Neither Hitler Nor Stalin. Neither Castro Nor Pinochet.

Through a complicated set of circumstances, which I will not recount here, I graduated from high school one year early but had not applied to college.  So, I found myself seventeen and out of high school with not much to do.  At that point, I had been working part-time at the factory outlet of a designer clothes company for almost a year.  So I asked the store manager if she needed someone full-time.

Working full-time at the store has become one of the defining experiences of my life.

I was by far the youngest person working at the store and that, coupled with my part-time status, created some insulation from the internal store politics.  But now that I was full-time, I was starting to be included in the day-to-day political nonsense of the store.  Interestingly, the most salient aspect of politics in the store was sex and gender.

We lived in an inverted world: every position of authority at the store was occupied by a woman.  Interestingly, this did not lead to gender equity.  No, it led to the abuse of men by women.  Though I have an endless list of examples I could give of how this abuse manifested itself I will give only a few.

The first example is the self-perpetuation of the dominance of women.  I saw women who had worked at the store for a fraction of the time, and had objectively done a poorer job than men in the store, get promoted and have their salaries increased at the expense of those men.

I witnessed multiple instances of sexual harassment take place.  The harassment was not so much a quid pro quo sexual harassment – the women in the store were not interested in the crappy men that worked there – as much as it was a hostile work environment.  The men in the store constantly faced jokes about their masculinity, sexuality, and virility.  It was not enough that they were subaltern to the women, they had to be reminded of it in a castrating manner.  Thankfully, even though I did not completely escape it, since I was so young I was not forced to participate, too much, in this particular dynamic.

The following apparently benign example, although  in reality insidious, will be the last I discuss. However, it by no means even comes close to exhausting the actual set of occurrences. Every morning when it was time to re-stock the store the men were sent to the stock room to find all the clothing items needed to restock. Meanwhile, the women would stay in the store chatting.

The justification for this was that men are stronger physically, so they should do all the carrying in the store.  Of course, it is undeniable that the average man is stronger physically than the average woman, but it is beyond absurd to use that as an excuse for women to not carry ten pounds worth of shirts.  This was done simply to further emasculate.  It was done because stock rooms are unpleasant places and the women had no desire to go there.  The physical labor element was an excuse.

The worst part of this, however, was the chatting that took place in the store while the men worked.  This chatting further strengthened the divide between men and women in the store because the women strengthened their bonds with each other during this time.  Thus, by creating “men only” tasks, they furthered their hegemony.

The way I dealt with this, I realized much later on, was by telling myself everyday that I was there only for a limited time and that there was a different and better life waiting for me once I left for college.  But what about the men there that were going to be there permanently?  They were fucked.

Eventually I left the store, though not before exploding on the assistant manager and telling her that I didn’t give a shit because I was leaving.  When I got to college I was faced with the mid-nineties PC world of American academia where comments like “the world would be better if women ran it,” were common.  The first few times I heard that one I had to disagree and try to explain why I thought so.  But it was pointless; the left-wing thought police would not allow departures from dogma.  Fifteen absurd reasons were given to me as to why I was wrong and why what I had experienced was not real oppression.

Eventually I learned my lesson and stopped replying to statements such as those.  There simply was no point in trying to show someone what I had lived.  The facts matter little when ideology invades.

What I did learn from both experiences was that it doesn’t matter much which group is in power.  The set of ideologies of the group also matter little.  Women are just as fucked up and oppressive as men.  A tyranny of women is “better” only for women, and a tyranny of men is “better” only for men.  I want neither.  This applies pretty much to all groups that find themselves in some sort of power struggle; it is not only a men-women dynamic.  For example, a tyranny of pro-independence leftists is no better than a tyranny of pro-statehood right-wingers, or of status-quo-ers.  Neither Hitler nor Stalin.  Neither Castro nor Pinochet.

What matters is creating a society where those in power cannot abuse those without it.  Power has to be controlled and capped.  We have to allow for space for the other to exist and to thrive and to be happy.  This means that we need to learn how to compromise.  That we need to live together in a fellowship, in a real community where we are all partners, because in the end, whether we like it or not, we are living and dying together.

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