The Undercover Introvert

Sexism 101: Internalized Misogyny

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In case y’all haven’t noticed, we live in a deeply sexist country. I don’t think I really understood the true depths of that sexism until 2016. I knew the country’s founding documents — you know, the ones talking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? — had been written solely to benefit rich, land owning white men. If we look back at the Cliff’s Notes version of our history, black, brown, indigenous, and female folks have had to fight tooth, nail, and whatever else to gain the same access to freedom, education, the ballot box, property, etc. that said men received by virtue of their being born rich and white. These fights are still going on today.

But, I guess what I’m saying is, though I knew we had a long way to go where matters of racism were concerned, I thought we’d gotten a whole lot further along the road to enlightenment where issues of sexism were concerned. I mean, there are lots of white women running around, right? And they benefit from systemic white supremacy the same way white men do, right? Wrong. Their access to power runs through the white men standing next to them. They don’t own it. They only borrow it, which means that access is precarious at best and can be torn away at any moment.

I digress.

Back to the 2016 election. Actually, let’s take it back a little further to the 2008 election. I supported Hillary Clinton from the beginning in that primary. I just figured there was no way in hell this country was ready for a black president. But an accomplished white woman? Now, that was doable. Also, I really thought someone would assassinate Barack Obama, and that feeling never dissipated after he won the primary and eventually the presidency. It only intensified. That was something about which I’m glad to have been proven wrong.

So, naturally, when HRC ran again in 2016, I was a supporter. We had our first black president, which I hadn’t thought even remotely possible, and I therefore thought getting our first female president would be a BREEZE (next step, a black female president!). And when I saw the asshole that ended up being her Republican opponent, I really thought we were in for some smooth sailing. Remind me never to get into the prediction business…

Everything that could go wrong in that race went wrong, but the sustained and scathing media scrutiny of HRC surprised me in a way that it just couldn’t when it happened again during the current election cycle, this time focused on the many women running for the highest office in the land of the free. Because I saw the process clearly for what it was: this country’s collective refusal to accept a woman daring to rise to the highest level, the level reserved for men. That’s what this electability argument is all about, and you’ll hear it trumpeted from the rooftops by men and women.

Madeleine Albright once famously said that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. That hell is happening now. We’re living in it. We were born and raised here. Many of us just didn’t realize the full extent of the shitty landscape until after 2016. I’ve been a proponent of burning down the patriarchy since I understood what it was, but the fact that women might be its most loyal foot soldiers never quite hit home the way it did during that election. I can call it out now because I possess the ability to see it clearly for what it is. But when I watch other women jumping to do the work of the patriarchy and tear down another woman before she rises too high, it still saddens me.

Ladies, we’ve got to talk about internalized misogyny, and why it’s one helluva drug.

It’s bad enough when guys limit us because of our gender, but it’s doubly fucked up when another woman does it. But this happens all the time. Why?

Think of it like hazing. It’s absolute, unmitigated hell to get through, and you’d think, given your experience, you’d never want to pay that forward to anyone else. But you do, and with glee (just an FYI here: I’ve never been hazed, nor have I hazed anyone else; fuck that shit). Internalized misogyny works the same way, except the hazing never ends, even once we start paying it forward to other women. And remember what I said about white women and their proximity to white male power? Well, if you don’t tow the patriarchal line, you might lose some of that power. And that’d be like being forced to sit next to the lavatory in Coach after traveling your whole life in the cushy comfort of Business Class (First Class is still reserved for white dudes only, ladies, sorry). The horror.

Don’t get it twisted. Internalized misogyny isn’t just for white women. It may be a garment that fits them the best, but we have women of color out here wearing it too. It doesn’t quite fit the same way, but we can make it work. And it’s not really surprising. The foundations of this country aren’t just racist. They’re sexist too, and that means we’ve all grown up in an environment where women were judged to be inferior. This omnipresent misogyny infects us, and we eat it up, eventually learning to turn it against each other. The patriarchy hides. It protects itself. And its greatest trick is convincing women that we can’t support one another. It makes us believe that there’s only space for one woman at a time in a position of power, though not the top position. It makes us think that the only road to success runs through other women, that we have to tear each other apart and step on each other’s backs to get to the next level. Success is being the badass exception that proves the rule about female inferiority. Whose rule? The patriarchy’s, silly. It sets the music, and we dance.

But what if we’re tired of dancing? What do we do about it? How can we change the toxicity of our culture? The way we were raised? How we learned to treat other women and girls?

Step one: admit that we have a problem.

Step two: commit to doing something to solve it.

