You will notice I NEVER come to the whine cellar, because I'm not really one to complain... I figure if you can't make something better, walk away and surround yourself with something better.
Anyhow.
Today the GRAND grand grand fromage (boss's boss's boss) was in the building and he's a HUGE soccer fan. I have World Cup Fever and I've watched most of the games so far, and I thought I'd make some small talk with him. We were standing with a male colleague of mine who is a computer geek and couldn't possibly care LESS about World Cup Soccer. He even said so. Several times.
So as the three of us chit chatted, GGG Fromage KEPT looking at Sean. NEVER looked at me. I kept asking questions and talking about the players, and when he replied, he looked straight at Sean, even though Sean KEPT shrugging and saying I don't know what you are talking about.
I FUCKING HATE THIS PLACE SO MUCH!!
Grrr
/rant over
Just told a female colleague of mine this story and she nodded knowingly. Said GGGFromage NEVER listens. She has had multiple conversations with him and she said he has not heard a word she said.
I had a few teaching assistants in university who would do this. They were always from nations that weren't very encouraging of female independence. I was the student, and they were there to help me in labs. I would often have a male lab partner and occasionally we would encounter a TA who would listen to my question and then answer it while trying to engage with the male student (looking him in the eyes, taking his visual cues) and completely ignoring me. If I had follow-up issues I would state them and the TA would pretend like the words were coming out of the air on behalf of the male student and would answer them. Every single time my male lab partner would look at me afterward and say "What the fuck was up with that?!"
It's definitely sexist, and I always felt this urge to slap them so that they would take notice of me - "Hello! I'm over here!" In reality, there no good solution that I have found. If he's that high up then hopefully he'll be retiring soon and saving you from his continued presence...
What total BS. That guy needs to enter the 21st century!
Urrghhh! how infuriating Jo!!! Next time he tries to talk to you you could act indifferent or direct your answers to a nearby female colleague LOL
Sexism is alive and well.
When my grandmother bought me a car almost ten years ago she was the one paying and yet the salesman ignored her completely and only spoke to me.
I would definitely have walked away from him. How could it be rude? To him you weren't there anyway.
As to people who are equal, I get right in their face. I say things like, "I know women, especially older ones, are invisible in this culture, but I will not tolerate that."
It really freaks them. Usually they don't know they're doing it. I did it to a salesclerk who walked away from me in a Target to help a pretty young thing while he was talking to me, and then I reported him.
"Why are you talking to him? I am talking to you." also works. People really and truly are unconscious. And I'm usually always in a place where it costs me absolutely nothing to do that.
I can't tell you how many times I've encountered this. The men either flat out ignored me as though I weren't standing right there speaking, or if they were looking at me, it was in a way that made it very clear they were looking at me as a fuckable object--this was back in my younger days. Now that I'm over 40, I'm not even a fuckable object anymore, so it's just full on ignore mode. Of course, not every guy does this, most of the men I've encountered in my life have not done this at all, but the ones that do sure stand out in my memory, it's absolutely infuriating.
Oh, yeah, Anastasia, that's a very good point. Most men are not ogres or brutes. But we remember the ones who are. I suppose that's not very fair or very productive. And this carries over to non-gender groups, too. Like cops and doctors. You remember the really evil, crappy ones. And they create a bad reputation for their groups that the good ones get blamed for, too.
This is big in 'apartment hunting' too.. they just assume that the man is the breadwinner and so he should make the decisions, so they talk to him and show him everything.. but they are talking to me when they show the kitchen or laundry room. Seriously! I thought it was in my head until my DH mentioned that he had noticed it too. I'm young but not attractive, so I guess I'm invisible too.
Oh, you know what? I just realized this thing doesn't happen to us as a couple because we're BOTH women. So when we shop together, it's different. If I am out alone, though, and competing with men (who arrive after I do) for attention, then it's sometimes a matter of being quite vocal. Not rude, but insistent. I love asking them if they realize what they're doing.
When we were on vacation last year, BJ was buying tickets for someplace when a man came up and began asking questions, The clerk then turned to him and totally ignored BJ and she said, "Hey, I was here first! What do you think you're doing?" And the clerk said, "I thought you were together." She says, "No, we're not. He pushed in and you let him." Then the man called BJ a bitch, and we called security. Just that fast, it escalated out of control because of a sexist assumption.
Guess what, Anastasia. This was in your hometown.
Someone I knew from school was walking home with a couple of male friends when the male friends decided to stop in an electronics store because one of them wanted to buy a new toy. She wanted to get home, so she stood closer to the door and acted like she wanted to leave. An older male sales clerk came over to her and said "This stuff doesn't interest you, does it" and her response was "No, it doesn't. I find it interesting when I design them but they aren't interesting once they've reached the stores".
