Chana Joffe-Walt
Coming up, the story starts over, but it's going to go so differently next time. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt. Today's show, "Five Women." We wanted to take one of the Me Too stories, where you hear about encounters women have with men who abuse their power in the workplace, and expand that to look at the lives of the women before that encounter.
And we're telling the story of several women who worked for the same person, Don Hazen, at AlterNet over the course of 13 years. So we met Deanna and Onnesha, and we just met Kristen, the student at NYU. Kristen is going to come back. You need to meet someone else first.
Act 5, "Tana.".
Tana was asked to have an opinion about Anita Hill. It was 1991, and she was in the third grade. Her opinion was that it was wrong, because she knew that was the opinion she was supposed to have. The opinion Tana actually had was not one she imagined the adults were asking for.
Tana
I remember thinking that it wasn't that big of a deal, but I think that my natural instinct-- and I mean, again, I was a child --was maybe people were freaking out a little bit too much. Maybe everyone should be a little bit more chill.
Chana Joffe-Walt
By 10th grade, she was stronger in her conviction. She knew about sex, and she knew about feminism, and she believed that if Monica Lewinsky wanted to have sex with someone, or blow them, or whatever actually happened in the Oval Office, that was her choice. Men had been allowed to follow their bliss forever. They went a little too far, but that had been corrected, and now Tana could see things had swung too far in the other direction.
Tana
Oh, nobody can have sex anymore. That's terrible. That was the impression I got. Like, I just envisioned the US workplace as a bunch of bureaucratic, fun-hating HR people taking you to jail if you said someone looked nice.
Chana Joffe-Walt
One of her first bosses was Jeff. He ran a shop in town. Tana had just started college, but it was summer, so she spent most of her days at the shop.
Tana
And he would always tell me these awful things about his wife, where he'd say, you know, she's so beautiful, when she walks down a restaurant, all men, you know, whiplash to check her out, but I'm just sick of her. Want to go out to dinner, can I get you a sandwich? You know, like, you're so tiny. Can I grab your waist? He definitely tried to physically grab me a lot.
Chana Joffe-Walt
It was irritating, but Tana tried really hard not to show it because Jeff was middle-aged, miserable, she'd heard his wife kicked him out. A coworker said he found Jeff in the shop one morning, waking up surrounded by beer bottles. He made Tana uncomfortable, but he was so pitiful that it felt unreasonable to attach any value to her discomfort. Like when her friend at work, a guy her age, told her, Jeff always talks about you. It's really creepy.
Tana
And he goes, Jeff always talks to me about how he just wants to put his head between your breasts, and just go
[EXHALING AIR THROUGH CLOSED LIPS]
Like the motorboating sound, and this guy said that. And I was like, are you kidding me? That's the saddest thing. That's what a 12-year-old would say. This is a grown-ass man. How could he say that? I just remember being, like, so grossed out.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Jeff denies all of this, by the way. Tana did tell her parents, though it took her a while. They were protective. She was worried they would make her quit.
And then, they were driving one day, her mom, her dad, Tana in the backseat.
Tana
Then I was like, mom and dad, I have something to tell you. And I was very dramatic about it. And they're like what? What happened? And I remember, like, taking a deep breath and saying--
--I've been sexually harassed.
And they kind of laughed in my face, and they're like, what the hell do you expect, you're a 19-year-old woman. Of course you're being sexually harassed. I thought, oh, that's just a thing that happens that I can accept everywhere I'm going to work.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Tana worked a lot of different jobs and got a lot of education-- college, graduate school, which did not open a path to a graduate school job, but a job at a Whole Foods. That's when her roommate told her she knew an editor of a political news website. Would Tana be interested?
Tana
I can't even imagine a world in which I would go from working at Whole Foods to working in journalism. And she was like, well, just have an interview with this guy.
Chana Joffe-Walt
On her way out the door to meet Don, her roommate said, if you get that job, you'll definitely be sexually harassed.
Tana
I just kind of thought, well, that's just the way it is.
Chana Joffe-Walt
The Interview went well, which felt great to Tana, because she was used to bombing interviews. She was so shy. It was raining when she and Don walked out of the building. He offered her a ride. She said no, I'll take the train.
