I have done everything I can think of to encourage my younger female relatives in STEM (one of the teachers is an eighth grade math teacher) and to pursue educational and professional credentials. I lobbied one of my godchild nieces to prepare for and attend medical school, but she wanted to be an RN like her mom.
I'm still confused about what happened to my first niece. We used to be very close. (I used to be the favorite uncle until around the time they turned into teenagers.) I remember my sister telling me her daughter, then in primary school was literally counting the days until my next visit. I remember flying home one visit (this was still in the days when family could still see you off from the gate area), and she repeatedly kissed my cheek. There were puzzling moments; for a while, after I left academia, I did some subcontracting programming work at an IBM subsidiary in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Two of my sisters (including the one with a daughter) then lived in the Dallas suburbs, and I would visit them. My niece is fairly bright; she and her older brother qualified for merit school programs. So one morning I'm visiting and my sister asks me to drill the niece on her vocabulary list. I correct her misspelling a word and the next thing I know she slapped me hard across the face. (Yeah, I realize a lot of trolls are thrilled to hear of this and would have loved to see a video clip.) I was stunned more than anything else; it's not like I teased her over missing a word. I guess she just didn't like being told she was wrong.
We still kept in touch when the family moved to Colorado for my brother-in-law's IT managerial position in the telecommunications industry. In high school she wrote how she was planning to major in science in college and get a job in the biotech industry, and I couldn't have been prouder or more encouraging. And then all hell broke loose.
I still only have a sketchy view of what happened. I think some of the "mean girls" in high school started mocking her looks and/or her weight, she ran away from home for a while and then deliberately got pregnant in her mid-teens (from a guy she didn't want in her life). She departed our Catholic faith (my sister was attending daily mass during those years, and my niece often accompanied her), finding emotional support among fellow witches/pagans in the Wicca movement. She dropped out of high school and eventually got her GED. For some reason, she got interested in the graphical arts, with limited opportunities. Today I rarely hear from her (not from a lack of trying). She eventually married some Wicca guy who adopted her first-born, and they have 2 other kids (I've never met).I remember I once asked for family pictures, and she referred me to her family blog.
A younger niece, my baby brother's oldest got into a highly competitive nursing program at an east Texas university. She was sailing along, making Dean's Lists. But she fell in love with her eventual husband and it seemed like her grades became less impressive. There was some sort of a major (external?) exam that she needed to score something like a 75 to continue as a nursing major and she missed the cutoff by something like 2-3%. I'm writing her, trying to argue for a second chance based on her strong academic effort. (I don't think I directly pointed to her relationship as a distraction from exam preparation, but she probably inferred it sensing disapproval of the relationship, and I don't think the relationship ever recovered. She dropped out and went to a community college to gain credentials as a licensed vocational nurse. A few years later, I ended up hearing at the last minute she was graduating from the nursing program of her original university. Never even a hint she got back into the program, despite all the letters and/or emails I had sent encouraging her to lobby for a second chance. Not sure why I was out of the loop, maybe because she thought I disapproved of her relationship. No. She was responsible for going into the exam unprepared.
In high school, I was a fairly shy geek. I sat in the left front desk in homeroom as a 13-year-old freshman, and the lovely JD, with her fragrant perfume, sat behind me. I quickly developed a crush on her and couldn't wait to get to school. I don't think she ever noticed me. A year later, we're in the same biology class. For some unknown reason, she starts throwing crumbled paper balls soaked in preservatives from specimen jars at me. I eventually returned fire--and got caught, of course, which is the one time I remember I got in trouble in high school. Not many other crushes; there was a fellow freshman girl KO whose older brother was a prodigy of sorts, placing into MIT I think his junior year. She wanted me to join her brother in UIL science. She would later tell me some of her best moments was scoring second to me in math class. But they left after my freshman year.
