Don't Give Me No Lines and Keep Your Hands to Yourself

I am dismayed at the repeated sleazy violations of my friends and associates that happens at events. Attendees can be a problem, they creep on performers, they don’t respect boundaries, they assume that because a woman exists that they can objectify and harass them with impunity. This is depressing and infuriating.

I have a whole separate level of disdain and enmity for men who are to any degree a part of the performance community who engage in such behavior. These are your friends, supposedly. And yet you are glad to sexually harass them, to create excuses to get into the dressing room to see them changing clothes, to grope them against their will despite repeatedly being asked not to. It is appalling. You should be ashamed of yourself. I have had numerous performers complain to me about individuals that everyone in the community knows. And the performers quietly warn each other about the worst of them. I personally am a big fan of publicly naming and shaming predators, but I am not willing to violate the requests of confidence under which I’ve been told these things. If you think I might be referring to you in this, take that as indicator that you need to seriously reevaluate your behavior.

This is exacerbated by women who are very particular about which women they are willing to support and defend when they are subject to harassment. I’ve heard of lot of slut shaming of women in the community that boils down to “I don’t like her as a person/performer therefore she’s a slut and I don’t care if guys are hassling her”. Defending shitty behavior of men because their target is someone you find annoying/untalented/whatever is disgusting and supports a culture in which a woman’s value is defined entirely by her sexual availability to men. This is abhorrent. Stop it. Defending shitty behavior of men because they are your friends? Same. You may want to rethink why you would want to be friends with someone who doesn’t see you as a person but as an object and not worthy of respect. “Oh, but he doesn’t treat ME like that, he’s great with ME.” Until he decides to make a move on you and you reject him, at which time you will suddenly realize he was never actually your friend to begin with.

I am in a moral quandary about what to do. I have no qualms about alienating people who treat women with such disgrace, who gleefully leverage their privilege and actively support the rape culture in which we exist. I cannot in good conscience expose the women who’ve confided in me to what would surely be a torrent of slut shaming, retaliatory attacks, and quite realistically probably physical danger, I can only encourage performers to be open and honest about what they are subject to and to support each other on this. Stand together, support one another, reach out to allies, expose predators.

I will note this bit I wrote a few months back, it encapsulates my personal standards for physical contact. I’ve been told that people think I don’t like them because I don’t hug them every time I see them. This is not the case, I’m simply choosing to not impose physical contact on people. I realize that harassment, creeping, et al, do not have to involve physical contact, but I’m reasonably confident that no one has ever felt intimidated or threatened by me in any of those ways so I’ve not felt it necessary to consider my need to address my behavior in those realms. If I am incorrect in that belief I urge you to correct me.

*yes there are women who sexually harass both men and women, and men who sexually harass men, and the disgraceful way transgender people are often treated by both men and women is a whole additional issue, for the sake of clean prose and in acknowledgment of the simple fact that the vast majority of the time it is a male harassing a female I’m writing from that perspective.