How to (not) talk to your barista

Last month during a lecture on Margaret Atwood’s “Penelopiad,” my professor opened a dialogue about its feminist critique of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Many students began to direct the conversation to the novel’s portrayal of sexual assault, which made sense to me.

I suddenly found myself eavesdropping on a conversation between two boys behind me who felt differently. One of them said, “We get it!” before launching into a whispered but heated rant about sexual harassment always being portrayed as more important an issue than it really is.

This is a viewpoint that somehow manages to persist in the face of a great deal of evidence highlighting why we still need to keep talking about sexual harassment.

Part of the reason people fail to grasp why women continue to talk about sexual harassment is that they don’t believe women. In 2021, A shocking study by the United Nations said that more than 71 per cent of women had experienced sexual harassment. This statistic went viral, with a lot of men commenting that this number seemed impossible. Yet, the study didn’t shock me at all. In fact, I’m surprised it isn’t higher. I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t at least been catcalled. I began to understand how rampant sexual harassment is during my first job at age 15 — I don’t think I’ve seen power imbalances as clearly laid out as when I was a high school girl working in the service industry with older men.

When I was a barista, creepy things were said to me all the time; but what bothered me most was that my male coworkers blamed me for feeling uncomfortable.

I regularly interacted with much older male co-workers and customers, who would make comments like, “Oh I don’t want to MeToo you.” I couldn’t believe that these middle-aged successful guys with families struggled so much to interact normally with a teenage girl serving them coffee. In some cases, it was clear that it was not their intention to be creepy, but their insistence that their behaviour was “not creepy” was off putting, making them seem almost like a thief showing up to the scene of the crime and saying he didn’t do it.

I have a suggestion for men who don’t want to scare away their baristas: if you have to ask if something is going to get you into trouble, it probably will. For men who do not want to immediately appear predatory, I would recommend saying something like, “Hey could I grab a flat white please?” instead of, “Hey honey! Oh no … is that going to get me in trouble?” Workplace harassment is also ignored because many people don’t want to believe their peers could behave that way. When I was 15, I told my manager about an older male co-worker who was, “Being a pedo.” He told me to “Stop being so quick to judge people.”

As a result, I was the only one of my female co-workers who never reported his weird “jokes” to my boss and I was also the only one to be put on the schedule with him. Any time he made suggestive comments, I would laugh it off. I remember being praised by my manager for “Being a good sport about it.” I still wonder how my own dismissal of his comments contributed to the way my coworkers’ complaints were dismissed. When older guys blindly defend each other while teaching young people, and especially girls, not to be “too sensitive,” they enable a culture of sexual harassment to exist in workplaces and be brushed off as jokes. This may sound like a point that has been made a million times over, but it seems to me that people still aren’t getting it. Until women are no longer being regularly harassed at work, I don’t want to hear guys in my lectures complaining that women are still talking about it.

When I was a barista, creepy things were said to me all the time; but what bothered me most was that my male co-workers blamed me for feeling uncomfortable