September 12, 2011
8. Newblog2011: 09/12/11 Shelters/Women who participate in the harassment/Irony
I've been staying at the Quincy shelter because the smaller shelters often have nowhere to go to get away from the harassment. For all the shelters, there's a time of day when you have to be there and stay there; the most recent shelter that I stayed at was St. Patrick's shelter in Somerville. It's a relatively small, all-female shelter, and, like the shelter in Lynn, the harassment there reached unmanageable proportions quickly, because the percentage of people who wanted to harass me there had nothing else with which to occupy their time, and there was nowhere for them or for me to go by 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon when we were all back there every day.
The Qunicy shelter isn't the most comfortable place I've been and I, as I've said, I get harassed there. However, all women are now targets or potential targets for being abused, and anyone who doesn't understand that by now doesn't understand what's going on. For example, the coughing; there are several homeless men at the Qunicy shelter who do the loud, fake coughing, sneezing and vomiting noises whenever they walk by the women's restroom that's around the corner from the cafeteria, even if they don't know who's in that restroom. I know that because that restroom is small, has doors on both the stalls, and is the only place at the shelter to get some privacy. I've only stayed at that shelter for a few days in a row now, and it's a shelter with a lot of people. Therefore, if I'm in that restroom at any given time, am there for 20 minutes to brush my teeth and organize my things, and hear man after man pass by the closed, outer door to the restroom coughing as if they're on their last legs, I know that they're doing that to indicate something that they want to say about all women and not only about me, because they can't know who's in the restroom. Another reason that they can't know who's in the bathroom is that I haven't established a set time for going back to the shelter or for leaving it; there are several buses that go to and from that shelter every day, bringing people to and from Boston, so few if any of the men who do walk-by harassment near that bathroom can know for sure that I'm the woman who's in that bathroom.
What's happened over the past year and a half is a hideous campaign of nothing more than the basest misogyny. If, on this page, I'm only going to talk about the side of the campaign that's specifically about women, I'm going to say that the only purpose of that aspect campaign is to degrade all females and to subjugate all females to all men.
The fact that the true purpose of the female-oriented side of the harassment is to permanently turn women into second-class citizens, if not less than second-class citizens, is one of the reasons that I sometimes get especially frustrated with women who perpetuate the harassment. It's not possible that women who perpetuate the harassment realize that they're hurting themselves, that what's going on is a full attack on the dignity and rights of all women.
Here's another prediction: once the attacks on women's legal rights to which the worldwide degradation of women is leading begin, those attacks are going to happen very quickly and will be as large in scope as the informal, extremely visible and loud degradation has been. All of the ridicule of me, the accusations, the persecution, the pretense that there's any inoffensive, nonviolating way to make constant references to female genitalia and other sexual characteristics; all of that is the lead-in to sweeping women out of the picture socially, legally, politically, and in every possible way.
The harassment of me by other patrons of the Boston Public Library has continued. There is severe noise happening at the shelter, especially at night in the female dorm, but really it's ongoing.
As for the last shelter I was at, St. Patrick's, the small shelter:
I got really abused by some homeless women and some staff there. The final incident involved a woman who had constantly harassed me since my first day there. On my last day there, she walked up to me and demanded that I get out of her way.
For that shelter, everyone gathers at another, non-residential service center in the afternoon and then the guests are brought to the shelter by van. On my last day there, I sat around the corner from the main room. I wasn't visible from that room, although I could hear some of what was said and done there.
I sat at the end of a long ramp that is several feet wide and that goes from the entrance to the building up to the room where the other women were sitting. There is a half wall that separates the ramp from the rest of the room. If you stand at the top of the ramp, you can see all along the ramp and into the hallway that leads into the office of the service center.
I was reading, and, all of a sudden, I heard "Can you move your feet please?" It was said in a very loud, nasty tone of voice. The homeless woman, who had harassed me nonstop since I had been staying at the shelter, had started at the top of the ramp, where she couldn't help but have seen me, and she had chosen to walk up to me until her feet were almost touching my feet and then tell me to get out of her way.
