Erin Passons's Blog, page 6

The Battle of Twittergrad

Excerpt from Unfriended: Social Media in the Era of Trump
***
Wendy didn’t get Twitter. The forty-five-year old librarian from Fargo, North Dakota, tweeted occasionally, but no one replied or retweeted her tweets because she was, admittedly, a nobody. She used Twitter mostly to stargaze; to look up her favorite celebrities, sometimes replying to their tweets and hoping they’d reply back (they never did).

In October 2016, when the race for the White House was in full throttle, George Takei tweeted, “I hear the bathrooms in Trump Tower are being relabeled ‘Bad Hombres’ and ‘Nasty Women.’”

Wendy laughed and retweeted, adding her own comment, “He’ll have to learn how to spell first!”

Immediately, another Twitter user replied to her comment, “TRUMP WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. #MAGA!!”

Intrigued, Wendy looked up the commenter’s profile. “FloridaMom4Trump.” A profile image of a woman in her sixties with a full head of ruffled, graying blonde hair grinned back at her. Her bio read: PROUD AMERICAN PATRIOT AND MOM OF ARMY SOLDIER. #MAGA, accompanied by multiple American flag emojis.

Wendy tweeted back, “Do you really want a racist misogynist for president?”

FloridaMom4Trump replied, “HE’S BETTER THAN KILLARY!” and added a link to a story, “WikiLEaks Confirms Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS…Then Drops Another Bombshell!” Wendy was no expert, but even she could tell the news was fake, as well as the site, The Political Insider, reporting it.

A sinking feeling settled in Wendy’s stomach. “What in God’s name am I looking at?” she wondered.

#

For some, Twitter was a delightful, no-frills social media platform where they could jump in, grab what they needed, and jump out.

For others, it was a piss pool—a Palahnuikesque fight club where the morally defective could settle scores. Polluted, bitey, and overpopulated, its dumbed-down, noncommittal pop-in and pop-out public interface made it the friendliest for the trolliest—the type of asinine environment where narcissistic arrivistes like Donald Trump could thrive, turning their 140-character yammer into a propaganda megaphone audible to the world.

So it’s no wonder when Putin sent his trolls into battle, Twitter was Ground Zero.

#

In October 2016, London-born writer and former Conservative Member of British Parliament Louise Mensch broke the news of Russia’s Twitter army and its attempts to influence the election.

It was a shot fired too far and too late.

Blame it on Mensch’s not-so-credible reputation (she’s been called, among other things, “the paranoid bard in the age of Trump”) or the outlet in which she published it—Heat Street, a decidedly right-wing news blog funded by none other than Rupert Murdoch—but when the article broke just weeks before election day, it wasn’t well-received—when it was received at all. Conservatives laughed it off; the Washington Post refuted the evidence backing up Mensch’s claims. Liberals largely ignored it; they didn’t need a conspiracy theory raining on their parade. The “grab them by the pussy” tape had been released. Republicans had, as Bill Maher put it, “handcuffed themselves to a dead hooker.” So what if Russia was playing a virtual mind game on social media? It didn’t matter. Nothing could stop a Clinton win.

It was an assumption that 65,844,954 Americans would live to regret.

#

Perhaps Louise Mensch and other foreign press were on top of the Russian’s covert online operations because they saw history repeating. The American election wasn’t the first time Putin had sought to manipulate an event in his favor.

In 2014, Russia used social media to promote their Ukraine campaign. When almost fifty people—most of them pro-Russian activists—were killed in a building fire, Russian Twitter accounts went into overdrive, blaming the Ukraine and asking for public sympathy, forgetting to mention that the pro-Russian activists had fired the first shot, and continued to fire on pro-Ukrainians even as flames engulfed the trade union building.

In April 2015, The Guardian reported details of a Russian troll house, where hundreds of bloggers spent hours each day flooding forums and social networks at home and abroad with anti-western and pro-Kremlin propaganda. These trolls would work especially hard when Putin launched his less popular campaigns. For example, when the army’s fighter planes were sent to the war in Syria, the Russian population—only 14% of whom supported military intervention in Syria—where inundated with a “succession of live reports, analysis, and official defence briefings that combined delivered a seemingly coordinated message: that airstrikes in Syria are crucial in the fight against ISIS.”

Skip to June 2016, where more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted tens of thousands of messages urging Britain to leave the European Union, just days before referendum on the issue. When government officials studied 139 of these tweets from twenty-nine accounts, they found unflattering, photoshopped pictures of London Mayor Sadiq Kahn, racial slurs against refugees, and articles about terrorist attacks in England and across Europe, all clearly directed for spreading racial hatred across the Western world.

#

A year and two months after the 2016 American Presidential election, and Americans still don’t know what to think. New—and often contradictory—information continues to leak daily on how far Russia’s propaganda machine reached. So far, 50,000 Twitter accounts have been directly linked to the Kremlin, as well as 3,000 accounts to the Internet Research Agency, an infamous troll farm responsible for wide-ranging influence operations on social media in the lead-up to the election. I suspect by the time you read this, thousands—if not millions—of more accounts will have been uncovered.

#

The Kremlin’s modus operandi for attacking the 2016 election via social media came in two varieties—bots and trolls.

The Kremlin bots are automated Twitter accounts programmed to fire off the same message seconds apart, in alphabetical order according their made-up last names. Their messages include hashtags to rig Twitter trends, such as #TrumpTrain and #CrookedHillary. They can retweet, “like”, and reply to tweets; they can also follow each other and retweet themselves.

