"Women of a certain age" are full of rage and sick of everyone's shit
As British TV presenter Gregg Wallace has discovered
[Non-UK readers: if you don’t know what I’m on about, I’m not going to give the guy more airtime (or have his mug on my page), but if you’d like more detail you can find it here.]
It starts with ‘cheer up, love’. Sounds anodyne enough. But it’s a gateway drug. Because you do, cheer up, don’t you? They tell you, a perfect stranger, to cheer up and you smile, or force a grin, through gritted teeth. They can’t tell the difference.
‘Smile love, it might never happen.’ It takes you until you’re 50 to realise you don’t have to smile, and whether or not “it” has happened is none of their damn business.
‘Nice legs, shame about the face.’ I was 11 the first time that was yelled at me across the street. About the same time I was first flashed as I walked home from school. Back in the 70s, dodgy men with their penises hanging out wandering around the small English town I lived in were ten a penny. Seriously. Nobody even blinked. It certainly wasn’t worthy of mention.
‘Don’t get many of those to the pound.’ Not penises, breasts. Which always led onto
‘Show us your tits.’ Slag if you did, frigid if you didn’t.
‘I would.’
‘I wouldn’t, if you paid me.’
‘Can’t you take a joke?’
‘It’s just a bit of harmless fun.’
‘We’re just having a laugh.’ (At your expense).
‘Bantz, innit.’
‘Where’s your sense of humour?’
‘You’re not one of those humourless feminists, are you?’
‘They’re harmless.’
‘Just put up with it. They’ll get bored and move on to someone else.’ (So that’s OK then.)
‘Grin and bear it.’
‘It’s only words.’ Until it isn’t.
That wasn’t a grope it was an ‘accidental boob graze’.
So was that.
And that.
‘Don’t get in the lift with x.’
‘Don’t stay late on your own if y is still in the building.’
‘Don’t let z give you a lift home after that event.’
You already did? Oh well.
He did? Oh well. Better suck it up.
In fact, better start looking for another job. (You’re lucky to be here and he is the boss/senior to you/the talent - whatever the hell that means - after all.)
And on and on it goes.
Women of a certain age, middle class or not, have been putting up with this crap for decades. Since puberty. Probably even longer. The realisation has just hit that we don’t have to any more. And we won’t. And we don’t think other women should have to either. Whatever their age, race or class. Whether or not you think they’re fanciable.
Got that Gregg?
In 2022, this was the first ever post on The Shift with Sam Baker. Couldn’t be more pertinent today:
And I wrote this just over a year ago. Still enraging, still true:
• I’d love to know how you’re feeling about the Gregg (with two Gs) debacle.
Yes, we are.
I was telling my husband all the shit I had to put up with when I was younger. I lived in a small market town and always had a job in a shop somewhere, so I often had to smile at people when I served them.
As a teen, it shocked me that just a smile was enough encouragement for some.
I had one bloke, someone's Dad, follow me home from my work (newsagents) in his car for months, slowly curb crawling. In the end I asked him loudly in the shop if he would stop doing that, because it was a bit creepy. It stopped.
Another job I had, off-licence, the boss moved the till counter so he had to rub himself against us when he came to empty the till.
I worked in a pub and that was odd, if you work behind a bar they all think you are their property. That got a bit dangerous.
And as you say, the comments from builders, etc, for just being out and breathing air.
In my freelance life, I attend networking events, and those men are still out there, with their little wife-hating jokes, testing the water to see if they have more misogynists in the room - often, sadly, they do.
Yes, our buckets are full. We don't need more.
I followed the Gregg debacle; my reaction was spontaneous nausea and a slight nervous tremor of my right hand because it—all of it—was so familiar. The accusations but also his rapist-brained belief that it was his right. It’s the same somatic trigger response I get when I see a man indicted on 34 felonies, who was accused of raping a 13 year old, who was best buds with Epstein, and he is heading back to Washington where he is appointing men just like himself because this is his norm, they will all protect each other, and they will be on the world stage for another 4 years. I grew up in the 70s, when it was commonplace to see dodgy guys around young girls, their family jewels on display. It was commonplace to be groped (and worse) everywhere from the schoolyard to the subway, and when this happened to me (subway) when I was 12, my mother (a glam queen television singer during the pre-Mad Men era) simply shrugged and said “Honey, that’s just cause he thought you were so cute.” (Many more similar occurrences; many more mother comments, which bordered on a twisted pride, but that’s for another time.) So on the one hand, we have to deal with the act itself and the self-loathing, shame, and fear (of reprisal, of not being believed, of the objectification, of dredging it all up) it engenders, and on the other hand, the utter normalization of rape culture. We’re now at the point where every woman who has endured this shit over and over and is now in blessed middle age understands at the visceral level that no one will protect us beyond ourselves. We’ve had it; we’re done. But look at the American Republican Party and the men who lead it, and look at Gregg (and Bill Cosby, and all the others), and look at Gisele Pelicot, and it’s absolutely evident to me that we will no longer remain quiet, no matter how hard it is for us. And yet, after all this time I *still* have to remind myself that the shame I carry is misguided and misplaced, and a knee jerk response to the sensibility swirling around men that requires their cultural protection, and enables them to continually get away with criminal behavior.
As for Gregg: he is an animal.