Man, Firewatch could easily have been about the sexual harassment of women rangers. Really depressing stuff.
Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream - Kathryn Joyce
The dangerous culture of male entitlement and sexual hostility hiding within America's national parks and forests.
In Szydlos recounting of the trip, Loeffler didnt adhere to this code. When she bent to move provisions or tie up the boat, he commented on a logo on the back of her utility skirt. He asked frank questions about her sex life and referred to Szydlo as hot sexy biologist. That June, the temperatures at the bottom of the canyon reached 109 degrees, and when Szydlo scorched her skin on a metal storage box, Loeffler said she had a hot ass. He adjusted her bra strap when it slipped and, one chilly night, invited her to sleep in the boat with him if she was cold. When they stopped to take a picture at a particularly scenic spot, he suggested that she pose naked. He told her that another female Park Services staffer would be hiking in to meet them at the halfway point, and that he hoped they would have a three-way. Szydlo told me she laughed uncomfortably and spoke often of her boyfriend and their plans to get married.
By the third day of the trip, it seemed to Szydlo that Loeffler was getting increasingly frustrated. They stopped at a confluence where the Colorado meets a tributary and forms a short tumble of rapids gentle enough for boaters to swim through with a life jacket. Szydlo pulled on her preserver, but Loeffler insisted she didnt need one. When she entered the river without it, the water sucked her under. She somersaulted through the rapids like I was in a washing machine, she recalled. She thought she was going to drown. Then the rapids spat her out into a calm, shallow pool. She came up gasping and choking to the sound of Loefflers laughter, and thought to herself, Im in deep shit.
This field started from military backgrounds so there was insecure masculinity from the start
In 2012 in Texas, members of the Parks and Wildlife Department complained about a legacy of racial and gender intolerance; only 8 percent of the state's 500 game wardens were women. In 2014, in California, female employees of the U.S. Forest Service filed a class-action lawsuitthe fourth in 35 yearsover what they described as an egregious, long-standing culture of sexual harassment, disparity in hiring and promotion, and retaliation against those who complained. (That lawsuit is still pending.) And this January, the Department of the Interiors Office of Inspector General announced that it had found evidence of a long-term pattern of sexual harassment and hostile work environment in the Grand Canyons River District, a part of the Park Service.
Ever since the U.S. created institutions to protect its wilderness, those agencies have been bound up with a particular image of masculinity. The first park rangers in the U.S. were former cavalrymen, assigned to protect preserves like Yellowstone and Yosemite from poachers and fire. The public quickly became enamored by these rugged, solitary figures. In the early 1900s, as the Park Service was created, a new breed emerged: naturalists who endeavored to teach the public the principles of conservation. As the historian Polly Welts Kaufman has written, the earlier generation of rangers resented the intrusion of pansy-pickers and butterfly chasers. Also controversial was the presence of a small number of women at the agency. Male naturalists worried that their job would be seen as effeminate, instead of, as one put it, the embodiment of Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, the Texas Rangers, and General Pershing. In the 1930s and 40s the ranks were mostly filled by returning veterans attracted by the ranger corps quasi-military culture. Until 1978, female rangers werent permitted to wear the same uniform or even the same badge as the men, but instead wore skirts modeled on stewardesses uniforms.
Employing more women but scout boys club tries their hardest to come across as villains. "Cuntsent degree", joking about raping you in your sleep, tying your blood-stained underwear on the antenna of a truck, and more than dozens of allegations still today.
By the 1970s, women held only 2 percent of full-time professional roles in the service nationwide. In Californiawhose lands are the crown jewel of the national forest system female employees filed a class-action lawsuit known as Bernardi v. Madigan. The case was settled in 1981 with a court-enforced consent decree that required the Forest Services California region to employ as many women as the civilian workforceat least 43 percent in every pay grade. The decision ultimately saw hundreds of Bernardi women enter the service, to the disgruntlement of many male employees.
Lesa Donnelly is a former Forest Service administrator who worked for the agency from 1978 to 2002. In 1994, she filed a complaint charging that three of her male colleagues were harassing her. After word spread (incorrectly) that she planned to file a class-action lawsuit, she received dozens of calls. She heard from women who claimed they were being threatened with physical and sexual assault, and women who said theyd been punished for making complaints. One said the men on her crew joked about raping her in her sleep and had tied her blood-stained underwear to the antenna of their fire truck. Two women told her that a notice in their office about the Bernardi consent decree had been defaced with a scrawled reference to the cuntsent decree. She realized her own complaint was nothing compared to what I found out was happening.
