Dissent, that’s what it is.

The other night I got to hear about a friend’s troubles with an old perv she has to work with. She’s been slowly building up resistence, she told us, and was thinking that it was leading to a straight up cut-off, telling him she can’t interact with him about anything but work. The perv in question is twice her age and makes pathetic advances to try to win her attention, calling her his “girlfriend,” and other unmistakably patronizing and objectifying languate. He also manipulates her into paying attention to his “bad days,” pretty often, and she’s begun to respond to his “Oh, I’m not doing so well this moring”s with “Well that’s too bad, see ya!”

It’s interesting to hear about how her voice of dissent is taking formation each day as she thinks about how to approach this and other situations.

Once you become aware of something–whether it is sexism, racism, ageism, abuse of someone–you come to a cross roads where you can choose action and dissent, or cowardace and detachment. Unfortunately, for most people in most cases, we choose to detach. I know that sounds like a generalized cliche, “most of our culture sucks most of the time, blah blah.” But what I’m talking about, my friendly Feminist reader, is YOU! And ME! Us progressive enlightened guys and gals, acting like the jokes people tell and the side comments made, don’t ultimately reflect bigger ideas and concepts that cause discrimination, objectification, and hate.

I’m talking about those times when someone (or you) makes a call to you on the street, and you just keep walking; or when some dude (or you) calls you his sweat heart while excusing himself for bumping into you in a store, and you just roll your eyes at your friend and keep going; or the times when the guy at work (or you) to whom you’ve made it clear that you don’t wish to be friends keeps cornering you at the water cooler for a friendly come-on, and you jiggle it out of your head so as to not cause too much turmoil in the workplace; the countless times someone (OR YOU) cracks a joke at women’s expense, and “it’s just a joke,” so you don’t say anything; and how about those family functions or work parties where the dudes engage you only in that chatty banter about sex or relationships, saving their more intellectual moments for their male counterparts; or how about when you were a kid or when you see kids now, not being chosen for sides during a sport or game because they are a girl or not being given as much credit for a project or experiment because it is assumed the boys around deserve it more?

It happens ALL the time, and there are so many more examples, and the point is: if you’re aware of them, and you brush them off, you are choosing to detach from a personal interpretation of them. You have the “Yeah but he doesn’t mean me!” syndrome. In his Documentary Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhyme, Byron Hurt demonstrates at length why black women tend never to speak up against hip-hops misogyny and rape of its women: because they don’t think the pimps and gangStars are “talking about me,” when they are whistling for their hos, among other things. He explains that these women don’t think of themselves as being targeted for abuse and discriminated against, although documentary-watchers see the statistic on the screen that black women are 35 percent more likely to be raped, and that, yes indeed, those RapStars are talking about them when they swing their bling and call to their multitudes.

And in all of our everyday situations we’re faced with the same things, presented differently from time to time, and we have to choose. My friend is learning how to choose dissent. I call it desent because when you speak out against sexism and discrimination in these small situations, you are not only defending yourself against another, you are speaking out against a system that holds misogyny and sexism as a norm and works against your essential being to feel safe, respected, and free.