preussisch-blau-und-kadmium-auch:
Yesterday we met up with a bunch of family friends and at one point my dad asked me to move a plastic table. “Can you come up here and help me move the table,” he said, “since it’s light anyway?” I was a bit taken aback by the last comment since, well, I could just go and do it and if it was too heavy I’d notice by myself. But I just say “sure” and decide not to comment on that.
So I come up to my dad, lift the large but actually incredibly light plastic table (it was something I could evidently easily lift with one arm, for reference); I realize there’s a bunch of chairs in the way so I tell my dad, who’s on the other side of the table and might not see it. I put down the table and start moving the chairs. All the while he’s started insisting he can call someone else to move the table and I keep saying “really, we just gotta move these chairs that are right here in the way”. He insists and I repeat that, and so on.
Now, most of the time when my dad is being unintentionally sexist I let him know, but this time all I could think of was that I really didn’t have time for bullshit about lifting some feather-light plastic table and I didn’t wanna stress myself out on vacation so I just insisted more forcefully on doing what I was doing.
Anyway, after I’ve moved all the chairs out of the way, I pick the table back on, my dad on the other side of it, and I start moving. Immediately another one of the guys runs up to me and starts offering to do this instead, to which again I say “no thanks”, adding “this is really light really” for good measure because I’ve been here many times before and I know that unless I reassure him the object in front of me is so innocuous even I, a woman, can take it!, he’s not gonna listen. He insists, I say no again, he comes up behind me anyway no matter how much I protest that I’m fine and picks up the motherfucking table (which is still being lifted by my dad and I as we move) on my side and starts walking with us while I refuse to let go. By the time we’ve reached some stairs, another two men have appeared behind me and are also insisting I leave the task to them. Eventually they corner me on the stairs and since the stairs are tiny and I don’t want them to fucking cause an incident because they’re basically bodily pushing me aside, I let go. (Funnily enough I end up in a corner and have to yell to let me pass because they’ve become too focused on talking amon themselves and moving the table through the door in front of them to realize they’re about to shove the legs of the table on my face).
I cannot tell you how livid I was.
When I told my sister, she told me about this one new guy who wouldn’t hit her no matter how much she insisted it was fine during krav maga practice. She comes from years of various combat arts. He later realized she’s trained and acted surprised despite the fact that she’d told him several times to just do the exercise as he was supposed to.
I told her the two guys at therapy will literally refuse to go through the door if I’m holding it open for them unless I act distracted while I do it (not look at them, make it look like I just casually forgot I’m still holding the door open). They’ll either bodily push me out of the way so they can hold the door open for me instead, or stay still and insist I go until I do it. I’ve had time to experiment.
My sister said the men at her therapy group do the same.
This isn’t courtesy. You’re not helping someone who asked, or offering help and then listening to the answer. You’re not saving women as a group. You’re not making up for other men’s sexism (or your own). You’re being sexist. You’re being condescending, not listening to the woman in front of you, aggressively trying to keep yourself in a position where you can be the sole offerer of things and the woman can only be in the role of receiving your “kindness” and exchange gratefulness for it, and making it all about your coming to the rescue – even though no-one asked you to in the first place. And if you’re so uncomfortable with any breach of the script that you can’t even walk through a door if a woman is holding it open for you, then there’s a problem, and it’s yours, and working on it is on you, not on me. Same goes when you treat a woman like she can’t perform menial tasks.
This, so much. When I was younger (and not chronically ill) I used to volunteer on the weekends with this group that did things like winter-proofing houses for people who couldn’t afford it, fixing their cars, collecting used furniture and appliances to give to people who needed it, etc. And one Saturday I was assigned–along with a guy about my age, height, build, and level of athletic ability–the task of cleaning and organizing the warehouse where we stored the furniture and appliances.
It involved a lot of physical labor, including moving objects of various sizes and weights. And it wasn’t necessarily easy or menial in any way, but it was well within my capabilities and it was, after all, literally what I was there for.
But I spent 75% of my energy that morning repeatedly telling the dude to stop trying to keep me from picking up anything heavier than a hand blender. It took me a solid four ours of insisting, cajoling, reassuring, and finally just outright snapping at the guy to get him to lay off and just let me do the job I’d come there to do.
Then, when I finally had him resigned (very reluctantly) to only helping me move large, extremely heavy furniture that legitimately required two people to move–which he started out trying to move alone because he was so insistent on “being a gentleman”–his damn stepbrother showed up and started up with the same shit (in addition to giving the dude crap for “letting me” carry all this heavy stuff myself).
Well, by that point I’d run out of patience, and I told him in no uncertain terms that I was here to do work, not stand around and look pretty while the big, strong men did all the work for me, and if he wasn’t going to help where it was actually needed to kindly get out of my way and stop being a distraction. I then proceeded to take the feather-light stack of plastic fucking lawn chairs he thought I was too delicate to carry back from him and continue with my work.
