Advanced Warning: Profanity/Donald Trump quote

WHY DO I MAKE FUN OF THESE MEN? IS IT BECAUSE I’M AN A$$HOLE?

First of all, I don’t want anyone to worry. I am not sitting down to learn from Bob. Especially because he says no one should know about it. I wasn’t born yesterday. I sent Bob a quick email which should’ve pretty much taken care of everything. Maybe I’ll share it sometime. I don’t expect to hear back.

Let me start 25 years ago. I was a student at a Super Fancy Music School (SFMS). I was the only woman in the oboe class. I was 19 and the senior player and felt lucky just to be in the room most of the time. There was a Moderately Fancy Man (MFM) Former Oboist who ran a record company in his retirement who took a real interest in me. He was not on faculty but came to SFMS recitals and asked me for CDs of the performances he didn’t hear live. (Having access to one’s own performances on CD rather than tape was pretty new and cool at that time.) He listened to my recordings carefully, emailed back and forth with his wild compliments about my playing and some other musical thoughts, and wanted me to record a CD for his label. We were talking repertoire and scheduling, with lots of communication at least daily. Then he made a trip to SFMS for “archival research” about Marcel Tabuteau. He took me out to dinner at my favorite Chinese place. I naively thought nothing of going; he was a MFM and connected to my SMFS through all the Big Fancy Men (BFMs). At dinner, we talked about Tabuteau, the other BFMs, and all their lore; we talked about the Philadelphia tradition and more BFMs; and we talked about my CD-to-be. Plus, I was broke and he was offering me free dinner. He offered to drive me to my apartment afterward. On the way, he angled towards his hotel, telling me I should really come up to his room to hear some ultra-special recordings of Tabuteau there with him. I said no thank you, that I had to go practice, but asked him to please send the recordings to me by CD. We had a back and forth for a few minutes, he said the recordings could only be heard on the equipment in his hotel room, and I made more excuses. My heart was pounding at this point as he became more and more insistent. I knew with every fiber of my being and every hackle on my body that I could not go in that hotel room. I don’t honestly remember all the details of the conversation beyond the pounding of my heart in my ears. I did open the car door against his wishes many blocks away from either destination at a stop light, telling him I had to go practice. You could say that I’m crazy and paranoid and that things would’ve been fine in the hotel room. I guess I will never know. But I do know that he never communicated with me again and that the CD didn’t happen. I was left wondering if he had only pretended to be interested in my playing and all the talent he spoke of because he was trying to get me to sleep with him.

Not that many years later, I won an oboe competition. The prize was $5,000 and money I needed desperately. I had practiced hard, made a good reed, and delivered what I thought was an excellent performance in the final round. Everybody in this competition knew each other; it is a small world. My BFF who didn’t make it to the finals listened to the public finals and was congratulating all of us afterward, including the second and third prize winners. One of them told my BFF that I "only won because" I “have nice tits.” (That was three children and decades ago, but I will give that asshole that part of the statement was true.) You can say that my BFF should not have repeated that to me, but *my* BFF absolutely should have. The person who said that now sits principal oboe in a Very Fancy Orchestra. Successful women are often told they are successful because their appearance trumps their skills and are often accused of “sleeping their way to the top.” It is much less common that a man’s work is denigrated by an accusation that he won something because of (insert gendered body part) or sleeping with someone.

Not long after that, I had secured a job that on paper was a heroic return to {This part of my essay has been removed for legal reasons. I refer you to my EEOC charge.} Like with the MFM CD guy, I was left to wonder if he ever actually thought all the wonderful things he said about me or just wanted to sleep with me.

In all of these incidents, I was expected to STFU. The first incident I described here, I was a 19yo with everything to lose, no proof, and no authority figures who would have believed me or cared. {These next sentences have been removed for legal reasons. I refer you to my EEOC charge.} But I ultimately went public after the last incident I described here {I refer you again to my EEOC charge for deleted parts}, feeling forced into a corner and being a much older woman. The sole benefit of that whole thing? Entrance into the Zero Fucks Club and Feminazi Facebook.