There were at least 2 feet of space (no code--I'm not going to repeat that again, either) past the tips of my toes to the other wall. I wasn't AT ALL taking up all the room at the end of the ramp, and it's not as if she hadn't walked up to me on purpose so that she could bully me.
I looked up at her, saw how close she had gotten to me before she said anything, and told her "You can go around me."
She said "I have bad legs."
Literally, all she had to do was take one step to the right in order to have a free path around me. Also, there is no way that she didn't see me from the top of the ramp; she deliberately walked up to me SO THAT she could tell me to move.
She said, again, more loudly "I have bad legs!"
I said "You had all the way along the ramp to figure out where to go. You can go around me."
She stepped on me. She stepped on my legs to get to the door.
I didn't really notice her doing that; she walked over me, hitting my legs with her legs, and I thought that maybe she had just stumbled over me, until she got to the door and I heard her say "SORRY," in a tone of voice that showed me that she wasn't sorry at all, that she had meant to step on me.
I had already gone back to reading before she had stepped on me, so when I realized that she was talking to me again and that she had deliberately stepped on me, I looked up and said "It's not my problem, it's your problem."
She couldn't have been too eager to get outside, despite the fact that she'd been yelling at me to get out of her way, because she started to raise her voice to me again. Another homeless woman appeared at the top of the ramp and yelled to her "Don't say anything, just tell staff when they get here."
From past experience, I knew that the van driver wasn't going to help me, and wasn't going to take my side.
i went into the office of the service center and asked if I could use the phone. I called the shelter and spoke to another staffperson who was there. I told her what had happened, and that I was going to walk to the shelter in order to avoid more conflict.
Women often walk from the service center to that shelter; they get asked to do that if there's not a lot of room for them and their bags on the van.
The staffperson on the phone wasn't nice about it, but she said "Go ahead," meaning "go ahead and walk."
When I got back to the shelter, she and the van driver screamed at me. They told me that they had been getting a ton of complaints about me, that I argue with everyone, that the woman had a bad leg and I was cruel to her, that there was a witness to the whole thing.
All of that wasn't true, but those two female staffpeople at the shelter wouldn't stop yelling at me. If I tried to defend myself, they yelled at me more. I tried to tell them that I got along with the majority of the other women at the shelter, that a few of them wouldn't leave me alone and that those few women were the ones with the problem. I got yelled at for that. They said everything was my fault.
They had the Wet Floor sign out, too, outside the bathroom for me to see as soon as I got back, even though there was no wet floor there.
The homeless woman who had ganged up on me with the women who'd walked right up to me and then told me to get out of her way joined in, saying "She only had this much space to get by you," and using her hands to indicate less than a foot of space. That was a total lie; a total lie, as I've already described in preceding paragraphs.
The two staffpeople kept yelling at me. Nothing that I said was met with anything but more accusations. Then they told me that they were never going to let me out of the tower, not ever, even if I could learn the spell by heart....wait, no, wrong story.....
OK, here's what happened.
Then the van driver yelled "I don't wanna hear no more. Don't say another word, or I'm gonna bar you. I can do that, I can bar people."
I closed my mouth. I kept getting yelled at. I said "I'm not going to just take being abused by you."
The van driver jumped up and yelled 'That's it! You're barred for the night. Go!"
I went out into the completely silent dining room, from where many of the other guests of the shelter had heard what happened. As I walked by a woman who was standing next to the completely out of tune upright piano, I saw that there was a box of Cheez-its on top of the piano near her. I picked up the box and threw it over the top of the refrigerator.
Unfortunately, there was someone sitting in the chair on the other side of the refrigerator. I saw her here there a second too late; the Cheez-its box was halfway across the top of the refrigerator before I realized that it might hit her.
I jumped out from the other side of the refrigerator and said "I'm sorry, I didn't mean for that to hit you."
I hadn't thrown it that hard, and I don't know that it did hit her. I think it might have landed next to her. She wasn't mad; she said "It's ok. Just go."
I was only barred for the night, but I haven't gone back.
