Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

“If a client becomes a problem,” Oksana continued, “we ask the receptionist to highlight his name with yellow in the computer file. If that client requests evening or early morning training, the receptionist tells him that the female trainers are booked up or have off. If a problem client gets too out of hand, we code him red. And if that’s the case, all the female trainers become too busy to work with him at all.”

We wanted to be treated like men at work for the same reason that people bought smartphones: it made life easier.

“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

There would forever be strangers offering us candy.

“Death by a thousand paper cuts,” but that a million might actually do the trick.

Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.

By whispering, whose secrets were we keeping anyway—ours or theirs? Whose interests did our silence ultimately protect?

As we grew tired of whispering because what were we hiding, after all? We had stories, all of us. Would speaking up cost us? Maybe. But maybe it would cost them, too.

And so, when one of us spoke up, it was never just for her. It was for us.