Autobots rarely feature a profile image, and when they do, it is often shared among multiple accounts. Bots also reply to messages in less time than what is humanly possible to read the tweet that they are responding to, and their response to you is the same response they’ve given others. They follow far more accounts than they are followed in return, they have little to say apart from the topic that they were programmed for, and they tweet prolifically without apparent need to fulfill the basic human requirements of food and sleep. (If the account has tweeted at least fifty times a day across a period of four or more days, it’s fair to assume it’s a bot, according to researchers.)

Kremlin troll accounts are run by humans. These accounts are usually the curators of the messages that the autobots retweet. In terms of the 2016 election, they trolled pro-Hillary accounts with disparaging, often crude comments and images, and they were the first to comment on Trump’s tweets, replying with memes of the American flag or photoshopped images of Hillary in prison stripes.

These online hecklers are also designed to discredit or silence private citizens in powerful positions, like journalists or celebrities, by means of organized harassment, leading the way with autobots following close behind them.

Kremlin trolls are harder to spot than autobots. Keeping up appearances is important to them: they don’t overtweet, they tweet ideas that appear to have some original thought behind them, and they almost always geotag their tweets. That last bit—geotag—is important, because occasionally the bots will forget to hide or change it, and towns like Anzhero-Sudzhensk or Belaya Kholunitsa appear instead of towns like Phoenix or Miami.

Kremlin trolls are also harder to discern because they are often not new accounts, but hacked accounts recommissioned for propaganda. In a 2017 article, the New York Times cited the case of Rachel Usedom, a young American engineer in California, “who tweeted mostly about her sorority before losing interest in 2014. In November 2016, her account was taken over, renamed #ClintonCurruption, and used to promote Russian leaks.”

Working together, these trolls and autobots turned election era Twitter into a dark, dystrophic slaughterhouse. As The Atlantic’s Douglas Guilbeault put it, “Never have we seen such an all-out bot war.”

#

Perhaps the best (and most disputed) example of Russia’s army bot tactics occurred after the first presidential debate. While everyone and their racist grandmother could tell Clinton came out on top, Twitter activity suggested a different outcome—an alternative fact, if you will. The hashtag #TrumpWon began to trend, and it stayed that way for hours.

The odd phenomenon had many Americans scratching their heads. The next day, Boston Globe readers woke up to the headline, “Why is #TrumpWon trending on Twitter?”

Louise Mensch knew the answer. In her October 2016 Heat Street article, she explained the Kremlin bot methods: “Let’s say you had a hashtag you wanted to get trending. You have a thousand bots (or Russian Trolls) and a popular account like Ricky Vaughn [a real person]. You have the bots use the hashtag, flooding Twitter until it gets a high count, but stays just under the top twenty trends. Then, Ricky Vaughn pitches the hashtag to his followers. Here is where the window of timing kicks in: within minutes, Ricky Vaughn can have a hashtag trending, but before he gets the hashtag to the top fifteen, the bots automatically delete their tweets with the hashtags. You’ve now started a ‘trend’ associated with Ricky Vaughn, and not a 1,000 odd bots or Russian trolls.” (At the time Mensch wrote the article, Ricky Vaughn was not a confirmed troll. A year later, his account has been deactivated by Twitter—but the question of whether he is a troll of the American or Russian variety, remains unclear to this day.)

As controversial as Mensch's conclusion may be, she wasn’t the only one watching Twitter closely. A research team led by Oxford University Professor Philip Howard was also studying nuances in hashtag trends after the debates, using popular pro-Trump and pro-Hillary hashtags as guides.

After the first debate, their research concluded that 37% of the pro-Trump tweets had been posted by bots, while bots were responsible for only 22.3% of pro-Clinton tweets. In total, 576, 178 pro-Trump tweets were by bots, while 136,696 were in support of Clinton.

Bots turned up the heat for the second debate, with 800,00 pro-Trump tweets and just under 200,000 pro-Clinton tweets.

Howard didn’t point the finger directly at Russia for the huge political bot party; however, he did suggest the data indicated a deliberate manipulation behind the bots’ behavior: “They were purposeful, thoughtful, and deliberate about when to release messages, what those messages should be, and what their targets were.”

And while both candidates benefited from the bots’ hard work, there was no question who they preferred. "On the balance of probabilities, if you examined an automated bot account, the odds are four to one that you'll find it's a bot tweeting in favor of Trump," said Howard.

So why bother tweeting for Clinton at all? According to the September 2017 New York Times article, “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” Russia used the pro-Clinton bots to blur its role in influencing the election results. Additionally, their seemingly pro-Clinton hashtags weren’t pro-Clinton at all, but modern-day black propaganda for spreading dissention among Clinton supporters, applying pro-Clinton hashtags to inject anti-Clinton memes, links, and political messages into pro-Clinton circles. “Like a virus, they essentially co-opted the opponent’s messaging and infiltrated her supporters. Using pro-Clinton hashtags like #ImWithHer and #uniteblue, memes describing Clinton as corrupt ricocheted across both blue and red feeds.”

#

The bot activity may have increased around the time of presidential debates, but it didn’t start and stop there. A November 2017 analysis published by the Wall Street Journal determined that Russian Twitter accounts began promoting Trump mere weeks after he announced his candidacy. Not only did these accounts, often disguised as fake, right-leaning Americans, heap praise on Trump, but much of their effort was also spent criticizing and spreading fake news about Trump’s Republican opponent, Jeb Bush, as well as Clinton.

“The support for Trump was clear even at that stage,” reported the technology news site, Engadget.com. “There was a 10:1 ratio of praise to criticism among the bogus accounts, a figure that would climb to 30:1 when the election was two weeks away. Identical messages often showed up within minutes of each other, hinting at tight coordination.”

