(I have recently started working at a restaurant as a waitress. About halfway through my shift one evening, a group of four men are seated in my section. I head over to take their drink orders.)

Me: “Hello there. My name is [My Name] and I’m going to be your waitress tonight. Can I start you all off with something to drink?”

Customer#1: “Well, aren’t you a pretty little thing!”

Customer #2: “Good thing the ol’ wives aren’t here, or we’d be in trouble tonight!”

Me: “…”

(I’m feeling uncomfortable, but I do my job and take their orders. When I return to the table to hand them their drinks, I notice [Customer #2] looking me up and down with a creepy grin. He scoots to the side of the booth and leans over, hand out-stretched, clearly intending to slap me on the butt. I leap to the side as he swings, causing him to miss his target and lose his balance, sending him tumbling to the floor. As he pulls himself off the ground, he begins yelling at me.)

Customer #2: “You little b****, how dare you?! You flaunt yourself around in those f****** tight pants and can’t take the consequences? You’re a f****** teasing b****!” *shoves my shoulders* “Get me your manager! Now, b****!”

(My supervisor runs over to the scene and places a protective arm around me.)

Supervisor: “Sir, you need to calm down.” *turns to me* “Go take your break, I’ll handle this.”

(I run to the back and take my break. My supervisor kicks the men out of the restaurant. When I arrive for my shift the next day, the manager calls me into his office to speak with me.)

Manager: “Now, [My Name], I heard about what happened last night. So, consider this your first warning. If it happens again, you will be written up for it.”

Me: “What? What am I trouble for?”

Manager: “You made some loyal customers very angry and lost us a lot of money. We had to give them a gift card for their trouble.”

Me: “What?! He tried to sexually assault me!”

Manager: “[My Name], don’t turn this into one of those ordeals. You know what really happened.”

Me: *stunned silence*

Manager: “Situations like these are just what comes with being a waitress. The guys can’t help it, so you need to get used to it.”

Me: “I quit.”

(I walked out of his office and right out the door. I’ve never gone back.)

(I am broke, living with my broke friends. We won some tickets to an event in another city, and a well-off relative of mine is paying for a hotel stay for me, but he has asked for my friends to contribute their fair share back. This is easily agreed upon by everyone involved, with an invoice/contract for fairness’s sake. But, naturally, it can’t be that easy. [Friend #1] pays her share right away, [Friend #2] is paying in a couple of paychecks from now, and [Friend #3] is turning into trouble. [Friend #3] is the only one of us with a full-time job, and she is only living with us because she is fighting with her boyfriend. This takes place a few months after the event.)

Friend #3: “It’s no big deal; I’ll pay at the next paycheck.”

Me: “Okay, [Relative] is getting really impatient. You promised you’d pay him last month.”

Friend #3: *scoff and rolls eyes* “Well, I had expenses! The next check is Friday.”

(What she had was a fancy manicure, several new foreign comic books, two new video games, and five character plushies.)

Me: “Then, we’ll meet with him on Monday. Be ready so we can make it quick.”

(Over the weekend, [Friend #3] brags about her new anime plushies — which she bought on Saturday — has an entirely different manicure with acrylic nails and glitter-glaze, and has some new mid-range designer clothes, and her room REEKS of reefer. On Monday, [Friend #3] refuses to come to visit my relative.)

Friend #3: *shrugs and clicks her fake fingernails together idly* “I don’t have the money. I had bills to pay, so he can wait.”

(I’m pissed at this point, because my friend’s debt is causing tension in my relationship with the one relative who ever so much as tried being kind to me after I came out. I don’t reply; I just walk to [Friend #3]’s room and grab the nearest shopping bag of brand-name consumerist garbage, still new with tags. I check what’s in the bag to find four $60 figurines of popular anime characters.)

Me: *fake smile* “I’m sure this’ll be enough. I’ll just return these for you since you need to pay back your debts and you didn’t need to buy anime character figurines.”

([Friend #3] sputters and grunts; she can’t even come up with an argument. She follows me as I load the bag into my car. Just as I sit in the driver’s seat, she gets into the car.)

Friend #3: *dejected and quiet* “Take me to [Bank], please.”

(She got out the right amount of cash, so I let her have her stuff back and took her home. I brought the cash to the relative alone to avoid drama, but then he was upset with me because I couldn’t convince him that it was her money. He still thinks I covered for her. [Friend #3] helped herself to literally all the food in the house as revenge and gave it to her boyfriend, who she moved back in with. The rest of us were forced to go hungry for the next two weeks.)

