|
COPYRIGHT 1998 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
Sexual Shakedowns
It has been nearly twenty-five years since the terminology of sexual harassment began to enter public discourse. In her ground-breaking book Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job (1978: xi), Lin Farley recounts how, while teaching a class on women and work at Cornell University in 1974, she realized that she and her women students had a crucial experience in common: all had left a job because they had been made "too uncomfortable" by the behavior of a man at work.
At the same time, also at Cornell, a 44-year-old woman named Carmita Wood, having been promoted to the position of administrative assistant in one of the university's laboratories, found herself in constant contact with a Cornell official in a nearby office who subjected her to unrelenting sexual attentions. After repeated efforts to get a transfer, Wood resigned. Denied unemployment compensation, she began to talk about her situation (Farley 1978: 82-84). A group of women gathered to help her pursue her case and, in this context, the term "sexual harassment" was first used to designate a problem that, until then, had had no name (Kramarae and Treichler 1985: 413).
Lin Farley's book, published just four years later, was one of the powerful early salvos in a rapidly defined straggle. Shortly thereafter, Catharine MacKinnon's The Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979) publicized her argument that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination, and as such a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in employment - a prohibition that Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments extended to educational institutions receiving federal dollars (Sandler 1997: 1).
Looking back at this sequence of events from the vantage point of the present - a time in which sexual harassment is one of the hottest issues not only in the workplace but also in educational institutions at all levels, from kindergarten to graduate school - I find myself much intrigued by the process in which a problem without a name has been transformed into a name that is itself a problem. How did we get from clear examples of sexual extortion - the substance of Farley's book - to a preoccupation with "comfort" levels, dirty jokes, ogling, and passing innuendoes? How did sexism, sex, and sexual harassment get entangled to such an extent that, today, a bit of overheard banter or a clumsy sexual overture in the office or school is as actionable as the sort of persistent sexual aggression described by Farley?
Farley herself gives us a clue. On her very first page she characterizes as "uncomfortable" the situation she and her women students encountered in their places of work. It was not sexual extortion, not pressure to perform sexual acts as the condition of continued employment that disturbed them, but a variety of overt manifestations of male sexuality in the context of the workplace. All were understood as "male assertions of dominance" (Farley 1978: 16). From the very beginning of the discussion, therefore, the subject of sexual harassment was marked by conflicting definitions rooted in feminist assumptions about the relations between men and women. It took some years for the notion of "comfort" to become enshrined in law (through the concept of "hostile environment harassment"), but in this key early document it is clearly foreshadowed.
Farley's book still made a strong case for the need for a concept such as "sexual shakedown." Recounting story after story of women who had appalling experiences at work, Farley demonstrated that some recourse was needed for women whose work lives were made intolerable by the sexual aggression of men. But there is a long distance between objecting to the intolerable and demanding the comfortable, and we have crossed that space in an astonishingly short period of time. The concept of sexual harassment has, by now, become so pervasive that it is hard to imagine a time when the awareness of it, and the terminology it has generated, did not exist. Yet, instead of leading us into a better world, it seems as though the establishment of sexual harassment as a category of illegal behavior has led us into a world in which sexuality itself - as innuendo, as allusion, as an awareness that is a vital part of life - is increasingly being viewed as illegitimate.
Farley's work, however, also suggested that there was another side to the coin. Cases that she discussed (such as that of Elizabeth Ray, employed by Congressman Wilbur Hays in a job for which she was unqualified) testified to the ways in which women have always been able to use their sexuality as a means to gain upward mobility. Is closing this avenue down something women necessarily want? The issues lurking behind sexual harassment, then, have to do not only with fairness and equality in the public sphere but also with our definitions of the kind of world we want to live in and of who we are - bodies and souls - as we go about our daily activities. These are basic issues, arousing passion and resentment, for the truth is that women are no more united than men in their pursuit of their own individual ends and, like men, they will use whatever means it takes to achieve them.
Most important from our present vantage point is the realization that "sexual shakedown" has little to do with the vast majority of situations that today account for what is called "sexual harassment." The immense literature on the subject tells us that "quid pro quo harassment" - the extortion of sexual favors as a condition of employment or advancement - is now a rarity. It is the easy case that should have found legal recourse, and did.
But it is in the nature of feminism, as of every other social activist movement, to propose ever more expansive definitions of the problems over which it seeks to stimulate public outrage. Rhetorical effectiveness makes its own demands: one does not draw attention to an issue by declaring it to be of minor importance, or peripheral to most people's daily lives (Best 1990).
This is borne out by the literature on sexual harassment, written by an ever-increasing group of experts in this new field, eager to give lectures, workshops, and training sessions, and prepared to draft policy and testify at trials. In their writings major and minor infractions are blurred, gross offensiveness is conflated with a mere word or gesture that made someone - perhaps only a bystander - "uncomfortable." Responding to the alarm sounded by the Sexual Harassment Industry, as I call it (Patai 1997), we have moved from addressing a visible and palpable wrong to institutionalizing a corrective apparatus that has, by now, itself become a problem.
Because the Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI), small disclaimers notwithstanding, defines its concerns as being primarily with the wrongs that men do to women, there has been little feminist complaint about the excesses of its activities, the tense environment it creates, or the many ways in which it infringes on freedom of expression and association. But these activities have demonstrated that the charge of sexual harassment can be leveled against anyone. An elaborate series of laws, regulations, and policies is now in place, designed to support the complainant and cast automatic suspicion on the alleged harasser. "Presumed innocent" is no longer the prevailing assumption when accusations of sexual harassment are made.
Not content with freeing women from discrimination in their professional and academic lives, the SHI has, moreover, opened a new avenue for advancement as alleged victims find themselves rewarded with both monetary and professional gains. Consider the case of Susan Hippensteele, who won a sexual harassment suit against the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her major professor, she claimed, having repeatedly harassed her with sexual suggestions while she was a graduate student, once grabbed her and planted a kiss on her forehead. Such an experience, she later affirmed, "is life changing" (Hippensteele 1997: 299) - true enough in her own case, for after winning her suit and receiving her Ph.D. in psychology, she found employment on the same campus as a "sexual harassment counselor/victim's advocate for students, faculty, and staff" (Sandler and Shoop 1997: xi).
In her role as "victim's advocate," Hippensteele guided three student complainants in their ever-escalating charges of sexual harassment against a professor...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