According to Howard’s fellow researcher, University of Washington Professor Samuel Woolley, the persistence of the accounts during the election were also meant to give the appearance that Trump had a bigger following than what he had in reality.

“Some of the botnets that supported Trump were more than likely purpose-built to create an illusion of massive online political traction for Trump,” said Woolley. “These bots work to create a bandwagon effect among voters who were still considering a candidate, or were focused on a specific issue. They also generated a spiral of silence among voters who might not agree with a candidate or issue, but who experienced a barrage of hugely enhanced content from the Trump bot network. These purpose-build bots and botnets often disappeared right after a political campaign, some were even created for a specific issue within a campaign and go offline after working to manipulate public opinion around that one issue.”

On election day and a few days before, the bots redirected their purpose almost entirely to spread misinformation that benefited Trump: Democrats could vote on a different day than Republicans; Clinton had a stroke during the final week of the election; and that an FBI agent associated with her email investigation was involved in a murder-suicide.

#

It’s hard to look back a year later without a sense of awe at Russia’s commitment to divide America using a weapon of our own making.

But their commitment also begs the question: why Twitter? Why would Putin put so much investment in dividing Americans via a social media platform that only 16% of the country used? And surely he must have considered, out of that paltry percent, how many of those weren’t even registered voters, or too young to vote? How many were even active, or signed in just to stargaze before dropping out?

How many of the 16% were actually paying attention?

It’s a logical fly in the ointment, and not one that cannot be easily explained.

…unless Twitter was never the prime offensive, but a modern-day Pas de Calais, a staging ground to divert the enemy from the real invasion...
Coming soon: "From Russia, With Likes"

Red is the Bluest Color

I woke up from a nightmare where I was standing on a street corner during a storm, watching electric poles fall and knock over trees, and trees fall and knock down houses, and I realized my dream was America.
***

Two weeks ago my daughter interviewed my friends about their careers and one friend she interviewed was a mass shooting expert and my daughter asked, “Mom, do you think think that’s appropriate for school?”

I said, “I can’t think of anything more appropriate.”

***

Yesterday my daughter climbed into the car, held her arms out palms flat, and said, “I know, I know, mom. We heard in gym. Can we just enjoy Valentines Day? Don’t turn this into Sandy Hook.”

(Sandy Hook is forever engraved in my children’s memories as the day mommy locked herself in the bathroom and didn’t come out for hours. The Season of Grieving. The Christmas That Wasn’t.)

***

Over sandwiches I told my 11 yr old son, “Kaya, run outside if the shooter is inside and you’re near an exit.”

“What if I’m not near an exit?”

“Then hide behind a locked door.”

“What if the door won’t lock, Mommy?”

“Then make yourself small and stay perfectly still.”

We play Mario World 3D and the mushroom men are chasing us. Kaya’s toad character runs inside a gumdrop tree. “I would hide here if this was real life,” he says.

We change worlds. Now we’re speeding through clear pipes sprinkled with gold coins. “Here, mommy,” Kaya says, jumping into a wall of bricks. “I would hide here.”

“Good, Kaya.”

We’re chasing turtles through the sky. Kaya pops into a rainbow and waves from a cloud. “Am I safe here, Mommy?”

“You’re safe, Kaya.” And I throw fireballs through tears.

***

A child’s death is never a single casualty. A child dies, and a part of the parents die too. A community fractures. The future evaporates. Any weapon that can kill a child is a weapon of mass destruction.

***

American mothers,

each day you send your children to slaughterhouses.

and you pray at the altar of elected officials who advise, “say three Hail Marys and take a Tylenol in the morning.” Thoughts and prayers. Wink, wink. Their cloaks are lined with  human sacrifices, their pockets deep with second amendment rubies, and come reelection time, they’ll clink glasses of champagne with the men who armored the men who butchered your children, while in Florida, 17 angels roam the skies, searching for the cloud behind the rainbow.

American mothers,

Your country is killing your children.

American mothers,

Rise.
Scream.
Yell.

Your voice is more powerful than any weapon.

It is time.

Thank you Alabama

This one’s for the Yellow Dog Dems, the Exonerated Men, the Indies, the Greens, the Swings, the right-wing refugees.

This one’s for the fed-up librarian retired in Gadsden who never voted Dem until today and Peggy in Montgomery and Ebenezer on Fourth Avenue cutting hair saying white folks don’t scare him no more since Vietnam, he’ll vote in a dog fight, he don’t care.

This one’s for the troops on the ground, the phone bank crowd, the drivers and givers and big spenders and Twitter warriors and the keyboard queens sharing memes.

This one’s for the women who left early and the men who came late and the elderly and sick who waited in line for hours. This one’s for the disowned children of the rainbow world who stayed close to home when home wasn’t safe. This one’s for the descendants of slaves. This one’s for the woke kids in Tuscaloosa and Auburn and the gentile ladies in Mobile hiding their girlhoods in purses beside their photo IDs.

This one’s for the progress, the message sent, and the sins that can no longer be disguised behind a Bible verse.

This one’s for the Americans who lose time and again, but are never defeated. This one’s for the daughter who tugs at her mother’s skirt and asks, “what’s next?” This one’s for the mother who replies, “We keep fighting.”

An Open Letter to White Women in Alabama

Liberals are wrong about you. You’re not racist or homophobic (and no, you’re not married to your brother). You’re well-educated. You love your family and your church, and you will always put them first. If others have a problem with that, so be it.

You live in Alabama because you love it – the tall trees, the trips to the coast in the summer, the fried everything, the slow, pleasant pace of life (except during football season, when the air ripples with excitement).

