Human Property: All Strong Women Stand Alone

I was on a mandatory unpaid break at my coffee house job. That means that every day, whether I take the break or not, a half an hour was taken out of my paycheck. I was eating a meal that I paid for (with my employee discount) and drinking one of my two allotted cups of coffee for the day, when the company owner came by for his daily latte.

Unfortunately, the only other person on duty at the coffee house was hugely incompetent, a problem felt most strongly by myself considering that I was constantly having to do her job as well as mine. When Larry, the billionaire businessman saw this, he came to me and demanded that I make his latte for him right that second.

I calmly told him, that I was on break, and I’d be happy to do it when I got back, or that Sheri could make it for him right now. He did not like that, and proceeded to go on a screaming tantrum in the building lobby. I just sat there as he threw all of his weight and power at me, an over-worker, under-paid barista who just so happened to be keeping the service of the restaurant from severely dropping due to a weak link in the serving staff. I have no idea how long he kept his tantrum going. Sometimes thinking back to the incident, it seems like it had happened and was over in a matter of minutes. But as I was sitting there, listening to Larry undermine my rights as a worker and employee, the silence I had to keep as he went off felt like an eternity.

I learned an important lesson that day: strong women always stand alone.

The way my coworkers’ eyes widened when I recounted these events to them told me something that I was only vaguely aware of before that point. There really aren’t all that many strong women left in the world. None of them would have stood their ground the way that I did. They all told me that they would have just made the coffee to keep the peace, out of fear of losing their job.

But I didn’t lose my job. In fact, the other company executives all came together to make an official apology to me for the owner’s misguided commands. In the end, I got a raise.

This could easily be a post about the pay gap. Or about the tendency for female employees to have to “take care of” their male coworkers even if the men are on-level or underneath of them in the company hierarchy. But I’d rather go to the root of the problem. That is, the feeling that men have toward women and that women, in turn, feel about themselves, of being owned.

Clearly, the story of the billionaire yelling at me to make him his coffee is directly related to this problem. He felt entitled to get what he wanted, and he saw me only as a tool to get it, a tool that he owned. Finding a workplace where that isn’t the norm is harder than finding an employer-provided healthcare program. In fact, the job I have right now is the first one I’ve found since my high school hostessing job where my boss doesn’t treat me like his personal property. So one out of the past seven jobs has been bearable in this respect.

I wish I could say that this phenomena stays at the workplace, but reality is that the dating world is even worse. One guy that I’ve dated in my life didn’t try to hold me down as an object of HIS life. And that was only because he lacked the confidence to do so. He surely would have tried if he could have. The bottom line is that when it comes down to it, men are looking for mothers. Both to mother their children and, before that happens, to mother themselves. Being a mother, to comfort and sooth and reassure, has become the primary responsibility of any girlfriend, fiance or wife. And when that’s your purpose, it really doesn’t leave any room for your own goals and dreams and ambitions.

I was very lucky with the neighborhood I grew up in. It has ranked in recent polls as one of the top places in the country for empowered women. That’s likely why I’m seeing this problem as I climb up through my twenties into middle-adulthood. For most people, that’s just the way of the world. But for me, it’s an inequality that is thoroughly unacceptable. Maybe my upbringing is a plague on my adulthood. The desire to pursue my own goals the same way that a man would has put an incredible amount of strain on every relationship I’ve ever had. And has stopped me from pursuing countless other potential relationships out of fear of running into the same obstacle.

I have to believe that there are men who aren’t afraid of female ambition, but no matter how hard I look for them, I can’t find them anywhere.

I’m sure that any man who reads this would see himself as the exception to this ongoing problem I’ve had in my life. To those men I’d like to ask you this:

If a girl you were dating wanted to live and work abroad, would you support her? Would you search for opportunities in the same region even if they weren’t as good as opportunities you could get elsewhere? Or would you challenge her, saying that YOU could be more successful than she could, and therefore SHE has to follow you, and not the other way around? Would you even consider following her?

I can’t tell you how many have claimed that they would, then when it comes down to it, couldn’t even stomach the discussion.

Once again, I’m learning that strong women stand alone. Alone. ALONE. And that’s the only place we’re allowed to exist.