It was her first work drinks, she was so excited. She dressed carefully, she wanted to hit the right note, sophisticated, cultured, a little bit corporate but mostly sexy. Fuck she thought to herself, sexy! Remember that ? Vaguely, but it was attached to a version of herself that was a little bit hard to remember, a version of herself that took autonomy for granted, not to mention a firm ass and perky tits.
She had been with the company for a few months, and it felt like people really liked her. They thought she was funny, they liked her sass. She had grown bold with the beginnings of new friendships and she started to come out of her post baby post career rescue-dog shell. She started to flex some feminine muscle, she was good with the arch retort and the challenging flash of dark eyes. She knew her lips were a topic of discussion.
Several people including the Charmaine, the resident MILF with attitude who flirted with everyone, had mentioned the aphrodisiacal effect of her lips. “Really? I’m 39 and I have sexy lips?” The lips became her thing, collectively appraised and approved. Yes! They were “sexy” so she was sexy and therefore she fit. She felt younger, and admired and she was proud of herself for the first time in a long time. She was a 39 year old mother of two, who had no reason to brush her hair other than Christmas Easter and the occasional adult birthday in five years. The minute she got the job she’d started shedding weight, looking younger, feeling friskier, feeling like a person in her own right and she loved it.
After years of loneliness and isolation stuck at home with shit part time “sales consultant” work at serfdom rates, she felt like she had finally made it back to the party. Like a woman clinging to a frayed palm frond floating in the flat dirty mediterranean for five amorphous years of sleep deprivation, nappies and food smears, who finally lands on a tropical island to be greeted with mocktails and flower necklaces. She felt younger, and admired and she was proud of herself for the first time in a long time.
As a mostly invisible 39 year old mother of two, she had gained weight, she drank too much, she ate kids’ leftovers and told herself it was all part of the washing up. She wore ugly clothes because there was no reason not to and she had precisely two friends in her adopted “family friendly” home town, both in the same boat. She trailed around after her husband at family gatherings, listening to him being asked about his work and his life. She got asked if the children were sleeping, eating, how their tonsilitis was, how they went at Tiny Tots, did they like finger painting or play dough, was she tired, she looked tired, she must be tired….
The minute she got the job she’d started shedding weight, looking younger, feeling friskier. It seemed to her like there was a earthiness to the atmosphere around her that she liked and felt comfortable in. She felt like she was at last going to make some friends. She was so grateful. She loved every minute of it, the long Saturdays working together, dealing with dickheads together, being bored as bat shit together. It was like being in with the naughty bunch at boarding school but better. Then the invites to the pub, the raucous banter, the evening crew, the in crowd, she was invited to on the balcony of the most popular and “sexiest” director for beers and a durry, by invitation only. She was smart, and he was the only one in the place that had a degree like her, they played in words, they seemed to click. She liked the way he looked at her, it made her feel like she was fun.
The big boss made it clear she was different, with her experience and her early signs of talent he said she would go far. She liked the intimate talks about her plans, about her future. He made it clear he recognised and appreciated her difference, her class, her intelligence, her dedication to being the best she could. He made her feel like she had a very bright future, he told her she would go far and she started to believe that maybe she could. She felt grateful and beholden for the chance, as a mother to work hours that meant she could still do weekday pick-ups, clean the house, do the shopping, wash the clothes and all the things she couldn’t on a working Saturday. She knew she was going to be good. She felt like she belonged.
She did well, she kept her head down but went along to the casual gatherings of the chosen few, she started to realise she was being invited to be part of “the group”. She didn’t realise at the time how much that meant to her, having moved to her husband’s town, having to live his family traditions, his family birthdays, BBQs, his Easter and his Christmases. She got home to hers, but it was always the exception. And difficult with her new career that relied on weekends and evenings and as a woman establishing herself she had to sacrifice those times to cement her career now. She was up to the challenge, happy to prove herself for the chance. She felt she would be rewarded for doing more, working harder, producing more, and expecting excellence of herself..
