If you’ve been in one convention center, you’ve been in them all. And usually the people who work in fields that require them to work the convention circuit across the country have been in them all, too. The Anaheim Convention Center in California, like the Javitz Center in New York, is equipped with registration tables, several exhibition halls, seminar and press rooms, and a ballroom to top it off.
The ballroom is where Canon Communications—a trade magazine publishing company and the host of the Medical Design & Manufacturing West show—holds a party the evening after the first day of the show. The MD&M West show in January 2005 was the fourth convention I worked for Canon Communications, but the first as a photographer and writer for the daily show coverage on their website. It was also the first time I got to go to the party in the ballroom.
The band at the ball was a Beach Boys cover band who called themselves the Beach Toys. There were miniature tiki huts set up with trays of hors d’oeuvres. The trays were empty when my friends and I got there half an hour after the party started. When refills were set out, a stampede came out of nowhere elbowing us out of the way and gobbling everything down in less than two minutes. Free food and drinks turn the show attendees into ravenous animals, though some might argue that some of the men at these shows are already animals.
After the first 45 minutes of the party and my second screwdriver, I could tell by the way the dance floor was packed with 35- to 55-year-old men in polyester suits with silk ties and leather loafers leaning over women in their matching blazers and skirts or pants with high heels that it was time to leave before things got any worse. They were all on their fourth drink at least, and why not? They were away from home, they worked all day, and there was an open bar. I could feel the men’s eyes getting somewhat droopy and horny and lingering on us young’uns. I didn’t want to see how far they’d take it; I could guess easily enough.
Leaving the convention center after that first day, I could already feel the blisters forming on the outside of my big and little toes and heels. They would double in size and number by the end of the third day. The women at these shows—still dramatically outnumbered by men—who wear heels carry Band-Aids and cotton balls for cushion in their purses if they’re smart. My new job would have me on my feet constantly while I covered the events, press conferences and floor action for three days.
Floor action, in terms of my job description, means exhibitors enjoying the MD&M Zone (an arcade Canon set up in the middle of the lower-level exhibition hall) or an in-booth briefing, where a company demonstrates how a new product or machine works. Exhibitors try to make their booths stand out with flashing lights, bright-colored bottles or materials lining their packing machines, or free little gadgets to give away, like balsa-wood airplanes, bouncy balls that light up, sensor chips inside paper weights, Band-Aid cases, shoulder bags, pens. And absolutely everything has a company logo on it. There were over 2,200 booths filling the exhibition hall floors.
The grid of booths isn’t a perfect grid; it’s more like the strings on an old tennis racquet, wide in some parts and narrow in others. Little old men, the kind you see greeting shoppers at Wal-Mart, politely check people’s badges as they hurry in and out of each exhibition hall. These are the only polite old men of all the old men at the show. The businessmen and women at these events range in age from 20 to 70. They are all dressed professionally, and they conduct business in a professional manner—about 85 percent of the time.
At lunch on the second day I got my first real taste of “floor action” at this show. My mother, an editor on three of Canon’s magazines, and I went to the second-floor exhibition hall for a quick mini-pizza lunch between seminars. Six dollars each for tomato sauce and cheese on cardboard, plus sodas.
Two men, who looked older than 65, were sitting at the table next to us. Behind the tables was a six-foot-wide, blue-carpeted aisle that separated the eating area from the first row of exhibitor booths. A man at one of those booths was apparently a colleague of the sexagenarians sitting next to us, and they were carrying on a conversation across the aisle.
“Look to your right!” I heard the guy in the booth yell. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the old men were staring at us. I ignored them and asked my mom about articles she had recruited that morning.
“Nah, too young!” one of the old men shouted back. “I need an easy lay, not someone I’m gonna have to wine and dine!”
I swallowed the piece of cardboard I’d been chewing. It hurt my throat going down, and I was glad because it prevented me from turning around and screaming for an apology from the pervert. I whispered to my mom between sips of Coke, “Did you hear what I heard?” She had. I wanted to get away from their leering eyes as soon as possible, but they got up and left first. My appetite was gone too.
This wasn’t the first incident of this kind to happen to me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. My mom has a story like this and some much worse for every convention across this country she’s ever been to in her 18 years in magazines. I sat there, drinking my soda, remembering she’d told me that at one show a man actually grabbed her breast under the pretense of reaching for her identification badge for contact information. When I worked booth duty at a convention in Zurich, a man tried to give me his hotel room key.
What is it about men at business conventions that makes them think it’s all right to treat women like they’re call girls rather than colleagues? There’s something Vegas-like about the whole atmosphere: the windowless rooms, the swirly patterned carpet, the lost sense of time and place.
When a man makes lewd comments to or about me in what is supposed to be a professional business setting, professionalism crumples to the floor like drapes being torn down, and I feel naked and victimized, like I should trade in my suit for fishnet stockings and a black leather miniskirt. My job immediately becomes 10 times more difficult because I must maintain the professionalism and composure that men, without threat of disciplinary action, so easily throw out the window.
I love working for and learning about magazine publishing. It’s an exciting and demanding field that allows me to make good use of the skills I’ve learned as a journalism student. My appreciation for the work is what keeps my mouth shut when I am harassed at a convention. I can’t end sexual harassment any more than I can change the dirty habits of a 60-year-old man, so I know better than to even try. Doing my job and knowing that my work is done well is enough to keep me happy and confident. Knowing that the convention only lasts a few days and then I can go back to an office where I’ve never had to deal with harassment is enough to get me through it.
Stephanie Steward is a journalism and media studies major at Rutgers-Newark. Posted August 2005.