That means policing your behavior. That means challenging those around you. That means calling out misogyny wherever we see it, especially in ourselves and other women. If we can’t be on our own side, how in the hell are we going to deal with any of this mess? This isn’t a quick fix, ladies. But this shitshow didn’t come together overnight, which means it’s not going to be dismantled overnight either. This kind of massive shift in our collective behavior means we have to get used to being uncomfortable. It just so happens that discomfort is the condition for change. And, goddamn, we’re already uncomfortable enough with the patriarchy’s bootheel on our necks. Might as well go for it.

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Angry Women Get Sh*t Done

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Immediately after the 2016 election came to an end and the results were clear, I dressed in all black and began mourning the country I wanted America to be. This wasn’t necessarily the country it was, but the idea of it as a shining beacon in the slowly receding darkness of its own reality. My already flagging hope for the future had taken what I worried was a mortal blow, leaving me stumbling through the next few days as I nursed what felt like a repeated sucker punch to the stomach. But after a few days, that deep sadness morphed into something different.

I became enraged.

I wanted to scream, to burn shit to the ground, to roam the streets bellowing my refusal to accept the country as it was. And that fiery anger led me to do something I never thought I’d do: I got political. I became an active member of my local Democratic Party and joined every other progressive group I could find. That didn’t feel like enough, so I started a grassroots organization with a few other pissed off women that also wanted to get shit done. Instead of howling into the void, we figured out how to make change happen in our community. We built coalitions of other pissed off people, mostly women, and held our elected representatives accountable. When that didn’t work (I’m from a ruby red district in the Sunshine State), we rolled up our sleeves and worked to get local candidates elected. When the 2018 midterm cycle began, I threw myself into working for a gubernatorial candidate and hit the ground running. I’m still running today, and I’m still livid. I haven’t stopped being furious since a few days after November 8th, 2016.

Now, let’s cut back to the present day.

In a recent primary debate, a certain female candidate eviscerated one of her male opponents so completely, I was waiting for someone to hiss FINISH HIM. She then proceeded to carpet bomb the rest of the participants with devastating arguments and critiques while simultaneously making an ironclad case for her own electability. In short, there were a lot of things she came to do on the debate stage that night, and playing wasn’t one of them.

But after that performance, in pure this is why we can’t have nice things fashion, there was quite a bit of buzz that essentially centered on how angry this female candidate seemed, and how that was unfortunate, because this was a contest of ideas and likeability, and no one likes an angry woman. The immediate application of this annoying double standard especially rankled me, considering two of the male candidates spend the better part of their debate performances yelling at the audience, and one of them appears perpetually enraged, as though an entire coterie of grandchildren just ran through his precious flower beds after being repeatedly warned to stay the hell away from them.

Here’s the larger question in all this: why is male anger seen as a sign of righteousness and female anger is seen as a sign of instability?

We’re living in a political climate that’s akin to an endless dumpster fire that just keeps getting hotter and more destructive by the minute. We don’t have time to play nice. I want my presidential candidate to be angry. I want the person to be able to summon the flames of hell if need be, and focus them directly on the problem. This isn’t debate club, y’all. This is a fight for what the soul of our nation could become. It’s a fight for our shared future. Will we continue down this path of destruction and widespread inequality, or will we start to veer in more constructive, equitable, and sustainable directions? We have a man sitting in the White House (or gallivanting about the golf course, more like it) that would use the Constitution to wipe his ass if we let him. He’s damned near doing it now, and his cronies are more than happy to ask how high before he even thinks to demand they jump. This isn’t a drill, folks. It’s a five alarm fire. We need a fighter. We need someone enraged by the status quo and committed to do whatever’s necessary to change it.

The criticisms of that debate performance stem from society’s penchant for only allowing women to operate in one of two speeds, and they just happen to reside at the opposite end of the spectrum: serene and refreshing as a southern breeze or batshit crazy, hysterical, irrational. If a woman shows even the slightest hint of anger, that automatically labels her unfit for certain high level positions for which society agrees men are just better suited. And if she remains sugar and spice and everything nice, well, she’s too soft for those positions anyway, isn’t she? Just leave it to the men, sweetie.

This double standard is amplified to nearly insupportable levels if you’re black or another woman of color. God forbid any woman be angry, no matter the situation, but if she also happens to be a person of color, she’d better learn to balance on eggshells while keeping her emotions locked the fuck down or face swift repercussions.

As is my custom when faced with the worst American society has to offer, I’m calling B.S. on all of this. I categorically reject the implied premise of your argument that this female presidential candidate is unfit because she unleashed her righteous anger on several of her opponents.

