When lewd is just not funny

Here’s a story I read in The Citizen: there’s been an increase in workplace sexual harassment and rape, according to the Commission for Gender Equality.

And here’s a story I’ve sometimes told for laughs:

Many moons ago, when I was a fledgling journalist on the local press looking to move on, I applied for a job at The Citizen.

This was a few years before Caxton acquired the title, back when the newspaper you’re currently reading was still the bastard child of apartheid.

So along I came for my interview into what was just about the last business standing in Doornfontein, dodging tumbleweeds and portals into other worlds along the way.

I sat opposite the long-ago editor, a legend in the industry who still had an actual typewriter on his desk, and who was, like the newspaper he ran, a complete bastard.

He leered, he joked, he told me I was a good-looking girl.

“How do you feel,” he said, “when you walk into a room and men look at you?”

And how, he continued, would a young woman like me handle being in the newsroom with men making lewd comments about me, and maybe even groping me?

Later on his secretary called to say I’d got the position. Lucky me.

The next day I phoned back to say I couldn’t take the job after all. Funny story, right? No, it’s not. So why did I play it for laughs for so long?

Because it’s what we women do, we laugh it off, a habit learned over a lifetime of being objectified and then told let it go, walk away, it’s just banter ...

I blamed myself. I felt stupid for “overreacting”, angry that I wasn’t tough enough, and pathetic for not striding manfully – that word! – into an office where I’d been told, explicitly, I would be sexually harassed.

Eventually, in 1999, I did move to The Citizen, happily, under its new owners when the chief pervert was gone.

Some of the old crew told wry tales of how he’d literally chased my squealing predecessor around her desk, while everyone rolled their eyes, vaguely amused.

Now, two decades later, workplace abuse is not only still happening, it’s increasing.

So this time, can we at least acknowledge there is no harmless fun in sexual harassment, that there is no punchline to rape?