Tana
He said no, no, I'll give you a ride. I'll give you a ride. And he kind of insisted on it. And I remember I got in his car, and I-- and this is so silly, and he even made fun of me about this years later, where I said, I really want the job, I would even do it for free until I prove myself that I can do it. In hindsight, I want to slap my dumb 25-year-old self. Fortunately, I didn't have the opportunity to screw myself over that way.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Because Don brushed that idea off as ridiculous.
In the interview, Don suggested Tana might start editing a section at AlterNet they recently created about sex.
Tana
So it didn't seem totally out of nowhere that, toward the end of the ride, he has sort of like casually put his hand on my knee, and said something like, so I hear you and your roommates have pretty wild and crazy sex lives. I think I said something like, oh, haha, yeah. Life's pretty crazy, or something like that. I just-- on some level, I very passively did nothing.
Chana Joffe-Walt
And did you feel bad, neutral, just like, whatever?
Tana
It felt bad. But also, I was ecstatic, because I felt like I had a real shot at the job.
Chana Joffe-Walt
She called her friend to thank her. She said, as you warned me, he got a little sexually harrassy, but I'm so excited. I think I got it. She did.
And from the beginning, Tana understood that her attractiveness to Don meant she'd be seen rather than ignored. Tana was seen by Don all the time. He'd take pictures of her sometimes when she wasn't looking, and send them to her. He was generous with his attention, and controlling, usually at the same time. There is no way to tease the two apart, and she accepted them both. He appreciated her legs, which he told her. He did not seem to love her personality.
Tana
So I remember once we were at lunch, he was like Tana, what do you have to say? You can't even talk. And I was really sick, so I kind of, like, coughed a little bit because I had the flu or something. And I remember he-- in front of everyone-- fake coughed. He was like,
All you do is ever cough. That's all you ever do. Is that the only thing you can ever even say?
Chana Joffe-Walt
At a party, Don rubbed Tana's shoulders and asked if she wanted another drink. When she said no, he grabbed Tana's wrist, twisted her arm, and pushed her into a table. He had to be physically separated from her. He apologized later, and she forgave him easily. Don was old to her, pervy, but again, sort of pathetic. It felt inappropriate to read him as anything else.
Tana
I remember there was one woman in the office who started freaking out and crying because Don told her that the color of her shirt looked nice on her. And my reaction was like, all right, everyone, everyone's being hysterical here. It's a nice colored shirt, chill the fuck out, was my inner thought.
There was another woman who was really funny, actually, when she found the porn printed out in the printer, she-- you know, we were all giggling about it, because we all knew who it was. It was so obvious. And she sent this hilarious email to all of editorial that was something to the effect of, whoever decided to print out porn in the office, please abstain from--
Chana Joffe-Walt
Wait, who did print out the porn?
Tana
It was Don, obviously.
Chana Joffe-Walt
One of Tana's coworkers, another young woman, quit because of Don's bullying.
Tana
It's like survival of the fittest, like, I can handle the bullying and the sexual harassment. She couldn't.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Did you feel kind of proud of that?
Tana
Yes. I did. Like, I can take it.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Tana was the cool girl who could take it. She was comfortable in that role. It gave her more power professionally to have the attention of the most powerful person in the office, even if it meant accepting the attention that was not professional, like when Don kept telling her he wanted to buy her a black cocktail dress he thought would look great on her body.
Tana
So I just thought it was really kind of sad, or bittersweet, or semi-pathetic. He thought I needed for him to buy me this dress, when I could have just bought it myself.
Chana Joffe-Walt
And midway through that indignant thought, Tana felt guilty. Don wanted to be generous, to be a wealthy, charming man who could give her beautiful things. This was not the way she saw him, which made her feel bad for him.
Tana
And then I actually did end up buying it. And you know, this is where I wonder, was I not clear enough about setting boundaries. So I bought the dress. I told him, oh yeah, guess what, I bought this dress, because I have $90.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Don seemed pleased. But then she didn't like the dress. She didn't like the way it fit her, which she told him.
Tana
And he was like, oh, give it to me. I'm going to give it to my girlfriend. It will look better on her, because due to years of yoga, she has curves and muscles that are in separate places than you do.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Whoa.
Tana
That's crazy, right?
