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“My tongue is strong because I hold it too much.”
– Kathy Fish, Strong Tongue

This year has been very busy, much of it thanks to the extra service to the institution and the profession that I’ve taken on. And the more service I do, the more often I get casually insulted. People are absolute $hits, and they seem to be extra $hitty to the women who are supposed to help them. Every single member of our administrative staff (predominantly women) deserves a f*cking medal because I’m sure they deal with 10x the nonsense that befalls me.

Example 1: I took over the communication for a small technical community in advance of organizing a biennial conference. Like the apparent idiot that I am, I created a mailing list and sent out an email to the community members to inform them of new happenings, to which one member of the community (from Western Europe) basically told me to go f*ck myself, blocked the list and blocked me, and wrote all about it in a follow-up email, wherein he also informed me that I have ruined the last shreds of usefulness that email as a medium once possessed. While I generally love to have such supernatural powers attributed to me, this was not a celebratory moment on the whole. Yes, please, do tear me a new a$$hole as a thanks for the service I am volunteering for.

Example 2: No one is more defensive and pissy than a colleague (generally, but not always, male) who really didn’t want to have their attention drawn to the fact that all members of their instructional team (TAs and/or in-class undergrad helpers in flipped classrooms) have the exact same ethnicity and gender. All I did was recommend some additional helpers on top of those the colleague requested (usually people like more help rather than less, especially given budgetary constraints), and when the colleague came back to ask who these intruders were (all chosen from among our very top students, mind you) and I noted the various benefits of having these extra people, including the fact that they came from a variety of backgrounds, I was greeted with an email rant on how the presumably idiot likes of me conflate background with race and sex and ethnicity, because it couldn’t occur to the colleague that I might not have wanted to go into the possibly tricky details over email; it’s apparently much easier to assume I am an idiot, a thought that is somehow never too far from some (male) colleagues’ minds. Then the colleague treated me to a deep dive into their own history that can be summarized as “rags to riches” or perhaps “bad boy done good” lest I assume the colleague is as they appear at first glance. I won’t make that mistake again, because at first glance the colleague appears like someone who is not a douchebag, and now I know that’s not true. F*ck me for offering extra helpers (on top of those hand-picked by instructor) who are top students and for hinting that the variety in helper background might be a good thing for our undergrads.

Example 3: A little while back, I was on the committee with another woman and a bunch of men. The committee chair was a man. He ended up assigning significantly more work to the other woman and me than to the men. When I brought up that he overloaded the two women on the committee, the colleague reacted with shock and dismay, like, how could I accuse him of all people of sexism (I don’t see why not him; it’s not like he’s had a sterling reputation as a supporter of women, which I’m somehow sullying by my baseless accusations). Then he went full martyr, offering to step down from chairing the committee if I wanted him to, to which I said no one was asking him to step down, but I was asking him to redistribute the workload more evenly. Which he did. Eventually it all blew over, but I remain the difficult bitch for bringing it up. Of course there was no apology and no accountability or self-reflection, just pouting  followed by a grudging acquiescence to my complaint.

In all these anecdotes, I have had to hold my tongue, absorb other people’s outbursts, and generally keep my $hit together despite being the injured party, while the offending party got to add insult to injury and act offended themselves.

It’s also amazing to me is that fifty- and sixty-year-old people are unable to control themselves enough to not be dicks over email. And that there is never, ever, an apology of any kind.

I’m so tired of all this. And it’s not like I can escape it by retiring, because this $hit is pervasive.

Anyway. 

So, how’s your summer been, blogosphere?