It’s four o’clock in the morning. Sleep eludes me. I can’t stop thinking about her, the intelligent middle-aged woman who sat where 27 years ago Dr. Anita Hill sat facing some of the same men – white, powerful, aging men. One of them, Orrin Hatch, stands out in my memory, in the ways he belittled Dr. Hill’s story of sexual assault as “too contrived,” and accused her of enjoying the publicity.” Now 84 years old, he told reporters yesterday that he found Dr. Ford “attractive, a good witness,” clarifying that by “attractive,” he meant “she’s pleasing.”
Pleasing.
He just doesn’t get it. What he gets is reducing a woman to her physical appearance. What he gets – and what his colleagues get – is the power of optics. So they put their heads together and came up with a plan to hide behind Rachel Mitchell, a female sex crimes prosecutor from Maricopa County, and let her ask questions that, in the end, I’m guessing won’t matter. Make no mistake – her presence was their way of glossing over a truth that I feel in my bones, because these men are just as nonchalant about allegations of sexual misconduct as they were in 1991.
Yesterday and later today, I know these GOP senators will likely defend Kavanaugh. They will circle their tired old wagons around the misogyny and patriarchy that led to the tremble in Dr. Ford’s voice, a tremble I’ve heard in my own voice and in the voices of the women who have filled my world over these past five decades – my mother, my daughter, my cousins, my friends and colleagues, strangers who’ve shared confidences with me on buses and trains, in beauty salons and hospital waiting rooms. Every single one of us, at one time or another, recollecting trauma, summoning bravery, knowing our place, trying to please, fending for ourselves.
And what of Dr. Ford, whose circumspection and grace will stay with me for a long time, in stark contrast to the histrionics of an angry, defiant nominee and his most vociferous defender, Lindsey Graham? She is the embodiment of a lesson in civics, coming forward because she cared that the Supreme Court of these United States, the highest court in the land, is poised to include in its number two accused sexual predators.
I’ve heard that tremble before, and even though a strange man in a social media rant accused me of lying about my own #MeToo story and being disrespectful to Kavanaugh because I “lumped him in” with Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, I remain convinced that what Margaret Atwood says is true:
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
While we wait, resigned to the likelihood of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I’m beginning to believe that some of these men hate women. Six of them in particular. And, here’s why. In 1994, three years after Dr. Anita Hill sat in the same seat occupied by Dr. Christine Ford yesterday, Joe Biden and the late Louise Slaughter drafted the “Violence Against Women Act.” It was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and was reauthorized in 2000 and 2005. In 2013, these six men voted against it, the same men who defended Kavanaugh yesterday.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas
Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah
Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
For longer than my daughter has been alive – and she will be voting in November – they have shown us who they are and who they care about – themselves and the ideals of their tired old party.
It’s not too late for them to do the right thing. Over to you, boys.
Today 81 year old Bill Cosby is waiting to learn his fate, facing up to 30 years behind bars for three counts of aggravated indecent assault against the woman whose allegations led to the criminal case against him. He continues to deny her allegations and those of the scores of women who came forward against him. Remorseless, he maintains to this day that the sexual contact was consensual. Of course he does.
Meanwhile, Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court grows even more troubling, with new allegations of sexual misconduct that he vehemently denies. Of course he does. There are some Republicans defending him. It’s embarrassing to hear their dismissals of his conduct thirty years ago as something that “boys do in high school.” Others, including the President of the United States are dismissing the allegations as “totally political” going as far as to call Kavanaugh, “a fine man, with an unblemished past.” Well, Mr. President, your “fine man” has a past that includes a disrespect of women, his antics at Yale with his Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brethren memorialized in a photo of the DKE brothers waving a flag made of women’s underwear reportedly collected from women’s rooms while they were in class. Trump’s ‘fine man,’ Kavanaugh, also belonged to Truth and Courage, one of Yale’s secret societies for Seniors. An all-male club, it was also known by the nickname “Tit and Clit.” Noteworthy and important in light of the current allegations against him it is part of his record, and I’m at a loss as to why the character and record of a Supreme Court Justice nominee has been deemed irrelevant by those defending him.
Naively, I thought the Harvey Weinstein story might purge forever those predators and perverts and power-crazed men from Hollywood or Washington DC or my hometown in Northern Ireland. It didn’t. Such men still lurk around the corner – on Wall Street and Main Street, in the White House and the schoolhouse, in our churches and our universities, in the military and the media. And given the response on social media of thousands of people who are sharing their own sexual harassment experiences with the #MeToo hashtag, such men have been there for too long, their abuses of power and women camouflaged by the sad and systemic complicity of others.
