😮💨 The start of a long essay today, one that’s been weighing on my mind for a while. Thank you all for reading. Part Two is now here.
CW: Sexually charged workplace harassment
Note: Names and other potentially identifying information have been changed and/or removed for legal protection
When I was 18, I interned in Central Accounting at a massive tech giant for half a year. As my last internship before graduation, I had specifically tried to avoid this department — for the plain fact I was a Finance major and not part of my university’s Accounting cohort. Despite this, I was relegated to busying over 10Qs and 10Ks because, as a classmate later informed me, “all the cute girls go to Accounting.”
As it turns out, one of the main sponsors of the internship program — a Senior Manager I’ll refer to as “N” for this piece — headed up Central Accounting. In exchange for presumably greasing some budgetary wheels, he received his pick of the litter with every new class of interns. Even if my male counterparts had all but failed our school’s entry-level Finance 350 course, they were welcomed into “sexy” departments like cloud computing; meanwhile, I and a few other women were off to Central Accounting, none the wiser.
To make matters worse, as the newest and lowest-rung intern, I was tasked with coming in intermittently at 5am to upload encrypted data to Asia. (At least, I think that’s what I was doing.) No busses ran direct that early in the morning, so my best option was to wrap myself in as many puffy jackets as I could find, board a 4am bus that deposited me a half mile away, and walk across the bridge to the company’s HQ while politely declining offers for cheap drugs.
But even a shit sleep schedule and daily, mind-numbing Excel gymnastics were no match for the unwanted attention I received from N, encapsulated in a roughly hour-long exchange halfway into my 6-month stint.
It all began under the guise of a performance review.
I was, in all terms of the word, plodding along when I received a notice to expect an in-person retrospective. This seemed entirely standard. What was surprising, however, was that this would take place with N, a person I only met once or twice and saw from afar. My daily directives came from a manager I’ll call “B,” a round-faced, stubbly-chinned, and even-tempered man who understood I was uninterested in pursuing a career in accounting and left me to job hunt in peace.
Now, if there was one upside to Central Accounting, it was the predictability. Audible tidying-up started every day at 5pm, laptops confidently folding shut with a ffffmph by 5:15pm, backpacks zipped and out the door by 5:30pm. This was my routine, too — with the exception of 5am days, when B generously allowed me to leave at 2:30pm — interrupted abruptly by an email from N: Performance review. Today, 6:30pm.
I had never stayed in the office past 6pm, and I certainly didn’t have enough assigned work to justify it. My coworkers all knew this, each giving me a quizzical once-over on their way out but refraining from asking. I’ll never know why they didn’t; it could’ve been just coincidence, or maybe a well-intentioned attempt not to pry. But the effect of multiple people passing me by, doing something obviously out of the ordinary, contributed an eerie sense of secrecy to this impromptu meeting.
I am several rounds deep into cover letters for jobs I don’t care for by the time 6:30pm rolls around. The office is deserted. At several points, I wondered if N simply forgot he emailed me and left too, only to catch a small head movement in his office behind those blurry glass panels.
A few minutes past the half-hour, he silently arrives at my cubicle. “Let’s go,” he announces, startling me.
I stand up hastily, very aware of my open screen on a Word document. “Oh—”
“Would you like some ice cream?” he asks, cutting me off.
I’m confused. Why would I want ice cream in the middle of the winter? At 6:30pm, when has the sun already set? Before my performance review?
“I’m okay—” I begin, but N cuts me off again.
“Let’s get you some ice cream.”
Something in my stomach tightens at his tone, keeps squeezing as we make our way downstairs. The cafeteria is near-closed by the time we arrive, a lone cook wiping down the last remnants of spilled vinaigrette off the salad bar. I can barely hide my relief.
“I think they’re closed,” I squeak to N, my tone relaying obvious eagerness to go back upstairs and get the whole thing over with. “It’s okay, I really don’t need the ice cream.”
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I panic: what if I just offended him? I reflexively lean into a tried-and-true stereotype as a lifeline: “I’m trying to watch my weight anyway…ha ha.”
(I phrase it as a joke, but it isn’t. I’d just begun my years of disordered eating, and even contemplating an unanticipated addition of several hundred calories into my diet for the day was sending me into a tailspin.)
If N hears me, he pretends not to. His eyes clock the room and laser in on a chest freezer at a faraway station. “The ice cream is in that freezer,” he instructs, far more familiar with the cafeteria’s staging and inventory than me. It is not a mere invitation.
As we make our way over, I begin mentally bargaining with myself. An ice pop would have the fewest calories, I calculate. I don’t have to finish the whole thing. I can eat one of the lighter Lean Cuisines for dinner when I get home.
