The headline is startling and attention grabbing, but anyone on the backside of a racetrack or deep within the infrastructure of the breeding business knows that frequently women are subjected to treatment by men—including violence—that they wouldn’t face as blatantly on the “front side” of the game.
I know of a woman on a California stud farm, for instance, who lived in perpetual fear that one of the men—a stallion handler—would attack her for rebuffing his advances. She’d been threatened and physically manhandled by him but her pleas up the ladder hadn’t been headed until she was almost raped on the property.
An anonymous blogger, a woman attempting a second career on the backside of a small Mid-Western track, recently posted a piece that illustrates some of what women put up with. It’s an illuminating and disturbing post and here’s a brief excerpt:
I was at the track on one of our racedays when a jockey came up to me and started sweet-talking me. I wasn’t interested, although I am sure he meant it as a compliment. I was polite, but declined his advances. I figured he had gotten the message until I had my back turned and he decided to heave-ho on my flank with the palm of his hand.”
Click here to read this post in its entirety from the new Confessions of a Hotwalker blog.
It’s a problem that doesn’t get enough attention, partly because women who work in racing don’t want to talk on the record about what happens on the backstretch or on the front side. We don’t want to be seen as complainers, or thought of as not being tough enough. We want to be taken as equals, even if that means brushing off everything short of physical assault. On the backstretch, the issue is also complicated by race, class, and language — imagine, if English-speaking, native-born female barn workers don’t want to talk (or don’t know who talk to about these problems), how much worse it must be among the majority of women barn workers, who are marginalized by more than their gender.
There are jerks everywhere. Ignore it. If you continue to put yourself in the path of someone who intends physical harm, get out. Take care of yourself first. Find another job. Talk it up. Public opinion works. Stop whining.
[...] recently recounted a few startling, and all too plausible, experiences with men on the backstretch (via Sid Fernando). It’s one thing to brush off a lousy ad, it’s another to brush off an unwanted hand [...]
[...] not knowing where to go or who to talk to about what’s happening. And it’s complicated, as I commented elsewhere, by the fact that a significant number of female backstretch workers are marginalized by class and [...]