In the early 60’s, Jess Halford began a job as a clerk in the office of a manufacturing company. She was happy for her new found independence and income after a lifetime of relying on parents. She still lived with them, but hoped some day to save up enough money to have a house of her own. Her sweetheart was a paralegal at a respectable law firm in their small town, and knew he planned on asking her to marry him soon. Life was good, as good as it had ever been, and Jess had a lot to look forward to.

She liked her job just fine. It was somewhat boring and tedious, mostly involving passing on orders to the correct departments and checking filled orders against the originals. Sometimes she dealt with customer complaints (though never due to her errors), and sometimes she even made calls to men with important-sounding titles. These phone calls made her nervous at first, but then she grew to like them as it broke up the day.

The company employed three other women: two clerks and a secretary. The four of them got along well enough, taking lunches together and gossiping as their schedules allowed. They weren’t friends, but that was all right with Jess. She had a life beyond clerking, and saw work as a necessary and adequate payment for her contentment outside of the hours from 8 to 5:30.

At least, for the first few months. Around then, her supervisor, a man with a not-quite-as-impressive title as the men she made phone calls to, started making bizarre comments. At first she just thought he was being friendly, but the cool, toothless smiles of the other girls when he made such comments cast a shadow over her trust of his good intentions.

His behavior struck her as off. If he came into the room where the women worked, he would not leave for a few minutes, even if no one was saying anything. He would stand there, near the door, smiling, so expectantly that the first few times he’d done this she’d wonder if she had somehow not heard a question he asked her. She found herself blushing when he praised her work, which was always too gushing to seem sincere. She kept her smile hanging on her face as he continued to not leave, to the point where her face would hurt and there would be small lines at the sides of her mouth by the end of the day if he made a stop in. Over time, her polite laughs at his awkward jokes grew shorter and quieter.

Jess told herself he was merely eccentric, probably lonely, and tried to overlook the fact that the compliments changed in nature to be less about her work, and more about her appearance. They were innocent enough; a girl would have to be unusually curmudgeonly to see anything nefarious in them. Still, they were always awkward, in both content and delivery. He’d compliment her socks almost every day (even though she never wore anything other than brown or grey ankle socks) or he’d gush over her necklace (a single pearl given by her mother), or the interesting color of her dress (a moderately fashionable shade of green). She never once felt flattered by any of this, but still said thank you so as not to be rude. Every time this went on for too long, Jess would look at the clock or at her pile of work sitting on her desk, until he finally got the point. Apologizing profusely, he would make one or two more embarrassing comments and then, finally, finally, leave the room.

But a strange thing started happening, where the time in between her pointedly looking at her work and him noticing grew, and then the time between him starting to apologize and then actually leaving grew. After one particularly bad day, she counted that he had been in the office where the women worked for a full two hours, prattling on about absolutely nothing. She was starting to dread the sound of his characteristic footsteps, to suck in when she heard the doorknob turning.

At lunch one day, Barb (the secretary) broached the subject of their boss’s behavior for the first time, and asked Jess why on earth she was so nice to him. She was shocked. “I’m not nice to him! I’ve never been so curt with anyone like this before!” It was true- Jess always felt a little bad at how coldly her “thank yous” and “yes sirs,” were.

Barb’s face was strangely blank. “You always respond to him, can’t you see that’s encouraging him?”

The other girls just stared. “What am I supposed to do? Ignore him?”

Barb looked down at her plate and pushed a pea around.“That’s what we do. That’s the only way to get him to stop.”

The other two nodded. Jess wondered if Barb had this same conversation with each of them, when they started getting undue attention. She decided to try Barb’s advice for another week, and to find another job if things didn’t improve.

That afternoon, she merely smiled thinly when he doted upon the shape and color of her fingernails (trimmed, and red) and continued to work through her pile of papers. A moment of tense silence in the room as he waited for a response, and, receiving none, actually left shortly after.

She made eye contact with Barb as he left, who raised her eyebrows at her meaningfully.

For a few days, Barb’s advice worked. He’d come in, get very little response, and then soon after leave. She no longer dreaded coming into work, and even her sweetheart commented on how her mood had seemed to lift.

But that Friday, right as she was getting ready to leave work to spend time with her friends, he cornered her and fired off a series of very embarrassing questions about her opinion of him, each one without waiting for a reply from the previous. There was no one else around, and Jess felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise. Would he try something impudent, now that he got her alone?