I have been having menstrual problems for my entire life, which is later discovered to be a cyst on my ovary. About four years before it was discovered, though, I would bleed constantly. It was never fresh blood, though; it was old and black. I would go months without a period, and then months with one.

A doctor sent me to a gynecologist to make sure it wasn’t cancer causing my problems, as I have a family history for various kinds. I was 26, but I took my mom with me for support. The female gynecologist sent my mom out of the room to ask me medical questions, one of which was if I was sexually active.

I told her I wasn’t, because I hadn’t had sex. I’m used to people acting like they don’t believe me, so when she gave me this look, I just nodded to confirm that I was telling the truth. A few questions later, she asked if I had done any “self-stimulation” that may have resulted in a scratch or a tear that would explain the bleeding.

I told her no, because there was always too much blood and it grossed me out. She became exasperated and yelled, “YOU HAVE TO BE HONEST WITH ME!” in a very hostile voice.

I was angry, but I wanted to get this over with, so I just accepted it. Mom came back in and sat in the room on the other side of a curtain, so she couldn’t see any of what happened next.

This doctor was going out of her way to be rough in her examination. I was very sure it shouldn’t be as painful as it was. At one point, she used what she called a probe to hold me open and use a light for a better view, which I felt was fair, but it opened me very wide to the point of near pain. When I hissed and told her it was very uncomfortable, she looked at me like I was an idiot and told me, “You need to calm down. It’s smaller than a man’s penis.”

Now I was offended and angry, but I didn’t want to yell at this woman and upset my mom by “being rude,” since she couldn’t see what was going on. I tried to ignore it, and after another minute or so, I felt the need to fart.

I waited to see if she’d move away for something, but she didn’t. Before I could tell her, though, she realized I was tensing up but not why, and she leaned in to me and, in a very aggressive whisper, said, “If you do not relax right now, I will end this exam and make you come back, and I don’t think you want that.”

So, I nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll relax.”

When she turned away and came back to continue her examination, I finally relaxed and just let it go right in her face. My mom heard and yelled at me for it, and I just told her, “No, no. She was turned away; it’s fine.”

The doctor said nothing about it, but the exam concluded quickly and with no pain, like someone had flipped a switch on the whole thing. I later found out, while telling another female friend about this incident, that this particular gynecologist was known for being horrible to patients, and she thanked me for doing what she wished she had.

I work in an office for a large engineering company, it is a fairly laid-back office and the staff are all quite nice, for the most part. One of my coworkers looks like he has been picked out of a catalogue for 1950s suburban America. He has a set routine which, from what I can tell, never changes — the same lunch every day, skittles league every Thursday, a walk to the library with his wife to change their library books every Saturday, and a suit with waistcoat and tie everyday. (During the summer I am usually in shorts and baggy hoodies during the winter; it’s not a customer facing position so no one cares.) But he is a good worker and amiable enough.

Recently, his wife has been in the hospital — minor surgery but enough to keep her at the hospital — and he has mentioned several times that he hopes she is home soon as he is nearly out of the frozen meals she had prepared for him. Assuming that he is just anxious about his wife, I decide to offer to have him round for dinner one day. I explain that if he is happy with vegetarian food, my husband and I — both males — would be happy to have him round. I give him the address and let him know that dinner will be around 7:00 pm but if he is a bit earlier that’s no problem.

He turns up at 6:00 pm, brings with him a pack of steaks, complains that 7:00 pm is too late to be eating, comments that it is rude to have the TV on “with company present,” wanders into the bedrooms of our flat, complains that he “doesn’t really eat foreign food” when served vegetarian spaghetti bolognese, leaves half his dinner, wanders off to help himself to a drink from the fridge, complains that he doesn’t like the beer we have, complains that his wife didn’t leave him enough frozen food, complains that she isn’t around to “look after the house,” complains that he is still hungry, and is generally rude. At 10:00 pm, and after many awkward silences and Oscar-worthy yawns, we have finally had enough and manage to corral him out the door. Minutes after it has closed he knocks with a bag of laundry and makes it clear that because I had invited him around he expected me to do his laundry, as well!

He is only in his mid-50s, so I am unsure where this sort of attitude has come from, but apparently, the gender revolution is something that passed him by. If I were his wife, I would be signing up for all the elective surgeries they could offer!

(I’m in a wheelchair. My partner rolls me into the elevator. An elderly man grabs my handlebars from her and pulls and shifts me until he’s turned me around completely. I’m panicking too much to speak.)

Elderly Man: “There you go, sweetie!”

(We were both in shock as he exited the elevator, not even riding it. He never spoke to either of us, aside from what I wrote. Would you grab a walking person and forcibly turn them around?!)