Everyone is nice here, too. Neighbors are real neighbors; people take the time to stop and say hello. If you get a flat tire, a second later someone will stop and help. Do they do that up north, you wonder? In Chicago or Boston? Do they really care about their fellow man — all those self-righteous snowflakes with their protest signs, smug liberal cannibals so hungry for outrage that they’ll eagerly devour their own?

These Libs pop up online sometimes and accuse you of hating women, to which you reply, “I am a woman.” Just because you don’t strap on a pussy hat and march on Washington, demanding rights that (news flash!) you already have, doesn’t mean you haven’t felt the full weight of womanhood.

Or girlhood, for that matter. You remember being fourteen, don’t you? – all limbs and unruly hair, a mouth lined with braces. It’s a difficult time. You’re not a child anymore, but you’re not a woman either. Suddenly watching certain movies with your dad feels strange, and you no longer tell your mother everything. You still play games with kids on your street, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same – almost as if there’s another layer, a new price for playing.

Did older men approach you then, or gaze at you from afar with a look in their eye that made you uncomfortable — a look that you had no name for yet? Maybe it was a young man who first made unwanted advantages … are you the one woman out of four who has been sexually assaulted? If not, then certainly you’re in the Harassment and Close Calls Club, where most of us are members.

When was the first time you were told to be silent? When was the time you silenced yourself? Have you had enough self-reflection to trace back all your life’s struggles to the moment you said no and he said yes?

I think you have. In fact, I think you’ve changed a lot over the last couple of months, haven’t you? You’re still a God-fearing woman who loves her family, but lately, the pillars of truth that build the foundation of your faith have taken a beating. You’re starting to wonder if men, who have spent centuries interpreting God’s words, have maybe, just maybe, construed His words to their favor.

It started with Trump’s Access Hollywood video. It repulsed you. It didn’t keep you from voting for him (he was still a better choice than Killary), but it didn’t sit right with you then, and it still doesn’t. Then, a year later, the #MeToo movement grew momentum. You didn’t participate – at least, not in public. Instead you wrote it down somewhere – maybe in a post-it note that you slipped into your Bible, or maybe you typed it in a flurry of keystrokes that you saved in an inconspicuous folder on the family computer. Maybe you didn’t write it at all, but spoke it, when only God was around to witness your truth.

A month later, when public figures began to lose their jobs from sexual harassment claims, you thought quietly, “You reap what you sow.” And when, fifty-so plus men later, your husband casually mentioned, “This is turning into a Witch Hunt!”…you quietly disagreed with him.

Liberals are wrong about you, but maybe the Conservatives are too. You are not a sheep. You will not be spoon fed what to think. You may never march down Pennsylvania Avenue wearing one of those obscene pussy hats, but maybe it’s time you protested in your own way.

On Dec. 12, you have a big decision to make. As a fellow Southerner, may I make a suggestion? In the voting booth, go ahead and hand Jesus the wheel, but let your fourteen-year-old self lead the way.

What a Mass Shooting Expert Wants You to Know

What a Mass Shooting Expert Wants You to KnowJackie Schildkraut's Facebook wall is filled with posts describing the fallen, a digital shrine. Christopher Roybal from Colorado, "could draw people in with an infectious smile." Carrie Parsons "had a contagious giggle." Patricia Mestas was "a mother of three, a grandmother of eight, and a great-grandmother to one."

Nov 8, 2017

PART I
Me to Year Ago Me: “where are you going?”

Year Ago Me: “Home to watch the election coverage! Break the glass ceiling! Clinton might take Texas!”

Me: “yeah well I have something to tell you...”

Year Ago Me: “hey if you’re only one year older, how come you look so fat and old?”

Me: <pauses> “you know what, have fun! Enjoy your covfefe.”

Year Ago Me: “My what?”

Me: “You’ll see.”

Year Ago Me can suck it.
PART II

Year Ago Me: “why are you so tense? Is it a close call? Does Florida go red?”

Me: “well that’s part of it—“

Year Ago Me: “I KNEW IT! I fuckin knew it. Fuck Florida!”

Me: “look, just do me a favor— don’t post on FB about not warning Florida the next time there’s a hurricane. You’ll piss off your Florida friends.”

Year Ago Me: “what’chu talkin bout, Willis? We don’t have any friends in Florida.”

Me: <sighs> “oh shut up and eat your twizzlers. Enjoy these final hours.”

Year Ago Me: <mouth stuffed with Twizzlers> what...doyoumean... fiiinal...hours?”


PART III
Year Ago Me: “Ha! Alabama goes red, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Kentucky go red. Big shocker there! Racist backassward fundamentalist dickheads!”

<bites into a Twizzler, takes a swig of rum and coke, pushes a cat butt out of the way of Wolf Blitzer>

Continues, “Enjoy your red map while you got it, you Republican fucks! Ha ha we don’t need Florida, cause as soon as Ohio and Michigan..........hey....Year Later Me! Where are you? Where’d you go? ...Why are you out on the balcony? What are you doing with that rope around your neck?”
PART IV
Year Ago Me: “THE SUN WILL COME OUT, TOMMORR—“

Me: “Nope.”

Year Ago Me: “God you’re so morose and angry! You’re like Prince in ‘Purple Rain’ but taller and with no talent.”

Me: “which reminds me...”

Year Ago Me, “shut up, breaking news! 90% Ohio counties reporting in. Here we go! oh my wouldya look at Wolf Blitzer?! he looks—“

Me: “Like a man witnessing the death of our democracy?”

Year Ago Me: “...pale. I bet he’s tired. All that walking back and forth from the map to the guest commentators...”

Me: “Yeah, that’s def it.”
PART V

Year Ago Me: “well....some of the people on Pantsuit Nation are friending each other to drown out the Trump supporters on their wall. Should I accept their friend requests?”