At OLL, an initially women's college and still nearly two-thirds coed, you would figure even a geek like me could find a date, but among other things, I initially had ambitions to become a priest (lifelong celibacy) (I had served as an alter boy early-morning mass on base (AF brat) during high school) and I was fairly young (19 when I graduated, again in 3 years), had no money or a car. I did date occasionally during college and even had a secret admirer for a while. (The younger sister of a good coed friend F (I liked F, but she was already in a relationship) was desperately in need of a typewriter at the end of one semester; I had already finished my papers for the semester and lent her mine. I really didn't think that much of it at the time. She was grateful for the favor, but I really didn't think a lot about it. Sometime next semester I started getting these secret admirer notes slipped under my dorm room door. It was a bit of pleasant novelty at first and a bit of a mystery since women weren't allowed in the men's dorm. (A mutual male friend played the go-between.) As a geek and relatively inexperienced in dating (especially older women) with a high risk for rejection, I was secretly thrilled that a woman was personally attracted to me. But then there were a series of messages, and it started feeling a little creepy, like I was being stalked. The final straw: my male friend showed up at my door, bearing a pan of freshly baked brownies from my admirer. (Yes, I ate the brownies, although I worried a little what might be in the brownies.) I later told my friend that this was unnerving and had to stop. I got a final anguished note (I could almost hear her crying as she penned the note), saying that she would respect my wishes to cease and desist, that she had only intended to make my days a little brighter. I felt a little like a jerk for making her cry. I never heard from her again. I never knew who she was.) I still remember the last time I saw F (before her graduation or mine.) She said, "I wanted to let you know J is happy now; she's got a boyfriend and...." I remember thinking how odd it was that she was talking to me about her little sister's social life, like it was something I needed to know. Oh, damn! Wait a minute: was J my secret admirer? F must think I'm an asshole. I really didn't have a clue. If someone had let me know she was interested, I probably would have asked her out.
So yes, ideological feminists, I have personally experienced unwanted attention, but I also know that in some cases, the offending party is not aware of how he or she is being perceived. I know in my case I prefer a more direct approach; I deserve a mutually attracted, voluntary relationship, and if I know the other party isn't interested, I'll move on. Of course, in context, rejection can be a temporary phenomenon; one of my brothers-in-law got rejected a few times before my sister agreed to go out with him, and the rest is history, with 6 grown kids.
I have mentioned this anecdote a few times in past posts. I guess I had earned this reputation of being a nice, respectful gentleman among the coeds. I don't know if it was because the other guys were more sexually aggressive and immature or whatever. So one day I got my lunch at the campus dining hall and was about to sit down at a small empty table, when one of maybe a dozen ladies I didn't know or barely knew at a large table invited me to sit there. No soon than I started to eat, the lady who invited me over said, "So, Ron, we've heard you treat women just like you treat men." I nearly choked on my food. "I hope not; I'm attracted to women." I knew what she meant, of course. I lived in a world of ideas, and I never associated incidents like race or gender with what people do as scholars
I left OLL with no ongoing relationships, and my dating statistics over the next few years were sparse. I had a couple of crushes at UT and in the Navy. The first was this pretty, petite blonde, a math education graduate student with an office down the hall from the one I shared other math teaching assistants. She was sweet and friendly with warm brown eyes you could lose yourself in. But, alas, she was in a relationship. I still remember that beautiful, awful day; I had recently graduated with my MA, living in a low-cost coop just off campus, unemployed on dwindling resources. I often wandered onto campus, e.g., checking job listings at the library. My crush spots me walking from a distance and excitedly waves me down. I go to see her and instantly all the old feelings come rushing back. She has wonderful news to share--she shows me her new engagement. I'm trying to be excited for her as her male friend, but I'm crashing inside, worse than a sucker punch in the stomach. All my dreams seemed to be dying.
I eventually migrated to Houston for a better-paying programming job at a branch office of a now defunct computer company. The manager had a strict nepotism policy (I don't know if it was, in fact, a general policy). He had enforced it early in my employment; the receptionist had just married one of my new colleagues and was soon fired. (The story I heard was that the receptionist had been living with another colleague, that their affair had transitioning into sharing an apartment for convenience. The other colleague started dating the receptionist, and the old boyfriend was totally cool with it. However, the manager reportedly worried relationship issues would affect office morale and terminated the receptionist.) One of my colleagues J was a single female. I wasn't really attracted to her; she was actually a bit of a mess, couldn't handle stress very well, was so much of a coffee addict that she would literally shake without her morning joe. She basically provided assistance for one of our major applications involving an Exxon catalog; Exxon cycled a lot of up and coming company star managers through the operation, and J probably knew more about the application than her clients. She probably mentioned at a lunch break one day childhood memories of going to see the Nutcracker Suite. So one day after I heard the Nutcracker Suite was booked for a stretch of December dates, I casually suggested that we attend a performance. The idea of a date seemed to take her by surprise; I don't know if she read too much into the proposed date or was on edge because of the nepotism policy; I didn't see an issue because we worked on different accounts and didn't have direct report relationship. Somehow she had converted the date into a company event. I never tried to ask her out again, but that was sealed with a call to the managers. "I want you to know I am aware you and J are dating, and if this relationship goes anywhere, I'm going to have to let one of you go." What relationship? All I did is ask her out. The only way he knew it happened is if J told him or someone else. I was the best coder working for him and he knew it, but J had been there longer and had a higher-profile account. So I wasn't really sure how that would play out. Where there was some demand for APL programmer/analysts out there, it was a limited niche of the IT universe.
