It's Starting

It's started already, the victim blaming.

Betsy Schoeller, a former Wisconsin Air National Guard officer, posted comments on Facebook about Guillen’s death, saying sexual harassment is the price of admission for women in the military and “if you’re gonna cry like a snowflake about it, you’re gonna pay the price."

Women veterans read this and get ready to relive the nightmares.

It's been over 40 years since WAC was disbanded and women were integrated into all aspects of the military. Those of us who were there at the beginning are wondering if what we went through to get even a tiny amount of respect made any difference. We were on the front lines of the battle and we sure as hell didn't have family members as vocal as Specialist Guillen. We filled out questionnaires, we did surveys, we talked to all sorts of people about all sorts of things. Our responses were to be used to make the lives of the women enlisting after us better.

I don't think they listened.

Does this happen to civilians? You will be sitting at your work station, doing your job. You find a male coworker, who is the same rank you are but since he's a man, he's in charge, standing over you, breathing down your neck, and by way of explanation he says "Nice tits".  You are on the night shift and it's in the middle of REFORGER. You can't leave. There is no one else in your shop, just you and the tit fancier.  So you leave your office to deliver a message to another shop only to get called back a few minutes later because he can't answer the phones and read his porn magazine at the same time.

You go back to work, and later on, sometimes in the wee hours of early morning, you are once again trying to do your job and this same jerk, probably inspired by some bogus article he read in the porn mag, decides it's just fine to reach around and grab your breasts. 

You know what happens after you file the complaint?

The first person you get to see is some female NCO with her head so far up the first sergeant's ass she'll never see daylight.  The first thing she asked was "what were you wearing?"

Let's see. I was in the Army, this was an Army post, I was on duty, and we were in the middle of a huge military exercise. Of course, I was wearing this a cocktail dress and pair of fuck me pumps!  That's how all female soldiers dress. What kind of stupid assed question is that? I was wearing a camouflage uniform. One that was about two sizes too damned big because the military didn't stock uniforms for small people.

You know what happens when you are a female soldier accusing a male soldier of bad behavior? You catch hell from all sides. You had better be a reincarnation of Joan of Arc. It doesn't matter if you are married or single. They are going to want to know every detail of your sex life including how old you were when you lost your virginity. 

In the end, nothing was done about it.  It never is.

So we stopped talking.

To anyone. Including our husbands and significant others or our parents.

Back in the eighties, it was still a man's world and if we had stayed home and been the sweet keeping little doormats god intended us to be, things like this would never happen.

I thought things had changed.

It's forty years later and I thought things had changed.

They have.

They're worse than ever....