To reflect, post Russell Brand etc., on things I put up with from men but now don't know why

I work in a global company of approx 42k employees. We have had to do specific anti harassment training on what might be considered inappropriate sexual behaviour and language in the workplace. In 2026 ffs!

'I'm in my 50s. I always found Russell Brand to be utterly awful but he seemed to be just an extreme end of a whole bunch of awful men with awful behaviour which was, when I was young, taken for granted and laughed off. If you didn't laugh off you 'didn't have a sense of humour' or lost your job.'

Not remotely my experience. I am 55, always found RB repulsive as did most people I know. I can still remember the disgust in my friendship group when one of the girls said her sister really liked him!

Awful behaviour by men is not something I have ever 'laughed off.' I worked in hotels for many years and there was 1 guest in particular who told these horrible sexist 'jokes' and made inuendoes. There was a code among all the staff that you paired up if he was around! The male staff were next to you very quickly when he appeared.

In my twenties I worked for a big firm where a man on the senior leadership team broke into a junior female member of staff's hotel room while away on a business trip and got into bed with her. She managed to flee the room before he could seriously assault her. She had to spend the night on the hotel reception's sofa.

She obviously complained to HR and he was put on leave for a month, where he took the opportunity to go on holiday to the Far East. When the month was up, he returned to the company like nothing had happened and shortly afterwards, started up a relationship with another female colleague who he then married.

The junior female who he assaulted ended up with PTSD and left the industry.

Fucking disgraceful and enabled by the whole toxic culture, not only of that particular firm, but the industry at the time. I also left years ago but I doubt it's got any better.

That's not the only story I've got either.

People ask 'why didn't anyone say anything? Why didn't anyone do anything?' but even when you speak out, nothing happens. Who are you gonna tell? Who's going to listen?

‘The past is a different country’

im in my 60s and worked in a very male dominated world when young. In the 70s. God the shit I put up with then would make your toes curl. Could I say anything? No. It was ‘banter’. Fortunately little physical stuff but even when it was I couldn’t risk losing my job. I had a mortgage. It did however make me very resilient and I’ve had some really traumatic events in my life that I’ve managed to shrug off. I swear it’s because I’ve had a good grounding in dealing with shit.

You told him no and he carried on anyway is sexual assault. He knew what he was doing and him calling you rude is trying to put you in your place.

I've been thinking a lot about stuff that has happened to me, since RB and DW stuff came out, I was groomed online and fortunately never met him, not for want of him trying.

I used to attend a swimming club where the coach was sexually assaulting the girls (I was unfortunately a witness), and I reported to the police, went to court no punishment. Although he was put on the sex offenders register at least.

I was raped the morning after, went home with a guy drunk, consented to sex, woke up next to him and wanted to get the HELL OUT of there. He grabbed me and wouldn't let me, I said 'NO', he carried on I said 'NO' again, he carried on. Then he drove me to get the morning after pill.

Let's try and make sure this generation of boys and girl don't put up with this shit, and indeed aren't perpetrators.

This is why I would never want to work in the City. I live near London and have met enough creeps with nasty drug habits who don't bother with their children and who have big heads, fat wallets and nothing attractive about them at all.

A friend of a friend set out to marry for money and she did - one of them. Now divorced because (surprise) he was odious.

No money in the world could tempt me into that world.

Dear god. That's what you took from OP?

No. Anything other than clear, enthusiastic consent is a no - you had to start crying before he would stop!! "Whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no, and to demand justice from the criminal courts when sexual predators like you, Mr Brand, act without their consent."

Omg. I'm so sorry.

I have also been raped before a few years ago.
So I'm just p'ssed off at myself for allowing something similar to happen

I'm just sat here p'ssed off thinking... Should I say something to him?! I don't know.

I don't think it is improving. I feel like we've gone backwards in recent years.

I started work in the late 80s, and yes, it was a bery sexist environment. E.g. I was dropped from the management trainee scheme when the HR director heard I'd got engaged, but I worked almost exclusively with men until I was 40, and I don't remember dreadful sexual behaviour.

I consider myself lucky because I have never been raped and what sexual abuse I have experienced has been at the mild end of the spectrum. (It's appalling that this is what constitutes "luck" but that's the reality). Most of my close friends and peers have had worse experiences, at least three were raped in a traumatic way as young women.

What does stay with me from my youth (late 80s into early 2000s), as someone referred to upthread, was the overwhelming impression of having to constantly "shrink myself" in a certain sort of male company. I constantly felt, as a young woman, that I was "too much" for men: too opinionated, too loud, too talkative, too willing to do my own thing. I'm not particularly extrovert or clever or opinionated and I'm not an attention seeker, but I wasn't brought up to "shrink" myself (my dad, for his numerous faults, didn't raise wet women) and it took me a very long time to learn that what the majority of men want from a woman is basically just to be a pleasing, passive vessel: to look pretty and smile and to respond positively to everything they do.