I also just realized that some of what I wrote spontaneoulsy in this essay and without thinking about it might be construed as several lines of code for another person. I didn't mean it that way at all when I wrote it.
The harassment is taking all the fun out of life. Bullying and slurs, discrimination, and everything that's happened over the past year and a half; it seems to me that those things are only fun for the bullies who perpetuate them. They're not good things.
On another day at that shelter, before I was barred for one night, a guest of the shelter walked toward me through the hall. She coughed when she saw me. I said "However did you get that terrible infection in your throat?" which is a response that has gotten various responses from anger to silence to laughter from the person who had been harassing me, to sheer, boorish continuance of harassing behavior even when other people are laughing at the people who continue.
She had a reaction that I've only gotten once before, and I found it just as ironic from her as I had on the first occasion that I'd seen that reaction. We had been passing by each other, and she turned around and followed me.
She said "Are you making an insinuation?"
I said "What do you mean?"
She said "Yes you were. You were trying to say something about me."
I said "Really, I'm not sure what you mean."
I said that because I have found that there's a lot of risk in trying to deal directly with harassment of the past year and a half. What was I supposed to say to her, "No, you were the one who was trying to insinuate that you can smell the awful smell of my vagina from yards away, even though I'm fully clothed and really don't have a vaginal odor problem, and all I did was defend myself?" I could have said that, because that's what all of the people who do the coughing thing are trying to imply, and part of the enjoyment that they get out of trying to humiliate me is trying to get me to say exactly that kind of thing so that they can deny that that's what they were saying, call me crazy, call me a problem, and during that process get words to leave my mouth that describe exactly what they're trying to insinuate about me.
The last thing she said to me as I was about to walk out of the room was this:
"What kind of person makes an insinuation about someone they don't even know? Creep."
Copyright L. Kochman, September 12, 2011 @ 4:42 p.m./I really don't have time to edit this one./last edited @ 4:52 p.m./last edited @ 4:53 p.m./@ 4:54 p.m./last edited @ 1:53 p.m. on September 13, 2011
8. Newblog2011: 09/12/11 Shelters/Women who participate in the harassment/Irony
I've been staying at the Quincy shelter because the smaller shelters often have nowhere to go to get away from the harassment. For all the shelters, there's a time of day when you have to be there and stay there; the most recent shelter that I stayed at was St. Patrick's shelter in Somerville. It's a relatively small, all-female shelter, and, like the shelter in Lynn, the harassment there reached unmanageable proportions quickly, because the percentage of people who wanted to harass me there had nothing else with which to occupy their time, and there was nowhere for them or for me to go by 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon when we were all back there every day.
The Qunicy shelter isn't the most comfortable place I've been and I, as I've said, I get harassed there. However, all women are now targets or potential targets for being abused, and anyone who doesn't understand that by now doesn't understand what's going on. For example, the coughing; there are several homeless men at the Qunicy shelter who do the loud, fake coughing, sneezing and vomiting noises whenever they walk by the women's restroom that's around the corner from the cafeteria, even if they don't know who's in that restroom. I know that because that restroom is small, has doors on both the stalls, and is the only place at the shelter to get some privacy. I've only stayed at that shelter for a few days in a row now, and it's a shelter with a lot of people. Therefore, if I'm in that restroom at any given time, am there for 20 minutes to brush my teeth and organize my things, and hear man after man pass by the closed, outer door to the restroom coughing as if they're on their last legs, I know that they're doing that to indicate something that they want to say about all women and not only about me, because they can't know who's in the restroom. Another reason that they can't know who's in the bathroom is that I haven't established a set time for going back to the shelter or for leaving it; there are several buses that go to and from that shelter every day, bringing people to and from Boston, so few if any of the men who do walk-by harassment near that bathroom can know for sure that I'm the woman who's in that bathroom.
What's happened over the past year and a half is a hideous campaign of nothing more than the basest misogyny. If, on this page, I'm only going to talk about the side of the campaign that's specifically about women, I'm going to say that the only purpose of that aspect campaign is to degrade all females and to subjugate all females to all men.