But there are no ice pops. Instead, there are popsicles: flat ones and tubular ones, single and multi-flavored, even one colored as an American flag and shaped like a rocket.
Even without any formal analysis of patriarchy or power dynamics, my freshly “adult” brain had watched enough food-laced porn to know these were bad choices. I pause too long as N slides open the freezer cover for me, waiting.
“Can’t decide?”
He makes no movement to select an ice cream for himself, and I debate if it’s possible to salvage the situation by refusing on account of his not joining in. Before I consciously decide one way or another, my arm betrays me, reaching out to snatch a chocolate-covered vanilla bar — the only non-popsicle in the chest.
He smiles slowly. “Okay.”
N’s office is cold, unlike the rest of the floor, which was prone to variable heating spurts. As I take a seat across from his desk, I keep a sizable distance between the ice cream and me, its wrapper out of his line of sight, hoping he might forget it’s there.
He takes a moment to settle into his ergonomic chair. I notice it’s nicer than B’s because it doesn’t creak as it holds him up, alongside a string of other distracting thoughts. Those shoes don’t seem very comfortable. Where does he keep his office badge? Does N also play on the Accounting sports team with M? Has C (another intern, also an Asian woman) also been here?
“Are you going to eat?” N’s question snaps me back to my seat.
“Oh—” I start, flailing for an excuse, “I’ll save—”
“Eat your ice cream before it melts.”
I obey, eating the ice cream so fast I feel an immediate brain freeze. No matter — I plow through the frozen milk whole and unchewed. I never lick, I never look up, and I never open my mouth any wider than absolutely required. It takes three bites until my teeth hit the wooden stick, its cardboard complexion the most welcome flavor of dessert I’ve ever tasted.
“You really liked it, huh,” N says, staring at me wolfing down the bar without blinking. “Didn’t you?”
Somehow, both “yes” and “no” seem like the wrong answer, so I just smile at him hesitantly, my lips tight over my teeth.
He looks bemused now, and I have a sinking feeling he has been here before, that things are unfolding exactly as he intended.
“You have chocolate all over your mouth,” he says with a practiced vocal fry that is positively alien against his face. He does not offer me a tissue, nor are there any on his office table.
I visibly inhale. “Oh,” I hear myself saying again, as if it is the only word in my lexicon. My own voice sounds unbearably idiotic. I hoist my bottom teeth over my upper lips, attempting to remove all the melted chocolate in the most unflattering, Gollum-like way possible.
Time moves past me. At last, N seems satisfied and clasps his hands together. “Your review,” he says with a long-suffering sigh, as if he’s the one reminding me that’s why we came here, as if I were the one who has been dilly-dallying his time. “Your manager B tells me you’ve been doing well. He even said you’ve been coming in early to upload reports. Is that true?”
I’m not sure if the question refers to the first or second statement; I nod regardless. My fingers are gripping the ice cream wrapper, my sweat melting the remaining bits of plasticky chocolate coating the popsicle stick.
N readjusts himself in his fancy chair.
“Do you like this internship? I want all the interns to be happy.”
“Yes…” I mumble. “I’m learning a lot.”
“So you’re glad you were placed in Central Accounting?”
I have no idea what to say to that, so I nod, again.
He stands up and moves from behind his desk towards me. The room has never felt so small, or the office floors so big and far apart.
He comes to a stop right beside me, still standing, leaning his lower back against the desk and crossing his legs. I fix my eyes somewhere away from him, imagining just how many sexual harassment trainings he’s clicked through wearing that same awful, bemused expression.
“That’s good.” He takes his time with the next words. “You can go.”
I don’t move. My body is freezing.
A moment passes.
“Unless…there’s something else?”
Somewhere inside, the same voice from earlier tells me not to bolt out of my seat. It might offend him, she reminds me carefully. Stay professional.
Professionalism is the difference between the person who climbed the ladder on their own accord and one who didn’t. Professionalism wards off unwanted advances and resulting whispers. Professionalism is what will protect you.
I stand up, still clutching the sticky wrapper. “Thank you,” I manage, desperate not to be so flustered, so unprofessional, as I try to compute an exit without turning my back to him.
“Let me help you with that.” He reaches out his hand.
I look at him, stupefied, one last riddle I can’t seem to solve. I feel my breath quickening, panic welling into desperation in my chest.
“The wrapper.” He gestures to my hands.
