Let me count the ways . . .

The father-daughter lecture my father bestowed upon me as I prepared to enter Junior High School. In order to keep me from becoming pregnant, I would no longer be allowed to attend boy-girl events.

In order to ‘make up’ for the devastation of ‘the rule’, my mother purchased 3 new dresses, 3 pair of socks, and maybe some undergarments; these items augmented the bulk of my wardrobe which consisted of hand-me-down clothes of a neighbor’s daughter.

Brother was 4 years younger. He was allowed to all social activities and his clothes came from a store.

By the time I was I senior in H.S. I decided to disobey my father. Began attending Friday night canteens with most of the other kids in town. Met a guy who thought the sun rose and set by me. He was wonderful.

Father told me he was not good enough. Instructed me to ditch him. Once again I obeyed. Biggest mistake of my life.

Tnx murphy. If that comment is detrimental to this post, take it out.

When I was a young associate in the DC branch of a large law firm, all the members of our office would travel to the firm’s main office for the monthly firm dinner. The dinner was always held at a men’s club in the big dining room. The dining room was decorated with murals of naked women that covered all the walls. After dinner, the waiters would come around with wooden boxes with cigars. This being the 1985ish, some women actually felt that they needed to smoke cigars with the men in order to be ‘liberated’.

The club had overnight accommodations and we had to stay there overnight. While we allowed in the dining room for the firm dinner, we were not allowed to have breakfast in the dining room the next morning. (I think we could have had breakfast delivered to our rooms, but I just found a coffee shop.)

There were three female lawyers in the office (including one partner) and while we all hated going every month, we did not feel like we could challenge it without being branded as troublemakers.

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Scores of women and children wearing colorful miniskirts and tight leggings gathered in central Jakarta on Sunday, outraged by a public official’s comments that provocatively dressed women are to blame for sexual assaults.
The protest was in response to remarks by the Indonesian capital city’s governor Fauzi Bowo, who said on Friday that women must not wear revealing clothes to avoid being raped or victimized.

http://news.yahoo.com/dont-blame-us-rape-miniskirted-jakarta-women-114027825.html

These women are brave!

OMG..Let me count the ways!
A lifetime, I have never felt safe nor free in this man frigging world.

Hey Dances with oreos (cookies) who the fuck is Bucky Fuller?
Oh has some one tampered with your enrgies ?

My own sister has double standards and it drives me crazy. If a woman has more than one or two drinks she’s very critical, while her own son and husband get drunk and make fools of themselves. She also expects the “womenfolk” to get up and help in the kitchen while the men sit around. GRRRRRR,it drives me nuts!

Counting will not work. My years on this earth come to almost 20,000 days and hardly a day goes by…

Starting with my parents. Continuing with my teachers and on to my professors. I was 15 years old when my high school chemistry teacher explained to me that I was gifted. It had just not occurred to me before then. God bless Mary Wall. I think she saved my life.

My boyfriends, my ex-husband, my employers and my co-workers…

And the sexism in not just from men.

Every day in every way…
Let me tell you this story. Just last week on 9/11 I was flying back home on an International Flight – paying from my own pocket, a gazillion $ to be in Business class because Damn it, I earned it ! So we were taking off and everyone dutifully turned off their cell phones… except for this one guy across the aisle to me. He was busy emailing and the plane was already on take off. I debated, and debated and finally I leaned over and said “Hey.. aren’t you supposed to turn off your phone?” I thought he was going to cuss me out. OK, so I am still an outsider BECAUSE mind you, only a SMALL % of women are in business class in most of my experience (domestic or international) so we are a minority. He looked taken aback and he powered off and he said, Thank you , Thank you for telling me to do that. I said, OK, no problem. It being 9/11 and 10 years to the original 9/11, I didn’t want anything to happen on my flight again. Long story short he was extremely surprised and shocked but appreciative that I told him that. I found out that he is a Chevron Exec. coming from Indonesia and going back to HQ. There you have it. Mr. money bags executive who has never had a little woman put him in his place. We spent a good 15 minutes with him gushing about how great it is that I had stepped out and told him to shut that thing off and of course he tried to chat up but hey, I wanted business class so I could sleep not get chatted up. Another thing he said that showed it is a mans world, he explained that he just got word that his 22 year old son who just graduated from Houston, just got a $92,000 a year job from his company, Chevron. He is so proud, soooo proud. A 22 year old grad ? And gas is still over $4 in Coronado where we were last night. Anyone surprised ?
One thing I learned here, and that is, we have to woman up to the men.

bellecat
“well rounded” is a laugh riot in the context of my comment. ;-p

In kindagarten I loved playing (by MYSELF) with this little woooden tool bench. It had a wooden hammer, screwdriver, and wrench, with wooden nails, screws, and nuts and bolts that you used the tools to insert into the bench.
I played with this thing every day for the first week and a half of school until one day, as I was playing, the teacher came over, took the toy, grabbed my hand and walked me over to the miniature kitchen. There was a boy already at the kitchen table, pretend reading a pretend newspaper, he was the husband / father. There was a girl who was waiting on him hand and foot as she prepared his coffee and breakfast and served it to him. She was the wife/mother. I was the late comer so I became the designated kid. He was very demanding and she treated him like a prince and it made my stomach turn. She was an okay kid and he was a icky kid. Yet she was subservient to him!
I’ll tell you, I had never seen this kind of domesticity except on tv, and I sat there at their table shocked by the interaction. Really, she was being a Stepford wife, and he was just a bland jerk.

My parents always shared most of the domestic chores and parenting in our household. Both cooked, individually, and bother were mechanically inclined, and both read …a lot, difference was Dad loved reading history, science and technical books while my Mother read from the best sellers list and romance novels.
My father, a machinist at the time, was a quiet kind of guy. My mother was the socializer… life of the party type. Anyhoo…

I remember sitting at that fake family table thinking “that is NOT ME! NEVER EVER!” Sooner than later I became truant… and finally was allowed to dropped out of kindergarten. That spared me one year of sexism and gender role modeling.

Apologies for the length of this to anyone who reached the bottom here. I haven’t thought about that in 55+ years. lol

I should clarify – I was told by a few women lawyers who taught at my law school not to wear pants suits because male judges would object. And my first trial was before a male judge, who treated me fairly.

one of my law school professors was so tuned in to sexism and brilliant at revealing the subtlest forms of it that she had strict rules on what could be said by the male students who dared to take her class Women and the Law. Except for a few gems, including a man in my class, most men who took the class were there to challenge the feminist critique of the law (which critique was spot on).