She loved how alive she felt, how connected to these people who she had known for only a few months but seemed to be everything she had missed out on in her first five years in her adopted town. The hours meant time away from her small kids and her husband but she secretly admitted she didn’t miss them enough to care, she felt guilty that she cared so little but she still didn’t care. She liked it, the recklessness of staying out too late, drinking too much, getting loose with flirty, dirty language and badly behaved middle aged men. It was fun, yes it was!
She loved the confederacy of bad behaviour, theirs was an industry known for the worst so why not make the most? The white lies to the spouse about late meetings and training conference while the team clapped their hands on their mouths and tried to stay quiet. The hilarity of watching a magotted mate weave his way to his car, the half hearted pleas for keys and a phone to call a cab. It was like uni, but everyone was a grown up right? Everyone worked so hard and everyone deserves some fun right? She thought it felt like freedom, she thought it was independence, she became proud and protective of her new tribe. She tried to explain but her husband just didn’t understand the attraction, but they needed the money.
Yes they were vulgar and mouthy, they were sometimes overly sexual, everyone knew sometimes jokes went too far but nobody was offended, everyone was a mate and a good sport. And anyway, she thought it was grown up to speak this way, wasn’t it, to be confident and brash and make everybody laugh? She was sure it didn’t bother her, and she liked to be liked, to be part of the group. Yes! She was part of the group, they were her friends! It wasn’t her place nor her inclination to challenge any of the over the top behaviour, she was in their world and she couldn’t see then that if she had a chance to think about it, she might have been worried by just how desperate she was to stay.
And here she was, in her slim fit shirt, with her newly waspy waist and her still fullish breasts attracting admiring glances. Her shirt wasn’t short but it was tailored over her rump and she knew that there was regular assessments of all the rumps under 50. When the team filed into properties or walked back to their cars, when the women came in one by one to the team meeting, she knew there was discussion in the cars amongst the men about rumps, and lips.
She really was hoping her rump made the grade, she was older than the some of the other women in sales and management and it felt like a win. She was a lot older than the ranks of young admins, who seemed to rotate through the multiple offices, with dizzying regularity and she felt like she had to keep up higher standards as a result and so dressing for work was another bar to set higher. She knew they were young, they were obligingly sweet and more ornate but she felt confident that they lacked some of the boldness and risk taking behaviour that seemed to win her points.
The top dogs waved her over at the party, keen to get her a drink and say hello. Some of them they had brought their wives. It was drinks, the first of the warmer evenings, they were outside, in a dimly lit area of the beer garden. It seemed quite dark, with dramatic shadows and people she was just beginning to know looming up to call her name, kiss her, draw her into the circle. The “sexiest” director, the larrikin, the “scholar” who had failed at an outback teaching job abd was an accidental rockstar called her over to meet his wife. But not before he found her in the crowd, gave her an appraising look up and own and cocked a knowing and quizzical eyebrow.
I see you, he was saying, in fact I think I can see through those clothes, and I don’t think my wife can see me doing it either..but we both know don’t we?, said the eyebrow. He made her laugh, he was like a naughty, dirty child, the kid who wants to show you his Dad’s Playboy collection, the one who was very likely to say “ I’ll show you mine….” She thought they had a bond, in their education and their experience, their love of books and music, she liked the flirting, and she liked him. She was glad she told herself that her bosses were such regular people, that they drank and swore and behaved badly, she was so glad these people liked her and she could finally have some people of her own.
The party got rowdy, there were jokes and impersonations, there were hilarious stories of near misses with keys locked inside houses, Saturday morning hangovers and strategic vomiting before appointments, irate asshole clients and faggoty competitors who dropped their pants for a fee. The language was colourful, untethered, and amped for maximum performance value. It was like a party drug, the speed of the wit and the exchanges between competing bantam cocks. She was alive and she loved it.
Someone called her over. Andrew had something hilarious, he was showing the “sexy” director who clearly was the arbiter of what was good enough to share amongst the clowning, hilarious crew of pranksters. He was leading the pack, letting off steam and claiming the right to decompress without boundaries. A few guys were crowding around Andrew, looking over his shoulder, a couple of them seemed to peer closer then both made slightly disgusted “awwww” noises and tilted their heads away from the light coming from his early Noughties flip screen. They moved away and then looked up to see who had been watching them, they saw her. Come here they said, and beckoned her over as they laughed and groaned at the same time. You have got to see this they said, oh my god you have to see this!
