For the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing stories of women whose actions expanded Title IX to include sexual harassment and violence as a violation of the law. It got me thinking…

Why don’t we recognize sexual harassment when it happens to us? Why doesn’t it make us angry? Why don’t we all speak up?

I agree with the Yale student who said that sexual harassment is something that we all just expect. Something women just have to deal with. Maybe laugh about it with your girlfriends, roll your eyes, but otherwise let it go. It’s just the way it is.

But it isn’t the way it should be.

Safe in high school…

I got to thinking about my own experiences. In 1972, the year Title IX was enacted, I was entering high school. I knew nothing of the new law. I wasn’t an athletic girl; I was a geeky girl who played the flute and got straight As.

In my school, musical kids and top students were equally split between boys and girls as far as I  could see, no discrimination. If you were the best instrumentalist, you were awarded first chair. If you got the best grades, you were ranked at the top of your class.

I spent my free class periods in the quadrangle of private practice rooms in the music wing. I was perfectly safe there. I had two male band and orchestra teachers. Mr. Thrall was a fatherly gentleman whom we all loved. The other music teacher was a younger man who was also perfectly proper in his dealings with students. I rode in a car with him across New York State to the Catskills and back for all-state band, no problem.

Title IX didn’t seem to apply to me. At least for three years.

… Until…

In my senior year, I was in an accelerated English program that allowed me to choose independent study. I was assigned to a male teacher who was familiar to me from drama club. He was known — known! and we put up with it! — to be handsy and overly familiar with female students.

I don’t remember what path of study I chose, but I remember that he chose one session. He assigned me to read an e.e. cummings poem.

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.

Let me just tell you here that I was a very naive girl. I was brought up in a fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren household. It was an insular world that didn’t let in anything from the outside world, especially anything related to sex.

I think that explains my confusion when the teacher asked me what I thought about the poem. What did I think about the last lines?

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new.

I don’t remember what I said. Nothing? He went on — maybe that session, maybe another — to ask me about what I and my boyfriend of two years got up to together. Had we… you know… surely by now…

Throughout the year, he would whisper things in my ear. “I’m going to marry you some day,” he’d say. Was that grooming? At the senior prom, he asked me to dance — he, a chaperone — but after graduation, thankfully, that was the end of it. I guess he just went on to the next unsuspecting girl.*

I consider myself fortunate that nothing physical ever happened. It certainly could have. I’ve often wondered whether this teacher got through his career unscathed. Whether he ever faced any consequences for his actions. Whether any girl was brave enough to stand up to him.

Because of this experience, I understand the deep desire to let something invasive go unchallenged. I respect women who pursue recourse, no matter their feelings of humiliation and the cost to themselves of going public. They challenged what we all thought we had to endure — we all just thought it was the way things were. Yet because of the courage of women like these, it’s not the way things have to be.

                                                _________________________

* Unfortunately, that wasn’t my last experience with harassment. There was that Thomson newspaper executive who took me to dinner “to discuss my career advancement.” It wasn’t my career he had an interest in. 

PHOTO: e.e. cummings