sexual harassment Archives - Tracie McMillan

When the Kitchen Isn’t Safe for Women

January 22, 2025October 30, 2017

New York Times
October 30, 2017

In 2010, I took a job at a New York City Applebee’s. I said I was considering culinary school and wanted to get some experience in a real kitchen, but I was actually there to write about the experience for a book. I had grand plans to take a genre steeped in machismo and tell a woman’s story instead.

I got what I was after, though not in the way I had hoped. My kitchen stint included sexual harassment so common that it became background noise, and a sexual assault, which did not.

Here’s The Woman Rush Limbaugh Is Attacking Today; ‘Totally Bizarre,’ She Says

April 1, 2024March 6, 2012

Forbes • March 6, 2012

Say you’re a conservative radio host who’s losing advertisers left and right for saying some deeply misinformed and misogynistic things about the lifestyle of a highly-educated single woman, and now you need to change the conversation. How do you do that? If you’re Rush Limbaugh, you do it by attacking a different woman on the basis of her singleness, youth and education.

shoutout over @DailyMail with @DaisyDumas for the @DailyBeast piece on sexual assault

April 1, 2024March 3, 2012

Daisy Dumas from the UK’s Daily Mail gave my Daily Beast piece a nice shout out yesterday. Check it out here.

nice writeup from @dugbarry from @jezebel re: sexual harassment in kitchens http://ow.ly/9qoBr

April 1, 2024March 3, 2012

Undercover Reporter at Applebee’s Recounts Horrific Sexual Assault

April 1, 2024March 3, 2012

Jezebel • March 3, 2012

Applebee’s may be great place to wash down your cheese-infused dinner with an Oreo milkshake (they still have those, yes?), but, according to an undercover reporter who spent time on the prep line at one of the popular restaurant chains, its male-dominated kitchens simmer with sexual aggression.

Anthony Bourdain and Top Chef Have It Wrong: the Boys’ Club Is No Fun

January 22, 2025March 2, 2012

The Daily Beast • March 2, 2012

I’ve always wanted to be a tomboy, the kind of girl who could keep up with the boys—and do them one better. So when I landed in the kitchen of an Applebee’s, reporting undercover for my book, The American Way of Eating, I felt like I was getting my chance to be a downmarket, female version of Anthony Bourdain. My workplace was a perfect setting for it.

60 Seconds With…Eve Ensler

January 22, 2025January 1, 2008

Contribute • January/February 2008

In the 10 years since the debut of her still-controversial play, The Vagina Monologues, playwright Eve Ensler’s V-Day campaign to halt violence against women and girls has gone global, raising $50 million to support anti-violence organizations at home and abroad, from India to Asia and the Middle East. This year, a tenth-anniversary run of the play is being performed in 1,200 cities worldwide. CONTRIBUTE’s Tracie McMillan caught up with Ensler recently to talk about her decade of activism and her take on the changing landscape of philanthropic giving.