Because Someone Needs to Say It

The question behind the question

Whenever I tell someone I served in the Marine Corps, I get the same surprised look. Then come the questions.

Eventually, they get around to what they really want to know: what was it like being a woman in that world? There are roughly 175,000 Marines, and when I served, only about 1,000 of them were women officers. The math invites curiosity.

In a roundabout way, people are asking whether I experienced sexual harassment. (Usually it’s women who ask.) But what they really want to know is how I dealt with it. The assumption, and it’s a correct one, is that it was there. So how did I tolerate it?

What almost no one asks is why. Why was it there in the first place?

So, how did I deal with it?

Hard boundaries and four-letter words. Starting with this one: “F*ck off.  You can’t talk to me like that.”

And yes, I did the other things, too, to prevent unwanted advances. I watched how I dressed. I didn’t drink too much at parties. I guarded my reputation like a hawk. I’d seen what happened to women who didn’t, and it wasn’t pretty. If I could go back, I wish I’d had more courage to stand up for the women who found themselves caught in the rumor mill.

Because here’s the thing: all that vigilance didn’t keep me out of it.

When I got engaged, my soon-to-be husband told a friend in one of the platoons who he was marrying. The guy’s response? “Oh, Angie. I heard she slept with a bunch of the guys here.”

Not true. At all. (And shouldn’t congratulations have been in order?)

My fiancé confronted him. The guy basically admitted he’d never met me. He only knew me as “the cute Public Affairs Officer at HQ.” Personally, I would’ve gone with intelligent, athletic, the woman who could do 15 dead-hang pull-ups and beat most of the guys in a three-mile run. But I suppose that wouldn’t have made for as interesting a story.

That’s how it works. You can do everything “right” and still become an interesting story someone else tells about you.  You can still get unwanted advances and be objectified behind your back.  

The Cornell 7 and the question we skip

I’m sharing this because my girlfriends and I have been talking about the Cornell 7 story.  

If you haven’t followed it: a civil lawsuit filed last month alleges that a Cornell student was drugged and sexually assaulted by seven fraternity brothers at the Chi Phi house in October 2024. According to the complaint, one member sent a message to the chapter’s group chat inviting the others upstairs. None of the men were criminally charged. Cornell expelled two; the rest received lesser sanctions. The men deny the allegations, and the local prosecutor has now reopened the investigation. 

Our conversations have gone beyond the headlines. We keep circling back to the question nobody asked me about the Marine Corps: why?

Why did this happen? How could it happen? How does a group of young men (in a group chat, in a house, in a community) arrive at a place where that message gets sent, and no one stops it? And how does an institution arrive at a response that leaves so many people feeling it protected the wrong people?

Those aren’t questions about one bad night. They’re questions about culture. About what gets laughed off, what gets ignored, and who gets believed.

It’s a spectrum, and it’s at work too

We’ve also been talking about what happens at work. Not anything as horrific as what’s alleged at Cornell, but on the same spectrum: shaming. Humiliation. A quiet, steady disregard for female colleagues.

I see it in nearly every workplace I consult in, especially in male-dominated industries. The off-color comment in the meeting that everyone lets slide. The woman who pushes back and gets labeled “difficult” or “emotional.” The rumor that travels faster than the truth, just like mine did.

It doesn’t help that DEI is dying, if it isn’t already on its deathbed. Whatever you think of how those programs were run, they gave people a language and a structure for raising these issues. As that support disappears, women aren’t getting what they need. And, consequently, neither are the men.

Women need men. Men need women.

This isn’t a women-versus-men problem. It’s a human problem, and we won’t solve it from opposite sides of the room.

Women: we need to voice our concerns. We need to commit to our boundaries and say them out loud, four-letter words optional. And we need to stop assimilating. Shrinking ourselves to fit a culture that wasn’t built for us doesn’t change the culture. It just makes us smaller.

Men: we still need you as advocates. We need men who won’t allow anyone to be mistreated, and who make room for basic human-ness at work.  I love men – I love working with men, advocating for men, supporting men.  I know so many great ones, too.  We just need you.  More of you.

We need men on the group chat who act when someone’s dignity is being violated. Think about what one message, from one person, could have changed in that fraternity house.

And we need men in the conference room who will say, “She’s not being hysterical.” Men who will ask whether it’s really her fault, or whether there’s something about how the organization operates that isn’t supporting her.

I learned to protect myself with boundaries and grit. I shouldn’t have had to. Neither should the women coming up behind us.

So instead of asking her how she tolerated it, let’s start asking why it’s there. And then let’s do something about it.

Because someone needs to say it. And that’s real leadership.