Eventually, Donnelly compiled claims from 50 women, and in 1995 she filed a class-action suit against the Forest Service, including declarations from many of the woman who had reached out to her. The agency negotiated a settlement that allowed for continued court oversight of Californias Forest Service. But when the monitoring period ended in 2006, the old problems soon resurfaced, as Donnelly would describe in testimony to Congress two years later. One dispatcher reported that shed been sexually assaulted and stalked by a manager. He was made to resign, but after six months the Forest Service tried to work with him again. In 2008, a male supervisor at the same forest said that he hated a black female employee and wanted to shoot subordinates he hated. When the employee reported the comment, the district ranger told her to ignore him.
This year, I met Donnelly, who is 58, in El Dorado Hills, outside Sacramento. Now the vice president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, a civil rights group, she has the demeanor of a friendly bulldog. She told me that nearly every year for the last 15 years, she has traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby the USDA, Congress, and the White House to protect women in the service. She managed to enlist the help of representatives Jackie Speier of California, Peter DeFazio of Oregon and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who in 2014 petitioned the USDA to investigate, without success. Each time Donnelly comes to D.C., she added, she brings details of 20 to 25 new allegations. But while her fight against the Forest Service has persisted for more than two decades, in the Grand Canyon, similar questions about the treatment of women have only started to surface.
"When you work in fire, you have to have a really thick skin."
Many women in the Forest Service told me that fire is a small world, and that they repeatedly had to fight the perception that they were only there to meet men. Rice, who exudes a no-bullshit air of competence, prided herself on her toughness. When I visited her at her home in January, she drove to meet me on a four-wheeler, flanked by two bulldogs. When you work in fire, you have to have a really thick skin, she said.
Around 2008, Rice was a captain being groomed for promotion when she was befriended by her boss boss, a division chief named Mike Beckett. After about a year, their interactions took on a different tone. By Rices account, Beckett would describe sexual dreams hed had about her and comment on her body. When they texted about work, he responded with crass double entendres. He cornered her in the office, followed her into the bathroom, and tried to touch her or lift her shirt. She said he groped or touched her inappropriately at least 20 times.
Even when she was out in the field, Rice felt as if there was no escape. Sometimes Beckett would wait late for her to return to the office. He took to radioing in to ask her location and seemed to monitor the line for word of her whereabouts: Hed appear, unannounced, when she was in some remote locationsay, a tower lookout high in the Sierras. He was paying a lot of attention to an employee three to four pay grades below him, which is uncommon, recalled Rices former direct supervisor, who still works at the Forest Service. He was constantly going around me.
It became so uncomfortable that Rice stopped calling in her locationa significant safety risk. Eventually, Beckett arranged for her to be moved out of the office she shared with a colleague and into a room on her own. It was more of a storage area, recalled the former supervisor, tucked in the back of the building. During this time, her oversight duties were stripped from her one by one, Rice later said in a signed affidavit, and the former supervisor confirmed in an interview. (Beckett declined to answer any questions, and the Forest Service said it couldnt comment on specific allegations.)
Still, Rice was reluctant to take formal action. She didnt want to be one of those women, she explained. You dont cry in front of the guys, you dont show weakness in front of them. And you dont file. You just dont file. You suck up and deal. But one day in 2011, she said, after three years of harassment, Beckett came into her office and, with a letter opener, poked her repeatedly on her chest, drawing a circle around her nipple. She filed. Randy Meyer, the Eldorado union steward, said he got a phone call from Rice that scared me to death. She was highly emotional and beside herself. He told a senior forest manager that he was prepared to alert the policeand then everybody and his brother got involved in this mess.
In the ensuing investigation, some 30 of Rices and Becketts colleagues were interviewed about humiliating details that Rice hadnt even confided to her husband. Everybody knew that he took me in the bathroom, tried to take my clothes off, things that he would say to me: I want to watch you pee. They all knew, she said. And I still work with these people. Rice said she got sick from the stress. The supervisor added that once, after he went to check on Rice, Beckett threatened him with disciplinary action.
There's more about the power of boatmen, expecting women employees to sleep with them, upskirt photos, Loeffer the scumbag, the dangers of filing, physical assault like a chokehold, etc.
Used to not call it sexual harassment until the guy whipped out his penis and slapped you across the face with it.
The last sections are about actions for better accountability.
Read the whole article, it's an engrossing and haunting read.