Ms. Nice Guy Lost: Here's How Women Can Win

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Introduction

Yeah, we American women thought we’d finally arrived. We were about to elect the USA’s first woman president in 2016 – and do it the right way. You know … she’d be nicer and smarter and friendlier and more compassionate and more competent and more polite and more skilled and more knowledgeable and more experienced and more engaging … she’d take care to keep her nice lady bona fides no matter what was thrown her way.

America’s first female major party presidential candidate tried to show the nation that powerful women aren’t bitches. We could be oh so appropriately dignified and reasonable at all times and still succeed. No nasty woman president for us. We’d all behave the way (male) society expects women to behave. (And derides us if we don’t.)

And then, despite the fact that this candidate played the game exactly as men have told women we must … she lost. To a deplorable, despicable, disgusting, lying, cheating, adulterous, conniving, ignorant, incurious, corrupt, Russia-loving, misogynistic male chauvinist pig.

Instead of turning around and saying to that pig as he hovered behind her on the debate stage, Back up, you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up, as Hillary Clinton herself relates in What Happened, she kept her cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off.

Like every woman who’s ever been disrespected in a workplace or public forum, Hillary chose option A. She kept her cool. Held her tongue. Soldiered on. Chose dignity.

I wonder, though, Hillary went on in her book, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm – biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world…

Well, Hillary lost. So I’m here to argue that maybe we’ve overlearned that lesson. Maybe option B should be American women’s go-to response.

I’m here to declare that Hillary should have just turned around and told off the bully behind her.

Why not? She was criticized for NOT stopping Trump in his tracks. So why not just call him out?

What’s the point of being restrained and dignified, even when some guy’s obnoxious behavior is just begging for a thorough takedown? Why shouldn’t we give him the contemptuous disrespect he so thoroughly deserves?

We’re going to be called names no matter what we do.

Just ask ex-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who tried to warn the Trump administration in its first month in power that then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was a security risk and had lied to the FBI about his dealings with Russia. How did Donald Trump describe her later? As Michael Wolff wrote in his book, Fire and Fury, with a profane name that is sometimes used to crudely refer to female genitalia.

If we’re going to be called the c word just for doing our jobs, let’s stand up to the men who so casually and ruthlessly defame us.

Let’s say #MeToo when women go public with their stories of sexual abuse and harassment. American men have finally begun to sit up and take notice of how many of the women they know have experienced abuse, harassment or assault in the workplace and in their personal lives. Let’s build on that growing awareness.

Let’s tell men NO, loudly and unequivocally, whenever they attempt to silence or demean or disrespect us, when they interrupt or talk over us or mansplain, when they steal our ideas and present them as their own, when they try to stop us from assuming an equal role in the business and civic affairs of our nation.

Let’s stand up and demand equal treatment and equal opportunity in every aspect of our lives.

Heck, we’ve been asking nicely since before our nation’s founding. Abigail Adams kicked off the conversation in 1776 when she wrote to her husband John at the Constitutional Convention, imploring him to remember the ladies… If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

But all that asking nicely hasn’t worked.

In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, his policy pronouncements and administrative actions took American women backwards in every aspect of our lives. We experienced unrepentant harassment at the hands of sexist, misogynistic men who suddenly felt emboldened by the behavior of the boor in the Oval Office. We found ourselves re-litigating battles fought and won decades ago over the right to control our own bodies.

Almost as soon as he settled into the Oval Office, Trump moved quickly to rescind the Obama era equal pay measure that allowed women and people of color to find out whether they were being paid less than their white male counterparts.

He expanded the global gag rule, which forbids foreign non-governmental organizations that receive U.S. funds from talking to the women they serve about abortion.

He rescinded a rule that protects Title X patients’ access to family planning care at health centers that offer abortion services.

He killed U.S. financial support for the United Nations Population Fund, which provides family planning, maternal health and gender equity programs to vulnerable populations around the world.

He chose Neil Gorsuch to serve on the United States Supreme Court, giving that body one more stridently right wing, anti-reproductive rights voice and vote.

He sought to defund Planned Parenthood and to abolish maternity coverage in the GOP’s three unsuccessful attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Failing that, he and the GOP repealed the ACA’s individual mandate in their 2017 tax bill, claiming that the change offers more freedom for people to choose more diverse plans with less mandates imposed on them…

Finally, Trump and the GOP refused to reauthorize funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program when it ran out on Sept. 30, 2017. It took a government shutdown the weekend of January 19, 2018, to force the GOP’s hand on this essential coverage for the children of low-income Americans who don’t qualify for Medicaid.

Donald Trump and his allies are no friends to women. (Or our children.)

So let’s stop asking men for the equality and the opportunity we are entitled to.

Let’s stop playing the game the way men think we should, and just start asserting our rightful place in society.

No more keeping the assaults and abuse and harassment silent.

No more tolerating disrespect and discrimination.

No more accepting unequal pay and unequal opportunity as just the way it is.

No more going along to get along.

No more allowing right-wing extremists to rescind our rights and restrict our options.

No more being Ms. Nice Guy when we need to play tough.

Stand up.

Speak up.

Rise up.

And claim what’s rightfully ours.

Be who we choose to be. Assert our right to equal opportunity and equal reward. And if men start complaining that we’re talking too much about how the male exercise of power over women’s lives keeps us from realizing our full potential, tell them to stop complaining, and instead change their behavior so we don’t have to keep talking about it.

