Am I making assumptions about someone or some group based upon how they look? If so, exactly how am I acting with this individual or group? Given that I’m a decent person and want to contribute to the greater good, what if I learned more about the daily life experiences of this person or group? Why is it so hard sometimes to simply listen?
These questions represent one basic tool I used in writing The Other Feast, Part III of Miss Experience White, which sketches out stories of prejudice and the determined work of shedding it. Experiencing sexism and misogyny throughout my 60 years turned out to be very helpful in my writing process. Often, I could transpose the objectification and othering.
When the MeToo movement was going strong with women doing inventories and posting on social media, I couldn’t do it, although I am fully credentialed. I became overwhelmed by so much expressed pain; I couldn’t get my list past high school. But now, a few years later, after researching 400 years of American racial violence and genocide, I’ve come to a broader, deeper perspective of what my eighth grade teacher referred to as “Man’s inhumanity to man” (although I’m sure she meant to include women, too.) Here is my list.
Flashes – 2. These were not funny. It’s shocking when a man exposes himself in public. The eye contact is the worst part of it.
Gropes and grabs – more than 6. These are now called “assaults.” I remember feeling stunned when I first saw that word used. Stunned and validated.
Institutional discrimination. Yes. Most memorably in college in the early 1980’s, when the same male professors who complimented me on my camerawork and directorial skills repeatedly advised me to change my plan of being a cinematographer-then-director to being a screenwriter-then-producer. Because of my sex.
Peeping Toms – 2. Scary, creepy. One was a neighbor.
Verbal harassment on the job – I’ll estimate over a dozen times, but mostly by co-workers. Twice by a boss.
Rapes – 2. The first one was in high school when I was too drunk to give consent. The boy told his friends and everybody laughed and made jokes. The second one was a terrifying attack by a sociopathic ex-boyfriend. I did not “quietly submit” as women were instructed to do back then. I lost the fight when he knocked me unconscious. When I came to, he was raping me in a psychotic rage. He threatened to kill me if I told anyone, and I believed him. Decades later, I filed a police report just in case it would help get him convicted for a more recent charge.
Insults, slights, situations of fear... Thousands? Going out of my way to avoid walking past construction sites, carrying a knife or mace in my hand from car to front door, wearing shoes I can easily run in... normal things women do to stave off unwanted attention and keep safe from predators.
Life in a man’s world. Predominantly a white man’s world, and I’m white, too. What do I know about the experiences of women of color compared to my own? A few close to me have provided glimpses by sharing difficult, sometimes terrible stories. Through research, I’ve learned more. Miss Experience White is not my first project about white supremacy because I followed my professors’ advice and wrote several screenplays, including one based upon the activities of a 1980’s white supremacist group. This time around, more than three decades later, I discovered the new academic discipline of intersectionality: the study of how systems of prejudice overlap. Women of color face 2 fronts of oppression at once. It’s beyond my imagination. I’m continuously humbled and inspired by their courage.
Back to my list. I’ve recovered from much of the harm described above. I worked as a stripper for a little while, making a nice living off men objectifying me. Later, I became a member of an artistic community that was as diverse in sexual preference and gender as it was multi-ethnic and racially diverse. Straight whites were at most 30% of our community, and mostly female. It was healing to take a little break from the straight white male world. Also (written about elsewhere), I came into some money, and used this financial privilege for different kinds of trauma therapy, like EMDR. Ultimately, everything becomes grist for the artistic mill of theater, music, and poetry.
I don’t hate men. Not at all! Only a small percentage of men are predators. Most are well-intentioned and gradually coming to terms with how they benefit from living in a sexist society. When I make a new male friend, I want to learn where he is on the sexism spectrum, and, more importantly, how self-aware he is of his bias. That will determine how comfortable our friendship will be. Gender is a complicated issue because we women undeniably have some power in our sex. It’s way too big a topic for a blog.
But nobody said it better than writer Margaret Atwood, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
Today is April 29th, the 29th anniversary of the LA riots immediately following the acquittal of the police officers who battered and beat Rodney King. Driving home from work through downtown Hollywood as the riots got underway, I saw several attempted carjackings. Chaos, rage, and fear were everywhere. When I got home, I watched a news report about Reginald Denny, a white truck driver dragged out of his stalled truck at an intersection in South Central Los Angeles. Live footage shot from a hovering helicopter showed several young men violently attacking Denny. They were performing for the camera; it was horrifying, real time, real life violence. Denny survived, and later said he felt no resentment, that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, pointing out that his rescuer, another trucker, was black, and that some of the doctors who saved his life were also black. That was 1992.
Flashback farther, to 1979, to the cab driver who watched as I walked to his car, who looked at my beaten face in the mirror, who asked if I was sure I didn’t want to go to the hospital, who sighed when I shook my head no, who waited a bit, hoping I’d change my mind... That cab driver was a man. A white man with a kind voice, that’s all I remember.
Flash forward to 2021. After all the research, after the stories I’ve heard, a new question now forms in my mind. Would he have acted the same way if I hadn’t been white?
Milo