I all but fling the ice cream wrapper at him, turning my body a sharp 90 degrees so I can leap for the door. I glue my back against the door handle and hold it closely as I say goodbye, see you tomorrow, have a nice night, and oh thank god, I’m gone. Racing down the hallway I feel the first traitorous prickle in my eyes, my fingertips still smelling like sweet cocoa as I reach up to forcibly push any unfallen tears away.
I take my phone out to call someone, then almost instantaneously put it back away. Who would I call? My parents, who would most certainly see this as frivolous complaining? My business school friends, who liked to remind me this was a killer internship? My ex-boyfriend, who remarked girls in finance have it way easier? If I were to mention the interaction to HR, what would I report, exactly? My senior manager bought me ice cream and gave me a decent review?
So I say nothing, shrinking inwards as I board the bus and ride it home in silence.
N never talks to me again, and he doesn’t need to.
In that short-but-horribly-long hour, his existence had psychologically shifted the way I noticed people in power at the workplace.
There are people like N everywhere, sometimes latent but always present. These are the people for whom exerting reactive power is not enough. Open ridicule, or even public firing, are mere table stakes — flexes they are naturally entitled to in a world under patriarchy, too commonplace to be thrilling. To his ilk, satisfaction comes from devising new opportunities to see themselves as the ultimate marionettist: not just from denying a subordinate like me agency, but in soaking up the weaponized safety of my implied consent.
When I think back to that day almost 15 years ago, I wonder if it was his smugness that thickened the air between us, knowing my answers to society’s line of questions before they are even asked.
Did he force you? No.
Did you resist? No.
Did you say no? No.
Then nothing really happened, did it?
This presence of what we collectively accept as my individualized, “legal” consent would have been, I imagine, quite the rush for people like him. To watch a young woman cling to a facade that she is person enough to consent to what happens to her body, even as her skin crawls in his presence. Even as she allows something in her body she doesn’t want, speaks something she doesn’t mean, thinks something she cannot say — all the while agreeing that she liked it.
Or perhaps he still sees himself as benevolent, a feminist even. The kind of manager who championed women by “uplifting” them from the intern pool into his department. Who, if ever accused, could rally a legion of male interns willing to go on record that they never had such an interaction with him. I imagine they could utter, “All the cute girls go to accounting” and “he would never do anything to make anyone uncomfortable,” all in the same breath without a hint of irony.
These two possibilities sound diametrically opposite, but in the context of women and consent in our society today, they are the same: irrelevant. When we choose to individualize consent based on another’s “intentions,” we erase its relationship with institutionalized violence. We ignore the fact that for women, consent is a rigged game of chicken. When our bodies are indiscriminately sexualized, it does not matter how well we paper over them with collared shirts and loose slacks in an effort to project “no.” When modern society’s basic economic, legal, and social structures do not treat us as full humans with agency over our bodies, any degree of consent we give is little more than an echo of our oppression, warped to fit as words on our tongues.
If I say “no,” I lose my job. I’m difficult and unemployable. I’m uptight and ungrateful. If I say “yes,” by the account of not saying “no” or actually verbalizing “yes,” I have no legal grounds for complaint. I am making something out of nothing. I’m someone who can’t handle my own regrets and bad choices. I’m a flaky and emotional woman who can’t be trusted.
I know all this, as do millions of women when they consider what it means to “choose your words wisely” when the onus of prevention is on them. So do millions of Ns when they ask women like me, “Would you like some ice cream?”
This is just one story in a statistic so widespread, it’s pedestrian. So while I know nothing of quantum physics, of time travel or alternate realities, something, somewhere in my gut tells me another Jenny — in some other place, in some other life — she didn’t make it out of that office quite so easily.
P.S. Part Two now here.
Memes from the Past Weeks
Personal Things from the Last Few Weeks
Listening to: Healing singing bowls playlists on Spotify
Watching: Lighting Up the Stars and Extrapolations
Reading: Just finished Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom, now on No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz and Body Work by Melissa Febos
Eating: Lots of East Carolina favorites while I’m in the U.S. moving my doggie to his new foster home
Drinking: As many bottles of Topo Chico I can get my hands on (as they aren’t distributed in Singapore)
Nice thing I did for myself this week: Taking a purposeful break from my field research and interviewing people to work on my book proposal
I really enjoyed this read. While this ice-cream story would definitely seem insignificant to a regular bystander, it sadly works as perfect metaphor. There's something a little disturbing in feeding a phallic treat to a subaltern. Some girls in my high school would only eat bananas with a fork and a knife to avoid the charged looks from their male classmates when they were eating those the regular way. It's telling a lot about the oppression of politeness that's expected from women and people of color. Thank you for sharing, Jenny.