The first time it happened to me, I was walking home from school with a friend. It was dusk when a young man emerged from the shadows at the end of the Dublin road, pointed to his open fly, and asked us if we wanted to play with his furry friend. My friend and I ran home. We were afraid, but we laughed as though we weren’t. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell anyone until right now. All these decades later, I remember the chill in the evening air, the sneer on that stranger’s face, and the panic over not being believed if I told anyone. So I learned to keep secret the fear that it was my fault or that nobody would believe me.
As Kavanaugh’s history unfolds, I also find myself recalling, with some disgust, the time a male supervisor, a public educator, conducted his annual employee appraisals with all his female subordinates in a local coffee shop. Except for mine. His assistant, a woman my mother’s age, scheduled my evaluation in the bar of a nearby Holiday Inn. It shocks me now to admit – even to myself – that I showed up for it. Even though I knew he was out of line, I was afraid. I was too intimidated to confront him, to ask why the different venue for me. And I was too scared to tell his superiors or to confide in the other women – my peers. I didn’t even tell my husband, afraid of the consequences he would deal out to this misogynist. While this man did not touch me, he succeeded in demeaning me, making me feel different and uncomfortable, seated with his arms behind his head, comfortable in his own skin, talking quietly to me presumably to make me move closer to him. He’d ask, “what do you have on?” And when I appeared confused by the question, he’d follow up with, “Duh. Your perfume.” I remember how he questioned my body language and wondering if he had ever commented on the body language of a man in my role. And then I’d resume my default position – “It’s not a big deal,” I told myself. So he got away with it just as he had previously (I later learned) got away with similar behavior towards other women.
Such an experience taught me to run when I was afraid, a lesson that has been reinforced during the course of my adult life. Looking back over my first twenty-five years in America, I remember how I used to spend an hour each weekday afternoon, watching Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. It was Oprah who taught me about Gavin de Becker’s “Gift of Fear” – a book written the year my daughter was born – and how to predict dangerous behavior and how being nice does not pay:
Niceness does not equal goodness. We must learn and teach our children that niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction. It is not a character trait. People seeking to control others, almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning.
Later, if ever I were kidnapped, Oprah taught me that I should remember Sanford Strong’s Rule #1: to never let myself be taken to the second location. These and other such lessons I passed down to my daughter, hope burning internally that she would never need them.
My daughter sometimes tells me that when faced with a challenge, she copes by weighing it against the worst thing that has already happened to her – the death of her daddy and the missing constancy of him. Other men, good friends of mine and my own father, have tried to fill the gaping hole. Kind. Watchful. Funny. And – perhaps afraid that I might fall apart as her only parent, more aware than I of my own fragility – they are there for her. Just there.There, sitting under a Jacaranda tree with her as she held her dying cat; there, cheering her on as she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma; there, teaching her to drive; and, there, making a day in December feel almost like Christmas.
Between us, we provided a safe and soft place for her to fall. Prior to milestone moments – Father’s Day, his birthday, the holidays – we are extra vigilant, more active on her Facebook page with supportive comments and ‘likes’ and jokes we hope she will appreciate. Stupidly, however, we do not expect to be broadsided, as we were by a moment in a department store fitting-room where she works part-time.
My daughter is kind and warm with a personality made for retail. She’s good, but she is also nice. A college student, her first part-time job was in a local department store where her managers often assigned her to oversee the fitting room. Patient and pleasant, a pleaser, she was the perfect store associate to calm customers harried and in a hurry to find something that fits. To her embarrassment I’m sure, I went into the store one Sunday r and – worse – I even tried on clothes, so she could not avoid me, the way we avoid our parents when we are so “over them.” I remember that I didn’t notice the numbers scrawled on her hand, I was too busy embarrassing her the way I used to do when I dropped her off at junior high. Mortified that her friends might hear “my music” on the radio, I remember she would turn it down before getting out of the car. Then I would wait until she was on the sidewalk, turn up a Tom Petty tune and yell out the window for all to hear, “I love you.” It’s what mothers do, right?
Mothers also usually know when something’s wrong. I can tell by the first syllable of “hello” when she calls if it is, for example, a day when grief has her in its grip – ‘a grief day.’ I can sense it. But I somehow missed it in the department store that day. I missed it. How could I miss it? It wasn’t until she came home from her shift a few hours later, that she told me. She had written on her hand 4:30 – 4:45, the time period during which a middle-aged man – a customer – had inappropriately touched her in response to her telling him she was sorry the red shirt he was returning hadn’t worked out. She was alone. Vulnerable. Frozen after he put his hands on her, but somehow she thought to inform security of the time so they could check the videotape and “just keep an eye on him in case he came back and bothered anyone else.” Then my darling girl worked her shift for four more hours and told herself that because she was “alright,” management would probably minimize the situation. Nobody came to check on her. She ended her shift, walked to her car alone, and came home to me.
