This isn’t about Donald Trump. Or, not so much about him as about a particular kind of man.
Listening to those vile, reprehensible, evil comments last night actually, for the first time in my life, triggered a flashback. A memory I’ve always had, and occasionally talked about, but never experienced the sense of actually being transported back to the moment it happened, until now.
It was during the go-go ‘80s — February or March 1987, as I recall. A time when the concept of sexual harassment was just beginning to get established in the public consciousness. But also a period when corporate executives up and down the ladder were snorting cocaine in the bathrooms and stairwells, sales execs’ expense accounts were being creatively rewritten to cover the cost of hookers (yeah, I know, that still happens), and women entering the professional ranks were still being told to dress like a man and work like a dog.
I was working for a smallish company in the emerging computer industry — maybe $100 million in sales, several hundred employees, the bulk of them on the manufacturing line. I was an “assistant product manager” in the marketing department.
Our marketing and sales staff all went off to … Doral Country Club (aha! There is a Trump connection!) for a big internal conference. We were down there for at least four days, maybe five — one of those details I don’t remember any more — with perhaps 60 people. It was more an excuse to party than anything else; lots and lots of drinking, and the “leadership team” would disappear from time to time, going to a suite for private consumption of their blow and weed and anything else they could find.
One evening, though, the marketing and sales execs sat around in one of DCC’s clubhouse bars. There were about a dozen of us — just two of us women. The remainder were all white men, ranging in age from about 24 to 55 or so.
One of the youngest in the group was a new hire — I’ll call him “Jay”— who’d been with the company only a couple of months. As near as I could tell, his primary job “qualification” was being a former star player for one of the southern mega-football programs (I think in Texas, although I don’t remember details).
Jay was a big, dumb, asshole. And he had a mean streak. But the marketing VP and sales VP both liked him — they liked his energy, his football stories, his bragging about his sexual conquests. (Sound familiar?)
An older man came in, a big, strong, tough-guy looking fellow. He wasn’t part of our group, but Jay’s eyes lit up when he saw him. The man had been a professional football player, a member of the Oakland Raiders. Jay went over and talked to him for a few minutes. Then he came back to the table and started gushing about the retired player and the two Super Bowl rings he was wearing.
And then Jay made the comment that has lived in my mind for all these years.
“If I had just one of those rings, I could get all the hole I wanted.”
Thank you for letting me tell this story. I could go on for pages about some of the awful conduct I saw, and terrible experiences I had, as a woman trying to progress in the work world. And some of them might be objectively worse. But there’s something about this one that always leaves me feeling nauseated after it comes to mind.