MY SEXUAL HARASSMENT STORY

(For free downloads of the Hot Plate! show, please email karlstraub@hotmail.com. He'll respond pret-ty quickly, unless he's in the shower or something. Even that loophole will close soon, as he's looking into a new app that allows extreme entrepreneurs to retain full phone functionality even in the shower.) 

For what it’s worth, I’ve resisted posting this. For several reasons. The one that seems most admirable to me is that I don’t want to trivialize what women are talking about. Over the years,  I’ve heard stories from numerous women who’ve been raped, enough to convince me that these crimes are much more common than we want to admit. And the various campaigns encouraging women to tell their stories about rape and sexual harassment have piled up a disturbing amount of evidence. It sometimes seems as if women posting about this stuff are rushing through their lists of horrors, lest they give the impression that their lives have been filled with little but sexual assault and harassment. 

  My experience doesn’t compare to any of that. 

  And yet—two things have caused me to write this. 

  One is that my friend Layla has said that she won’t tell her stories until more men tell theirs. She feels strongly that many men have these experiences too, and are even more unlikely than women to tell them. I expect that men have confided in her because she’s a person who radiates integrity and empathy, and she makes them feel safe. She’s also a person whose disgust for injustice causes her to angrily draw lines in the sand. I’m not so much like that— people who know me, or my writing, know that my preferred tone is martini-dry sarcasm, and that doesn’t feel right to me with this topic. So saying nothing felt right. 

  But even Layla’s passionate post about this wasn’t quite enough to get me to speak. The thing that eventually became the thumb on the scale was how I felt when I started thinking about whether I should tell my story. 

  I feel a lot of things. I like to tell myself it wasn’t that big a deal, especially compared to what almost every woman in my orbit has gone through. I also like to tell myself that I’m basically over it. It was a long time ago, nothing particularly heinous happened to me, I was never physically touched, it was more annoying than scarring, etc. etc. etc. 

  At one point, I made the mistake of actually imagining what words I would literally use to talk about it, if I talked about it. This was my downfall. 

  Americans are fond of the construction “There are no words.” You’ll never hear Karl Straub say that, though.

  This is because there are always words. I have more words than the Augean stables had manure, and even Hercules couldn’t divert a river large enough, and roaring enough, to wash away them all. All of you have them, too, if you stop to think about it. 

  When I imagined what words I’d use to tell the story, I immediately started worrying about all the people who would be mad at me over what I would say. Even now, as I inch closer to telling the story, I worry about whether an entirely honest expression of how I felt and still feel could lead to legal action. 

  That’s because, I was forced to conclude, I’m still angry about it. 

  Decades ago, I used to work at a retail store. This store is now long gone, but many people who worked there (including some I’m still close to) have nostalgic memories about it. 

  I don’t. 

  This is for a lot of reasons, but one of them is my experience with sexual harassment.   

  In my younger days, I had a certain amount of sexual magnetism. (Normally I’d encourage you to laugh at that statement, but not in this context.) 

  I had a rock and roll band with a tiny cult following, I had long hair, and I was intermittently amusing. I also wrote some songs that affected some people emotionally. 

  For these reasons, I had a couple of stalkers. One I won’t discuss, and the other I’m forced to mention elliptically because she’s at the core of this story. She was my immediate boss, she hit on me, I politely declined, and then the trouble started. 

  I don’t remember now how long the toxic behavior lasted. Three weeks? Longer? The number of weeks escapes me, but each week was forty hours of her making my life extremely unpleasant. Eventually I realized that I had to report this behavior. (I’ve forgotten the chronology, but all of this was right around the time of the infamous Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas episode, and at some point I realized that sexual harassment was what I was going through.) 

  Rather than give details, I’ll tell you that I used to stare at these heavy magnets we had at the store for demagnetizing security strips that would set off our alarm if someone tried to steal something, and I’d fantasize about smashing her in the face with one of them. Suppressed murderous rage isn’t typical for me, but it sure felt normal then. I think I might have even mentioned it to someone at the time. 

  I don’t have any more anger for this woman now. Some may question my feelings about her, but I basically feel sorry for her. She was hardly an example of a powerful and successful person in the Harvey Weinstein mode. Far from it. And the behavior did eventually stop. 

   No thanks to the company, though. My higher-up boss went to a meeting of her bosses and told them what was going on, and she came back with their response, which was essentially “Deal with it.” The harasser in question was a more valuable employee than I was, so they weren’t willing to do anything about the situation. I was told that I would need to learn to get along with her. I suppose it might have seemed less awful if I was told in a nice way, something like “I know this is fucked up, but they’re not going to do anything. I’m sorry for what you’re going through, but that’s what they said.” That’s not the way I was told. The tone I got was that of a stern parent talking to kids fighting in the back seat on a car trip. 

  So I’m not really angry about the behavior any more. I’m angry about the way those cowardly assholes treated me. 

  It’s much easier for me to hate the men who’ve abused women I love than to hate my “abuser.” I’m even putting the word in quotes to emphasize my ambivalence. 

  But those weasels who weren’t willing to even scuff their meal ticket in order to do the right thing in my case— that’s a different story. We hear about these people all the time, it seems. And the outrage toward them is generally selective. It’s like a Starbucks of outrage where you can order with such quotidian specifics that the final product, far from resembling the cups of coffee of my youth, seems to go against nature. 

  Did a guy protect a child molestor? He’s obviously a monster. Oh, but he also won a lot of football games? Hold on, I need to adjust my moral compass. (North will henceforth be known as “north-ish.”)  Did a powerful organization shelter hundreds of pedophiles? Clearly, the men responsible should go to jail, and the company should be dismantled. Unless it’s a company that is charmingly dedicated to morality, myth, and superstition, in which case I need to re-evaluate. Does a man have a history of accusations of sexual harassment and even assault? I’m disgusted. Unless he’s running for president, and saying things I like to hear, forcing me to question the veracity of the gals who are accusing him. 

  Are all of these examples of hypocrisy equal? I don’t know. I hope they aren’t, because it’s the idea that they are not which keeps me from feeling like I’m just as bad as the hypocrites I’m calling out. When we’re listing all the hypocrites on a wall, please chisel my name in smaller letters, with an asterisk, so it’s clear I’m not quite as hypocritical as the other hypocrites. 

  If I’m less hypocritical, it might be because as a leftist I have love and respect for precious few institutions. Not because they don’t represent anything I value; it’s more because while paying lip service to integrity or honor, they privately decline to do the honorable thing in situations where their institutional reputation or their wallets might be tarnished. And this is where, like Layla, I will draw a line in the sand. I’m waiting for these institutions to surprise me by earning my respect. (Note to future people— I type this in 2017. If you’re defying statistics by reading this in a future year, ask yourself if this piece is dated at all. I hope it is.)