This isn’t a tea party. It’s a race to see who is best equipped to do what’s arguably the most important job in the world. And, anyway, world history is basically the story of pissed off men conducting their conquests and wars while women mostly looked on from the sidelines, smiling sweetly as they lay the table for a home cooked dinner. It’s about damned time we have some women take center stage for a change, and if that means slicing through a number of less qualified men to get there, I’m here for it.

I don’t care who you are, what you believe, or who you’re supporting. If you can look at what’s going on in this country and not feel a deep seated, unquenchable rage, then you must not be paying attention. And if you’re still clinging to outdated gender norms, that shit is on you. Women are pissed. We’re running for office. We’re winning. Get over it or get the hell out of the way.

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2020 Burn Book: Men, I’m Lighting You Up

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I already compiled my resolutions for the new year, but in light of recent events, I’m adding one more and moving it to the top of the list:

Men, if you commit sexual harassment, assault, or just general unwanted creepiness, I am calling you the fuck out.

I’m done. Time to burn this motherfucker all the way down. And y’all are on notice. Don’t act surprised when I tell folks how you really are.

First, let’s set some parameters. There’s definitely a spectrum when it comes to creepiness. On one side is unwanted messages from men we don’t follow on social media asking for dates, pictures, to know more about us, etc. Gross, but that’s what the block function is for. On the other side is full on life-shattering sexual assault. In the gray area between these two poles lie microaggressions, gaslighting, unwanted sexual advances, pressure for sexual favors, victim blaming, retaliation, and the list goes on. And on. And on.

Men, if you do any of this shit going forward, get ready to be exposed for the disgusting POS you are. I plan to go out of my damned way to make sure people know.

Why the sudden need to put all of this out there, you ask?

I just got off the phone with a close friend who called me first thing in the morning to tell me about some creep that sexually harassed her at a business meeting. At one point, he followed her into the bathroom, locked the door, and attempted to go even further. Thankfully, she was able to escape. Though shaken emotionally, she said nothing and tried to continue doing her job, which was why she was there in the first place. But this dude wouldn’t stop. He kept making advances and being handsy. When it was finally clear that she wasn’t interested, he ended by calling her a bitch in front of another man involved in the meeting. She left the situation as quickly as possible.

When we spoke, she was angry, frightened, and at a complete loss as to how to move forward. This meeting was about future consulting work. Should she tell others involved in the project? Should she pull out of this business opportunity so she wouldn’t have to see and work with this attacker moving forward? Should she make a big deal out of this? Or just get on with her life?

This helplessness, this terrible, roiling fury that too often ends up turning inward to eat away at us, is such a fucking textbook response to the kind of situation that can happen to women anywhere and at any time. We are always in danger of harassment and assault. We learn to live with it, because what other choice do we have? We teach our daughters how to live with it. We shore up the crumbling defenses of our friends when they take a hit, no matter how severe, and then we do what women have always done: we pull up our big girl panties and we get back to our lives.

It’s unconscionable that we live like this as a culture, that half the population just has to suck it up, buttercup, while the other half gallivants through life, setting fire to the women around them at will.

I’m calling bullshit. I’m not playing the game anymore. I’m done.

While I was talking to my friend, she repeatedly mentioned that she hadn’t been wearing anything that could have led this asshole on (see: appropriate business attire). She mentioned a few times that this was a business meeting that took place in the middle of the day (socially acceptable time for women to assume personal safety). She mentioned that she hadn’t done anything at all to make this POS think it was okay to follow her into the bathroom and then continue to harass her throughout the rest of the meeting (society teaches us that our behavior is directly responsible for how men decide to act). Even as she corrected herself, sometimes mid-sentence, to acknowledge that she understood it didn’t matter what she was wearing or what time it was, it was important to her that I knew she was dressed appropriately and that this occurred in broad daylight.

This call isn’t the first conversation I’ve had with a female friend about a situation like this, and it won’t be the last. Some situations haven’t been as severe, and some have been much, much worse. But the emotional aftermath looks the same in every case: the woman is left feeling helpless, angry, ashamed, and unsure of what to do next. Should she report it? What would happen? Would anyone even believe her? If people did believe her, would they care? What about retaliation? Should she quit her job? Or should she just take a personal day, cobble herself back together again, and then pretend nothing happened?

We should not have to live like this.

This is my solemn oath that if some man says or does something shitty and I find out about it, I will talk about it loudly and openly. I will out you, and I’ll keep telling people until someone fucking cares. If it sets your personal or professional career ablaze, that’s on you. Because women have been paying the high price for men’s decisions for centuries. And silence only helps the aggressor. It allows for the creation of additional situations in which other women are victimized by repeat predators. Even worse, this silence causes our insides to corrode over time. It poisons who we are. It makes us question ourselves and other women. It isolates us.

