Sit Down and Shut Up

My father, a stark republican, engrained conservative ideologies like Reganomics, and the idea of “cutting taxes,” into my head before I even knew what a tax was. In my 8^th grade mock election, I was selected to represent John McCain, and I vividly remember citing immigration as a problem that needed to be stopped. I even discouraged my little sister, who was 3 at the time, from learning Spanish because I thought English was America’s language. I told my middle school friends, “Mexicans were taking our jobs,” as if I knew anything about the job market at the age of 13. I was a sponge soaked in Fox News.

Additionally, my hometown was incredibly homogenous. Almost everyone was white, so much so that I rejected my own heritage for a large part of my life, not knowing claiming my ethnicity was something I could even do. I remember when I was five, I was watching Criminal Minds with my dad and a black man was the criminal – shocker. I turned to him and told him I was afraid of black people. The only time I had seen a non-white person was on TV.

These statements will come as a surprise for those who know me at the age of 22. Today, I am incredibly liberal in my social and fiscal views. Some have even gone so far as to call me a “Social Justice Warrior,” although I do not feel my actions or words truly live up to such a title. Sometimes it saddens me to think about the way I used to see the world. I was young, close minded, and even brainwashed, if you will. I hate the way I viewed people who were different than me. I hate that I perpetuated fear, even as an “innocent child,” as some might say. I think it is important, however, to acknowledge my past in order to tell this story. I believe my political and ideological transformation gives me insight into other people’s minds who may be different than my own. I understand how easily it is to be “one track minded “and disregard anyone who challenges a viewpoint. For better or worse, I have tried to find ways to step back and understand not only what people believe, but why people believe what they believe.

The ability to be self-aware is something I have been able to do from a very young age; I have always been hypersensitive of my actions and behaviors, often obsessing about their small impact on other people. For much of my life, this characteristic made me incredibly quiet, afraid to say anything wrong, do anything wrong, be anything “wrong.” I had extremely low self-confidence. In regard to sharing my opinion in recent years, this self-awareness has been more difficult as confidence in myself and my abilities has increased. Around people I am comfortable with, I find it easy to release emotion rather than logical thought to express myself, something I have actively tried to change. Yet regardless of opinion differences, living in Michigan, I never felt I was less than someone or belittled for feeling differently about politics, religion, or the like. Sometimes I felt misunderstood, but never that my thoughts or feelings were not valued. All of that changed yesterday.

I moved to New York three months ago to study public health. Given the nature of the public health field, it is no surprise that my professors and classmates discuss politics regularly, and we are all often biased to the left. I, very ignorantly, believed moving to New York would feel like this almost all the time – feeling inspired and unified by progressive thought and action to help marginalized communities. For me, Monday through Friday, this is the truth. Yet, I seem to have forgotten about the other 8 million people living in the city.

I was invited to dinner by a group of friends, and my best friend had warned me to not discuss politics, in an effort to protect me from inevitable backlash. I promised I would be cordial. Naturally, whenever you make a pact to not do something, an event occurs to challenge your restraint and self-control.

I was discussing birth control with two other girls – IUDs vs. the pill vs. the injection vs. the bar – the side effects, the weight gain, the stress, the depression, the pain of insertion, the regularity of bleeding, the lack of periods. One girl was worried about expenses. I told her, under current legislation it should be free… that is, if “Trump doesn’t fuck it up.”

I had slipped. I ruined the dinner. I had inadvertently let my flag fly high to tell the entire table of 12 or so people, I detested Donald Trump. To make matters worse, the man sitting next to me was oozing “Make America Great Again.”

He turned to us and said, “I hope he changes the laws. He better change the laws.”

We bantered back and forth as I tried to articulate a man’s place is not to control a woman’s body or choices.

The conversation grew into other political topics, healthcare, welfare, taxes etc.  He told me how his grandfather’s best friend was Trump. How his family had a legacy of wealth in the real estate investment arena. How he felt he did his part by owning a homeless shelter and that was enough for him to contribute to societal wellbeing. How he didn’t like Trump’s actions in office, but “Hillary should be sent to Guantanamo… but don’t worry, I think Bush also should be exiled too” as if these comments would somehow appease me.  

I said, much to my surprise, “I don’t dislike you. I think you’re a nice guy. I just disagree with your opinions…. Let’s agree to disagree.”

He truly was a nice guy. We did agree to disagree. We continued to talk, and I felt like, in the name of liberal women everywhere, I was trying to understand a conservative, wealthy, white man’s point of view. I was being a voice, an advocate. Most importantly, I was being civilized. I was not overrun by emotions or screaming obscenities (as I previously have done to ignorant or seemingly insensitive people). I was doing the impossible.

We left the restaurant and went back to a mutual friend’s apartment to pregame for the night out. We sat down, poured some drinks. It was fine.  

To my dismay, the “guy banter” began.

The guys in the room started talking about women and how “all Israeli women are hot,” and in Tel Aviv the women are in the “best shape of their lives.” One man said he liked the way they looked but as soon as they opened their mouths to speak he didn’t like them anymore. He said their language was ugly. He couldn’t bare listen to them talk.