Endlessly having to people please, to rein in strong opinions, to pretend to laugh at suboptimal humour, to refrain from being too funny yourself, to not try to do anything which could be perceived as "copying" the man. Having to stay quiet and smile a lot of the time and not get drawn into good-natured arguments or discussions in case it scared the horses. Being laughed at if you did anything too "male" (speaking too much in public, drinking too much, playing an instrument, being good at computer games, having too much sex, having too many opinions, DJing, playing sport unless it was girly sport, writing, etc etc). All things I would have done and done OK at if I hadn't been made to feel that all of this made me sexually unattractive to men.

Which makes me massively regret the time and emotional energy I wasted and has given me new respect for women who did manage to make it in creative careers in these brutally misogynistic cultures.

What the women who were raped by Russell Brand went through is obviously a different league of magnitude from any of this and it's a bit of a digression. But the whole thing has given me a bit of a flashback to the culture I grew up in which I think anyone of my age will recognise: women at that time were basically rewarded for erasing themselves as far as they possibly could. And I'm not sure much has changed.

You see one aspect of their behaviour. The part of their life they have trained for, presumably are paid for and are observed doing.

I do remember being puzzled as a teen that as a girl you couldn’t win. You were a frigid bitch if you wouldn’t have sex and a slag if you did. Definitely a man’s world.

Agree with pp I couldn’t give a stuff now what men think of me and do find myself very cynical about men generally. Cut zero slack and assume the worst.

God yes @OneoftheWeddingPeople. Frigid vs slag… I was called both as a young woman 🙄

Teenager really

Can I just bring up Page 3 of The Sun ??

How on earth was this ever acceptable. Wasn't there a countdown for somebody reaching 16 , the legal age ?
It was available in every newsagents . And the lovely Benny Hill on TV .

I had come to live in UK with my father's job . We were quite a religious family and my parents would have been very reserved . For years my siblings and I were encouraged to believe that unfortunately the Brits were just a bunch of vulgar nasty cultural wasteland peoples . And try to avoid it . Our experiences at schools , jobs didn't do anything to dispel this .
Of course now I am aware that there are many decent lovely people . But at the time it seemed everywhere and that it was condoned and tolerated .

This. And it was totally normal.
Ive got two DD’s 19 and 20 and they have it worse , not better than I did. I’m so angry that this is all there is for them.

NC for this.

I worked in the music industry in the 90s at the height of Britpop. It was absolutely rotten to the core.

I was seriously assaulted by someone who was prominent on that scene. I attempted to report it but never got further than a phone call to my local police station, who told me that they weren't interested in taking it further. The man who assaulted me boasted about it and talked about it in the media. He was basically untouchable. Over the years I have heard of other women he assaulted. He has never (as far as I know) faced any consequences for his actions.

The scene was full of men who had sex with very young teenagers. The singer from one band had a relationship with a girl who was 13 at the time and was seen as quite the Jack the lad for doing so. The girl later attempted suicide several times and developed EDs and addiction issues. I knew her well, we reconnected when she was in her 20s. We have since lost touch but I think of her often and hope she OK.

None of us who were victims of assault or the everyday misogyny of the time said anything. It was understood that we wouldn't be believed and that if we spoke out we would be drawn as 'mad' or 'mental'. It was seen as an occupational hazard of being a woman, something we had to just get on with.

Looking back Gen X girls grew up in a climate where Page Three regularly featured topless 16 year olds, Bill Wyman was celebrated as a bit of a lad for being in a relationship with 13 year old Mandy Smith, the comedy of the 70s and 80s was overtly misogynistic... From being children we were drip-fed the notion that this was normal, and if we complained there was something wrong with us.

If every man who had ever committed a crime like this were brought to justice the prison system would collapse.

It was utterly confusing wasn't it?

There was also the double standard: high profile/celebrity women who were attractive and overtly sexual were put on a pedestal, but most young men found overtly sexual women in real life a bit frightening.

I lost count of the number of times I was initially knocked back by blokes as a young women and they'd invariably come around to the idea after I'd lost interest and would pursue me. It dawned on me after a while that they couldn't deal with being pursued by a woman. Pathetic, really.

well said @JustAnotherWhinger

I put a similar thread up as well. I was raped and sexually assaulted on two seperate occasions between 2010-2012. I haven't told many people about it and the Russell Brand trial did stir up feelings of whether I should report it or not. However in my case there'd be no evidence, just my word against theirs and then I feel angry at myself for not reporting at the time when I could have had medical evidence, my injuries reported and feelings the men who assaulted me are still free and just hoping they never targeted anyone else.