Me:”Uhm....yes....well...no....wait, yes...definitely...do it....but wait...I need to give you a list...”
PART VI (The Finale)

Year Ago Me (spread out on the bed staring at the ceiling): “This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening...wait, why are you grinning?”

Me: “Bc I remember this part the most.”

Year Ago Me: “But you’re grinning!.. what does that mean? Am I exaggerating? Will everything be ok? Is this feeling going to go away?”

Me: “No. It will never go away. Tonight, you’re going to have nightmares—many, many nightmares about large dark oceans with no shore — the kind of subconscious dreams you dream when your waking dreams die. Tomorrow you’ll pick up kids from school and you’ll try not to cry in front of your daughter. She’ll sense your grief anyway, but she’ll never really know what this night took away – but then again, neither will you.
The shock will eventually flatline, become a low-pulsating numbness; but it won’t hold you forever. You’ll have to reach back to touch it.

The bitterness will be a wound you won’t bother covering; for you will never again feel quite as American as you did before Nov. 8, 2016. Your country, you think, has betrayed you. Your friends and family – the ones who voted red – you won’t talk to them for weeks, sometimes months. Everything will feel alien for a while. You’ll watch strangers go about their daily lives and think, how could you?

The anger will manifest in different ways. Some days you’ll crush it, but some days it will crush you, and that’s ok too. Some days it will be your fuel; you’ll call or write your state representatives, you’ll join with other women to write a book, you’ll march and you’ll protest. Other days it will sit inside you like a buried scream, and you’ll find yourself pacing your house at odd hours at night wondering what you would have done differently.

But it won’t be all bad. The friends you made tonight—many of them will stay with you throughout the year and beyond. Some will become closer to you than your sister. You’ll laugh with them, you’ll cry with them. Together you’ll celebrate the victories (and there will be many) and mourn the defeats (and there will be plenty of those too). They’ll broaden your horizons, teach you to be more empathetic, to listen, to lead, to follow, to live in the moment. You’ll learn you weren’t the perfect liberal. You’ll learn no one else is either. You’ll learn you’ve been doing a lot of things wrong. You’ll strive to do better. You’ll fail and you’ll get up again. But most importantly, you’ll learn that you’re in this together, that no man is an island, and no matter what, we must keep living and we must keep fighting, because life has no meaning if you’re only surviving.

Chin up, younger, slimmer me. You've got a hell of a year ahead of you.”

100 Women

Collected from stories of over one-hundred women 


She was young. She was older. She was nineteen. She was thirty. She was fifty-five. She was fresh meat. She was ripe for the pickings. She was no spring chicken.

She was in high school. She was in college. She lived alone. She lived with her girlfriend. She was a single mother. She had a family. She wanted a career. She needed the money. Her husband was on disability. She had to feed her kids.

It was her first job. She was about to retire. She was changing careers. She worked full-time. She worked on weekends. She worked at night. She worked nine to five. She worked for hourly wages. She returned to the work force after becoming a mother.

She worked in the fields. She worked in an office. She traveled across the country. She worked from home. She worked in sales. She worked in a factory. She was a chef. She was an artist. She was a teacher, a programmer, a secretary, a doctor, a waitress, a therapist, a lawyer. She worked in a prison. She was a sergeant in the army.

She had the type of face you’d see on magazine covers. She had her father’s nose. She had a scar above her eye. She had cheeks etched with laugh lines. She was tall and shaped like a tree. She was barely five feet. She was embarrassed of her thighs. She wore sweaters to cover her arms. She wore her hair long. She had a crew cut. She wore her hair in beads. She tied her hair back in a bun. She wore pantsuits. She wore a uniform. She wore a white coat. She wore flip flops and jeans. She came to work made up every day. She came to work fresh-faced in khakis. She wore safety goggles. She wore boots and a toolbelt. She wore little more than nothing.

It was a boys’ club. It was a mixed bag. It was a starter pack. It was millions in. It was just her and him. She was the only woman. He was the only man.

He was charming. He was a prick from the start. He was helpful. He cracked jokes in meetings. He was her age. He was older. He was her father’s friend. He had a wife and children. He had an impeccable reputation. He was highly respected. He was the office sleazebag; everyone knew about him.

He was her boss. He was her co-worker. He was her customer. He was a co-worker. He cleaned the bathrooms. He fixed the machines. He was the president of the company.

It happened only once. It happened repeatedly. It would stop and start again. It happened when they were alone. It was a suggestion. It was a touch. It was a handprint she couldn’t wash off. It was a scream. It was a whisper. It was menacingly quiet. It was a remark about her looks. It was a tug at her skirt. It was a shoulder hug. It was a tap on her desk. It was a phone call. It was an email.

It happened in the office. It happened in the back room. It happened out of town. It was after hours. It was in the parking lot. It was beside the dumpster while they were hauling trash. It was at the annual Christmas party where everyone saw but no one said a thing. It had come out of nowhere. It had been building up. He said he had always wanted to do that. He said he didn’t know what had come over him. He said it must have been the way she was dressed. He said he must have been reading her wrong. He laughed and said she was sending mixed signals.

She didn’t want to believe it. She was ashamed. She didn’t know she could do anything. She just wanted it to go away. She wanted to be seen as tough. She thought it was her fault. She was worried no one would believe her because she wasn’t pretty enough. She was worried about not getting the deal done. She needed the job and was socialized to be silent. She wanted to come across like she could handle anything. She was already made to feel inadequate as a woman in a male dominated industry. She didn’t want to be considered a troublemaker. She was physically afraid of her boss. She had seen what had happened to the other women who had reported him. His wife was pregnant and she didn’t want her to have a miscarriage over the shock. His wife was the only other employee. Her co-workers thought it was funny. She wasn’t the only one, but no one else reported it either.