With time to reflect on this, to raise hell, to broadcast it all over social media and report it to management, to confirm that, yes, detectives were looking into it, and to ensure that a policy would be enforced to require at least two employees in the fitting room at all times, the lingering issue remains. There are menacing men who move among us every minute of every day and that women who look just like my daughter – my mother, my best friend, me – continue to be sexually harassed in public places. My girl is now one of those women. #MeToo
I know she is vehemently opposed to “mommy fighting her battles.” I don’t know if she understood I wanted to find that stranger and tear him apart until there was nothing left of him. Nothing. She didn’t hear Gavin de Becker tell Lena Dunham in response to a question about how young women can best protect themselves against violence:
. . . Do not accept the scam that violence is a strategy only understood by men. There’s a universal code of violence, and that’s not a code you have to crack; it’s all inside you. When I used to give more speeches, I would ask audiences, “Is there anybody here who feels they could never hurt anybody?” A bunch of people would raise their hands and say, “I could never be violent under any circumstances.” If it’s a woman, I would say, “Well, what about if somebody was hurting your child?” “Oh, oh, oh, well then I could rip, burn, bite, scrape, scratch, poke, shoot, stab,” and so the resource is in all of us.
That resource is in all of us. Except, we don’t really believe it, do we?
One evening a couple of years ago, I went to a local bar to play pool with one of my best friends – like me, an older woman, or as we like to say of ourselves, “women of a certain vintage.” For reference, a bad thing had happened to me the previous summer, and playing pool became the good thing that lifted me up and out of it. It was a perfect distraction. We found the quintessential American dive bar – a hole in the wall without windows, and oddly smoky even in the absence of smoke, three pool tables, a parking lot aromatic with weed, Bob Seger on the jukebox, and bartenders who tell stories and listen to yours and call everyone ‘sweetie.’ You get the idea.
I had never played pool until that summer, but because of Paul Newman in Color of Money, I had always wanted to. I didn’t even want to be good. I wanted just one time to make that sound – the crack of a great opening break. At the time, I was a long way from doing so. I didn’t know how to hold the cue and could barely make contact with the ball. I love my friend, but she is a lousy pool teacher, so we would resort to watching YouTube videos on our phones or we would ask the advice of guys who brought their own sticks to the bar on League Night, which also happened to be Ladies Night, or on Sundays when it is still free to play. After months of practice and time spent with the man who is now my partner, the man who still quickens my heart and still teaches me how to make the shots he makes me call, I grew less embarrassed by my game. In fact, now that I have a bridge he deems almost acceptable, I win more than I lose – just not against him.
He wasn’t with me that evening when I put up my quarter. Oblivious to my surroundings as I sometimes am, I was only vaguely aware of the young man seated at the bar behind us. Remembering the shape of him now, I recall shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops, receding hairline, slightly overweight. There was nothing remarkable and no hint of danger. I remember half-noticing him talking to my friend, but I thought he was only asking about the boxes from a local pizzeria stacked on the bar and if anyone could have a slice. (Yes. Anyone could.) She didn’t tell me until later that he had rubbed against her and asked if she liked playing with balls. She froze the way so many of us do, later telling me,
Yeah, he hit on the old broad first.
Subsequently, when it was her turn to play, he sidled towards me, and said quietly to me, “Hey, hey, pretty lady. Your friend says you like playing with balls. Is that true?”
Hey. Hey.
Typically, this would have rendered me frozen as I had been every other time something similar has happened, but this time I felt an approximation to violence. A foreign and empowering feeling, it made me neither fear him nor ignore him. Nor did I run away. I don’t know what shifted in me, but something did. Clutching my cue – and wanting to break it over his head – I eye-balled him and never looked away as I told him, coolly and quietly, “Yes. Yes, I do. I love it. But you will never know since you don’t have any. Now get the f**k out of my space.” I almost scared myself.
Now I am no stranger to profanity – I’m Irish after all – but the words came out of me like razor blades, and before I could turn away from him, I watched him slither out the back door. Still, I felt guilty about cursing at him, about losing my cool, and – even worse – wondering if perhaps it had been the way I had smiled, the silky summer top I was wearing, the cut of my jeans, the length of my legs – if it had been my fault. Was it because I was in a bar on a Friday night without a man? He would not have said it had I been with a man, would he? Had I asked for it? Well, had I? And, if I am honest – mindful that I am middle-aged, menopausal and most of the time most likely invisible to men on the make – should I have been grateful for the attention? This is the maddening and shameful contradiction that sends me, recoiling and ashamed, to the disconcerting reality that I am no longer the proverbial spring-chicken, therefore, attention from a young man must mean I’ve “still got it.” Really? Yes, really. This confounds me and makes me want to cry.
