#metoo

I lost my virginity to a boy that had a girlfriend.

He had been feeding me all of the stories about how it wasn’t working, they were on a break, he wanted out, etc. etc. etc.

I am in NO WAY defending my actions, I know what I did was wrong. I also didn’t know her very well so I didn’t know if there was truth to his story. Maybe he was really telling me the truth.

He wasn’t.

Shortly after, she found out. I assume he told her, probably due to his obviously guilty conscious. Maybe he told someone and they told someone and they told someone. It was high school. Who knows really. At the end of the day, she knew and so did her cheerleading squad friends. Now I was receiving dirty looks, being called a slut/whore, clearly getting all of the blame. Like I said before – I am not defending myself but HE was the one that had a girlfriend and did her wrong. He cheated on her. I did not. He lied to her. I did not. But I was the one that was being treated as though I had done something to betray someone close to me.

What we don’t realize sometimes is that sexual harassment and assault does not always come from the opposite sex. I was being harassed, I was being called cruel names, I was being verbally assaulted on a daily basis by other females.

And what became of that couple – why, they’re married of course. No one will really ever know if he remained faithful after that but in history, they usually don’t.

My second high school was no different. If you liked a boy and he happened to be the same boy as someone else – someone more popular, more well known, prettier, that has attended that school longer – you were somehow misconstrued into being a slut that just wanted to sleep with him or would sleep with him to steal him away. I know because this happened to me. Being the new girl was never really enjoyable.

I accepted a job at a hibachi restaurant/event venue when I was 22 years old. Almost immediately I went from the receptionist in the venue office to being offered venue server positions. I worked a women’s event one day and apparently impressed the owner so much that I was then offered the marketing position/assistant event planner because the current one was moving to NY. I loved it. Planning parties with themes, decorating, coordinating, it was like a dream job for me. After a few sweet sixteens and weddings – I was offered the position of front end manager of the restaurant in addition to coordinating events during the day/during the week. I was a rising star. My nickname was “Friday” because I was considered “his girl Friday” from an 80’s movie. The girl who did it all, did what she was asked, didn’t hesitate to take on tasks. Which was true. But this job came with a lot of harassment. The owner of this restaurant was an Italian man in his 50’s that surrounded himself with good looking women and felt it was okay to say anything to them that he wanted.

One day while I was trying on the venue server uniform jacket, I had to take off my blazer in order to put it on, and he looked over to me in front of the restaurant manager and said “are those real?”. Like it was no big deal to question whether or not my boobs were real or fake.

Many days while I was making the trek from the restaurant to the offices upstairs, I was going up the stairs while he was going down, and he would make it very clear he was looking down my shirt and say “nice” with a disgusting enthusiasm.

After a few months of working here, I developed a mutual interest in a coworker. When the event planner I was working under caught wind of it – she sat me down to say it was unacceptable and fired me. I always felt as though I wasn’t supposed to be interested because the owner just wanted to think he had a chance with any of us.

Two career moves later, I was back in DE and beginning a job at a motorcycle dealership. The man that interviewed me, the sales manager, made it very clear that the way I looked was one of the number one reasons that I received the job. Especially considering I had ZERO finance experience. I would need to be trained from the bottom, but since I was a good looking young blonde girl – he thought it’d be worth it.

Not long after beginning that job, it became clear that while I did have the important job of securing loans and speaking with banks, taking down private customer information, and maintaining records of it all – I was also supposed to pull my shirt down a little lower, wear higher heels, shorter dresses, and walk around the showroom to somehow convince the potential customers to buy a motorcycle so they could end up sitting across the finance desk from me.

Most of the times that I go to a public place – there is guaranteed to be some disgusting no mannered man there that will make a comment, a gesture, give a look, you name it. Because it is thought to be okay to just do whatever pops into their head.

A few days ago I was driving through the front of the Walmart parking lot, slowing down to let pedestrians cross, when a man (young 20’s if that) looked at me and winked, while puckering up his lips.

Disgusting.

To these kind of people, it does not matter if I am a twenty-eight year old wife (with OBVIOUS wedding rings on her finger) and mother (whose children are always in tow while this happens) because to them – I just exist to please their eyes. I am just there for them to make comments to, give a gesture towards, wink at, pucker up at, etc. etc. etc.

Who cares if I am at this location shopping with my children for dinner that night for my family? What do you care? You just want to spew disgusting things at every women that pleases your eyes.

It is horrible. It is a disgusting world we live in where women are harassed and assaulted THEN made to believe they somehow asked for it. They somehow brought it on themselves.

I can dress how I want, do my hair how I want, wear as much makeup as I want, show whatever amount of skin I want – this DOES NOT mean I am asking for it and it does NOT allow you to say and do whatever you want.

The day we stop criticizing our daughters for the way they are “suggestively” dressing (with natural discretion in place) and teach our sons that there is NO situation in which they can take from a female without asking, no female is EVER “asking for it”, and no tank top on the girl next to you in school suggests that she is a slut – will be a beautiful change in our society.

#metoo

xoxo K