Chana Joffe-Walt
That's pretty crazy.
Tana
OK.
Chana Joffe-Walt
When you say, this is where I feel, like, confused about, what is it that you feel confused about?
Tana
If I didn't set clear enough boundaries to more clearly communicate that this exchange made me uncomfortable. That's what you're supposed to do. You know, you say, no.
Chana Joffe-Walt
That first time Don drove her home and put his hand on her knee, Tana did not say, no. Instead, she entered into an unspoken agreement between a cool girl and a flirty boss. He'd look after her career, and he'd flirt with her while he was doing it.
The rules were clear to Tana. You don't say no. Saying no would destroy the agreement from which both parties have something to gain. You don't ask, why do you want to buy me this dress? You don't say, please don't rub my back, or please stop taking pictures of me. You don't reply when he says by email what he wants for his birthday is sex with a mysterious blonde woman, and then adds, or you could just put on a wig.
When Don asked Tana to his New York apartment for meetings, she followed the agreement. She said nothing. There was no office in New York, so it was easy to pretend this was appropriate. One night, they met. They talked about work, and then Don wanted to keep hanging out.
Tana
It was getting kind of late, and we we're drinking, and he was like, hold on, just one second. I'm like, oh, my God, what's he going to come out with? He comes back out-- runs back out to the table --with a paper bag filled with photographs.
And he says, you know, these are photos from my past. So he starts, like, showing me all of these old photographs from the '70s and '80s, and they're basically almost exclusively of very conventionally beautiful blond women. So he was like, like this was my ex-girlfriend at this point, this was my ex-girlfriend at this point. I was like, all right, cool, a lot of blondes. Like, I don't know why are you showing me this stuff. And then he, like, gets a photo, and then he says, and this is an artistic photograph of my penis. And he hands me this photo, and it's like, a black and white photograph of an erect penis. And he just did it so casually. I just kind of look at it, and hand it back to him. I'm like, my God, did my boss just show me a picture of his dick? And I was like, yeah. Yeah, he did.
Chana Joffe-Walt
This did seem like a violation of the agreement.
Tana
I mean, it was an artistic picture. It was black and white. It was from the '70s. I mean, I definitely didn't say, hey, you know what I'd love to see right now? A picture of your erect penis from the '70s. Like, it was definitely not the most appropriate thing to do to a female subordinate, right?
Chana Joffe-Walt
Right, yes. Right.
That's seems very true.
Are you still doubting if that was appropriate or not?
Tana
It was obviously inappropriate. I definitely didn't enjoy the experience. I told a million people about it contemporaneously like, hey guys, guess who's dick I just saw against my will right now. But also, we were in his apartment, it was late at night, and we were drinking. It just seems like a 60-something-year-old man who's in charge of, you know, 25 different people should just kind of know that you don't show a young female subordinate a picture of your penis even if it is from the '70s, even if it is late at night, and even if she doesn't say, hey, this is wrong. There are certain standards of behavior that seem like they should be obvious to everyone.
Chana Joffe-Walt
But it seemed like they were not obvious to Don. Don seemed to think it was appropriate to show her that picture. So Tana thought, maybe there was no unspoken agreement between them. Maybe the agreement, and the boundaries of that agreement, were something Tana imagined on her own.
In the beginning, as a new employee with no experience, Tana's power was her attractiveness to Don. She had tried to use that to her advantage. It was the same power that Onnesha did not want to use when she asked Don for a raise, the power of The Hypnotizer. Tana engaged, Onnesha did not. It cost them both in different ways.
New people came in to AlterNet, and Tana trained a lot of them. Many of them were young women, and one of them came to Tana and said, we've got to do something about Don's behavior.
Tana
And I said, are you kidding? You're not going to change anything. I don't think it's a good idea. I can't do this.
Chana Joffe-Walt
Tana felt for this woman, but she did not understand her, and why she thought anyone would care about this. She said, this isn't news that this happens.
Tana
It was like, yeah, dude, what do you expect?
Chana Joffe-Walt
Yeah, you were your parents in the car that day.
Tana
Right.
Chana Joffe-Walt
The young woman was Kristen, the NYU student who Don spotted at the protest, Terminator-like, while Deanna watched. Now, Kristen was full of urgency, and she was ready to fight.