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“This is not okay,” I thought.

It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.

It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit Pause and ask everyone watching, “Well? What would you do?”

Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space?

Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly, “Back up, you creep, get away from me, I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.”

I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard.

I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm—biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.

Of course, had I told Trump off, he surely would have capitalized on it gleefully. A lot of people recoil from an angry woman, or even just a direct one. Look at what happened to Elizabeth Warren, silenced in the Senate chamber for reading a letter from Coretta Scott King because it was critical of Jeff Sessions, a male Senator, during his confirmation hearing for Attorney General. (Moments later, Jeff Merkley, a male Senator, was allowed to read the letter. Funny how that worked.) Senator Kamala Harris was derided as “hysterical” for her entirely coolheaded and professional questioning of Jeff Sessions (him again) during a Senate hearing. As one writer put it, she was being “Hillary’d.” Arianna Huffington was recently interrupted in a meeting of the Uber board of directors when she was making a point about—of all things—how important it was to increase the number of women on the board! And the man who talked over her did so to say that increasing women would only mean more talking! You can’t make this up.

In other words, this isn’t something that only happens to me. Not even close.

It also doesn’t just happen to women on the Democratic side of politics. Trump made fun of Carly Fiorina’s face because she competed against him for President. He lashed out against Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski in gross, physical terms because they challenged him. Maybe that’s why Nicolle Wallace, White House Communications Director for George W. Bush, has warned that the Republican Party is in danger of being “permanently associated with misogyny” if leaders don’t stand up to Trump’s treatment of women.

This hearkens back to a powerful ad we ran during the campaign called “Mirrors.” It shows adolescent girls looking tentatively at themselves in the mirror—tucking their hair behind their ears, evaluating their profile, trying to decide if they are okay-looking, like so many girls do when they see themselves. Over their images, we ran a tape of cruel things Trump has said on the record about women over the years: “She’s a slob.” “She ate like a pig.” “I’d look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers.” Was this the voice we wanted in our daughters’ heads? Our granddaughters’? Our nieces’? Or our sons’ or grandsons’ or nephews’ heads for that matter? They deserve better than the toxic masculinity Trump embodies.

Well, he’s in their heads now. His voice resounds far and wide.

Now it’s on all of us to make sure his ugly words don’t damage our girls—and boys—forever.