toddler/kids says “Stop!” Parent: [Arms thrown up in the air, body frozen] “Oh, you said ‘stop,’ you bet, right away.” Sometimes they thought it was silly and funny, but it was all we could really think of without getting into a tedious explanation of 4yo wouldn’t understand anyway. Then when they were tweens we said “remember how we used to do that? Here’s why.” The problem is the cultural and societal cues go completely against that.
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