I realize I am a privileged woman because I’ve not been raped. (DO YOU REALIZE HOW PATHETIC OF A STATEMENT THAT IS? But it is true.) Men are able to behave in the ways I describe above—and worse--because our silence is expected. It is cultivated into very young women and these men have tremendous cultural assistance in maintaining our silence. I hear from these silent women every day. Yes, every day. Our careers are completely screwed if we talk about this stuff. Only a few women ever get to the position to even contemplate talking about it publicly—and it requires a tremendous nadir for any woman to take the suicidal option of going public. And once we do, people do not. like. us.

As women, we are supposed to be likable while men enjoy living in a double standard. (Case in point: Hillary Clinton was unlikable but highly qualified while Donald Trump, who said “grab them by the pussy” was still somehow likable enough to get elected to the Presidency of the United States just about six years ago.) Yet we competent, qualified women are supposed to just shut up about these things because they make men—and women often, too—uncomfortable if we bring them up. And when men do stupid, jerky, assholic, or even completely unethical things, they expect us to still shut up. “Take it easy on the poor guy/he’s a loser/he’s mentally ill/you shouldn’t bother with him” all equal: don’t talk about this, and these statements do not incidentally come in large proportion from white men. It is this required silence which allows this behavior to persist, the silence which we must maintain in order to keep a “decent” working environment and career, the silence which we must maintain to feed our children and pay our bills, the silence which we must maintain to be likable.

I get assholey comments from men pretty frequently. Most of them don’t have the balls to use their names. But when they do use their names, I will call it out. I do that by making fun of them. They want my silence. They want our silence. I do not owe them anything.

Take Bob, for example. He’s probably in his eighth decade of being able to speak to women he doesn’t know with dramatically less respect than men. It’s totally normal for him and he doesn’t even realize he does it. Being called out on it is so deeply offensive that he calls me a man-hater. But how many qualified men commenting on this page that I should just let this be because XYZ routinely have their own competence questioned by people with no qualifications? How often do you have dramatically less qualified people write you out of the blue to tell you you are terrible at your work and are not deserving of your success? I just don’t think it happens very often. But conversely, I bet just about every woman you know can tell you some stories about getting mansplained and worse by some audacious asshole with fewer qualifications and skills than she has.

To those who think I should take pity on poor, idiotic Bob, or poor, mentally ill Bob (I believe these are nearly all white men), I do not think he is any of these things. Or at least, I am not qualified to comment on his mental health. I think he is an entitled old white man who has been conditioned to act like an asshole toward women and our society has supported him in that work. For those who would defend Bob by saying he’s likely an asshole to everyone, I asked him to share similar unsolicited, mocking remarks he made to my male colleagues and I haven’t heard back.

Men so very rarely call other men out for behaving badly and differently toward women. (This would be the first step toward real allyship in my view.) The price for women to call men out for the same is almost always too high. And so, silence from both men and women allows bad behavior to continue.

I learned the term “Impostor Syndrome” in my forties. I still don’t even understand it as different than my regular existence. It is bred into women from a very young age. It is one of the reasons I believe women do less well than men in auditions, besides all the systemic problems at play I work to describe. We would do well do have some of Bob’s clueless and wild audacity when showing up behind a screen. While Bob never made a big career, there are so many men with identical approaches to women who have. They are excused at every turn in our profession. Women who would behave similarly would have zero career. I see it in the small doublereed world every day.

I do not support Bob’s work to be an asshole, so I choose to expose it. And I will continue to do so for any other such work that comes my way. The less we shut up about this stuff, the more people will become embarrassed by the double standards they use to address women, work with women, tell women how to behave, and exist with women.

I leave you with the photo that led Bob to write me, an unknown woman, that I am a “self-absorbed narcissist” because I am “using the oboe as a prop” and showing my image on my professional website, goddess forbid. We women can never get it right—too much skin or not hot enough to show skin; too much makeup or not enough; got her gig because she was hot; or not hot enough to invite her to play with us; too fat or too thin; whatever. This “narcissistic” photo was taken when I was seven months into my geriatric, diabetic final pregnancy. I bore a son, who is being raised to not be an asshole

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