One of the motives I had in starting my MBA program at UH was the hope of extending my dating opportunities. I had joined a young adults group at church, but the young ladies were opting for the more established 30-plus group of more prosperous experienced professionals. I had mixed results on the dating from. During my part-time/full-time years at UH, I did do some dating, mostly from friendships at the local Catholic Newman center; none of them ever got that serious. For example, in one case I think this undergraduate used me to show her folks she was dating other guys. I never stood a chance; her parents loved me.
The sexual harassment workshop stressed that victims are sometimes in a state of shock and paid lip service to the notion males can also be victims.
Me, I was never aware that women could be sexually aggressive. I was still in the geek stage of will she go out with me? When is it okay to hold her hand or kiss her? I was in a world with women who were far more experienced than I was; how could I compete against other member? I wasn't tall or athletic; I could barely pay my own bills. So I remember at the beginning of the MBA I had to take about 12 graduate hours in economics and quantitative methods. I usually grabbed an available desk at the front of my macroeconomics class. On my left was a 6-foot blonde I didn't know (I don't recall who was seated first). I don't recall any pre-lecture small talk, and for the record, I'm open to dating women regardless of height, race or other characteristics. When in the middle of lecture, I suddenly feel her bare foot digging inside my left pant leg and stroke my shin up and down. I really didn't know what to say or do, but I remember worrying what the prof might say if he noticed. I'm not really experienced in the protocol of playing footsie. Maybe she got the idea I wasn't interested by the lack of reciprocity, and I don't recall seeing her after class or the rest of the semester.
When I finally started teaching at the college level during my doctoral residency and beyond, I remember being aware of the politically correct atmosphere and was acutely aware as a single male, I was particularly vulnerable to frivolous complaints and devised measures, like never being in a room alone with a coed with the door closed. As a graduate fellow at UH, I had to share an office with up to 3 colleagues; as a professor I had more discretion to seal off access behind my desk (which didn't always work, as I'll soon disclose).
Although thank God no one made a frivolous complaint (that I'm aware of) in 8 years of college teaching, there were at least 3 incidents (and these happened in real life) which I never reported, in part because I worried about effects on my academic career (e.g., a frivolous counter-claim), but I would contend are real-life incidents of harassment.
- A Second Footsie Incident by One of My COBOL Students. I was teaching the service MIS course, which included some basic computer programming in the COBOL computing language. I often proofread and corrected student programs, e.g., during office hours. So one day a couple of coeds dropped by. Normally I would welcome this because there would be a witness if anything happened. So I'm looking in her program listing, probably the least sexy thing in life one can do, when all of a sudden, I feel her foot dig under my left pant leg and stroke my shin repeatedly. All I can do is think: "Damn, what do I do now?" I decide to pretend like nothing was happening; she eventually stopped, and the ladies left. But I heard the coed laughing to her friend down the hall, "Did you see me turn on the teacher?"
- Something Weird Happens During Lecture. One of my classrooms had auditorium style seating, i.e., I stepped down to the front of class. One of the coeds (IG) had an uncanny resemblance to my 14-month younger sister (the nurse). With maybe 10 minutes left in lecture (she's maybe 5 rows up, dead center), she did something I've never seen or heard of any women doing in public, other than maybe a soft porno video: The smiling coed grabbed the front of her (clothed) breasts with her hands and started kneading/rotating her breasts in a circular manner (and wouldn't stop). Now it's bad enough what she was doing, but it was almost like seeing my little sister in a porno movie. I didn't know exactly to do; I didn't want to draw attention to what she was doing. So for the remainder of lecture I spent my time lecturing to the floor. I was pissed. I came to the next lecture waving a stack of drop slips, and without further explanation I said if the nonsense during lecture didn't stop now, I would drop the offending student in a heartbeat. It did stop.
