Isn't it interesting that out of all the stories in her piece, this one is really staying in my head for some reason?
"Autumn 1988. I am an assistant professor of English at a Jesuit college in central New York. My office is at the end of the hall. As I walk to my office, the other English professors on that corridor (all men) stand on either side of the corridor and trade dirty jokes and dirtier literary allusions over my head. Jokes like: A man admires a girl’s fur coat. She says, many animals died so I could have this coat. His riposte: Isn’t the question How many animals did you have to sleep with to get this coat? To a colleague who recently gave birth to a 9-pound baby: 'So that is why you looked so ridiculous.' Of an adjunct faculty member who edits a poetry journal for her students’ work: 'She couldn’t run a used pair of panty hose.'
At a department meeting a senior colleague turns his back to the only woman present, and to make a point, drops his trousers. When she objects he says: 'You couldn’t see anything; I was wearing my running shorts.'
In honor of my Ph.D. and my new job, my mother has gifted me with an outrageously expensive desk edition of a Merriam Webster Dictionary. I am standing at my desk, looking up a word in this wonderful book which makes me so happy, when a male colleague stops at my office door long enough to look me up and down and to say: 'Just what kind of pretentious bitch do you think you are, anyway?'
I don’t share this anecdote with my mom when she asks how I like my new job.
Only now, years later, do I realize it had nothing to do with the dictionary. He had caught me alone and was telling me how it was and what my place should be."
Susan Thornton — "Duende"
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