{"id":4590,"date":"2026-04-29T05:48:50","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T13:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4590"},"modified":"2026-04-28T10:15:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T18:15:15","slug":"4590","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2026\/04\/29\/4590\/","title":{"rendered":"Notice, Class, How Angela Circles…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am up to my hips with reading for World Fantasy, but I was reminded of this piece which I wrote about 10 years ago. Sadly, it is still topical…<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"I was once chased around my parents\u2019 kitchen by a friend of my father\u2019s. But I\u2019ll come back to that.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to leaf through a 25-year collection of New Yorker cartoons<\/a>. Even at the time (the mid 1960s) many of them referred to a world that was vanishing or had vanished: references that must have been side-splitting at the time they were published, but were totally opaque to ten-year-old me. I still remember some of the cartoonists fondly\u2013Chas. Addams, of course, but also James Thurber, Helen Hokinson of the deep-bosomed, slightly clueless club women, and Syd Hoff. But there was a class of cartoons\u2013by guys like Peter Arno and Whitney Darrow, Jr.\u2013 that might loosely be termed a critique of modern relations between the sexes. They weren\u2019t opaque, but even to me as a kid they were troubling.<\/p>\n

A staple of these cartoons was the young, buxom woman being variously leered at, groped at, chased, etc., by an older, usually wealthier white man (well, yes, in the New Yorker of early days everyone was white). In some of these the woman is clearly playing along in hopes of\u2013what, a diamond bracelet? A fur coat? As Cole Porter had it in Kiss Me Kate<\/em>, \u201cMr. Harris, plutocrat, wants to give my cheek a pat: if a Harris pat means a Paris hat, Okay!\u201d But in others, the woman looks uncomfortable and apprehensive.<\/p>\n

As for the men in these cartoons, a few of them look hapless, as if they\u2019ve stumbled into a situation where a woman is forcing\u00a0<\/em>them to ogle etc. \u201cHonest, officer, I was just sitting here at my desk in my loud checked suit when my secretary perched on my desk to take dictation. What could I possibly do?\u201d Others appeared to at least pretend to be looking at something other than the cleavage\u2013pearls were a frequent fixture\u2013but that was the joke, right? Because everyone, even a ten-year-old girl, knew that he was really ogling the woman\u2019s breasts. But mostly these men look like they\u2019re predators.<\/p>\n

As a eight-, nine-, or ten-year old, what was I to make of all this?\u00a0The takeaway appeared to be that all (powerful, elderly, white) men were letches. That working for such men inevitably meant some sort of harassment. That the wives of these men (who were all portly and dripping in the signifiers of their husbands\u2019 success\u2013furs and diamonds etc.) could do nothing but occasionally fume and nag. That the women being ogled etc. deserved it because they had breasts, because they wore provocative outfits and should have known what would happen, because they had jobs that took them out of their homes and into contact with the aforementioned predators. Some of the cartoons also suggested that there were young women who made the attraction of older, wealthier men into their jobs. All those portly, powerful, older white men were their marks (in which case it must be reasonable that the men would treat the women as prey, because the women were treating them\u00a0<\/em>as prey and\u2026).<\/p>\n

So there I am in my parents\u2019 kitchen. I was 16 and home from school with a really horrendous cold of the streaming variety\u2013my recollection is that I was a walking river of snot in a plush bathrobe. As I\u2019ve said before, I grew up in a barn, and the living room windows overlooked a valley and a river and fields\u2026 very picturesque. One of my dad\u2019s friends, a very fine painter, was painting a landscape of that view. I heard the downstairs door open, went out to the landing, saw it was\u2013let\u2019s call him Fritz\u2013said hi, excused myself on accounta sick, and went back to bed. An hour or so later I went downstairs to the kitchen to make myself some tea and, being a well-raised child, I asked Fritz if he wanted a cup. He said sure, and I put the kettle on.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not clear exactly how the subject of wouldn\u2019t I like to have an affair<\/em> came up\u2013I was standing there in my blue plush bathrobe with a handful of tissues, blotting my nose and waiting for the kettle to boil. \u00a0I answered in the negative (this was all rendered more surreal by the fact that I had a crush on Fritz\u2019s son) and may have made some comment about Fritz being my parents\u2019 friend, and it would be weird, shading toward wrong. I was still trying to be polite, and perhaps he took that as an invitation to explain why it would be fine, don\u2019t worry about it. Note: our stove was on an island in the middle of the kitchen floor. Gradually, Fritz moved around the island toward me, and I moved around and away. I felt rotten, and this was the last straw, but I did not want to be rude to my father\u2019s friend. And all the time the image in my head was the one above: \u201cNotice, class\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The kettle boiled. I poured the water, told him where to find milk and sugar, should he want them, and decamped to my room. I think I may have locked the door, but in the event, Fritz didn\u2019t push the issue, and while I saw him a number of times after that, his invitation was never mentioned between the two of us.<\/p>\n

When older people excuse men for predatory workplace behavior (or predatory behavior generally) by saying \u201cthey came up in a different time,\u201d well, yes, they may have done. But even in that \u201cdifferent time,\u201d the cartoonists who were depicting these \u201cfunny\u201d chases got the look of dismay on the faces of the women, the look of \u201cI need this job but\u2026\u201d The look of being trapped. Even when I was eight- or nine- or ten-years-old I couldn\u2019t see how that was funny.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am up to my hips with reading for World Fantasy, but I was reminded of this piece which I wrote about 10 years ago. Sadly, it is still topical… I was once chased around my parents\u2019 kitchen by a friend of my father\u2019s. But I\u2019ll come back to that. One of my favorite things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4590"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4598,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4590\/revisions\/4598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}