Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - Posts
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Well, E.J., having spent several years of my adult life working as a waitress, I take issue with your post. Over a two-year period, I worked at two restaurants. For most of that time, I worked at one of the most high-end restaurants in town. Sexual harassment? That was the least of it. When I was hired, there were 13 servers. Eleven were hard-core substances abusers: cocaine addicts, alcoholics, one crackhead. There were three drug operations. Pot, coke, and whatever else you wanted to get your hands on were sold by the valets, in the kitchen, and on the floor. One night, a buser went after a chef with a butcher knife; he was fired only after he didn't show up for work because he'd been shot. By the end of many shifts, most of the servers were coked out of their heads or too drunk to talk. To reiterate, this was a very upscale place. Some of the most high-profile people in the area dined there. Maybe it took getting high to deal with the never-ending demands of the wealthy patrons upon whom we waited.
So, sexual harassment? Uh, yes. Chefs in their 30s had sex with hostesses in their teens. Managers had sex with servers. One young, drunk waitress performed oral sex on the executive chef in the liquor closet during a shift. This extremely high-stress environment was virtually nonstop rife with sexual innuendo, grabbing, and harassment. Every table had to be served bread we cut in the kitchen, and it was a regular occurrence that the cooks would holler at us to "Shake it!" as we sliced the bread. We were regularly objectified, fondled, and solicited.
And the fact of the matter is that we women sexually harassed right back. We flirted with managers to get better shifts, we unbuttoned buttons on our uniforms to get bigger tips, we regularly used sexual innuendos, physical contact, and body language to squeeze as many dollars as possible out of the men with whom we worked and upon whom we waited. Why? For the money. Because we were desperate. Because we were broke. Because we could.
I was raised by two English professors in the most liberal place in America: Berkeley, Calif. I'm all too familiar with feminist rhetoric, with academics in ivory towers who point down at the masses to declare what the populace should and should not do, with those who seem to perceive the world as a place in which what "should" happen is what does happen. That's not reality. When it comes to sex—or sexual harassment, for that matter—the situations are often neither black nor white but decidedly gray. The idea that it's possible to eliminate or police human sexuality in any context is a fantasy.
For those of you interested in reading a moving, compelling, and insightful book about what it's really like to live and work in the trenches of America by a woman who found out the truth by sticking her head into the toilets of America's rich, buy yourselves a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
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