This bullshit has to stop.

Women shouldn’t be forced to continue removing themselves from professional and social situations to avoid men who have attacked or harassed them. Why do men get to continue on in their lives and careers unhindered by their own behavior? Why are women routinely left to bear the consequences?

I know women who have left jobs, who don’t volunteer with certain organizations, who don’t leave the house at night alone, who refuse to date, because of things men have done to them. I know women who are horrified to learn that I go running alone before the sun comes up, because of what a man could do. But I prefer to run in the dark. Running when the sun is out invites honks, shouts from open car windows, and men pulling their vehicles over for an unwanted chat. I also altered where I run to avoid main roads, which, together with running in complete darkness, has really cut down on the harassment.

That’s the long and short of what women have to do to get by: alter our lives to cut down on the harassment. Choose another route home from work. Quit your job. Start shopping at a different grocery store. Stop taking public transportation. Walk around with headphones jammed into your ears, even when you aren’t listening to music. Move to another town. Don’t make eye contact with male strangers. Only go out at night in a large group. Dress in less form fitting clothing.

But it’s never enough. No matter how disciplined we are in policing our own behavior, we can’t control what men will do to us. Because the problem isn’t us. It’s them.

Men, you are the problem. Your behavior. Your sense of entitlement. Your belief that women are here for your enjoyment. In 2020, I intend to make it my duty to disabuse as many of you as possible of the notion that we are simply receptacles for your unwanted attention, abuse, and harassment. We aren’t in the workplace, gym, store, classroom, social gathering, or wherever waiting for you to notice us. And we aren’t the ones that need to leave a situation after you do something wrong. You are. And, please, let the door hit you on the way out.

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One ‘Year of the Woman’ is Not Enough

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2018 was called the Year of the Woman. The first election cycle to take place fully ensconced within the #MeToo era came to a close with a historic number of women running for office and winning. Many of these newly minted legislators were women of color, and the doors they flung open simply by their mere presence at the table reverberated through the nation’s marginalized communities. As a black woman, I felt the power of it. Representation matters, and I saw more faces that looked like mine in a crowd of lawmakers than I’d ever seen in my life.

More of us are at the table. That means we made it, right?

Well, not quite.

We still have a long way to go before we reach the fabled promised land of racial and gender equality. Last year was yet another baby step in a seemingly endless line of baby steps. Slow and steady wins the race. We step forward twice, get pushed back once, maybe even twice, ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the road ahead of us goes on past the horizon, the goal completely out of sight. No one quite knows the distance between where we stand and where we want to be, but moving forward is the only option, because we know exactly what dangerous territory lies behind us.

Thanks to the many hundreds of thousands of women who came before me, being a woman in 2019 is better, but it’s still not easy.

I may no longer pass from the dominion of my father to that of my spouse, but I’m not paid the same as a white man for identical work.

Birth control and access to safe, legal abortion may give me the kind of control over my reproductive system that women living decades ago could only dream of, but the war on women waged by old white men rages on and, if successful, would leave me with few options that didn’t include being either celibate or perpetually barefoot and pregnant.

I may be able to go wherever I want, whenever I want, without asking any man’s permission, but I’m not safe walking alone after dark, being too friendly to a male stranger, being too dismissive of a male stranger, or leaving my drink unattended at a party for fear of what might happen.

I may be able to set my sights on any job that strikes my fancy, but I can’t be taken seriously in most professional spaces, and I often have to push back extremely hard on men who believe, simply by the grace of their gender, that they are more learned than I am, no matter the subject or situation. When confronted on their mansplaining, most men seem taken aback, because they don’t even notice themselves doing it. Yet it happens ALL. THE. TIME.

And those are just a small sampling of the many complications of being a woman in this country.

When you add being black on top of that, all of the aforementioned difficulties magnify, and the discrimination becomes labyrinthine in its complexity.

After an incident, I often find myself wondering: was this because I’m black? Or because I’m a woman? Or both?

But there are no clear answers, only the dark, ugly feeling of being targeted, humiliated, overlooked, or attacked.

Discrimination exists as a claustrophobic maze for those of us that call more than one marginalized group home, and the uncertainty inherent in its twists and turns often makes it impossible to find our footing. You flounder, you double back, you forge ahead, hoping for something better around the next corner. An exit, though you don’t ever expect to find one.

