“I want you to polish that bumper bar so hard your titts wobble.”
”While you’re down there…..”
The first comment was made to me by my boss, the owner of a trucking business, in 1994, when I was 22 years old and supplemented my income as a pizza chef by cleaning trucks.
The second comment was made to me by a Senior Counsel when I bent over to collect some legal documents from the floor of a courtroom. It was 2003. I was 31 years old and a solicitor.
When the first comment was made I told my boss you can’t say that to me! And he said “OK. Sorry.”
When the second comment was made I was so shocked I didn’t say anything. In case you’re unaware, a man saying while you’re down there to a woman whose head is below his waist level means while you’re down there, give me a blow job.
I had heard of it because the female solicitors in my office joked about how it was the sort of appalling thing the less evolved men in our office might say. But the men in our office had never said that to me, nor to anyone else, to my knowledge. A visiting Senior Counsel had. In court. In front of me and a junior barrister.
Later the same day the junior barrister came to me and quietly apologised on behalf of the Senior Counsel. He said, “That was way out of line. He (the Senior Counsel) should know that I’m the one who makes sleazy jokes around here, not him.”
Reading Whisper Network inevitably makes you reflect on your own experiences of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. I was not shocked when the first comment was made to me; I was a woman in a male dominated workplace and the men I worked amongst were not politically correct. I accepted my boss’ apology as genuine and he never made a sleazy comment in front of me again.
The second comment, coming from a Senior Counsel, shocked me to the core. The Senior Counsel was an educated man and surely aware of the concept of sexual harassment in the workforce. In addition, the ethics of working as a senior barrister surely obliged him to behave in a professional manner. I expected better of him and I got worse.
I wish I’d said something in response. As women, we always wish we’d said something in response. The regret stays with us; we dwell on it. We feel as if we’ve somehow failed ourselves and other women by not speaking up. As if it is us who should be ashamed.
In Whisper Network, women working in a legal company in Dallas compile a list of BAD (Beware of Asshole Dallas) Men and email it to other women in the office, particularly junior employees. A man’s name can be added to the list anonymously, with a brief description of his inappropriate sexual behaviour. Turns out the personal trainers in the office gym have a similar list, with the names of male clients highlighted in red if they aren’t to be trusted with female personal trainers.
One such man whose name is highlighted in red is Ames. Ames is touted as the company’s next CEO. His name is also on the BAD Men’s list, courtesy of one of the novel’s protagonists, Sloane. After witnessing Ames’ suspect behaviour towards a new female employee, Sloane and her two friends and co-workers, Ardie and Grace, file a civil suit against Ames for sexual harrasssment, and against the company they are employed by, for providing an unsafe work environment.
When Ames dies shortly afterwards in an apparent suicide, Sloane, Ardie and Grace are counter-sued for Ames’s wrongful death. Things look bleak, especially when Katherine, the co-worker whom they sought to protect from Ames, comes out swinging for the opposite side. The three women stand to lose the lawsuit, a great deal of money and their jobs, plus being publicly condemned as a coven of malicious bitches who drove an innocent man to suicide.
I won’t spoil the ending, except to say there’s many reasons why the perspective of Rosalita, one of the office cleaners, is included. One is to remind us of the inherent privilege of these three women. They are educated and wealthy; if they’re fired they can undoubtedly get another well renumerated job. Two of them have supportive husbands; all of them have lovely homes and each other. They have choices Rosalita never had. The second reason Rosalita’s perspective is included is far more integral to the plot.
Chandler Baker nails it fairly often in this book. Ames’ attitude to women is neatly captured in one phrase; “He hated having to listen to someone he didn’t enjoy looking at.” She also nails the double standards applied to parents in the workplace; “A man could say he was taking the day off to go fishing with his son, while a mother was usually better off hiding the fact that she took a long lunch to run her child to the doctor’s office. Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees.”
And this, on recognising the moment when the line is crossed; “How did we know when behaviour was inappropriate? We just did. Any woman over the age of fourteen probably did. Believe it or not, we didn’t want to be offended. We weren’t sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to show up and offend us so that we would have something to do that day. In fact, we made dozens of excuses not to be. We gave the benefit of the doubt….But trust that by the time we were working, our meters had been tested dozens of times over. We were experts in our field.”
In the end what happened to Ames is less interesting than the truths of womens’ experience laid bare along the way. Give Whisper Network to a female friend and it’s like giving a bunch of flowers with a bomb inside. You cannot turn away. You cannot help but stop and reflect on your own experiences and on those of others.
And I know this is probably not the lesson intended to be learned from the novel and it’s a form of vigilante justice and could be used to slander good men without granting them a right of reply etc etc etc, but apart from that – isn’t having a BAD Men’s list, relevant to wherever your workplace is, kind of a good idea? I certainly would have added the Senior Counsel’s name to that list if such a list had been circulating in 2003.
Anyway, do read Whisper Network. Pass it on to your female friends. Get the males in your life to read it. Start the conversation, and keep it going. As Madeleine Albright once said (and this is quoted in the novel), “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