That day of work got me labeled “too independent” by all the guys in the volunteer group. Even my grandmother, a fierce Annie Oakley of a single parent with no qualms about speaking her mind and making her own way, told me I should have just let the boys “help” me because they were trying to be “nice.” No amount of explaining that they weren’t helping, they were being a hindrance, seemed to get through to anyone.
Nothing they did that day to try and “help” me was helpful. The other guy actually ended up injuring himself trying to keep me from helping him move heavy things. And every moment he spent trying to take things out of my hands and carry them for me was a moment he could have just picked up something else and moved it, or cleaned something, or otherwise helped actually make progress on the job we were doing.
So my dudes. Listen. I am not “too independent” to accept your help or whatever bullshit, if and when I need it. We all need help sometimes, regardless of gender. But if I say I don’t need your help and you keep insisting, you’re going to get my mean side really quickly.
Ooh, ooh.
So back in my girl mode days when I worked at McDs, I was heavily feminine presenting. Like, went to work always with nails done, hair done, full face of make-up… the works.
And a lot of the other girls there wouldn’t lift anything heavier than one 10-lb box of sauces… and not even that if they could help it. Like, they’d get a cart and block everything to stock one type of sauce.
So one day, about three weeks in, I get told to stock sauce. And there’s a LOT that needs stocked.
But the cart is in use.
Oh well. I load up all the sauces I need – a good 70 or so lbs; more than half my body weight at the time – and carry them in my hands to the front.
Or. I try to.
Twice I got stopped by male coworkers getting in my way trying to help me by taking my carefully balanced boxes off my stack. I almost had to shout at them to get out of my way and let me get to the front.
Eventually I trained them to just let me haul the heavy shit and not get right in my fucking path.
Then we got a new guy. Who did not take, “No.” or “Move.” for an answer. And just yanked the top four boxes of sauce off my stack one day.
They fell. And of course the boxes busted open and sauce packets went everywhere.
And whose fault do you think this was?
Well, obviously the guy’s, but he tried saying that, see, I couldn’t carry all that, I should have let him help.
Literally the only thing that shut him up was the male manager saying, “Dude, shut up. She does that all the time; she had it until you got in her way.”
Needless to say it is almost a decade later and I am still livid.
It’s almost as if men as a group thought they know how much our bodies can take better than we do and thought they get to decide how much our bodies should take and how we should use them
When I was moving the big stuff back in after my renovation (fridge, couch, washing machine, …), together with my dad, my neighbor literally pushed me out of the way to do it together with my dad. He was an immigrant, which is mostly only relevant because he didn’t speak the language quite yet and I couldn’t argue with him (although really “no” is sort of a universal thing), but I was SO pissed.
You know what happens when you carry heavy stuff? You grow some muscles. You learn how to grab on to things, how to balance the weight. You know what happens when men don’t let you do that, and insist they do it themselves? THEY get stronger, and you end up a little flower with no ability to carry anything anywhere.
Men are stronger than me without trying, they always will be, and I have no issue asking for help when I need it. But jfc let me do what I AM able to do.
when i was still presenting more femininely/thought i was a girl and as a literal kid, my DAD would routinely have to tell dudes to back off because I was stronger than him and to just let me carry things
like my dad would catch shit from grown men for letting his daughter carry shit for him and men were outraged that he’d say a girl was stronger than him…and then i’d prove to be stronger than them too and it PISSED THEM OFF TO HELL but god was it so satisfying
with chronic illnesses i am no longer fucking jacked, but still pretty solidly strong and in places that i grew up or i’m treated like a woman, men still try to stop me from lifting heavy things. it’s especially laughable when it’s older men because i’m still stronger than them! like just let me lift things. i won’t do more than i’m able, i know where my limits are pretty damn well and if i’m like “shit nope can’t lift this all by my lonesome” (which happens sometimes) i call for help because i am a goddamn adult and don’t need to risk my physical health for some status bullshit
i’m gonna give y’all a bit of strategic advice.
you’re making it be about you – your strength, your capability, your bodily autonomy – which makes perfect sense because it factually IS about you, and to the extent it’s about them, from your POV, it’s about their sexism. but they’ve had a lifetime of smug entitlement, combined with lectures from parents about ‘how to treat ladies’, that’s proof against changing.
you have to hit them where they live, make it be about their weakness.
“stop showing off.”
“who are you trying to impress?”
“you’re just getting in the way.”
“are we gonna stand on the sidewalk all day, mister chivalry, or are you going through the damn door?”
“yeah, you lift that flimsy plastic table, i’ll just stand here and swoon at your muscles.”
“WOW RUDE.”
“you’re a lil bit grabby, ain’cha?”
“every time i turn around you’re in my face, what’s your problem?”
and when they tell you they’re “just trying to be nice/good/polite/helpful,” you tell them, “try something different.”
go on the attack. you’ll never convince these guys to lay off when you’re justifying your own abilities rather than criticizing their rude behavior, out loud, to their faces.
obviously there will still be the occasional walnut who can’t be reasoned with. but a lot of these dorks are just following a script they had drummed into them by well-meaning parents, and have to be knocked off track by a good verbal swat.
@ men: this is not courtesy
Published
just moving along like everyone else 