I live in a country that once owned people who looked like me, and also a country in which people of my gender we never expected to contribute to society in any meaningful way. Women were to bear children and look pretty. Black women were to bear children and toil until they died. And though we’re no longer seen as property or lesser than men in the eyes of the law, we’re still nurtured by a society that views us as fundamentally weaker than men, both mentally and physically. Our bodies are still the subject of a dogged legislative agenda that won’t stop until it completely strips away control over our own reproductive destiny. Our bodies are still seen as existing almost exclusively for male enjoyment.

It would never occur to me to tell a man minding his own business in a public space that he should smile, that he’s good looking, or that I’d be interested in dating and/or sleeping with him. These are all things I’ve heard from complete strangers, and not just once. Not even just a dozen times.

It would also never occur to me to interrupt a man who was a subject matter expert because I assumed I knew more than he did, though I was not a subject matter expert, nor was I invited to speak on the topic. Yet this is also something that happens to women with annoying regularity. Even when we are speaking about our unique experiences as women in the world, men will often dive headfirst into the fray to talk over us, muscling their way into a conversation that shouldn’t even feature them.

Again, these are just small things, but if you add enough of them together, they become weights heavy enough to hamper our upward mobility and obliterate our spirits.

So, yes, let’s celebrate 2018 as the Year of the Woman. But let’s not forget that there have been thousands of years celebrating men, their achievements, and their exclusive centuries’ old dominion over the world and all the women in it.

We women can’t be content with a single year that only sees our total representation in Congress reach 25% while we make up more than 50% of the population. We have to keep pushing until the many layers of glass ceilings shatter, and we can breathe the fresh air and feel the full strength of the sun on our faces.

The thought of a world in which the full range of possibility and promise isn’t limited on the basis of sex, race, disability, who you love, or how you self identify is what keeps me going every day, despite the constant backsliding, the defeats, the frustrations, and the heartache.

As always, women of color, disabled women, women identifying as LGBTQ have a harder path, one we’ve often had to walk alone as our more privileged sisters moved quickly along the path ahead of us, leaving us behind. But none of us will truly be free until we all are, meaning we’ll have to wait for that last woman to make her way across the finish line before we can consider the battle won.

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Grab ‘Em By the Childcare

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When we talk about the concept of women’s liberation, the conversation often centers around burning bras, shattering glass ceilings, providing the full range of reproductive freedoms, and women no longer allowing men to dictate the conditions of their existence. But there are other ideas that are even more revolutionary than these, and they aren’t what you might think.

Recently, Elizabeth Warren, a candidate running for president in 2020, floated the idea of universal childcare, and it shook the ground beneath my feet in a way that very few policy proposals have done. This is mostly because I understood how much of a game changer a program like this could be for the everyday American female.

Reproductive freedom and the refusal to allow men to continue to control how much women are able to achieve in their personal and professional lives are all extremely important to a woman’s overall autonomy. However, they don’t address a large part of the problem women face when attempting to fully actualize their potential. Since women are the ones biologically responsible for birthing children as well as the ones society still pegs as the primary caregivers, childcare remains a persistent obstacle that so many — especially single mothers, women of color, and women of all races living just above or in poverty — cannot overcome. The cost of childcare is outrageous, oftentimes more than what a woman would earn actually working a 40 hour per week job. The exorbitant cost also keeps women from pursuing higher education or technical programs that could lead to jobs that pay more competitive wages.

When we normally talk about strategies to lift folks out of poverty and into higher wage careers, we always hit on incentives and programs to increase access to education and job training. If the conversation focuses on women, we might also mention access to comprehensive healthcare, inclusive of contraception, in order to provide her with more control over when and if she has children. But once the woman has already had children, family planning, education, and job training are often a day late and several dollars short. What good is access to a wide range of programs if a mother can’t find anyone to take care of her child while she’s earning a degree or learning a skill that will drastically increase her earning potential? Removing that obstacle, that worry, would change everything for so many single mothers and working class families struggling to make ends meet.

Universal childcare is a big, bold idea. And, as with most big, bold ideas, we’re going to hear a lot of grumbling about how we pay for it. These concerns are valid, but it’s important to think of the drain on our economy created by so many individuals who are unable to rise to their full potential because they are drowning in poverty with no sturdy life raft in sight.

A program that offers universal childcare could be that life raft.

The country would reap the benefit of a more educated, more highly skilled, more productive population. We would see the wage and opportunity gap between men and women begin to narrow and finally, after centuries of systemic inequity, to close. Something as simple as providing childcare so women can pursue the same educational and professional opportunities already available to men could be revolutionary, and the return on investment would be beyond our wildest dreams.

**Original article published in Florida Today

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