The lengths to which women in compromising situations go … to sidestep or to confront the insistence of powerful men.
I worked for The Boss for about 6 months during the rainiest and greyest Parisian winter I can recall, following just on the heels of my encounter with The AdMan, in fact.
I’d taken this international marketing job he’d offered me in the Parisian garment district because I mostly needed money to start paying back my student loans. And also because I was exhausted from working three jobs under the table to try to make ends meet. But especially and above all else because I really wanted to live in France, with its outdoor markets and cobble stone streets, its wealth of history and art, its effervescent, bubbling culture and its inclusive social system… So I needed declared employment to certify my new French “Green-Card”… which The Boss must have gathered too…
Because on my first day of work The Boss cupped my ass in his palm while I was attempting to send a fax…
And on my last day, he feigned an outside appointment, took me instead to his secluded country residence just minutes from the city center where, after showing me a couple reception rooms, he caught me off guard in a hallway. He pinned me against the wall with his huge hands then, kissing me and thrusting his body against mine, attempted, I suppose, to make me desire him too. Finally, after all those months of my noncompliance.
When the first day happened with the fax, I’d just turned around and told him I was not interested in having a sexual relationship with my boss, although I had to lift his giant paw off my butt cheek myself. I didn’t shriek, I didn’t jump nor did I yell though, because the secretary had yet to officialize my paper work. But I didn’t walk out then and there either, because again, I really needed the job.
The last day however, unsure of where to go, who to call or how to get away… angry and scared, I panicked and did the only thing that came to mind. I stripped down, lay on the first bed I could find in his empty house and I told the boss to fuck me quickly and get it over with because I was sick and tired of his selfish, disgusting, unwanted sexual harassment, which I assume he, like many of his fellows in those days, just considered pestering women into getting something they really desired.
After the first day, the boss acted like he’d understood, became friendly and almost fatherly, encouraging my work while intermittently joking about having sex with me. And although I had to repeat my refusals constantly, his tone was always jovial and old-school. He’d roar with laughter, appear upset by my rejections to his advances, but would then acquiesce and leave me alone until the next occasion came along.
Boys Will Be Boys was the idea in those days and although I surely found this masculine loophole uncomfortable, I probably didn’t think I had to fear him. Men’s desires for women simply precluded our own, so I’d become accustomed to them attempting to invade my bodily space, I guess.
On the last day though, my naked body sprawled on a guest bed, the boss said he couldn’t get it up like that. So he didn’t rape me.
And the following day I resigned. I never saw him nor spoke to him again. I never told the secretary or my ex boyfriend or the other staff. I had my work papers in order and I guess I thought near-rape was the price to pay. It had certainly seemed that way to me, up to that point, at least.
I was a foreigner. An immigrant. And a friendly, smiling young woman. So who would the cops have believed thirty years ago? Him or me? Hadn’t I been asking for it all along, really?
