The sisterhood of the extremely modest and incredibly professional pants

I wear pants, instead of skirts, when I visit the state Capitol now.

My first meeting with a male representative in the Washington State Legislature was the last time I wore a skirt in that building. It was my senior year of high school. I left school early that day in order to speak with him about education funding and the nonprofit I started. He sat me in the corner of his office. His chair was taller than mine. Picking at the seam on my pencil skirt, I nervously, and excitedly, told him about my work in his district feeding homeless students.

He looked me up and down and decided to interrupt me mid-sentence.

He smirked and said, “As a young woman in my office, are you feeling intimidated right now?”

He had power in every sense of the word, and I felt trapped. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to laugh along with his joke or speak up. I was intimidated and repulsed in equal measure. I felt myself being appraised, like he was trying to decide if he wanted to sink his teeth into me. I was squirming on a hook, and his eyes were vacant and hungry.

I had organized another meeting that day, and because I was afraid to attend it alone, I enlisted a male colleague to accompany me. I thought this would solve the issue of feeling objectified in the meeting. But what I didn’t anticipate was the fact that this representative would go on to spend the whole meeting only addressing the boy, even though I was the one who had arranged it. I realized then that I had to choose between being objectified or being ignored.

That’s the worst it’s gotten for me, in terms of brazenness. But as I’ve journeyed deeper into the political scene, I’ve learned that many young women have had experiences that are very similar, and often worse.

I spoke with one former intern over the summer who told me it’s rumored that the men in the Capitol have a shared spreadsheet of the interns who are “easy.” In response, some interns created a shared spreadsheet noting which officials to avoid, which ones had crossed boundaries with them. Another friend of mine told me to meet with her before interning in the Legislature so she could tell me which offices to stay away from to stay safe.

I’ve recently joined an organization dedicated to empowering young women in politics — and that’s helped some, but I still can’t shake this underlying insecurity and sense of inferiority, which is fed by the way men treat me in these spaces. There are many spaces where I feel that my opinion isn’t nuanced enough, that I don’t know enough about the subject, and that I can’t be successful.

But I do know what I’m doing.

The level of hyper scrutiny that women in politics are always under is exhausting. And it bleeds over into daily life — it doesn’t just stay in the Capitol. I feel like I’m taking up too much space when I’m speaking in male-dominated classes. I believe I am unworthy when I’m interrupted, cross-examined, and condescended to -- which seems to happen very frequently, no matter what I’m talking about.

And all along I thought this was my fault — that I really was incompetent and inadequate. But these are false feelings created by a system that stands to gain from the routine silencing of women. And I refuse to allow men to keep deciding who gets heard.

It’s not my fault that I was wearing a skirt that day during my senior year. It is the representative’s fault for ogling me, and our culture’s fault for enabling such behavior and giving it a powerful platform. We must exhibit continuous resistance to these power structures. And I concede, sadly, that women might have to wear loose-fitting pants to do so.

This story was originally published April 2, 2019 at 4:56 PM.