Taking it on the chin...

Photo of boxer Silvia Bignami courtesy of Instagram

Content warning: Contains references to sexual harassment and abuse.

There I was during a New York City summer - 1988 to be exact – sweating behind the counter at my summer job. The busy SoHo deli was where I earned money while on break from college. Most mornings, it was chaos as I tried to keep pace with ringing up customers and doctoring coffee orders and bagging to-go breakfasts for the hurried crowd. As I went to retrieve a customer’s bacon and egg sandwich from the short order cook, I noticed a maniacal smile spreading across his face as I approached.

Handing me the order, he leaned in and muttered so no one else could hear the lewd declaration of what he wanted to do me. To eliminate his revolting verbiage, let’s just say it would have involved the need to take a towel to my face after he worked his magic.

You’d think I would have been apoplectic.

I wasn’t – and not just because leering at the deli’s female employees was an open pastime of his. I was also relieved: that he didn’t make a humiliating remark about my weight. That variety of shrapnel came at me since the tender age of five and I was raw from it.

Compared to other 21-year-olds of the day, I had little-to-no experience in absorbing vitriol and disrespect of a sexual nature. (Who says those layers of fat can’t come in handy?) This still didn’t cancel out his vile behavior and the fact that he needed to be taken down a peg – or 17. With deliberate apathy, I pulled back, looked him in the eye, and replied (in his native language, which I studied in high school) ‘OK, then…when and where?’

His eyes widened, and then his jaw clenched.

“You’re…TERRIBLE,” he sputtered, turning his attention back to the grill.

I was happy to take the wind out of his sails; not only for his flagrant misogyny, but because I was flying high with euphoria that my old, festering wound hadn’t been gouged again. It may be impossible for someone who hasn’t lived it to understand, but consider a lifetime of being lectured to by doctors and family members, ridiculed at school, even scream-insulted while entering a Chinese restaurant, and it’s not a stretch to see how reopening a wound that’s been repeatedly poked and chronically infected, can be too much to swallow.

This is not to minimize the heartache and humiliation my slender sisters have experienced from puberty on. The damage is real. And often long-lasting. Adding to both varieties of shrapnel is the reality that the offenders usually feel no remorse, let alone take accountability. I came of age in an era where all varieties of disrespect and degradation directed at women were tolerated, even encouraged. And I’m sure it was worse for preceding generations.

All I knew in that encapsulated moment at the deli grill was…he wasn’t tapping into the reservoir of primal shame I still harbor regarding the size, shape and acceptability-level of my body. And it washed over me like a salve.

I could give a five-installment litany of insults women of every shape and size are subjected to, but herewith is a mere fraction:

• “Yo! Jack LaLane has a warrant out for your arrest!” (shouted to me as walked down the street one day)

• Uninhibited, shameless critiques centering around the blame-game played on women whose breasts are ‘too’ big or ‘too’ small.

• “Get your fat ass out of the way.”

• And this: A true corporate horror story recounted to me by a friend who witnessed a supervisor at a large national company deliberately drop the papers he was clutching so a female underling would have to obediently squat down in front of him and pick them up. This alone is repugnant, but it gets uglier: when the woman handed the papers back to this poor excuse for a man, who towered imperiously over her, he concluded the charade by commanding her to ‘close her mouth, swallow, rise to standing.’ This was witnessed not just by my friend, but several other employees in the company reception area where visitors enter. That’s how overwhelmingly entitled this bastard believed he was. But hey, it was the 80s.

And in the most extreme cases, there are hardcore criminal incidents where inappropriate and harmful physical contact is made, and that’s a whole other study in emotionally infirmed and entitled men. Yeah, I know, this isn’t representative of all men. But one of these types is too many, and we all know we’re not fortunate enough to be down to a single predator roaming the earth.

And so, women are tasked with carrying on, usually without apologies, amends, or justice. That leaves us with unhealed wounds, unmet needs, and untold amounts of time and energy expended attempting to heal and make sense of it all. And by make sense, I mean disinfecting the foul stench of the self-blame women tend to be saddled with. You know, the worn-out gaslighting tactics such as critiquing a woman’s wardrobe or food choices.

How do you cope with being the object of degradation and disrespect as sport? There’s no adequate way to cope while its happening, and there’s no one way to attempt healing once it has occurred.

Sometimes…

You space out

Pretend it’s not happening

Tell someone

Have a drink and try and forget

Binge-eat sugar

Plunge into people-pleasing to make yourself less of a target

I did all but one as a habitual rotation. I guess you could call it a master class in getting through the day without solving the problem. Telling someone, however proved to be a one-and-done when my parents’ response was to blame their eight-year-old daughter for society’s contempt by reminding me, with raised eyebrows, that if I just stuck to my diet it wouldn’t be happening.

Little pro tip, fellas and parents: this type of abuse can start as early as kindergarten. The most extreme case I’ve come across is a middle-aged woman who confided to me her size-phobic mother put her on a diet at age three and it went downhill from there. But since it starts at a tender age, maybe think twice about the remarks you make to a woman or girl at ANY age – unless you’re honest enough to admit that promoting lasting damage is your goal.

The reaction of HALLELUJAH that surged through me that day at the deli was a response to how my body and it’s underground tunnels of stored trauma are architected. That a comment such as that would elicit relief should give anyone with a pulse pause to ask what the FUCK we’re doing to women and girls.

It does not pass for comedy, or bonding, or flexing.

There’s nothing jovial about causing embarrassment or shame because you threw an inappropriate joke or double entendre someone’s way in order to have a little knuckle-dragging fun. Or because you think it’s your right to pass judgement on someone’s appearance.

To those who have the power to curtail this damaging and ingrained behavior (even deciding not to laugh at your friends’ jokes moves the needle), do you want to be part of the problem or part of fomenting the long overdue shift of females feeling safe and secure in their bodies? I kid you not when I say this move would change the world.

And to those recovering, the first step is to not minimize what it did to you (tactic No. 1 of the misogynistic overlords). Then remember the simplicity that you were, are, and always will be a specimen of God’s beauty and splendor.

And then…you can start to make your way home. Or as I like to say, re-matriate.