[at-l] (OT) Lawyers, and those who work with good ones, have feelings too!

[MedusaJ at aol.com (MedusaJ@aol.com)]

Yes, all this sounds a bit overdone given that poor Kent was just making 
a mainstream joke, but as someone who has practiced law for 21 years, I 
still am hurt by these jokes, and tired of them, however well-intended 
in good, clean fun the jokster may tell me he or she was.  I sometimes 
try to think about how my hurt feelings, magnified 1,000 times, might 
approximate how a black person feels when he/she overhears a racially 
charged joke, or how a polish person feels, or a blonde woman, etc. 
etc.  Jokes are important as a way to let off steam about issues, but 
they also have widespread, long lasting social impacts - worth thinking 
about, even though too much thinking here can lead us to the other 
extreme, which results in sanitized Christmas greetings such as the one 
that started this all! :)


A really interesting point given something that happened to me two nights ago 
at the diner where I work (incidentally, the minimally remunerative, 
extremely low-cost lifestyle I'm adopting in order to finance my next thruhike):  a 
trucker came in and had dinner.  He was a fairly obnoxious person, and luckily 
the other waitress, an eighteen-year-old high-school grad who lives alone with 
her brother and supports them both by waitressing full-time, served him.  His 
first comments were flirtatious and annoying, you know, commenting on how 
beautiful her eyes were, how they complimented the rest of her face, then the 
casual sprinkling of "honey" and "dear," but got progressively more sexual until 
he requested a dessert of "TCP."  I grinned to myself, thinking he misspoke and 
really meant PCP, and in all likelihood the guy was just stoned off his 
gourd.  Instead, what he was requesting was a dessert of "Thigh Cream Pie," as 
spelled out, loudly, to the waitress, the rest of the patrons of the restaurant, 
including a man whose flirtatious comments to me always get laughed off by his 
wife, and the girl's *grandparents.*  When she pretended to not know what he 
was talking about, he said that she must be familiar with it, and when on to 
make reference to her probable familiarity to various positions.

Everyone, even the grandparents, laughed this off.  I was furious.  Later, I 
talked to her about it, and she concurred with me on how horrible the 
situation was and said something about someone, "getting in trouble for it."  I 
assumed she meant the guy, but she was saying that if she had said anything, she 
might have got in trouble with her boss (another woman, incidentally), even 
though the cook (also the woman) had told her that she would back her up if she had 
told him to shut up.  I was stunned.  Is this the world we live in?  A world 
where a girl must risk her livelihood to protect herself from base and public 
dehumanization?  If so, thank God for the lawyers.  Thank God for the 
sexual-harassment suits.  I hope someone someday sues the poo-poo out of that man.

It got worse, too--he ended up spending the night in the parking lot as a lot 
of truckers do, and he came in later to get some drinks for the night and he 
and one of the gas-station attendants were mulling over a comment that some 
other customers had made about the same waitress earlier in the day that they 
wouldn't tell her.  The last comment he made was, "So, I'll be seeing you out in 
my truck after you get off-shift, right?"  He laughed that off, too, and then 
told us to stay safe on our way home.  The whole experience just made me feel 
dirty:  the guy obviously got a rise out of being able to be blatantly sexual 
with a girl a third his age.  I encounter this sort of discrimination far 
more often than I ever expected to in the rural community I recently moved to, 
and I feel like most of it's caused by utter insecurity on the part of the 
speakers.  The only way they know to make themselves feel better about themselves 
is to reduce people who have far less power than them--young women--to nothing 
more than sexual objects.

All this to say that I know--boy, do I know--how much "hurt feelings" matter, 
and how so-called jokes have far, far-reaching social impact.  If that guy 
had made those comments to me, I would have hit him.  And I would have been the 
one who got fired.

So on a somber note, Happy New Year to everyone--may we all treat each other 
with more kindness and compassion in the coming year.

Marzipan
AT04