Now what? Well, today and tomorrow, I will step out into the world, and I will dress the way I always do. I will “sparkle and enchant” the way I do and risk being called flirtatious which sometimes sounds very much like “you’re asking for it.” My daughter will continue to be good – but perhaps not as nice – to strangers, because she and I have been altered.
Like a thief in the night, those men – and every other entitled man who has ever touched me or taunted me or told me I smell good when I’m standing next to him in line at an electronics store or called me a stuck-up bitch and told me to suck his dick because I didn’t smile back – has taken something from me, from all of us – and we are not sure how or if or when we will get it back. Men like Brett Kavanaugh and Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein know this.
In December 1988, shortly after Candice Bergen showed up as Murphy Brown on American TV, I took up permanent residence in these United States. And for the next decade, I liked knowing I could find her if I needed her on a Thursday night at nine o’clock. Characterized as “Mike Wallace in a dress,” she was tough and didn’t suffer fools. She was, as the saying goes, “one of the boys,” a moniker that has been applied to me a time or two prompting me – then and now – to consider what it means to be a boy, a man. What constitutes “masculine” behavior, especially today when there are men and women defending the alleged sexual assault of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh? Perhaps a new and acceptable understanding will come out of the proceedings – but I’m not confident. In this country, we don’t do well with learning from history. Just ask Anita Hill.
By the time the Murphy Brown show ended in 1998, Murphy had a son, and I had a brand new baby girl. Smitten, my baby made me feel like a natural woman too, but she also intimidated me like no other force in my life – six pounds of pure hope in my arms.
Motherhood exposed a vulnerability in the irascible Murphy Brown, as did the diagnosis of her breast cancer in the final season – a vulnerability that was no match for her big hair or the business-suit armor and the smart-ass attitude. Out of the blue, I would meet a similar fate 13 years later, not fully aware of what the woman who played Murphy knew –
Life is wondrously and appallingly surprising. Anyone who doesn’t know that is unarmed.
Like Bergen, I was an “older” first-time mother. I often wondered if I was up to the task of motherhood. I know now that I was. Like Bergen, I was widowed and didn’t think I would love or trust another man again. But I did, and with every storm that has passed in the past five years, I am reminded of Lou Reed’s wisdom – “There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.”
I’ve missed Murphy Brown and FYI, the magic of which returns to TV this week in The Murphy Brown Reboot and the timing couldn’t be better to reprise the character, who twenty-six years ago was the talk of the country when Vice President, Dan Quayle, criticized her for ”mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.” As an aside, the same guy would come out and praise ”The Osbournes” as a loving example of family values on TV. And, I think we all know how many of his peers feel about Barack Obama, the child of a single mother, who would go on to become President. In its rebuke to Quayle, Murphy Brown incorporated some of his comments into the show, drawing about 70 million viewers.
Perhaps it’s time for the Vice President to realize that whether by choice or circumstance, families come in all shapes and sizes, and ultimately what really defines a family is commitment, caring and love.
This was real news on a fake news show, and its 2018 reboot will continue to grapple with issues of the day – the #metoo movement, fake news, Twitter, the relationship of the Press with the Trump White House, the current Supreme Court nominee, gun control, and immigration to name but a few. Murphy Brown has my attention again. She has thirteen episodes, and you know she’s going to make some noise. I’m all ears.
Yesterday President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins signed into law the Thirty-Sixth Amendment of the Constitution Bill, repealing what have been some of the strictest abortion laws in the world. A historic moment for Ireland, this is also a moment to acknowledge how things have changed for women over the past 50 years – at work, at home, in the bedroom, and even in the pub.
In the late 1960’s, I was a little girl concerned mostly with riding my bike and making daisy chains. I was often oblivious to The Troubles that dominated the news and even more so to the double-standards that affected the women in my life, most of whom were stay-at-home mothers. Most of them didn’t drive, a few worked outside the home, and I don’t remember ever seeing any of them go to the pub by themselves. I know now that this wasn’t because they were too busy doing other things; it was because it was considered unladylike for women to drink beer in pubs – and out of pint glasses. In fact, some pubs wouldn’t even admit a woman unless they were chaperoned by a man, and legally they could refuse to serve pints of beer. It wasn’t until the Equal Status Act of 2002 that this practice was outlawed, thanks in no small measure to women like Nell McCafferty who led a group of thirty women into a Dublin pub, where they bellied up to the bar and each of them ordered a brandy. After the drinks were set up on the bar, the group ordered a single pint of the black stuff. Upon being refused a Guinness by the bartender, the women drank their brandy and walked out – without paying.
