Squirrels that Spite You
Marginally Correct Advice from Your Stalker
It would be an exaggeration to call the fifty-some-year-old man who worked across the hall in grad school my “stalker”, probably. His behavior was the liminal and familiar flavor of unwanted attention so familiar to young people, young women most of all.
Not knowing how seriously to worry about him sent me into an anxious and unfocused state for longer than I should have allowed, if people really control things like that, which maybe they do and I just never learned how.
He was the father of multiple kids, a couple of whom were adolescents he brought to my lab to introduce. They seemed uncomfortable in a way I later realized must have been related to something he said about me beforehand, about a relationship that only existed in his head.
I was still collegial and friendly when I was 25, a person who baked for affection and listened attentively. I learned to stop being that way shortly thereafter, and it either protected me from ruin or wrecked my life, possibly both. I was friendly with him, a colleague, inviting him to my cheesy dinner parties and talking to him with a smile on my face.
When he said something mildly assuming, I told him to leave me alone, and he complied completely. He continued to ask people in my department about me for an unhealthily long time afterwards, and he even invited himself to a lab in another city where I got a job after I left school and asked my co-workers about me while I was in a different room. A decade later he tried to follow me on LinkedIn.
Unwanted attention guy had a comically Anthony Wiener-grade Scottish name and he was never gross or touchy, but he was wholly convinced that he loved me and that it was ok to ask his wife about the possibility of exploring “other relationships” in a wink and nudge towards me. I never saw him again after I said he was making me uncomfortable but I was terrified of running into him in public for years until I finally moved to another country.
Before all that happened, he introduced me to my husband, to whom he gifted a stuffed squirrel plushie that is now beloved by our cat more than 15 years later. He also told me a thing that I hated and railed against in my heart but that was probably true and also why things are (gestures around) like that there.
He was doing a mixed-up thing in which he was telling himself, and probably believing, that he wanted to help me. He said I needed a mentor. Truthfully, I never had a good one in academia and most of my work supervisors have been middling to indifferent. What he actually meant was that I needed a patron, and I guess he thought he would be that guy, but also a boyfriend, I don’t know. I seethed at the thought of it for ages, I found it paternalistic and also callous in that it precluded any need I might have to partner with a peer, an equal. But he was kind of right (kill me) that I needed someone who would steer me towards a workable situation, at least career-wise.
I don’t know any women who are now successful in male-dominated fields who are actually doing their first-choice job. All of them were chosen in some way by a more powerful figure, they were touched gently on the elbow and allowed to stay in the game. It usually cost them something. I’m not saying sexually, I’ve never known it work explicitly that way, but they usually had to give up something they thought was important or cede to someone else in a significant way to stay. Men are also subject to the need to be chosen and I don’t dispute that at all, but they are usually selected for different reasons and asked to give away less, do less, grovel less.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how people end up where they are and most of the reasons are frankly unbearable.