Now, to some men reading this, you might be thinking, how is this offensive? They’re saying women are hot! That’s a good thing! It’s a compliment.

Wrong.

Generalizing an entire ethnicity or community of women and boiling their meaning down to one word and having that word be “HOT” is incredibly objectifying and demeaning. On top of that, saying their language is the factor that makes them not hot – or ugly- shows again how this specific group of guys did not value a woman’s culture, heritage, history, or opinion. A woman is just hot, nothing more, nothing less.

We hear statements like this all the time. We brush them off because we do not want to “cause trouble.” And being a woman is hard in that way. We don’t want to be seen as a bitch or to reference recent politics, as the “Nasty Woman.” We want to be the “cool girls” the girls who can hang with the guys, the girls who can shoot the shit and drink a beer and talk sports and… demean other women.

I have never been that girl. I admittedly wish I knew more about sports. I wish I liked drinking Coors Light and shooting hoops or playing pool. I wish I could be “chill,” whatever that means. Honestly, I am and always have been so easily intimidated by men. Speaking and hanging out with men has always been very hard for me. Most of my friends are women for this reason, and that same reason is why I revere women generally. Although I have all of these desires which would make enjoying a male’s company so much easier, I do not ever wish to be so ingrained in a societal patriarchy to which I comply with the degradation of other women.

I could not sit still. I thought about my friends, my friend’s friends, my friend’s mothers, family members. I thought about the girls in the room with me, some of whom were dating these men who were so actively reducing a woman’s worth down to her appearance. My blood boiled. In that split second, thoughts raced. Nobody was sticking up for women. ALL WOMEN.

“That’s actually incredibly offensive”

“How….?”

“You’re objectifying an entire community of women based on their appearance and their language.”

We bantered back and forth. He did not care what I had to say as he rolled his eyes at my comments, sliding his hands through his gelled hair, awkwardly fixing his suit coat, subconsciously puffing his chest like he was trying to show dominance. I was not going to let this slide. I could not be in a room with any man who did not respect women – who did not respect me.

“You know… you have caused a lot of arguments tonight. Why don’t you just sit down and shut up?”

I froze. My heart beat slowed. I could not speak.

“Why don’t you just sit down and shut up?”

That’s just what I had done. I sat there. Dumbfounded. I stopped talking.

Chatter around the room continued. It sounded like muffled buzzing. All I could hear was the sound of my heartbeat in my ears.

“Sit down and shut up”

I turned to the girls, and I asked them to excuse me for a moment, tears welling up in my eyes. I ran to the bathroom.

 I let him win.

I realized then the reality of sexism today. I realized how the fight for equality is not over. In the midst of sexual assault allegations, news around the world of human trafficking and female sex workers, female genital mutilation,  the lack of women’s rights in other cultures…the list could continue on for pages, I am sure. We care about these headlines, and for good reason. Those forms of sexism and misogyny cause physical and mental harm, sometimes to the point of life and death. I guess, in 2017, in New York City, in an apartment with educated millennials my own age, I very naïvely thought I was equal. I do not feel equal.

I don’t feel like I was heard. I felt like my words were background noise. I felt like my pain was subliminal to the I enjoyment and appeasement of our male peers. I was secondary.

But what I contemplate today is this: is it better to live in a world of which I only surround myself with likeminded individuals? Should I play it safe and strictly engage with other liberals, other activists, other advocates? Or do I rise to the occasion and be open minded trying to be accepting and understanding of people from all walks of life with all ideologies?

If I do the later, how do I walk the thin line between opinionated advocate and argumentative bitch?

It’s sad that this dichotomy still exists. It’s sad to me that I hear this all the time women who express their opinions openly are seen as abrasive, argumentative, bitchy, ruthless, insensitive, or overwhelming. Yet, if a man were to behave the same way, he would be revered for his amazing ability to express himself and his viewpoints. It’s amazing to me that today we still have women who cope with this sexism by remaining silent because it’s easier. It’s easier to not have opinions, to keep them to yourself. God forbid we sacrifice our neutrality façade in the name of actual stimulating debate.

I do not blame women for behaving this way, in fact, I sympathize. I understand because that was me for years of my life, afraid to say anything that would rub someone the wrong way. I can’t be that girl anymore. I am not that girl anymore.

I am tired of being called these evil terms like those listed above: abrasive, argumentative, bitchy, ruthless, insensitive, or overwhelming. I want more people to see the beauty and strength and perseverance and self-confidence it takes a woman to truly put herself out there and willingly, honestly, vulnerably advocate in the name of something bigger than herself. I applaud the women across the globe who do this so gracefully, bravely, effortlessly. You are an inspiration.

I am embarrassed I let him get to me. I am embarrassed I left to cry alone in the bathroom on a Saturday night. I, once again being a “woman,” let my emotions get the best of me – damn. What I often forget is the power of an emotional appeal. The ability to authentically feel such raw pain not only for myself in that particular situation, but for the systematic and pervasive sexism and mistreatment we have in this nation and around the world. Emotion is powerful. Speaking out is powerful. Women are powerful.

I am not discouraged. I am emboldened.

I will never “sit down and shut up” again.