The fact that the true purpose of the female-oriented side of the harassment is to permanently turn women into second-class citizens, if not less than second-class citizens, is one of the reasons that I sometimes get especially frustrated with women who perpetuate the harassment. It's not possible that women who perpetuate the harassment realize that they're hurting themselves, that what's going on is a full attack on the dignity and rights of all women.
Here's another prediction: once the attacks on women's legal rights to which the worldwide degradation of women is leading begin, those attacks are going to happen very quickly and will be as large in scope as the informal, extremely visible and loud degradation has been. All of the ridicule of me, the accusations, the persecution, the pretense that there's any inoffensive, nonviolating way to make constant references to female genitalia and other sexual characteristics; all of that is the lead-in to sweeping women out of the picture socially, legally, politically, and in every possible way.
The harassment of me by other patrons of the Boston Public Library has continued. There is severe noise happening at the shelter, especially at night in the female dorm, but really it's ongoing.
As for the last shelter I was at, St. Patrick's, the small shelter:
I got really abused by some homeless women and some staff there. The final incident involved a woman who had constantly harassed me since my first day there. On my last day there, she walked up to me and demanded that I get out of her way.
For that shelter, everyone gathers at another, non-residential service center in the afternoon and then the guests are brought to the shelter by van. On my last day there, I sat around the corner from the main room. I wasn't visible from that room, although I could hear some of what was said and done there.
I sat at the end of a long ramp that is several feet wide and that goes from the entrance to the building up to the room where the other women were sitting. There is a half wall that separates the ramp from the rest of the room. If you stand at the top of the ramp, you can see all along the ramp and into the hallway that leads into the office of the service center.
I was reading, and, all of a sudden, I heard "Can you move your feet please?" It was said in a very loud, nasty tone of voice. The homeless woman, who had harassed me nonstop since I had been staying at the shelter, had started at the top of the ramp, where she couldn't help but have seen me, and she had chosen to walk up to me until her feet were almost touching my feet and then tell me to get out of her way.
There were at least 2 feet of space (no code--I'm not going to repeat that again, either) past the tips of my toes to the other wall. I wasn't AT ALL taking up all the room at the end of the ramp, and it's not as if she hadn't walked up to me on purpose so that she could bully me.
I looked up at her, saw how close she had gotten to me before she said anything, and told her "You can go around me."
She said "I have bad legs."
Literally, all she had to do was take one step to the right in order to have a free path around me. Also, there is no way that she didn't see me from the top of the ramp; she deliberately walked up to me SO THAT she could tell me to move.
She said, again, more loudly "I have bad legs!"
I said "You had all the way along the ramp to figure out where to go. You can go around me."
She stepped on me. She stepped on my legs to get to the door.
I didn't really notice her doing that; she walked over me, hitting my legs with her legs, and I thought that maybe she had just stumbled over me, until she got to the door and I heard her say "SORRY," in a tone of voice that showed me that she wasn't sorry at all, that she had meant to step on me.
I had already gone back to reading before she had stepped on me, so when I realized that she was talking to me again and that she had deliberately stepped on me, I looked up and said "It's not my problem, it's your problem."
She couldn't have been too eager to get outside, despite the fact that she'd been yelling at me to get out of her way, because she started to raise her voice to me again. Another homeless woman appeared at the top of the ramp and yelled to her "Don't say anything, just tell staff when they get here."
From past experience, I knew that the van driver wasn't going to help me, and wasn't going to take my side.
i went into the office of the service center and asked if I could use the phone. I called the shelter and spoke to another staffperson who was there. I told her what had happened, and that I was going to walk to the shelter in order to avoid more conflict.
Women often walk from the service center to that shelter; they get asked to do that if there's not a lot of room for them and their bags on the van.
The staffperson on the phone wasn't nice about it, but she said "Go ahead," meaning "go ahead and walk."
When I got back to the shelter, she and the van driver screamed at me. They told me that they had been getting a ton of complaints about me, that I argue with everyone, that the woman had a bad leg and I was cruel to her, that there was a witness to the whole thing.