Ultimately, he didn’t, and she felt foolish for suspecting this silly old man to be capable of that. He merely told her about how he wants the women at his workplace to be comfortable, and if he ever did something to make her not feel this way, to tell him to knock it off. She smiled, genuinely, relishing the image of the look on his face if she’d say this to him verbatim. Jess used this as an opportunity to politely excuse herself, saying she was in a hurry to reach an engagement, and after dodging his questions about where she was going, finally left. The discomfort of being alone with him lingered, and she felt uneasy for the rest of the night.

After the episode on Friday, Jess noticed he was finding ways to get her alone with him. His excuses were so thinly veiled as to be laughable. He would see her walking to the restroom, or the kitchen, or outside to lunch, and then come to ask her if she finished an order from days ago, or would ask her what her opinion was of a minor adjustment he was making to a letterhead. After he did this, he would compliment her profusely on some article of clothing she was wearing.

A few days of this, and Jess started looking through classifieds for new job openings. Until she found alternate arrangements, she did everything she could to avoid him, but she still had to come into the office and leave, and he’d come up with some excuse to talk to her. She tried to politely remind him of their conversation about overstepping boundaries a few times, but he’d only get quiet, abruptly leave, and then seem to have forgotten about it the next time he “happened” upon her in the hallway. The comments grew more bizarre, until it struck her that slowly, gradually, without her noticing it, they became wildly inappropriate. Embarrassing comments about plain socks had turned into poetic exclamations about the shape of her calf muscles, innocent observations about her necklace turned into deliberate stares.

She decided to ask Barb for advice. “the only thing that will stop that man at this point is a punch in the face. You’d be better just leaving at this point, or dealing with it. Wouldn’t hurt to ask for a raise if you decide to go that route.” She laughed, and Jess blushed.

That very day, when Jess was startled to hear a particularly forward comment, she took Barb’s advice. She drew back her arm, clenched it into a fist, and without fully believing it was happening, punched him directly in his face. He staggered back, a small trickle of blood coming out of his nose, looking strangely less surprised than she would have expected. Jess turned on her heel, collected her belongings, and walked out of the office. She didn’t look back, and no one called after her.

The supervisor, angry at his manhood being so thoroughly defeated, began bothering the other girls in the office anew. Barb especially, as he convinced himself it was somehow Barb’s idea for Jess to punch him. She tried her old trick of ignoring him fully, not even smiling like Jess had done, but it ceased to work and soon she was dealing with the same nonsense of her former coworker.

In the kitchen, after he told her she shouldn’t be eating such fatty foods because it would spoil her lovely figure, she punched him too.

Everyone knew, but no one openly mentioned these events. The supervisor never bothered the girls again, in fact, he tried his best to interact with them as little as possible. Time went by and the company grew, hiring three more women to work in the office. In whispers, the two girls who lived through the punches told the new girls what had happened, and they giggled about this any time one of them had a story about a man being too forward.

The company grew so much, in fact, that more men were also hired to work in management. The men already working at the company, unlike the women, never warned new hires about the feisty girls in the office. The men in management were used to treating the girls under them like the supervisor had originally done, and sure enough, a few sore noses later, promptly stopped. This time, they didn’t even bother firing the girls who did the punching, and they stayed on with pride.

Word got around about the women who punched men, and rumors started floating about other companies suffering the same fate. The local newspaper picked up on the story and, during a slow news cycle, dropped an explosive article making much more of a deal out of it than it had actually been.

Nevertheless, the trend of women punching overly friendly bosses grew beyond the town, beyond the county, and soon, stories were reported of women in widely different states exacting the same punishment. The media grew hysterical about gangs of women roving the streets, punching any man who dared to look at them, prompting the first lady to deliver a much-televised warning about returning to family values and respectability because “the whole world is watching”.

This only seemed to fan the flames more, and in due time not a single woman would whisper over lunch about how to handle unwanted attention: the women did not need to be told anymore. Women all across the world dealt with their problems more effectively than ever before, and slowly, the news stopped picking up on the stories. The explosive headlines stopped, the appeals to christian values from radio hosts dwindled to periodic, half-hearted trickles, Jess got a new respectable job in an office, and the men never bothered the women again.