Because this needs to be said, too

Earlier this week, a graphic designer named Justine posted an account of her boss's sexual assault on her at a CodeMash conference. As a woman in tech, its disheartening to hear how she was treated by her superior, and even more disheartening to read anonymous Internet commenters suggesting that she got what she deserved. But if there's a lesson in all this, something more empowering than "men shouldn't assault women," I think it's that no matter how many successful, confident women I see in this field, there are still some out there who don’t know how to stick up for themselves.

On the first night of the conference, everyone was at a bar drinking and having a good time. At one point, a drunken Justine lies down on the bar to do a body shot, and is surprised when her boss, Joe, is the one who takes it off of her. Joe, also drunk, starts rubbing her back and kissing her forehead, which she notes is not uncommon behavior among her coworkers.

But then things start to get more uncomfortable. Joe puts his hands down the back of her pants and starts kissing her. Next he puts his hands down the front of her pants and starts fingering her. She tells him to stop, reminding him that he has a wife and kids at home. When he doesn’t, she feels like “a deer in headlights staring into the eyes of the two male bartenders hoping someone would help me.” Eventually, a coworker (who has also written an account of the incident) notices that something doesn’t seem right and asks her if she wants to go out for a smoke. When they get outside, she breaks down in tears.

In the months after the assault, Justine falls into a downward spiral of anxiety, anorexia, alcoholism, and depression. Joe is terminated after an HR investigation, but he’s allowed to publicize that he left voluntarily. Several months later, with her life in shambles and feeling like her “reputation at the company had been stained,” Justine is offered the same deal.

By Justine’s telling, this is a story about how women in tech can’t win. We’re under tons of pressure to keep up with the dudes, but when we try to act like they do, they put us in our place with cutting remarks, mansplaining, or, when things get really bad, sexual assault. Justine felt this pressure to keep up acutely on the night of the assault:

At some point it was suggested that I do a body shot. I’ve never done one in my life but at the insistence of many people, attendees and bartenders I decided to lay on the bar. I just wanted to prove myself as one of the gang. Someone who was up for anything. I cannot explain to men how hard it is being a woman trying to play it cool in an industry of men. I want everyone to think I’m cool and relaxed so I try and just play by their rules. Regardless I got on the bar and lifted my shirt as far as I was comfortable.

Is this really what it means to be a woman in tech—lying down on a bar and hiking up your shirt in hope that people will like you? I hope not. This is a story about men behaving badly (or rather, one man behaving badly—Justine mentions several other male colleagues who were very supportive), but it should also be a story about a woman learning to behave better. Throughout the ordeal, Justine shows herself to be a woman who easily succumbs to peer pressure, who doesn’t know how to stick up for herself, and is not very resilient:

In recent months this year I’ve been arrested, charged with a DUI, involved in second intervention classes, lost contact with most of my friends, broken up with my long term and very supportive boyfriend, lost interest in speaking with my parents out of embarrassment, gone into credit debt, become a borderline alcoholic and continued my eating disorder for self punishment.

I’m doubtful that this can all be chalked up to fallout from the assault. It seems more likely that the anxiety, binge drinking, and other issues she struggled with after the incident also played a role in getting her in trouble in the first place. That she was drinking heavily on the night of the assault doesn’t make it her fault, but it also doesn’t absolve her of responsibility to be more careful the next time. 

Instead, she ups her drinking. Even while still at the conference, she says, “everyone did a really good job of making sure I was drunk enough to not have to deal with what was going on.” It’s worth noting that her sentence structure shifts the responsibility for her drinking onto other people. She didn't decide that she wanted to drink and then pour herself one, nor did she decide that she didn't want to drink and ignore the people who offered her one. She let other people decide for her. 

Justine narrates her story as a series of events that happen to her; she floats along like a leaf on the wind, tossed about by self-doubt and male encouragement. Even after the assault, she doesn't feel indignant so much as afraid that she did something wrong and might get fired, that her t-shirts are too suggestive or her lipstick too red. It's an attitude that made her feel trapped in a situation that she might otherwise have been able to extricate herself from, hence her climbing onto the bar when “it was suggested” that she do a body shot, and silently beseeching onlookers for help when her boss started kissing her.  

None of this is to indict Justine, who suffered something horrible. She was doing the best she could at the time. But if women may sometimes feel intimidated and defeated, we should encourage each other to push past those feelings and stick up for ourselves. After all, men sometimes feel horny and emboldened, but that doesn't mean we expect them to put those feelings ahead of their consideration for other people. 