All of that wasn't true, but those two female staffpeople at the shelter wouldn't stop yelling at me. If I tried to defend myself, they yelled at me more. I tried to tell them that I got along with the majority of the other women at the shelter, that a few of them wouldn't leave me alone and that those few women were the ones with the problem. I got yelled at for that. They said everything was my fault.
They had the Wet Floor sign out, too, outside the bathroom for me to see as soon as I got back, even though there was no wet floor there.
The homeless woman who had ganged up on me with the women who'd walked right up to me and then told me to get out of her way joined in, saying "She only had this much space to get by you," and using her hands to indicate less than a foot of space. That was a total lie; a total lie, as I've already described in preceding paragraphs.
The two staffpeople kept yelling at me. Nothing that I said was met with anything but more accusations. Then they told me that they were never going to let me out of the tower, not ever, even if I could learn the spell by heart....wait, no, wrong story.....
OK, here's what happened.
Then the van driver yelled "I don't wanna hear no more. Don't say another word, or I'm gonna bar you. I can do that, I can bar people."
I closed my mouth. I kept getting yelled at. I said "I'm not going to just take being abused by you."
The van driver jumped up and yelled 'That's it! You're barred for the night. Go!"
I went out into the completely silent dining room, from where many of the other guests of the shelter had heard what happened. As I walked by a woman who was standing next to the completely out of tune upright piano, I saw that there was a box of Cheez-its on top of the piano near her. I picked up the box and threw it over the top of the refrigerator.
Unfortunately, there was someone sitting in the chair on the other side of the refrigerator. I saw her here there a second too late; the Cheez-its box was halfway across the top of the refrigerator before I realized that it might hit her.
I jumped out from the other side of the refrigerator and said "I'm sorry, I didn't mean for that to hit you."
I hadn't thrown it that hard, and I don't know that it did hit her. I think it might have landed next to her. She wasn't mad; she said "It's ok. Just go."
I was only barred for the night, but I haven't gone back.
I also just realized that some of what I wrote spontaneoulsy in this essay and without thinking about it might be construed as several lines of code for another person. I didn't mean it that way at all when I wrote it.
The harassment is taking all the fun out of life. Bullying and slurs, discrimination, and everything that's happened over the past year and a half; it seems to me that those things are only fun for the bullies who perpetuate them. They're not good things.
On another day at that shelter, before I was barred for one night, a guest of the shelter walked toward me through the hall. She coughed when she saw me. I said "However did you get that terrible infection in your throat?" which is a response that has gotten various responses from anger to silence to laughter from the person who had been harassing me, to sheer, boorish continuance of harassing behavior even when other people are laughing at the people who continue.
She had a reaction that I've only gotten once before, and I found it just as ironic from her as I had on the first occasion that I'd seen that reaction. We had been passing by each other, and she turned around and followed me.
She said "Are you making an insinuation?"
I said "What do you mean?"
She said "Yes you were. You were trying to say something about me."
I said "Really, I'm not sure what you mean."
I said that because I have found that there's a lot of risk in trying to deal directly with harassment of the past year and a half. What was I supposed to say to her, "No, you were the one who was trying to insinuate that you can smell the awful smell of my vagina from yards away, even though I'm fully clothed and really don't have a vaginal odor problem, and all I did was defend myself?" I could have said that, because that's what all of the people who do the coughing thing are trying to imply, and part of the enjoyment that they get out of trying to humiliate me is trying to get me to say exactly that kind of thing so that they can deny that that's what they were saying, call me crazy, call me a problem, and during that process get words to leave my mouth that describe exactly what they're trying to insinuate about me.
The last thing she said to me as I was about to walk out of the room was this:
"What kind of person makes an insinuation about someone they don't even know? Creep."
Copyright L. Kochman, September 12, 2011 @ 4:42 p.m./I really don't have time to edit this one./last edited @ 4:52 p.m./last edited @ 4:53 p.m./@ 4:54 p.m./last edited @ 1:53 p.m. on September 13, 2011