Here are all the reasons we must.

Story: When you’re a girl

It isn’t always this blatant.

As the first year of Trump’s presidency slithered into the second, Melissa Atkins Wardy of El Paso, Texas, shared this story on her Facebook page. It quickly went viral.

On December 29, 2017, Wardy took six members of her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to the Sun Bowl, where they sold game programs to earn money for summer camp. She also took her son, who’s a Cub Scout. All seven kids were in uniform.

The girls were addressed as sweetie and honey and baby. Maybe well intentioned, maybe condescending. Who knows. But one of them, a 9-year-old, was called a bitch.

One man kept offering to give Wardy’s daughter a patch for her little vest instead of $5 for a program. When she responded, How about instead of a patch you give me five dollars, he called her pushy.

He then told Wardy’s daughter and her friend – both 11-year-old sixth graders – that his two adult buddies needed girlfriends, and asked if the girls would oblige. The two girls turned and walked away.

Wardy’s son reported a much different experience. People stopped to shake his hand, thank him, give him tips, pat him on the back, or asked if he was going to become an Eagle Scout. He was called young man and told thank you, sir.

No one, Wardy recalled, asked the girls about the Gold Award, the Girl Scout equivalent of an Eagle Award. No one said atta girl or yay Girl Scouts. No one shook their hand.

This, Wardy concluded, is what the world looks like when you are female.

Chapter 1: Growing up female

I’d love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.

— Maya Angelou

I was lucky. I was raised by parents who told my sister and me that we could be anything we wanted to be. They encouraged us to think for ourselves and to stand up for what we believed in.

Their lessons were seldom delivered in words – most often, we learned through their actions.

My dad, who was born in Russia and came to America as a six-year-old, enlisted during World War II and became an Army officer who fought in Germany in the closing year of the war.

When he came home, he convinced his parents to sell their record and bookstore in Chicago and move out to sunny California. My mom, refusing to knuckle under to her stern German Lutheran father, who didn’t want her marrying someone Jewish, followed my dad to L.A., and they were wed.

Within a few years, they bought the little GI-bill tract house where I grew up. Much later, I learned they chose the neighborhood because home deeds there had no racial covenant. They wanted their kids to grow up in a place where everyone was welcome.

I still remember the day my dad opened the screen door to confront a realtor farming the neighborhood and urging people to list their homes because a low caste family from India was buying a house down the street. He got in the guy’s face and yelled him backwards off the porch, onto the driveway and out to the curb, telling him to never step foot on our property again. Word quickly spread. No one listed. And curry dishes soon became a favorite at neighborhood potlucks.

While they looked on the surface like the stereotypical 1950s couple – Dad headed off to work every morning, and Mom ran the house, led my sister’s Brownie troop, and became active in the PTA – they, like my dad’s parents, ran an egalitarian ship. They made financial decisions together, chose furniture only if both of them liked it, and shared cooking, cleaning and yard duties. Nothing was labeled women’s work or a man’s job. So it’s no surprise that, when feminism’s second wave struck in the late 1960s, I jumped right on board.

It’s no surprise that I’m political, either. My parents were enthusiastic Democrats whose politics reflected their values. We talked politics at the dinner table. We watched the evening news. We read the newspapers. Politics and governance mattered to us.

The first campaigns I remember are John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential run; Tom Bradley’s first race for L.A. mayor in 1969, when Sam Yorty resorted to racist fear mongering to defeat him; and Bradley’s second campaign in 1973, when he won. My dad passed away in late 1969, but my mom glued that Bradley sticker to the bumper of her car and cheered his win for them both.

And it’s no surprise I thrived in school. If my sister and I wanted to stay up an extra half-hour at bedtime, we could … if we used the time to read. When I was a toddler, my parents scraped together the money to buy us the Book of Knowledge, the working class version of the upscale World Book Encyclopedia. I still remember sitting on the floor in my room and going from one essay to the next to the next.

I was 2½ when my sister went off to kindergarten. Every morning, I’d walk down to the end of our street – where I could see the elementary school around the corner – and sit under the tree on the Rawlings’ front lawn with a book and a snack, pretending to be in class too.

By kindergarten, I’d become a voracious reader – dragging my mom to the library every week so I could check out the maximum ten books. By third grade, I was scrounging for new titles, and the librarians would point out new acquisitions for me to consider.

And from kindergarten until third grade, I loved school. That’s when attending school became a love-hate affair. It’s when my teacher and my parents decided to have me IQ-tested.

I remember the day I took that test. The whole thing made me nervous. Why had they pulled me out of class and sent me to the office? Did I do something wrong? Who was this woman? Why was she asking me all these odd questions?

Recognizing my discomfort, the woman administering the test shared a slice of the LAUSD’s legendary cinnamon spice coffee cake with me. And then she asked me the only question I still remember – because it seemed so utterly dumb. If you had a cast on your foot and you couldn’t get your jeans over it, could you put them on over your head? No! Why not? Because there’s no opening for your head to go through!

And with that indisputable display of brilliance, I skipped third grade the next day and moved into a fourth grade classroom.

The lessons girls learn

About the same time, I started wearing glasses.

I continued to thrive academically, but suddenly I was the nerdy, four-eyes teacher’s pet who showed off by getting the best grades