Michelle Williams
speaker
1,165 appearances
24 recordings
10 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 29 Jan
Michelle Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 12.
Appearances
I am fortunate enough that many of my girlfriends who've chosen to have children and have the young women that I do see in my life have so much more empowered messages of what it is to be a girl. They're proud of their strength. They're here for it. They stand up for themselves. And it's so cool to see
And I kind of had this hope that maybe this work and some of the things I'm talking about of the casual sexual harassment and misogyny, maybe this is the last generation. Maybe this is going to You know, be more of a historical reflection of a certain point of time. And since the recent election, I kind of have felt this really familiar fire under my skin.
Trump's nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is saying that women are incompetent and that their presence in the military causes love triangles and drama. And the conversation about women in combat is a really charged one. And it distracts from the fact that ostensible leaders saying that kind of dismissive, reductionistic language is going to seep down through the ranks.
And it is going to affect women like me who are nowhere near combat but are still going to be hearing this language of inherently your value within the Marine Corps, your value within the military is less than a man's. Because you are not as mission critical. Where it really matters, where push really comes to shove, that's not you. It's me.
And that kind of othering dismissed the heck out of the contributions of women who have been leaders in the military and who have been smashing all these barriers as long as they've been in.
Boot Marines became fluent in how we spoke of him. We would often speak of him. Everything the Marine Corps does is for the Lance Corporal on the front lines with his rifle, we echoed, a mantra training our attention outward to our brothers overseas. Everything we did was for the infantrymen, always the infantryman. Infantry was exclusively men.
The pinnacle of actual Marines in the actual war meant forever and always he. You, Marine, are learning a language to support him. When you are tired or Arabic irregular verbs make no sense, you need motivation. You need to remember him. You do not have it as bad as him here in cushy Monterey, California. And so you can run another mile or stay up an hour later. Marines also spoke of her, too.
A warning. She was a phantom, the female Marine accepted as the standard, an allegory. She was an overweight, non-deployed corporal. She spent half her life on chit nursing some made-up injury. That she was sexually repugnant yet slept with everyone, which would mean everyone slept with her also, no, confused me deeply. Males had their standard to prove, be like him.
Females had our standard to prove, don't be like her.
I think there were a lot of people who had their heart in the right place. There were a lot of Marines who did have kindness to them. I think also very, very few, I can think of so few examples when someone was saying, you know, it was always joking, right? It was always intended. Well, I actually don't know the intention, but it was always portrayed as, oh, we're just joking.
Williams just takes things too seriously. She's just too sensitive, you know, like females are, that kind of thing. Very rare would someone say, hey, maybe we shouldn't talk about our colleagues that way. Or like, hey, not only do we work together, we all live together. There is no separation between our professional and personal lives.
And maybe we don't need to be sitting here and speculating about our colleagues' sexual lives while they're right there. And I don't think I ever heard anybody, and part of it is a maturity thing. We speak so much about like men and women in the military. I enlisted the week of my 18th birthday. A lot of us were under 21. I think our leadership who we looked for to mitigate some of our
Scuffles were like 23, 24, 25. Like we were kids and didn't necessarily have the mentorship or maturity that maybe should have corrected some of the behavior that we had.
And it's another one of those things where with retrospect, it's like, wow, that was really childish. But I was 18 and I just left the Mormon church. I had no idea when to push back and say like, hey, that's inappropriate, knock it off. Never said that ever. I, again, believed in this kind of inherent superiority in men. And if that's how they saw it, then it must be so.
And thank God, not every woman who serves had my background and my kind of training and subservience. But nor do I think that was an entirely unique thing either, where I think many girls and women are conditioned to make allowances for the boys and men around them.
The language was... Yeah, absolutely. You know, maybe you shouldn't be a Marine because you can't hack it. So first I was conditioned to understand that, you know, basically anything I heard, the appropriate or the thing to do that would best convey that I wanted to be on this team was silence. So it starts there.
And then there's the casual touching, like the men who just like find an excuse to stand behind me and put their hands around my waist or who would move me physically with their hands, just joking. Yeah. Just joking. Never mind that it was in the barracks where I lived. Never mind that I had an eating disorder. And never mind that I wasn't consenting. You know, you're a woman among men.
Again, why are you making a big deal out of this? So then that's the second level of conditioning. And then you learn to not believe other women. That, you know, the first platoon I was in, there were women who had had a sexual violation. I don't know the details fully, but I do know that the perpetrators were back in our platoon.
They'd been to some, you know, slap on the wrist, some degree of being removed, and then they were back. And I learned to question when women said, you know, this thing happened to me because I was hearing, well, what were you wearing? Had you been drinking? Were you supposed to be there? What did you expect?
And that kind of horrible, just heinous victim-blaming language I feel was very prevalent. So now you are isolated from feeling like you can speak up for yourself. You are disconnected from other women who could be your allies, but you're trying to be like the guys by distrusting them.
Showing 1121–1140 of 1,165 · page 57 of 59
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