“Sexy director” was still standing next to Andrew, he was not making any noise, just a chuckle and a grin and the slight sardonic shake of the head to show he wasn’t the owner of this stuff, it wasn’t him but he definitely had the ticker not to look away. His wife was in the bar or talking to someone, she can’t remember but she wasn’t there. She hadn’t really understood what they were looking at, didn’t get the joke as she made her way over to Andrew and the phone. She wasn’t hearing the words or connecting properly with the reactions. She was expecting to see what she saw. She was expecting a bad joke, a toddler fall out of a swing, a dirt bike flip and bounce it’s rider int a lake.
She was expecting to see something lame, in the way that so much men’s humour is lame and unsophisticated, and to react in the way women have for time immemorial learned to. With a hearty yet hopefully unencouraging laugh, to pay the social debt that unfunny white men are owed without question. To get it over and done with, to spend as little time as possible dwelling on their mediocrity, and their entitlement to laziness, incompetence and constant attention, while you the fucking work. She was expecting the work version of a Dad joke, in her case a Dad joke for 16 year boys, she knew they were immature, but she blamed their lack of education and the cultural poverty of their backgrounds. She knew she couldn’t be a snob and fit in with this crew. And she didn’t want to, she wanted them to like her.
So she went. And she looked. And in the phospherence of the screen she made out two white figures. For a moment she had a flash of Princess Leia pleading Obi Wan. The light was bright in the dark and her eyes took a few seconds to see the shapes in contrast, to pick out the forms in relief. On the right was a large white figure, it was moving rythmically, slowly, it wasn’t a person in a robe, it was a horse! A large bright white horse on it’s hind legs. It’s front legs were placed on high shelf, she wasn’t sure why at first but it was definitely a horse and had looked like a man because it was “standing” on its hind legs.
She looked for what seemed an eternity, she saw the horse, she could see it was doing something on its rear legs, and slowly like a fog clearing her brain made the connecting. In front of the horse, facing the shelf was a woman. The woman was white too, dark hair, no face but a long naked back, luminous in the light..
She felt something hot start to rise in her, she had drunk a few glasses of wine and had been feeling light and free but all of a sudden she felt a frightening heat in her chest, and a weight in her belly. Her chest got tight, she still couldn’t understand why, what was so funny about a woman and a horse? She started to understand that the women was being forced on to her tip toes, she was being penetrated by the horse. As she watched frozen, and horrified yet unable to act in any way other than to stare, the horse lunged forward with sickening regularity, the woman visibly straining against the force.
“Ah ha ha ha” “ Fuck no” “That’s sick” she heard, as the woman flinched and braced for the force once again of the the sixteen hands of erect horseflesh. The horses penis was now quite obvious to her. It was shocking, and disgusting and yet the atmosphere was electric. The pack was gathered and the shared horror of watching the degradation of a human and an animal created an energy that made it impossible to break out of the ring. She couldn’t speak, she shocked herself, she was always speaking, always prepared to pipe up, take them on, have joust. She didn’t speak. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t. No, she hadn’t. Not a word, not an inch. Frozen.
The big boss, arrived with his wife and Andrew hastily put away his phone while everyone gathered around to hail the chief. The “sexy director” winked at her. She felt her head thrumming and the nausea filled her throat..she stood there and one of her new friends, younger than her but admiring and affectionate said “Andrew is disgusting isn’t he? Let’s get a drink”
I stayed in that job for the next 10 years and that was just the beginning. I hate myself for what I didn’t say and what I didn’t do. I hate myself for watching that woman and that horse and being weak and afraid. I hate myself for not understanding that what I was being shown was a culture of hyper sexualised misogyny. I hate myself for not speaking up, or quitting the next day. I hate myself because by saying nothing, I signed up to be bolied in it, one degree at a time, one day at time for the next ten years.
#metoo
