I wish it were as simple as telling you to report this to your HR department, but if it were me I know just how unreliable reporting to HR is when the "offender" in question is in a position of authority himself. And it could backfire too, if HR decided to simply give a warning--the offender will immediately know who filed the report. Even if I face homophobia everyday I still feel it more practical to ignore them than resist on a per case basis out of conviction.
Funny how, in my times of need, it wasn't any of the Marxist nor feminist thinkers (Marx, Gramsci's historical materialism, Ernst Bloch's principle of hope, Helene Cixous' deconstructive feminism) who've given me the emancipatory strength to face oppression, but the selfish capitalist Ayn Rand. When I was a new immigrant in America, I had no place to stay. I found work as an assembler in an assembly line working 12-hour shifts. I was in the company of people you'd forgive for being ignorant (for why should a Marxist criticize an individual for his lack of education, which was brought about by the system?). Although I lived in a third world country, I was educated in the best university in there and landing an odd job never crossed my relatively privileged lifestyle (but still impoverished in American standards); my world since then was a nihilist ruin. During a ten-minute break, I was reading Atlas Shrugged and the following quote changed my life:
Quote"But... but what are you doing here?" Her arm swept at the room. "This doesn't make sense! What is it? A stunt? An experiment? A secret mission? Are you studying something for some special purpose?"
"No, Miss Taggart. I'm earning my living." The words and the voice had the genuine simplicity of truth, "Dr. Akston, I... it's inconceivable, it's... You're... you're a philosopher... the greatest philosopher living... an immortal name... why would you do this?"
"Because I am a philosopher, Miss Taggart. ... If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner--check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."
"I'm earning my living." That simple truth framed my world in a positive light. I was trading a product of my own effort.
I used to hate Ayn Rand before I even read any of her works, for she was the favorite author of the most selfish ->-bleeped-<- I know. I realized after reading her novels that the selfishness she was referring to has an entirely different definition than "pursuing one's self-interest at the expense of others": Ayn Rand was referring to the existence of a self, a self from which you produce goods of your own mind and muscle, in exchange for an equivalent worth of goods--not just free trade, but fair trade. She clearly associated the usual definition of selfishness with looters in her novels and contrasted it with a man with his own sense of self-worth.
The assembly line I worked on may not have had the same inhumane working conditions prevalent in third world countries, but my supervisor was a notorious slave driver. He demanded output twice that of other lines doing the same work obviously to please his superiors. He prided himself of cutting costs for the company, giving little to no raise despite our performance. All he did was sit in his cubicle doing nothing, and only came out to micromanage bottlenecks (stations who couldn't meet the hourly quota) using an abusive tone that had often made my coworkers cry. Most of us were on minimum wage, and he was said to rake in more than $10,000 a month.
Ayn Rand advocates for you to have your own code of values. "Of what account are praise and [criticism] from men whom you don't respect?" My supervisor was most weary of me for he's the kind of man who is discomforted by a subordinate more intelligent than he isn't (I overheard him laughing about my stellar resume to his superior, a close buddy of his). Once, he found an opportunity to subjugate me in his own terms, accusing me of being a bottleneck for not using two machines at once (a work supposedly done by two people), when his simple mistake is that I wasn't getting parts from the previous station. He couldn't fault me because I was obsessive-compulsive with my work, and I found a way to use one machine efficiently. I followed my own standards in my work, and if I ever did poorly, it is because I didn't meet my own set standards, my own code of values, and not because I was trying to please someone else's. His way of life is dependent on the exploitation of others, and I'd rather die than live a life like that.
Whenever my socially normative coworkers ridicule my effeminate mannerisms and my androgynous appearance, I just couldn't help but shrug them off with a sad smile. Is there not a more tragic thing than to have such limited consciousness of an infinitely complex world? Even if they attain all the power in the world, their world is only as vast as their minds can see. And there's not much they can see. Especially that they couldn't even see you at all.
