You post about reporting harassment is offensive

“I am 50 and I had kids at 36, and I have never met a woman who said she was happy she waited until after age 35 to have kids.”

same here. very insightful. that being said, I’ve met a LOT of women who had children between the ages of 11-21 and they seemed rather unhappy about it, too.

RE sexual harassment. Perhaps here’s a way of rephrasing it to convey that the advice is, or can be, empowering:

Ever since you were a young teenager, guys have been harassing you, on the streets, in the pubs, wherever. Now there’s this guy at work who is doing the same. In an ideal world, you could call him out and he would get punished, whereas you wouldn’t face any consequences.

In this world, in most companies (and you would likely know if your company were the exception), he would not get any punishment worth that name and you will be stigmatised.

Under those circumstances, you are *not* obliged to report the harassment. You are *not* obliged to go through the channels that society, or your company, has set up, and that have proven to be worthless.

If your company is not going to do the right thing, you don’t have to do the ‘right’ thing of calling out harassment. It is fine to decide that you don’t want to deal with that – that you want to keep your career, your credibility (sad as it is), your job prospects.

It is not your duty to be a feminist at all costs in a world that doesn’t particularly care. You are not obliged to fight the battle on your side if your company isn’t doing its part. It’s not your fault the harassment is happening.

And saying that women should stand with other women – or that women ‘shouldn’t be writing those things’ that Penelope wrote – implies that women somehow have more of an obligation to be a feminist. That’s problematic because then you put the burden on women to solve the issue, and society/men/companies are once more absolved of their part.

And, I mean, these companies and society know there’s a problem. That’s why everyone pays lip service to the idea of gender equality and respecting women laleelalah. It’s not like there’s an information gap you’re solving by reporting. It’s a caring gap – on their side.

So it’s not that you *can’t* report those things. It’s not that you *can’t* call out these things. But you will pay a price. So why should you – or women in general – be the only ones to pay?

And one can argue that that’s empowering. Because now instead of having to worry about addressing harassment – on top of everything else! – you can just go out and have your career. Or have kids. Whatever you want. Like the guys have been doing all along.

I am not sure how to feel or what to think about the sexual harassment side of this. I can see very clearly what Penelope is saying particularly in terms of the price that is paid by women who report, but I can also understand how that seems very counterintuitive for a young woman right now in the midst of the metoo movement. I wonder if the metoo movement/momentum needs to start focussing on the the price being paid by women who report their abuse/harassment and how we can overcome this, or at least better equip women for the fight. It seems like telling women to speak up without having this conversation first is setting us up for failure from the start.

On the other note of having kids – I think the key thing you start to realise as you get older (and I don’t want to sound patronising here) is that no one will ever really know how you can live your best life – except for you. You can seek out all the advice in the world, but at the end of the day, only you will know if it fits or not. The trap you can fall into is to only seek advice or views that fit a preformed idea in your mind or beliefs you have always held and then automatically categorise anyone who says otherwise as being wrong. It is always good to step outside your filter bubble and find views on the world that can help you see things from a different angle, even if they make you angry. There are so many things that Penelope has written in the past that I initially have gotten angry about and thought “you are so wrong!”. However, these are often the posts that have given me the opportunity to really question myself and the belief structures that I have formed in my own mind. Sometimes it’s resulted in me being even more convinced of my own ideas, other times I’ve come away going “wow, I never thought of it that way”.

I had my first child at 34, second at 36 and am expecting my third now at 38. There’s no way for me to really know if I am better off than I would have been in if I’d done this in my 20’s. I’m happy with how things have worked out for me both in terms of being a mum and maintaining my career. However, I can see the positives and negatives either way and just because it’s worked for me doesn’t mean I’ll be flat out saying to my daughters ” wait until your 30’s to have your babies”.

Keeping in mind that the OP states she is 14, I’m hoping that maybe I can respond to some of her underlying concerns and bridge what appears to me to be a gap between experiences.
OP speaks about women and marriage and careers and children in “one-day” terms, but her experiences of harassment are not at her workplace. They are every day, on the streets and in her school. I think the confusion comes up in that it all falls under the umbrella category of “women’s rights” even though the situations in which the harassment occurs are worlds apart.
I think 14 year-old me would probably have conflated the two worlds as well, not yet having had *much* experience in the professional environment. (I rushed to the nurse’s office to have her sign my working permit as soon as I turned 14 so that I could have money to pay for my own text messages.)