She asked him to stop. He said no one would believe her. He threatened to get her fired. He threatened to tell her father that she was a slut. He threatened the safety of her unborn baby. The harassment only increased. He said she was imagining things. He said, “You sure do think a lot of yourself!” He said women were too sensitive and couldn’t take a joke. He said she only wished; don’t worry, honey, I won’t fuck a pig.

She sought advice from others. She was told it was just the company culture. They said that’s just how men are. They said, “Oh, he probably likes you.” They said he’s just a friendly guy. They said there was nothing she could do. They said maybe she should leave and find a new job. Move departments. Work from home. She was told she would be labeled a dyke and raped by the prisoners if she complained. She was told to do her job and shut the hell up. She was told to wear different clothes, then maybe he’d lose interest.

She did report it but nothing happened. She was ignored. She was threatened repeatedly. She was fired. She was called a liar. They said it was just the culture. They said it would ruin his life. Her claim was disregarded by the owners of the company because he was making a lot of money for them. They moved her to another department but didn’t fire him. They started cutting back her hours. They treated her like a leper. They made it impossible for her to work there, she was almost forced to quit.

She is retired now. She is still working. She hears men how come forward and say they have daughters and harassment should no longer be happening. She wonders where these men were when this was happening to their wives. She wonders where these men were when it was happening to their mothers. She speaks out now more than ever before. She chooses to remain silent. She talks only to her therapist. She talks only to her minister. She saves the headlines from today’s stories and promises she’ll read them later. She’s walked a hundred miles in other women’s shoes; she’s not afraid to walk a hundred miles farther.


—Erin Passons, 10-15-2017

Things That Men Should Know About

I was sixteen the first time I was sexually harassed. 
I was working at a one-hour photo store at the mall with a twenty-five-year-old male coworker named Bert. We bonded over bootleg Tori Amos albums and a mutual unappreciation for our manager Tony whose temper can only be described as Satanisque. One slow Sunday afternoon Bert touched my arm and told me that he had a crush on me. Then he leaned in for a kiss. With a forced giggle, I pushed him away and moved to the other side of the printing machine. I didn’t feel terribly threatened because Bert was the stocky type with a doughy-like physique and I was a tough girl with a pair of biceps strong from years of gymnastics and cheerleading; I figured I could easily knock a geek out if I had to. Still, it didn’t stop me from going to Tony and asking him to schedule me on days when Bert wasn’t working. Tony obliged but didn’t ask for more information. Looking back now, I wonder, why didn’t he?





The second time I was sexually harassed, I was twenty-one, already married, and working as an office assistant at an architecture firm in Jackson, Mississippi while finishing up the second of my two useless college degrees. I became friends with a fifty-year-old married man named John, who seemed to have a good head on his shoulders in what was otherwise a chaotic work environment. His office with windows facing a flower-spouting courtyard became my work sanctuary when I wasn’t typing letters or faxing invoices. 
“Why are you here?” he would always ask me. “Clearly this isn’t your dream job. You’re a writer.”

I’d shrug and say, “I don’t have any good ideas.”

Three months into the job, I arrived at work to find an email from John waiting in my inbox. The subject line read: “Book idea.” I opened it and began reading.

Young, lonely married woman works at a job she despises. She friends a lonely, older, married man. They begin a hot, steamy, illicit affair, and eventually leave their spouses to be with each other. The email went on to outline how the affair would start, with detailed descriptions of me pinned against the wall begging for him to put it in, with me bent over his desk moaning, with me on the trunk of his car, my legs over his shoulders as he pumped me full of hot cum.

The words became a blur as my mind tried to accept what my eyes were feeding it. My mouth hung open, my heart beating out of my chest. After the shock wore off, disgust coursed through my body, and after that, betrayal. I had spent hours pouring my heart out to this man; I thought of him as a father. How could he correlate our mutual preferences for cats over dogs and our similar political beliefs into an erotic sex fantasy?

I left work early in tears. I took a shower as soon as I came home. I think the shower must have lasted for hours. Too exhausted to dress, I fell into bed wrapped only in a towel and dialed my mom’s number. By then, guilt had set in. I must have done something. I must have said something. I must have led him on. Otherwise, why would he focus on me? I wasn’t the type of girl that men typically thought of that way. I wasn’t beautiful. (I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been tricked into believing one of the biggest myths of sexual harassment: that it only happened to "pretty" girls. This was a lie. It happened to all of us. The undesirables and the less than 10’s and the picture imperfect alike. We all get a slice of the harassment pie.)

Sobbing, I told my mom the story. She responded with the expected amount of anger and outrage. I think she may have cried too. Before we got off the phone, I asked, “What do I do? Do I tell him?” Him being my then-husband.

“No,” my mom said. “There are some things men should never know about.”

Taking my mom’s advice, I said nothing to my husband when he came home that night. When I went back to work the next day, I didn’t bring up John’s email to anyone, nor did I make my routine stop at John’s office. After days of feeling my distance, he stopped me in the hall and asked, “So I guess you didn’t like the book idea?” All I could do was shake my head. I remember my eyes landing on John’s blotchy red hands. I remember imagining what he imagined doing to me with those hands, and the familiar sickness took over again.

At home, sex life with my husband died on a vine. “Are you cheating on me?” he asked, more than once. I promised I wasn’t. “Then what is it?” he demanded. I would always turn away, mumbling a bogus excuse.

