The Believe Women Meme
When I was twelve, my mom decided to create a financial crisis compelling her to get a paid job over Dad's objections.
After Dad declined to sign the paperwork for an abortion, she arranged an apartment for my sister at college, bought furniture for my sister, bought a car for my sister and then announced Dad didn't have enough money and this was a dire financial emergency and she began working. As a twelve year old, I utterly failed to connect the dots between the abortion and the sudden spending spree followed by mom NEEDING to get a JOB.
Probably that same summer, Mom took me with her to do some shopping and on the way home, stop and talk to a guy about a potential work opportunity. While we were there, I asked the man a question and he got real ugly about children should be seen and not heard and didn't my mother have any sense.
I spent decades feeling like my Mom maybe should have told me beforehand to stay quiet or something. I've recently changed my mind.
My Mom grew up in the sophisticated freistadt of Danzig. Her father was a businessman making enough money to support a wife and twelve children and to move the family to the countryside during World War II to minimize risk.
My mother was extremely socially savvy and between having a large family and growing up in a big city, she had lots of exposure to opportunities to observe and analyze social stuff.
I think she casually dropped by his office with me in tow to avoid being alone with the man and he was verbally abusive because he was mad she arranged to not be alone with him. She was quite beautiful and he probably wanted her as soon as he laid eyes on her.
He was probably a sexual predator and I don't think my mother pursued work with him. She learned all she needed to know that day.
Predators practice DARVO. They play the victim card and they blame the victim for their abusive garbage, pretending they hurt you because of what you did when that's not really true.
She may have been crystal clear what that was about and just never explained it to me.
My sister is not similarly socially savvy. She didn't know how to navigate certain things about public life and career.
PR in a Small World tells a story of one such failure on her part. It also explains that I found this stuff baffling as well though I'm more socially insightful than my sister.
I didn't grow up with eleven siblings in a big city with a successful entrepreneur father.
I have an entire different blog dedicated to exploring my hypothesis that women get raised to have private lives and men get raised to have public lives. A piece there called Pandora's Box posits that sometimes even very successful women in the public eye see more drama than their male counterparts because they don't get clued about this as little girls to the same degree as boys.
So let's continue to assume the yarn I've spun on this blog about my sister's life is reasonable and accurate. She has cheated on her SAT, she is now spending summers in Athens to change her grades during the slow season and keep her National Merit scholarship and she meets Julius.
He learns of her fraud and he owes tons of money. He decides this is his opportunity to get his mountain of student loans paid.
Why does a bright, hardworking, attractive young woman go along with this? If she's so smart, why not tell him no?
Because he has a key advantage: He knows how to deal with the public and she doesn't.
And then she gets a good paying job handling a lot of money and he's not satisfied with her improved pay. He wants her to steal money to fast track paying down his debt.
On probably her first try, she flubs it. IT shows up and says "Looks like user error." and realizes it's user shenanigans and begins plotting to blackmail a woman out of his league into sleeping with him.
She knows from long experience when a woman goes up against a man, the truth and justice be damned. His mountains of lying BULLSHIT will win every single time.
She doesn't know WHY. Perhaps chalks it up to sexism.
It doesn't matter. She's guilty of cheating on her SAT and changing her grades to keep a valuable scholarship and Julius knows it. Mr. IT knows she's tried something at work she shouldn't do and she can't really prove he's after sex.
Her actual crimes of cheating at school -- which are nothing compared to the crimes that come later driven by these two men -- up against their ability to win the argument and justice be damned means fighting it isn't a risk she feels she can take.
And it's probably a common experience which is where we get the Believe Women!!! Grrr!!! meme.
"I'm a girl. You meanie faces keep SHAFTING me. I don't know WHY. I just need SOMEONE to BELIEVE ME!"
I don't think I've ever done that. I think that's a broken solution.