I know what the everyday, on-the-street harassment described by OP feels like. I grew up with it. I grew up in an area where that sort of male-female interaction was commonplace and expected. I grew up in an area where, from the age of 13, I had grown men following me down the street in their car, whistling at me, trying to get my number, trying to get me to get in the car with them. At the age of 13, I started walking home from the bus with my keys between my fingers. This was not considered out-of-the-ordinary; it was simply the way things were. It was viewed in the same way one would view a fly buzzing around your head. It was annoying, but flies will be flies and women will have fly-swatters. It was part of a culture where men were expected to be the sexual aggressors, and women the key-toting Madonnas. It was part of your social life.

To whom would you even report this behavior? Your parents? Your teachers? They can’t walk around with you everywhere. The police? They weren’t exactly viewed as protectors in that area either. So instead, women put up with the daily assaults. Many were impregnated against their will at young ages, and threatened with alienation from their families if they exercised their choice to terminate the pregnancy. They learn to be afraid, and to cover up that fear with hardness and an aggression of their own.

That environment is miles away from a professional environment, where no one is expected to be a sexual aggressor, and where women are not allowed to be aggressive in general. One could imagine that a bold 14 year-old, angry at the way in which she is currently treated on a daily basis, could not possibly fathom allowing herself to be treated that way as an adult, when she *could* do something about it. I certainly would have felt that way. In many ways, I still do.

So, to the OP:
I find it interesting these days – I now work in a large corporate firm with many women who come from more middle-class suburban backgrounds (i.e. backgrounds where catcalling teenage girls was not something experienced on a daily basis). I hear the sorts of behaviors and comments that offend those women, and I also hear their concerns about how to respond. Their concerns about responding in the workplace are valid. Harassment in the workplace is insidious in a different sort of way- for all the ways earlier commenters have described. There is wisdom in their words. And that wisdom applies to certain times and certain places. If you take it to heart, it can help you in those times and in those places.

Perhaps you will end up with a different view (I grew up wayyyyy before #metoo, after all), but I find that I am not offended as easily or in the same ways as many other women at work. I laugh at the pitiful passes a man might make (thankfully, none in my current workplace). I recognize that despite the fact that we are supposed to ignore it in the workplace, we are sexual beings, and a man doesn’t walk around blindly – he may want to compliment someone who looks nice that day because he’s been taught it’s nice to tell a woman she looks nice and he may be awkward about finding the right words to do so. A compliment doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I recognize the difference between a compliment and leering, because I’ve had an additional 17 years of knowing what leering feels like. And those additional 17 years have made me angry and watchful. Just let someone try and put their hands on me and see what happens… Let someone say something smart and see what happens…

That’s how I feel. But no one tries. Thankfully, I do not feel that I have experienced any of that sly kind of workplace harassment in a professional environment. Many of my friends have, however, (and the stories they have told me have sometimes shocked me – “He said what?!”) and I can’t help but see a pattern among the “victims” – they tend to come from those middle-class suburban backgrounds.

I think even though women where I grew up were expected to be the protectors of their own virtue, they were expected to take an *active* role in doing so. It was acceptable for women to be more aggressive about asserting themselves. The threat of *physical* violence was the only real limitation on asserting yourself; reputational violence was much less common. I think in the more typical middle-class suburban/rural environments, women are expected to be *passive*; they are not even allowed to be active protectors of their own womanhood. And men are less public about their own sexual aggression, reserving most predatory behaviors for private situations, so it continues in the shadows. Therefore those women grow up with a different, but still very real, kind of fear, and a different kind of fear response. It is a valid one though, and to the extent that you enter into a world that is made up primarily of people who are coming from that background, you should be aware that no society is very accepting of people who don’t follow its rules, even the bad rules. By sticking your neck out, you may not risk physical violence in the same way you might on the street, but you risk other kinds of violence that are harder to pinpoint and weed out. As my mother used to like to say, “You’ve picked a hard row to hoe there…”

To all the women:
One more interesting note – I was in a conference where sex in the workplace was the topic of discussion, and the speaker pointed out that sexual harassment training is ineffective at reducing the incidence of harassment, and, more importantly, has the effect of undermining women by making them appear unable to solve their own problems. Sexual harassment training is often oriented towards having women report the problem to someone else to handle. It does not train women how to handle the problem on their own, which sends the message that women don’t have the power to do so.

I got pregnant with my first child at 29 and my second at 32. I can’t tell you how many of my friends waited slightly longer and then couldn’t get pregnant. And IVF is extremely expensive (and not pleasant to go through, I imagine.) My advice to young women is on par with Penelope. 1) You don’t have as much time as you think. 2) Having kids is exhausting and you have more endurance when you’re younger 3) It’s okay to plateau your career when your kids are young (I worked part time for five years, then telecommuted for another 9 ).