As a custodian, my coworkers consist of mostly women. In my five years working there I can count on one hand how many men have been on the team. Most of them have been older, but one time we had a guy about my age there. He was completely new to town. He was getting away from toxic family members and this was the only job that accepted him quickly. I didn’t really have any friends at work at the time since my other coworkers were all much older than me, so when he began singling out my company, I was eager to finally make a friend. Plus, him and I weren’t so different: I had also moved to my town to escape from my family and was working at the place easiest available to me. I knew how it felt to completely start over. There was a shared foundation between us. I showed him around town and tried to help him integrate into the community.
About a week after first talking to me and some casual intermittent texting, he told me I was pretty. I saw where it was going and shut it down, telling him I don’t date coworkers. He took it well and I thought we moved past it. However, every time we talked afterwards he began bringing up how it was “a shame I don’t date coworkers”. He said other things like that, designed to guilt trip my emotions into reconsidering him as a love interest. I was firm in telling him we were just friends every time I felt him push. He would stop after I said that, only to push again later on. Finally, in the middle of a completely different conversation with zero romantic undertones, he texted me that I was “a perfect woman” the second week after meeting me. I stared at that text for a while, wondering how he could even know that. He hardly even knew me.
In the two weeks leading up to that “perfect woman” text, all the negativity he felt about his life, himself, and his family flooded our conversations, drowning out anything else that was said. I listened and supported, but began to find myself not really existing much outside of himself every time we spoke. He had a habit of interrupting me with abrupt subject changes if I began speaking about myself for longer than a thirty seconds, sometimes only to keep at the same romantic pestering I’d been telling him to give up on. Whereas I had made an effort to know him, he lacked fundamental curiosity about me as a person and never asked questions unless it was related to my love life. He didn’t know my opinions on art or politics, or what I wanted to do with my life. At the heart of it, he didn’t know enough about me to be in love with me; I was just the only woman there. What a perfect woman was to him was fundamentally disturbing: a woman who is the nearest one around, whose innate inner world he never has to acknowledge, whose opinions he never has to listen to. She exists as pristine empty vessel that can only be filled by his projections and feelings.
I had become a receptacle to him, both physically and emotionally. This is a role of a woman.
Every woman has realized at some point in her life that she is a dumping ground for male emotions. A lot of men can’t open up to each other without social punishment, so women become the default for such things. Whether she is a friend or a romantic partner or even just a random passerby, every single one is transformed from a person to a receptacle, both by herself and by the men around her. As he continued to treat me like an object, I found myself objectifying myself as well as I reverted to playing that role. I played the role because I felt empathy for him and I didn’t know how else to show it.
I can’t even be mad at men for it. Despite centuries of socialization to be strong and stoic, men are who they are underneath, just as despite the socialization I endured in a fundamentalist Christian household, I was who I was underneath it—-strong-willed, masculine-natured, and mentally ill. Punishing someone for being human does not stop them from being human, it just makes them better at hiding the undesirable qualities of that humanness from unsafe people. As a result, men are just as emotional as women (because both have the same human brain), but it isn’t obvious. They are fulfilling their gender role, just as I fulfilled my gender role of keeping myself sweet and small instead of demanding the space I deserved with my coworker.
I stopped being that way with him after that “perfect woman” comment, though. I kept conversations to one word responses on my end. It wasn’t confusing to him as to why, since I’d told him he’d been making me uncomfortable with his continued micro-advances. He brushed me off initially, but as he started to realize I was serious about maintaining emotional distance, he began to lash out in little ways. Namely, he would interrupt conversations with my other coworkers. If I pretended not to hear him, he would yell my deadname at me until I paid attention.
That’s not the first time that’s happened. Many men have used my deadname against me when I started standing up for myself. It’s another way I can be easily dehumanized or have my agency thwarted, to call me by my hyper-feminine deadname that literally means “damsel in distress” instead of my current masculine-coded name, which means “protector”. Despite my best efforts, I was still a receptacle to him, but now for his anger and violence. That’s the frustrating part about all of it. Even if a woman tries to break out of her role to be seen as human, she will find herself harshly reassigned to objectification under a different action—an action that may not be as gentle as the one before it. Some may find sexually explicit rumors or photos being spread. Some may get threatened. Some may get hit. Some may get stalked. And for the unluckiest of us, some may get sexually assaulted.
All of the above have happened to me in retaliation to rejecting a man at various points in my life from childhood to now. What they all share in common is that I was simply being put back in my place by becoming a receptacle for violence. Doesn’t matter what type of violence as long as I’m still just a receptacle.
There’s no winning. If I give him what he wants, I give up my self for the woman’s role and his role. If I step outside of it, I get smacked down, re-objectified under a different category: as a bitch.
Anyway, he eventually left about a month later. He wasn’t even that good of a custodian.
