Wanting to send this to Shirley Williams but can't find a way to do that
I despaired on reading your comments about Lord Rennard. Unlike you, I am still engaged in working within organisations, with line managers and bosses and all sorts of people, mostly straight men, who wield day-to-day power over me.
I have, in the past 20-odd years of employment, suffered very little direct sexual advances from those I work with, in the office ? we are far, far better than your generation on that. But I have been through enough. It grieves me that at 24, I felt able to tell one late-forties man, to whom I had barely spoken and only politely, to fuck off when he ran his finger down my spine, but at 35, when a similarly-aged but even more revolting man put his hand round my waist as I walked past, all I could do was cry in the toilets. That change was because I had worked too long in an organisation that had no respect for women (or anyone, including themselves, a longer story*).
I have also been fortunate enough to work in organisations where a boss effectively sitting on your lap (ie in close contact from the waist down), and then pursuing you around the room to do so repeatedly, would be seen as absolutely unacceptable and ? if repeated ? a sacking offence. I thought the world had grown up.
I now know for sure that you don?t value women you don?t know, or their right to have un-horrible times at work, more than you value a deluded, inadequate, power-obsessed man. Because if these allegations are true, then he is not a ?good man?. He might be good at things, he might behave admirably in many ways, but he thinks women are a buffet, not people.
Please never speak about women at work again. Surely FGM, forced marriage, things you might not have sentimentally-distorted views on, are enough.
Again. Please be quiet. We are working.
*The short version is that a Senior Partner was shagging, doubly adulterously, a fairly capable but nowhere-near-great (and noticeably, for the job requirements, illiterate) economist, and retained his line management of her, and set her pay, appraisal and bonuses, and let her decide what she wanted to work on. It was despicable. Do you disagree?