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Senior Momentum by Zoe Tummillo - May 2019

Four or five people can be in the same place at the same time and hear something in four or five variations. I know that’s true when I get together with my siblings and we reminisce! (“I don’t remember THAT! That’s not what happened!”)

Memory can be tricky, and not just for seniors! That phenomenon comes to mind each time another person steps forward and into the media spotlight with a memory – real and accurate or embellished and revised – concerning what I’ll simplistically call an experience with human touch.

Recently, I drafted out a rough, free-fall piece targeting the issue of more and more persons coming forward with accusations and experiences (some decades old) that they describe with implications ranging over a very broad spectrum from really serious all the way to hardly believable as damaging. I gave copies to an equal number of men and women, and asked for feedback on how they feel about the subject. Yikes....

It’s a subject I have thought about before, but it came up sharply recently concerning incidents with Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke. In Joe’s case, standing behind her, he’d put his hands on the shoulders of a young woman (who’d been working with the political group and all were celebrating something). He kissed the top of her head, and, he says, whispered thank you in her ear. Beto’s bad move was to say that his wife was at home taking care of the children, which he helped with when he could!

The negative reactions to those two men really bothered me! They were surprised and intimidated by the outrage, and Beto actually apologized. Joe said he couldn’t apologize for the gestures because “...that’s just me, I’m a warm, expressive guy...” He said he was sorry the woman felt uncomfortable, and he’d be careful in the future. Much ado for two simple incidents? One was a compliment of appreciation to his wife; one a harmless gesture of... what? Thanks? Affection? Appreciation?

Doesn’t maligning (and sometimes ruining men’s reputations) with questionable accusations cheapen the real incidents that have truly harmed many women?

Speaking of sexual aggression, we women have developed and elevated the techniques to an absolute art! I often wonder how short the skirt, how much cleavage, how much verbal innuendo, how much body language do you think should qualify for a man to make a charge of sexual harassment by one of us? (Or, do we girls want to split the hair and claim: Well... I didn’t touch him! (...which we also do.) (Hmmm..... sweet memories of fighting the double standard.)

What do we think is happening? I received A LOT of heated feedback from my tester piece. Some men feel that basic, healthy flirting has become almost a crime, and stressed that they now go to extremes to be politically correct. Some women are annoyed by women who seem to be opportunists seeking that 15 minutes of fame over trivialities – while still others suffer in silence with real, horrific experiences to remember. And, when they come forward, they are often not believed and suffer a second humiliation.

(By what seems to me to be a simplistic, new criteria, all my uncles, grandfathers, father, male family friends, most of my male clients and definitely all of my male friends should be prosecuted. (Fortunately for many of them, they are dead!)

I wonder about the touchy-feely aspect of being Italian American – we hug and touch and grown sons still kiss their mom on the lips! (Have you tried telling an Italian NOT to hug?)

The subject is almost too hot to handle, and maybe not suited for even a little levity. I hesitated to launch. But if nothing else, I am hopeful it can, at least, be a thought-piece.

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