A few months after the email, I finished school. I quit the job at John’s firm, and my husband and I moved back to Australia. My marriage got back on track, but the experience had left a stain just under the surface, one that would reappear throughout the years out of nowhere, in the most inconvenient of circumstances, like during sex (Frustrated husband: “Why are you crying?”) or when I was playing with my children (Concerned four-year-old daughter: “Mommy, why sad face?”). But I had learned my lesson: never get close to a male coworker.

Not that keeping a safe distance mattered. Over the years, more incidents would occur. An executive of a company where I worked took me out to lunch with the premise that he wanted to discuss a promotion, but spent most of the hour ogling my legs, saying in an offhand, casual manner, “Your husband must love those wrapped around him at night” right before asking the waiter for the check. At the same company, another coworker shared with me music from his playlist from time to time, which I didn’t think anything of until his wife called me after discovering love letters he had addressed to my name. “Tell me what’s going on between the two of you!” she had demanded. “Nothing,” I stammered out, just as shocked as she was. Their marriage ended shortly after. With no pesky marital vows to interfere with my coworker’s delusion, his attention grew more aggressive, and his aggression manifested; his music sharing turning into emails that turned into unscheduled stops at my desks that turned into late night calls that I was unable to explain to my husband. I could have told his boss, I suppose, but his boss was the same vulgar man who took me out to lunch years earlier. I could have told my husband, but we were barely speaking (Our marriage was also on the verge of collapsing). In my mind, the only option was to look for a new job, and that’s exactly what I did.






My most recent experience—a member of the janitorial staff at my current job began going out of his way to say hello to me when he picked up the trash from our floor of the building. Mind you, the garbage can was at the other end of the floor; there was no reason for him to pass my office—but he did anyway. This was something I might have not even noticed in my earlier days, but I was 38 now, and my bullshit tolerance meter was at an all-time low. As the days passed, the man became more assertive, butting into my teleconferences to wave hello, interrupting my conversations with coworkers just to say, “Don’t work too hard,” with a wink, sometimes tapping my chair or shoulder to get my attention. It was annoying, but I wondered, could it really be considered sexual harassment? I wasn’t sure. I thought about asking my boyfriend. He was a lawyer and knew about these sort of things from a legal standpoint, if not from a personal one. The thought didn’t necessarily appeal to me – it was impossible to ask my boyfriend a legal question without getting a lecture on the whole Constitution and the entire history of rulings on whatever legality I was asking about – but, I decided, it would be worth sacrificing several hours of my life (in which I would spend most of the time trying to stay awake) to get his professional input (and, to be completely honest, his comfort).

Then I remembered my mother’s words (there are somethings men should never know about), and I changed my mind. I stayed silent.

Months came and went, but the janitor’s unwanted attention never ceased. Some days he’d shake my shoulders. Some days he’d grab my arm. Why do I still have to put up with this BS? I thought. I’m thirty-eight f*cking years old! (Another common myth: Sexual harassment slows down as women age. It doesn’t. In some cases, it only gets bolder.)

On a sunny afternoon six months into the janitor’s daily visits, I went out to lunch with a couple of female co-workers. I saw the janitor as soon as we stepped out of the building. He was leaning against a nearby tree, sucking on a lit cigarette. Our eyes locked. He waved at me. I didn’t wave back. “That guy gives me the creeps,” I blurted without thinking.

A co-worker turned to investigate the object of my angst. Her throat erupted with a low growl. “Me too,” she said.

The others chimed in.

Yes!

Me too!

I thought I was the only one!

It seemed the janitor had been obtrusive to all of us. Still, I thought, was it sexual harassment? Maybe he was doing it to men too. Maybe he was just over-friendly. After lunch, I pulled my male co-workers aside one at a time and asked them about him. Not a single one even knew who I was talking about. I had all the confirmation I needed. I marched up to the building manager’s office and described the predicament. A week later, the over-friendly janitor was gone.

I was proud of myself—proud and frustrated. Why had I not done this sooner? I mean, not just this occurrence, but all the other times I had been sexually harassed? In every scenario, I had thought I was the only one. But maybe that wasn’t the case. Perhaps the men who preyed on me had indiscriminate taste. The identity of their prey was of no consequence; they only hunted for the chase.

It was the guilt of remaining silent for so long and potentially putting other women at risk that finally led me to talk to my boyfriend. When I described the incidents with the janitor, my boyfriend’s face fell with unexpected shock. “Why didn’t you tell me you were being sexually harassed?” he asked.

“I wasn’t sure if it was sexual harassment,” I admitted.

“Well, it was! I would have told you to go to the building manager a long time ago. Hell, I would have talked to them for you.”

“Oh, and because you’re a man, your voice would have mattered?” I asked, my feminist flag rising.

“No,” boyfriend said, vigorously shaking his head. “Because I love you and you love me, my voice should have mattered.”




When the allegations about Harvey Weinstein came out, I saw people ask, what took women so long to come forward? – to which I answered, what took men so long?

Then I thought about that conversation with my boyfriend. Why didn’t you tell me…

It’s clear from the New York Times’ extensive investigation that the men who circled Weinstein’s life knew what was happening in the secret innuendo meetings that Weinstein held in the darker, more secluded rooms of the company’s office building and in the clandestine rendezvous in hotel rooms. In the absence of women’s visible outrage, however, exactly zero percent of these men spoke out against Weinstein’s actions. Why didn’t they?

Obviously, first and foremost, they were concerned about their careers (It was a well-known fact, Weinstein was an eye for an eye kind of guy). Maybe some men even approved of Weinstein’s actions and followed their boss’s example.

