Ruminating on The Hostile Work Environment Complaint

So many thoughts I want to smash together and sculpt the perfect post. I have to just accept I'm going to vomit the words here and it'll be sloppy, but so be it.

Since the outcome of the complaint amounted to a whole-lotta-nada, and has made me look at everyone involved, Tim-the-old-fuck, as well as his boss, I view them both with jaundiced eyes, and devoid of good will.  

I circle back to how this all came to be, how neither one of them, apologized to me. I think of knowing both of these people roughly 15 years, and how neither one of them valued me as a human or as a friend or even as a co-worker sufficiently to even warrant an apology.

The question I ask myself is, "How would they feel if it were their daughter or granddaughter." And then the realization hits me, that perhaps Tim does this to his own daughters and granddaughters, and he doesn't give a shit. They are theirs for the taking. Women exist purely for their pleasure and whim, without question?

This is the 21st Century. I work where I work, so you'd think the standard would be to default to being a paragon of propriety. And in the end, like every other instance in my life where I was harassed or molested--nothing happened to the person(s) who perpetrated this shit upon me.

Within a year or so of my complaint, we had an EEOC type meeting on harassment, and there was one slide in the powerpoint presentation, wherein EVERY. SINGLE. BULLETPOINT. was pertinent to my complaint. I resented being at this meeting. I resented having to sign a form stating I attended this meeting. It was clear to me, this meeting and the contents of the presentation was not to protect ME, but to protect the "office" where I work.

Me speaking out is not MY problem. 
Me wanting some modicum of acknowledgment or even justice, is not MY problem.

What IS my problem is being raised by two broken people who raised me to expect nothing more than to be broken, too. What no one (even myself!) ever expected was that I'd glue myself back together, and be strong, and be WHOLE, and have standards. This is not my problem.

I have no idea what it will take to break these old, abusive patriarchal behaviors and transgressions. No amount of outing famous, powerful men is going to do this. I haven't wrapped my brain around what it will take, but I know that a tag #MeToo isn't enough. And even men who come forward claiming #MeToo won't be enough either. And this crosses all manner of socio-economic, national, and racial lines too. 

Sharing our stories and examining how common all of this truly is, is good in that it exposes how entrenched this problem is, within families, within our work, within our communities; however, what happens next?