The double-standards and the discrimination didn’t stop there. Women working in civil service had to resign from their jobs when they got married, the rationale being that they were taking a job that would otherwise go to a man. It wasn’t until 1977, when I was a teenager, that the Employment Equality Act removed the “marriage bar” for women.
Because of Ireland’s family laws, women had few rights at home.The law did not permit them to seek restraining orders against abusive husbands. Because a woman could not own a home, her husband could sell it without her consent. If she was being abused, therefore, her only option was to leave her home or return to her abusive spouse. Domestic violence in Ireland wasn’t recognized in Irish statute until theFamily Law (Maintenance of Spouses and Children) Act, 1976 with the introduction of the first civil remedy for domestic violence, enabling women to seek a a restraining order. That same law also granted Irish women the right to share ownership of he family home. And it wasn’t until 1985, around the time I graduated from university that Irish women could legally ‘choose’ their official “place of residence.” Previously, it was wherever her husband lived. And, until 1974 with the passage of the Social Welfare Act, only fathers could collect the payment of state subsidized children’s benefits.
This notion that a married woman was considered neither legally or economically distinct from her husband was deeply embedded in Irish law. Thus social and legal inequality flourished – in the boardroom, the courtroom, the bedroom. Women couldn’t sit on juries until 1976, they couldn’t get divorced until 1997, and they couldn’t refuse sex with their husband. It wasn’t until 1990 that marital rape was deemed a crime, and they couldn’t buy contraceptives. The 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalized the import, sale, and distribution of contraceptives illegal. AIDS was now a fact of life – globally – yet the sale of condoms was illegal in Ireland except under very limited stipulations. In 1985 the law was amended to permit the sale of contraceptives to anyone over 18 but only in the pharmacy. I remember finding out that Dublin’s Virgin Megastore was prosecuted for selling condoms in 1991, an illegal practice, until later that same year when the sale of contraceptives was liberalized. By that time, I was far away in America and married. I’m ashamed to say I was unaware of the decades of struggle for all I was taking for granted – contraception, divorce, jury duty, property ownership, pints of Guinness in a sports bar. That struggle was happening in America too.
Fifty years ago, American women were fighting hard for many of the same rights that eventually came to their Irish counterparts. In 1968, there were no federal laws to stop employers from firing a woman if she became pregnant. Most women could not apply for a credit-card without having their husbands co-sign. signature. President Lyndon B. Johnson would eventually sign an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination by government contractors and requiring affirmative action plans for hiring women, and a year later, California adopted the country’s first “no fault” divorce law, allowing divorce by mutual consent. In 1969, the woman who would almost five decades later become the first female presidential candidate nominated by a major political party, Hillary Clinton, was the first student to address the graduation class of Wellesley College at commencement. At the top of the charts in 1968 was Jeannie C. Riley with “Harper Valley PTA,” a catchy cross-over tune that made Riley the first female artist to land at No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot Country Singles and Hot 100 charts with the same song. Written by Tom T. Hall, “Harper Valley P.T.A.” was an enormous hit, exposing the small minds of a small town that is no match for a teenage girl’s widowed mother who’s accused of scandalous behavior because she wears mini-skirts and, in response, shows up at the PTA meeting to call out – by name – every member’s hypocrisy.
Coincidentally, no other female artist would top the charts until Dolly Parton in 1981 with an equally catchy “9 to 5,” an anthem of sorts for millions of middle-class white women who entered the workforce at the same moment when many of those same women were exiting marriages they had entered in the 1950s. And, in the movie of the same name, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda sock it to their boss, showing him and the rest of us that they will no longer be controlled by “a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”
From where I sit today in 2018 America, with a known misogynist at its helm and too many folks clamoring to defend Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against him, I’m angry. We’ve come too far to be controlled by “a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” Let’s sock it to ’em.
“This is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.”
One evening a couple of years ago, I went to a local bar to play pool with one of my best friends – like me, an older woman, or as we like to say of ourselves, “women of a certain vintage.” For reference, a bad thing had happened to me the previous summer, and playing pool became the good thing that lifted me up and out of it. It was a perfect distraction. We found the quintessential American dive bar – a hole in the wall without windows, and oddly smoky even in the absence of smoke, three pool tables, a parking lot aromatic with weed, Bob Seger on the jukebox, and bartenders who tell stories and listen to yours and call everyone ‘sweetie.’ You get the idea.
