Check Yourself

(queued to scene discussed)

Having an opinion is one of my vices.  Despite my years of non-attachment or equanimity practice on the zafu, I often express my convictions with the preparedness of a Doctoral Dissertation Defense.  Pssssh, I sometimes take a side with bold drama even when I don’t agree with the position because advocating for the devil appeals to me in the moment.  So it’s a small wonder that while watching the new Amy Poehler sitcom I Feel Bad on NBC last night I had an epiphany, okay call it an attitude.

The scene that sparked a blog was the lead actress going to work questioning if her post-three children 30 something self is still sexy.  Her title as “head artist” at a gaming company would imply that she is in some minor or major role seen as a supervisory capacity for her team, where she is also the only woman in the group.  She makes light that they are all best buds and she can ask them anything then lobs a question

“I’m still doable right?”

Discourse ensures down to the particulars of who would “do her”.  No big deal, right cause the guys all seem GGG.  But how do we know that?  How are we certain that the quiet man in the back wasn’t uncomfortable by the candor?  Does it matter?  Cause you know, it wasn’t inappropriate touching.  It was just small talk, ye?

Working at a women’s college and seeing more than my share of workplace sexual harassment cases and given the formal mandatory training we all had to undergo on a regular mandated basis … this wouldn’t fly in my technology department.  As we all wake up in the #MeToo movement each of us need to re-evaluate our modus of operandi. We can’t simply take our personal experience of a boss we thought was super cool and assume everything they did was appropriate simply because he was never fired.  Well except for one of my supervisor’s who was terminated for sexual misconduct in that way that higher academia hands out money to emeritus faculty to quietly move on.

As women we have few if any role models for what appropriate content for the workplace should be, simply because there have been so few examples of what constitutes appropriate behavior.  And for women of a certain post-modern, post-menopause age we didn’t know we could even speak up when someone carried the conversation to an uncomfortable off-topic under the table transfer¹

Why does it matter?  Because we are all learning primum non nocere.  And frankly we don’t even know what that looks like.  We are afraid, sad, confused, alone and overcrowded in a claustrophobic pigeon hole of how we should behave.  Best we can do is consider, learn and unlearn as we re-consider another wave of memes.  But it’s time and energy well spent.  Because decades of ignoring the orange elephant in the room has put us in the bleek state of affairs we find our selves in today. 

With a bully at the pulpit we are tempted to always pit our self against everyone else, hyper focused to find fault in every byte that passe by our eye “I”.  You know like unwinding at the end of a long day to watch a new sitcom and feeling the need to get a step ladder to hoist myself up onto my soap-blog-box because I had an opinion about appropriate work place conversations.

^{1. Total-off-topic-non-sequitur ….The first time I heard the phrase “under the table transfer” was at a board meeting between the IT leaders and various VP’s of the consortium. As I recall we were asking for a large sum of money and knew we had nothing to offer in our technology line items. We thought it would be a difficult sell and were not hopeful of the odds of having it approved by the powers that be. However after a thoughtful if not also brief presentation, one of the Treasurer’s nodded and said, Yes we can do that with an under the table transfer and then moved on to the next agenda item. The technology staff was unaware of the nature of slush funds and how dollars made sense in the big league board meetings.  After that we were better able to negotiate to the proper deep pockets without π<sky concerns.  ↩}