People shouldn't make assumptions... in her case she's a hardware designer for high tech toys
I have effectively 'walked away' from all the sexist pigs in this department. I don't socialize with anyone, I refuse to attend work events that are not mandatory and I learned a LONG LONG time ago that there is no changing anyone's hearts or minds. I need to get the hell out of this job and just do whatever it takes to make it tolerable in the meantime. I am at my desk ALL the time, while everyone else is out golfing, drinking at the bar across the street, out in the smoking area... whatever they do. I work my hours and I make myself scarce.
I just happened to be at someone's desk when this guy walked up, and I know I have the reputation around here of being a standoffish bitch, so I was just being 'nice' and making small talk since I knew he liked soccer. Now I know better.
I freakin HATE this place.
Ugh. Sounds like it's getting worse and worse for you there.
The only thing worse than not having a job, is having one you hate. Even then, it's a stretch though. Sometimes no job at all is better than a toxic environment day after day after day.
(07-09-2010 01:58 PM)Jo Wrote: [ -> ]I have effectively 'walked away' from all the sexist pigs in this department. I don't socialize with anyone, I refuse to attend work events that are not mandatory and I learned a LONG LONG time ago that there is no changing anyone's hearts or minds. I need to get the hell out of this job and just do whatever it takes to make it tolerable in the meantime. I am at my desk ALL the time, while everyone else is out golfing, drinking at the bar across the street, out in the smoking area... whatever they do. I work my hours and I make myself scarce.
I just happened to be at someone's desk when this guy walked up, and I know I have the reputation around here of being a standoffish bitch, so I was just being 'nice' and making small talk since I knew he liked soccer. Now I know better.
I freakin HATE this place.
You have a realy good way of dealing with it. Sounds an awful lot like my days in the miserable Air Farce when I couldn't walk away. I wish I'd been smarter then but I was an awful lot younger, and attitudes about women were even worse.
Best of luck finding a different, better place.
(07-09-2010 09:17 AM)eslbee Wrote: [ -> ]Guess what, Anastasia. This was in your hometown.
No surprise there! Just because I was forced to live there until my mother died, I wouldn't necessarily call it a "home" town. More accurately it's the redneck dump I escaped from. Back when I lived there was when I experienced most of the sexist moments in my life. I even had a male co-worker tell me to "sit there and look pretty" when I asked if there was something I could do to help during a video shoot at a factory.
Of course, my experiences weren't completely limited to redneckland. This event sticks in my mind: when I experienced the big ignore mode in London. It was when the cable guy came over to my friend's flat to install cable TV. My friend never had cable TV before and didn't understand anything about it because he's completely tech-illiterate and didn't even have a TV until that week. The cable guy was an immigrant from Africa and he refused to look at me or speak to me and only addressed my friend, who was male, of course, even though my friend didn't get anything the guy was saying. I was the only one speaking to the cable guy, but he acted as though I wasn't there at all, and he refused to acknowledge that I was saying anything. He just hooked up stuff and spoke to my friend, who was confused about how cable worked, and didn't understand anything.
Of course, to an African male, I'm barely around the status of chattel, and there's nothing to be done about that. But I had four African male friends in Tennessee before that event (from Nigeria and Kenya), and they did speak to me on a regular basis, but now that I look back I think it was the "fuckable object" mode of speaking, rather than thinking of me as a real human friend.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! (Runs back to ivory tower).
Yeah, I definitely believe that women are either fuckable objects or not in the eyes of a lot, if not most men, and the men act accordingly. I have seen that look when they look at friends of mine and I have seen that look disappear from their eyes when they look at me. It has ALWAYS given me a very cheap thrill that I am not sexually attractive to men. I must emit some pheremone that lets them know I'm genderqueer, therefore, unfuckable. I think it's hilarious.
My problems at work stem from the fact that I am an unfuckable object with half a brain and enormous boobs. So they can't actually ignore me like they would some other unfuckable object. They have to associate with me on a work level, if not a basic conversational level. And the boobs make it hard (I have one coirker who ONLY looks at my tits when he talks to me... I think he thinks he's just looking down like he's shy, but it's VERY awkward) and then the rest that simply CANNOT put FEMALE BODIED and SMART and FRIEND in the same slot in their brain, so I seem to stay in the "unclassified" portion of their brain that they just ignore. On the bright side, I am not sexually harrassed, because I would have to be in some "sexual" slot in their brain for that to happen, and I'm not there. I'm invisible.
It has it's benefits, being invisible. But it's frustrating as sin when you are trying to work with these people or advance in your career or be taken seriously.