Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn’t play our cards right.)

Grace straightened. Sloane often wondered if her face underwent the same transformative process when she had to put on an air of authority about a subject at work. In her twenties, she knew, it had. Then, she could feel herself pulling on the mask of confidence, lowering her voice, removing the “likes” from her speech, stilling her knee, reminding herself that, yes, she was qualified. Grace’s tells were subtler. In Grace she saw a lift of the chin. A squaring of shoulders. Sloane—like most of us—rarely spotted these tiny betrayals of self-assurance in male colleagues. Was it because they weren’t there? Or were we not in tune enough to see them?

But it was a different kind of stress and theirs never needed to compete.

We needed only to have knocked at the door to one another’s worlds to find out how our histories knitted themselves together, weaving shared threads into a noose of our own making.

We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally.

(Because we knew this logic: we were always supposed to be thankful when anyone thought we were pretty.)

We thanked God it wasn’t us. And when it was, we felt a sick sense of comfort that it wasn’t only us, a relief like having just vomited after a hangover.

about what made the men on that list tick and in this, we failed inherently because we wasted more time focusing on those men’s emotional lives than they had ever spent on ours.

No number of commercials in which women dove into pools wearing white swimsuits could convince us that our periods were a thing of swanlike beauty. On our best days, we maintained a grudging allegiance with our bodies. We knew we shouldn’t be ashamed. We weren’t ashamed. We were grown-ass women—which is obviously why we paraded to the restrooms with tampons secretly stuffed into our cardigan sleeves as though we were spies delivering encrypted information. Other times, we had to fish quarters out of the bottom of our purses, searching for change to feed the feminine hygiene dispensers that had yet to be updated in the past twenty-five years. We took birth control in an attempt to assert a modicum of control over our uncontrollable hormones. We unbuttoned our pants at our desks. We rattled the kitchen Tylenol bottle into our hands. We ate chocolate. We pretended that all of this was a myth. That we had neither fallopian tubes, nor menstrual cycles, nor breasts, nor moods, nor children. And then we took it as a compliment when one of the men in the office told us we had balls. So, tell us again how this wasn’t a man’s world.

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

The sex hurt. There was no way around that. She winced silently. But then again, that was the point. She deserved a bit of suffering. Craved holy penance.

Since sexual harassment was a thing that happened to women, believe it or not, we didn’t want to admit that we had been harassed. It would be admitting that we were women in a way that mattered.

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

And so, when one of us spoke up, it was never just for her. It was for us. If anything, she was the willing sacrifice. Another log on the pyre stoked by us, our stories, our voices. And we would fan the flames. Spread the truth. Join the chorus. Burn it to the ground. Raze the earth, if we had to. Start over on level ground. Our legacy would be our words. Shouted out loud. For all to hear. We were done petitioning to be believed. We were finished requesting the benefit of the doubt. We weren’t asking for permission. The floor was ours. Listen.