- A UWM Coed Touched Me Inappropriately. No, it's probably not what you think, but she did something that my own girlfriends never did. This coed was about as purely evil a person I've ever met (another example below). Let me start by explaining that I positioned my office furniture to leave space barely wide enough to squeeze my thighs through to get behind my desk. I have partially discussed this in prior posts. I had decided to teach a couple of undergraduate COBOL classes using a textbook-provided COBOL-85 compiler, including newer structured language constructs. I soon faced opposition from all corners; the business school was pissed I wasn't using their paid Microsoft COBOL compilers (to humor them I called a Microsoft account rep who lied to my face they had released a COBOL-85 version). There were other issues, including paid student assistants in the computer labs weren't familiar with the compiler. Senior faculty and students also weren't happy with me. So there was a lot of political risk to what I was doing. I never assigned a program I couldn't do myself in less than a half hour, and I spaced out typically 4 assignments at roughly 3-week intervals during the semester. (Computer science courses often include 1 program a week.) Fairly early in the semester (I recall at the time there were still more than 2 weeks left before the assignment was due) a handful of students visited my office and demanded an extension to the first assignment. As a matter of policy, I don't grant extensions in advance; I might consider unusual circumstances like a freak snowstorm on a due date (which actually happened at the end of that semester). My message to the malcontents was they were panicking, I had plenty of lecture and office hours before the due date where they would be free to raise questions. The students, led by a particularly strident coed KA, were undeterred and explicitly threatened that I would face consequences for not capitulating to their demand. (I'm simply note that my second 3-year contract/renewal would come up mid-semester. That's all I'll say in this post; use your imagination.) Of course, I knew the rogue students, and even though I was the one being threatened, I had to respond professionally and gracefully, knowing each and every thing I did would be scrutinized.
So what does this have to do with sexual harassment? I was providing necessary context. One day KA followed me into my office hours. I squeeze through to my desk opening and am reviewing something on my office PC, totally unaware KA had followed me behind my desk. I'm wearing a dress white shirt, and all of a sudden I feel her genitalia pressing against my left shoulder (that's never happened before or since). What the hell? What am I supposed to do now? It's not like I have a video clip of the incident or other witnesses in the room. I once again pretend like nothing happened; she stopped, and I told her to get back in front of the desk and quickly resolved whatever issue she brought to me to resolve.But the last personal experience I want to discuss deals explicitly with sexual harassment policy and how totally untrue, baseless trumped-up charges can ruin one's career, and I don't give a damn about how valid they can be in other context; people can use the unconstitutionally vague standard of "makes me feel uncomfortable", there is no justification for short-shrifting due process. You are not entitled to fabricated "evidence". And this happened to me for literally trying to ask out the wrong woman at the wrong time. Not relentlessly, ignoring the other person's stated wishes. In the real world women and men meet in the workplace where they often spend more than 40 hours on the job. more than they spend in church or other places outside of work. You can spent a lot more "quality time" getting to know how a person responds under pressure, etc.
In the mid-90's I worked for a privately-held company, since acquired by Equifax. Our company provided value-added marketing research processes, e.g., filter out and target the most profitable customers; many of our clients were credit card issuers. I was involved in the process of generating databases from customer data used by our statisticians for modeling and analyses. I think SM was hired before me as an account assistant serving our biggest account, a major credit card issuer; word was that SM's father was a good friend of KL, our CEO, who hired SM as a favor.
SM occupied the cubicle facing mine in the next aisle. We almost never really met; for the first few months I was working on other projects, and I didn't really have direct client access. Mostly I met her in passing in company hallways or company special events, e.g., at a bar after work (I think she commuted from the city (Chicago) to Lombard, a SW suburb. SM was a petite, pretty blonde and seemed to be personable (appearances can be deceiving); she didn't seem to have a ring on her finger. I was intrigued, but it took a long time to get up the nerve to ask her out; I finally did in early October my first year. I think she was confused by why I wanted to talk to her and wanted to book a office or conference room. She eventually got the message and responded (paraphrased), "Thanks, but no thanks. I've got a boyfriend and we've been with each other a long time; I've been hoping for some time he'll pop the (marriage) question, but he hasn't yet." And this is pretty verbatim what I said next, "Look, if I'm not your type, it's okay: I won't ask you again." She hesitated and said, "No, I want to keep my options open." Again, I didn't record the conversation on tape, as if I'm collecting all the rejections from women I've ever asked out.
Now to understand, that was probably the first private conversation we ever had. There was basically no contact with her over the next 2 months. I don't even recall bumping into her in the company hallways. I never knew her personal address or phone number. I never followed her anywhere. I didn't leave notes at her desk, voice mail messages, etc. That's not a matter of opinion, but stone cold fact.
It's not like I was getting progress reports on her relationship; perhaps if she had moved one and she was interested in me, she would have found a way to let me know, but I'm not very experienced on these things. When is it too soon to ask again? So I decided to try again and was more specific. I had seen her go to lunch with my boss and other male colleagues off-site. I decided on the building cafeteria; that would give her freedom to leave at any time. And I was eyeing my birthday, just before New Year's, 2.5 months since the last time we met.