But I tend to think there was a little of the Not My Woman, Not My Problem factor involved too. Professional investment isn’t emotional investment, no matter how you swing it, and some of us have moral compasses that only point north when north is where we’re heading. In the mid-90s, when Gwyneth Paltrow told her then-boyfriend Brad Pitt about Weinstein’s harassment, Pitt confronted Weinstein. At the time I write this, Pitt is the only "significant other” who has been reported as doing so. One could reasonably argue that this was because Pitt felt like he had the invincibility to do so. He's Brad F'ing Pitt. Not everyone had that luxury.

But if that's the case, had other men who were invested in these women’s lives also been told about the harassment and had not spoken up out of fear of retaliation? Or was it because they were never told to begin with?

The first assumption seems like a reasonable (if somewhat crappy) excuse due to the nature of the beast they would have been forced to confront. But in other cases, in the millions and millions of other cases across the country where this happens every day, the same cannot be said; and in those cases, I wonder if those women, like myself, chose to stay silent, and in doing so, unwillingly helped men further remove themselves from taking accountability for our misogynistic culture in which the bad seeds sexually harass and never pay the price for it.

Do heterosexual women need their men to stand up for them? As a feminist, it’s a little disconcerting to write this: but yes, I believe we do—because until we live in a world where a woman’s voice carries more weight than a man’s lies, having allies with a Y chromosome is an important step to safeguarding against sexual harassment – and those potential champions of the testosterone variety start at home. Besides, when you get down to it, it’s not a war between the sexes (men are sexually harassed too, lest we forget, and women can sexually harass other women just as easily as men). This is a war against harassment, and everything that comes with it—the fear, the silence, the guilt, the shame, the systematic unraveling of a person’s self-worth. It’s not a man’s support we’re really asking for; it’s the support of a person for whom we love and who loves us back.

I think back on what my mother told me years ago. There are some things men don’t need to know about. I know what she was thinking: things could get worse. Then-husband might start a scene at my work, confront John, punch him out…or maybe not believe me at all. Maybe then-husband would blame me for the incident. My mom was protecting me from further hurt, but what she was really protecting and encouraging was the silence that surrounds stories of sexual harassment, smothering the voices within.

As women, it is crucial that we speak to the men in our lives—our husbands, our fathers, our sons, our brothers—about what we endure in the workplace, no matter how hard or difficult the conversation. We can no longer protect men from sharing the weight of our trials. These are things that men should know about.



Great sources written by people way far more knowledgeable than I:
How to Encourage More Women to Report Sexual Harassment Workplace Sexual Harassment Linked To Damaging Mental Health Consequences, Depending On Who’s Doing The Harassing
Sexual harassment in the workplace isn’t just perpetrated by co-workers or the boss

I Could Have Been One of You

There’s an odd pain that stays with you long into adulthood when you grow up in a place that is the exact opposite of everything you represent.

There’s jealousy too, I think. Last March when I was back in Jackson, my dad and I went to the famous St Paddy’s Day parade. Rows and rows of white women in their college sweatshirts and fake Mardi Gras beads laughing with friends and yelling at their children with twice the syllables that need to be (“John” is “Joooohaaaaan” in the Deep South). I could have been one of them, I thought, walking past. If only I hadn’t wanted more. If only I hadn’t asked so many questions in Sunday school. If only I hadn’t reached my hand across the expanse of racial lines. If only I hadn’t winced walking into a room with mounted deer heads. If only hadn't stormed out of my Music Appreciation class when the teacher used the word "fag." I could have stayed in MS, married a lawyer from Ole Miss, started a family in a white flight neighborhood, made banana pudding for tailgating at football games, went to church every Sunday, stayed unwoke and unaware of the sufferings of the world around me Bc my world was jus’ fiiiine, praise the Lord. — maybe then those plastic shamrock cups with warm beer would taste like mother’s milk. And I would be happy and content and not a fuming mess waiting for Mango Dumptruck’s next tweet, waiting for the ground beneath to shake, for the familiar outrage to swell and take my breath away.

I loved you, Mississippi. But you could never accept me. I didn’t fit into your mold. That’s why I had to go.
- Erin Passons, 10-7-2017

Mandalay Bay

Kids, remember Mandalay Bay? Our hotel during our Vegas stay. Remember the aquarium? Rooms and rooms of tanks populated with brightly colored fish swimming past pretending we didn’t exist. Daughter, you spent an hour filming them. You held your lens near the glass and gasped whenever a shark swam past. It wasn’t the first time danger held your glance, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Four years and ten months ago the two of you sat by the bathroom door asking why I had locked myself inside, crying. I could barely tell you about the twenty children your age who disappeared into death’s maze that day and did not live to find an exit.

“It won’t happen to you,” I had promised. “Stricter gun laws are coming soon.” I didn’t know then what a liar I was.

Kids, remember Mandalay Bay? Last night a shark entered the glass case of fish and picked them off one by one until 50 lives lay scattered among the debris of rocks while hundreds more floated by, their bodies in irrefutable disrepair.

This wasn’t the first time since 2012. Hundreds of others including kids have been broken and butchered by bullets flying past, small sacrifices for 2nd amendment rights – a week of headlines then on to the next. Each year we stop and ponder, when will it end, when can we feel safe again, but it never does and we never have.

Kids, this is the aquarium you are swimming in. Remember the danger you live with, yes; but also, remember you share the peril with millions of fish. Together you can move currents; combine fins to form a formidable prey who rides over the top, sinking threats like stones at the bottom of the glass floor.

Your fins are buoyed by coordination and action; life cannot sustain merely from thoughts and prayers or standing by the glass watching, impartial, as our so-called amendment rights take another deathblow bite from our nation.
— Erin Passons, 10-2-2017