This attitude does more than help protect women from assault—it allows us hold our own in a male-dominated industry every day. We shouldn't have to drink as much as the guys, eat as much as the guys, tell the same jokes as the guys, or otherwise try to follow them around like awed kid sisters. We don't have the power to fix everything, but we do have the power to fix that.

40 Days of Denial

I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around the fact that one day we are all going to stop existing. When I think about being dead, I picture myself slightly conscious and utterly bored for all eternity. Even writing about it now, I can feel the spindly fingers of existential dread wrapping themselves around my throat. When this happens, I usually just stop thinking about it, preferring to live with the illusion that I am somehow exempt from the laws of the universe.

Gravity, the new Alfonso Cuarón movie, dwells in this territory. In a terrifying early scene (they give it away in the previews), Dr. Ryan Stone is installing a piece of equipment when she becomes untethered from her station and is sent hurling through space. As she spins out of control, the camera zooms out and we see her tiny figure against the vast blackness. Moments ago, she was brown eyed and demure as she batted off George Clooney’s flirtations. Now she’s a meaningless fleck of dust, no match for the cosmos.

As far as plot goes, Gravity is predictable and straightforward: throughout the rest of Ryan’s adventure in space, we can feel the pull toward a happy ending. But at the same time, the possibility of a happy ending is destroyed barely ten minutes in. Seeing Ryan almost subsumed into the emptiness is an uncomfortable reminder of her insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things. Even if she’s standing on firm ground, she’ll never forget the fact that she’s hurling uncontrollably toward death. And so are we. 

I once read an interview with Woody Allen where he said, “One must have one’s delusions to live. If one looks at life too directly, it becomes unbearable to live.” Gravity serves us reality and denial on the same spoon. It’s a Hollywood sci-fi flick with enough action to distract from the constant background terror of knowing that we, like Ryan, are one day going to die. Like so much entertainment, it’s a diversion from the knowledge that we will lose everything that is dear to us. But even as Gravity offers an escape, it also delivers, in the form of Ryan’s vulnerable body spinning through space, a reminder of precisely that loss. The gravity of Gravity is this pull between palliative and pinprick, opiate and omen.

Just before seeing Gravity, I had been talking about 40 Days of Dating. I found the project kind of confounding, but I couldn’t articulate why. Strangely enough, Gravity provided the answer. Death is The Big Undeniable that we can’t help but deny, but there are plenty of other, smaller tragedies that we meet with mild self-delusion. Dating is one of them.

40 Days of Dating is a project created by Tim and Jessica, two young Brooklynites who’d been friends for years but never dated. They wanted to confront the issues that had prevented their romantic success; she tended to get attached, while he was a self-proclaimed commitment-phobe. So they decide to play at being a couple for forty days. The rules of their experiment included seeing each other every day, keeping separate blogs of their thoughts, and meeting weekly with a therapist. When the forty days were up, they decided whether they want to become a ‘real’ couple (spoiler: they don’t).

The experiment purportedly tests whether it’s possible to grow intimacy in a petri dish. But it doesn’t answer that question so much as it raises another: what’s the difference between fake dating and real dating? Not much, it turns out.

Over the course of the forty days, Tim and Jessica start to look a lot like a couple. They have sex. They bicker. They write cute love notes. But in the end, the pressure gets to both of them. He’s enjoying the moment enough that he’d rather not think about the future. She’s enjoying the moment enough that she can’t stop thinking about it. He senses her anxiety, and resents it. She senses his resentment, and becomes even more anxious.

You don’t need to be part of a dating experiment to experience this kind of vicious cycle—real dating has enough of it already. So why did they bother with the experiment at all? Why not just date? Perhaps they wanted to be different than they were before, different from everyone else who’s failing at dating. You can’t blame them for wanting to escape, but of course, they failed.

There’s no experiment that could rescue them from who they were, just like there’s no Hollywood movie that could rescue us from our mortality for more than the two hours it makes us forget about it. We may feel safe in the theater, sipping a soda and holding hands with our sweethearts, but we’re as doomed as Ryan was spinning through space. Movies might feel like an escape from life, but they’re just more life, happening right before our eyes. 40 Days might have felt like an escape from dating, but it was just more dating. We can’t escape, because there is nowhere to escape to; this is all there is.

That sounds pretty bleak, but maybe it doesn’t have to be. After all, Ryan stares these limits in the face and decides she still wants to survive. And who knows—maybe if Tim and Jessica had stared dating in the face they would have survived too (but then they wouldn't have Internet fame and a movie contract).