So I went to her cubicle but she wasn't there. Still on Christmas vacation? No idea and then I did something very stupid, and if any guys are reading this, take notice NEVER to do this: I left a note, inviting her to lunch on my birthday. I never got a response from SM. All she had to do was sent me a message in some form saying, "No, thank you; please don't ask me again. I'm not interested.", and just like my OLL secret admirer, I would have never tried again. I had no clue what was about to happen, which can only be described as pure evil and an abuse of process.
I had personally worked with the CEO and Executive VP on projects and was on good terms with them. But on my birthday, I heard myself over the intercom called into EVP MK's office immediately. Uh-oh. Something's really wrong, and I didn't have a clue what it was about.
MK was in the room with 2 or 3 suits I didn't recognize and the company secretary was there to take dictation. What the hell is going on? "We know about the note." What note? MK then goes on to explain that SM had lodged a sexual harassment complaint against me, and the key piece of evidence was my note asking her out on a lunch date at the cafeteria. Is this really happening? "Our lawyers have the note. If the company determines you've exposed us to liability, you're gone from the company immediately. In the meanwhile, stay clear of SM."
This was a pure shock. At work, I was guilty of being a socially-inept nerd. At my desk, I would later find a predated, totally fabricated letter accusing me of a long litany of ill-defined repeated attempts to request unwanted dates, which she explicitly rejected and told me to stop or else she would file a complaint if I persisted in one more attempt. This was beyond slander or libel. It was a departure from reality. I asked her out two times. The first time I explicitly gave her a chance to opt out.
I can't explain what happened; I'm not a psychologist. I don't know why she went into some pathological rage against me. Was she dumping on me because she hoped to be engaged over the holidays and it didn't happen?
I was beyond done with this woman, like "Daddy, tell us that story over how Mommy tried to get you fired on your birthday for asking her out to lunch. It's so funny!" It's bad enough getting rejected; I was having my nose rubbed in front of the company leadership and their lawyers.
A few hours later, I was cleared, but as a preventive measure they reassigned me to another section of the building. (And I don't know what game SM was playing, but she passed by my cubicle more often over the next 5 months than over the prior 8 months when I was in the cubicle facing hers.)
At the end of May I went down to work in Brazil for 3 weeks which ended up getting extended for maybe 3 months--no clue why, but when I got back, SM was gone (which I think was coincidental); I wasn't sure why and really didn't care. I heard a couple of rumors, one that she moved to Austin with her boyfriend, the other that, of all things, she was pursuing a Master's in psychology somewhere else in Illinois. Oddly, the administrative secretary stopped me one day and, avoiding eye contact, gave me allegedly SM's contact information. Was this some sort of trap trying to lure me into "stalking" her? I don't know if and when I trashed that post-it but I never read it or acted it on it. I should never have had to go through this.
Believe it or not, there's a postscript of sorts on this story. Don't tell your stories to future co-workers! I had a female supervisor JTA on a local number portability project in Chicago. One day I had a casual conversation with a male colleague over lunch and said, "You'll never guess what happened to me" and basically recounted the SM nonsense. And there was no subsequent conversation with JTA (so much for due process over a false complaint).
One day I was brutally terminated in a particularly humiliating way. What I initially thought it was about was our company had a relationship with a software company in the Denver area. The software partners had blown several major deadlines. I needed some information from the partner's DBA, and he refused to cooperate. So I ended up being some proxy political football between companies, with my company threatening to fly me to the Denver site, the other company seeing me as some sort of a spy being sent, and they said if I go there, they won't let me come on the site.
So what I figured was my company threw me under the bus, because like it or not, they still needed the partner to deliver the software. A few days later I got a tip from my original recruiters who told me the real story of the termination. They asked me if I was familiar with some element of the SM story; they then tipped me off how JTA called them in rage over how they had dare send her a "sexual harasser" to work on her team. (For the record, I have NEVER dated a co-worker. I tried a couple of times and failed. I'm one of the truly nice guys you would ever meet; I've always treated the women I've dated respectfully. I'm not like Weinstein, Cosby, Clinton or of the real harassers.) I loathe JTA and other ideologues who seem to believe smoke is fire. They are not the victim of false charges and outright, totally unsupported fabrication. All you're left with is trust that karma is a bitch.
Oh, the workshops will tell you only 3% of charges are baseless. I don't know about other cases, but it's hard for me to believe my nightmare scenario hasn't been replicated in other cases. What they did in my case was shoot a peanut with a cannonball. If they had any common sense, they would have told SM, "Did you try resolving the issue by declining the lunch invitation?" SM never faced consequences for her libel.
