What’s Your Click Moment? Readers Share Their Stories
Last week, Salon’s Broadsheet blog spoke with the authors of a new book from Seal Press about the the feminist eureka moment. It’s called, appropriately, Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists, and features essays from thirty feminists under 40, describing their own click moments, prompted by everything from bad sex ed to Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
Despite this variety, Salon writes, the click moments in the book share one common thread: the realization, as Sullivan put it, that “Wait a minute, this is not fair. This is not an equal society, and there has to be some way of combating that.”
We asked readers to share their own click moments. Here’s one of them:
My first job out of college I was hired as a designer for an ‘up and coming’ start-up. I joined with glowing public descriptions by the CEO of what broad role I would play.
Over time, my authority was co-opted by politics within the company, often with age-related undercurrents. I was too naive to really understand how that also undermined my personal standing. That is, until the holiday party, wherein the head of the company cornered me with a flight of tequila shots. He explained that the previous year, he’d gotten the (also young, blonde) receptionist drunk and the execs had ‘hilarious’ recollections of that poor woman break-dancing on concrete and tearing up her knees.
I refused multiple earnest efforts, trying to laugh it off. Eventually my male coworkers rallied to distract the small crowd of execs.
My work there was compromised by condescension from then on, as was my paycheck when I took a demotion in the form of a ‘re-org’ affecting just me. 10 years later, I still believe I’m making up lost ground.
Ugh. Have a similar story? Advice? Tell us.
