Why Didn't I Hear It Before?

I've been watching a lot of "old" TV on the Senior Citizen channels.  "Adam-12", "Emergency", "MASH", "Hogan's Heroes", etc.  One station has also revived the Saturday Morning Cartoons of my childhood.  I like the comfort of familiar G-rated fare in these difficult times.  But ... I'm hearing things I didn't hear before.  I've seen these things a million times.  Half-watched them while working out or doing the laundry.  But suddenly, there is a difference.  Yes, I know that gender relations have changed a good deal over the past four or five decades but I didn't realize how much.  Dialog which wasn't even noticed before now sends chills down my spine.  On "MASH", they joke about rape.  On "Emergency" Gage talks about how there are no good nurses left -- according to him they must be under 30 and under 150 pounds.  He and the others openly joke about women who are dogs.  On "Adam-12" Malloy is similarly judgmental of the women he dates.  He and Reed often refer to women as "girls" and explain to a battered wife that it's her job to calm her husband down.  

This isn't a shock.  Not too long ago a colleague and I tried to explain to a younger, "woke" woman about #MeToo and the changes we had seen in our lifetimes.  In our pasts a lot of these kinds of things happened, and it was wrong -- we knew that, but we also accepted it to some degree, the way the world was.  To this day I'm not offended by what I call "the little stuff" which others might label as microaggressions.  I grew up with it.  Yes, when it was bad, you spoke up ... carefully (or lose your job).  But you didn't swing at every pitch.  If you did you would be dismissed as one of those crazy/whiny feminists.  You wouldn't be taken seriously, no matter how serious the complaint.  

It's not an excuse, it was reality.  The world was literally different.  And it changed.  But not overnight.  Baby steps.  I interviewed with men who hit on me during the interviews (more than one) and had one boss who tried to hook me up with a friend, determined that I would be a better employee if I got laid (yes, he said this -- out loud).  I had another boss who had a good friend drop into the office every now and then.  The man had a habit of giving unwanted shoulder massages to any woman in the vicinity.  The network of women in the building let each other know when he was in the house and made a point to stay busy and avoid him.  The same was true with a co-worker who loved hugs -- long, too-long, lingering hugs.  Women just ducked out of his way every time he approached.  A male colleague, observing this, was shocked that no one had spoken up.  "To what end?" he was told.  Telling the boss wouldn't have gotten the man fired.  Also, since his behavior was already a little predatory I guess the women were afraid of what might happen if he knew how much his behavior was disliked.  

Being hit on in job interviews was particularly difficult.  You want the job, so you play along -- just enough but not too much.  It was part of the icky reality of women's lives, and still is in some fields.  I always thought women must be very brilliant to play this game to get the gig and not be destroyed in the process, but you forget that many women -- many -- were hurt.  Badly.

This was the reality of the 1950s and 60s (watch "Mad Men") but the stories I'm telling are from the 80s.  Not so long ago for my aging brain.  Should we have spoken up more?  Called them out as people do today?  It wouldn't have worked.  Anita Hill spoke clearly and eloquently about her experiences with Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991.  She wasn't believed.  Not even by our current President.  The Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Justin Fairfax, faced two different charges of sexual assault a year ago ... and nothing happened.  Nothing.  Not even an investigation.  

So, we've made progress.  But not enough.  The women of Ancient Greece protested, as did Lady Godiva and the women of Seneca Falls.  They would be pleased with all we have accomplished but would they recognize that the glass ceiling is still in place?  Many young women of today don't.  Today's youth might watch these old shows and flinch at some of the behavior but see it as the past.  It isn't.  Should I turn off these shows permanently?  

No.  These shows stopped production a lifetime ago.  Boycotting them would have little effect.  I do recognize the bigotry and inapropriate comments but I also know what it was like to live in those times.  I see the shows for their totality.  They reflected their times but they also fought against it.  The "Dragnet" shows lumped gay people in with drug users (no, I really didn't remember that) but all of the Jack Webb shows also made a point of pushing against the racism of the day.  Cops and victims of crimes were both black and white, with most characters depicted as honorable and decent.  Criminals were rarely black.  Looking back, I realize how edgy that was, how it pushed the boundaries of what so many believed at the time (and still believe).  In one of their final episodes, "Adam-12" featured a female cop.  Intelligent, strong and still a woman.  The paradigm was flipped on its head.

It is a bit disingenuous.  I stopped watching Woody Allen films a long time ago.  But for me there is a line of delineation.  These shows have elements which can be offensive but what Allen did was criminal.  Advocates of #MeToo may disagree but that's my personal line in the sand.  Feel free to select your own line, putting it at a different point.  This is, at its heart, a deeply personal issue.

Yes, Foghorn Leghorn makes a comment that something is "as unlikely as getting rent from (a certain racial/ethnic minority)" and I wince.  I shake my head.  So wrong.  And, for the record, I won't be watching Foghorn Leghorn again.  But the important thing is that I hear it.  I see it.  I'm aware, unlike I was so many years ago when first watching these shows.  I note that we have moved forward.  New shows, current shows, would not do this (okay, that's a lie, "Call Me Kat" did).  There is progress.  Maybe it's not an end-goal, maybe it's an unending journey.  And there is no way of knowing how long the road is.  We can only keep putting one foot in front of the other, keeping our heads up, our ears alert, our eyes open.