Originally published April 10, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1273
Well, I anticipated that there would be some response to my column about sexual harassment. What I wasn’t expecting was the number of replies which basically said that they agreed.
First to ring in was the e-mail contingent. Bart G. stated:
I wanted to tell you that I think you’re on the mark with the sexual harassment piece. What was a good-intentioned, needed piece of legislation has morphed into something unusable, that has weakened women’s position in the workplace. The irony of it all, I think, is that the people who were meant to be protected by it aren’t being helped at all by it. It is suffering from the “cry wolf” problem–too many women are using it. I’m assuming you’ll get some, er, disagreement mail, so I thought I’d let you know someone agrees with you…
Well, actually, the next person to write in didn’t disagree at all. Jeff, a.k.a. “Nearmint,” opined:
Just read your BID about sexual harassment and couldn’t agree more with your thoughts on the subject. It would be nice if that particular article could reach more female eyes than I suspect the average issue of CBG does.
By this time, I must admit I was a bit surprised. I was waiting for the firestorm of controversy, and it wasn’t coming in. I was, I admit, almost disappointed. My column on the proposed Jewish controversy garnered few replies, and none of them hostile. My item on the proposed South Park notion with Jesus dancing it out with Michael Flatley over the title “Lord of the Dance” did inspire a hostile Usenet thread, but it seemed mostly the instigation of one rather thickheaded individual who didn’t seem to understand that it was a suggestion for an episode of South Park… and when it was explained to him in sufficient words of one syllable, still ranted for a while. That and one or two e-mails explaining that Jesus still loved me was the entirety of the reply.
Perhaps, in this day and age, people are just getting tougher to shock.
I was almost relieved when I received the following from “Rik 1964″…
I was a fan of PAD before this.
PAD and I are both Jewish, and I have heard these kind of sentiments echoed before, I would have thought he would have too. How would he deal with only a minor change directing this at Jews…
I think the entire concept of ANTI-SEMITISM & HATE CRIME has created a sensitivity to the subject which has become so pervasive that it has rotted away much of the underpinnings of FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Not only that, but it has intruded on precious freedoms of expression, and we are risking the creation of an entire generation of helpless, whining JEWS who are oversensitive, neurotic, and incapable of dealing with anything that offends their sensibilities without running to authorities (usually CHRISTIAN) and asking for protection.
Does PAD know what it was like for women prior to creation of sexual harassment laws? Does he care? As for false charges or over reactions, those are and always have been dealt with individually, but to attack women in general because of sexual harassment laws, seems to me, to show a contempt for women in general.
Well, to a certain degree, Rik, if that’s the comparison you’d want to make, then I’d have to agree that, to a certain degree, your “revision” of my comments about sexual harassment into complaints about anti-Semitism are also true. It’s not exactly what you would call a pervasive trend, since over 50% of the population is female while only about 3% is Jewish. That means it’s not exactly as noticeable a trend.
But take, for instance, the Nazi march on Skokie, Illinois. The American Nazi Party targeted Skokie for a demonstration, particularly because of a high number of Holocaust survivors in residence there. There was major pressure applied to prevent the Nazis from exercising their right to demonstrate. The American Civil Liberties Union was called into the situation, and quite correctly sided with the Nazis and their right to march. The ACLU wound up taking a major hit from Jewish supporters, losing major donors (not to mention board members). This should not have happened. The ACLU simply followed its mandate, and any Jew–indeed, any person–who withdrew support at that point was showing open contempt and intolerance for the right to free speech that is, or should be, enjoyed by everyone in this country.
As for women… good lord, I have no contempt for women. At the risk of sounding cliché… some of my best friends are women. But it is these very women who are my friends–tough, independent, capable of giving as good as they get, and eminently able to handle a wide range of situations, including overt discrimination–who have shaped my attitudes in this matter. What I have contempt for is a situation of me-tooism, oversensitivity, and censorship.
Interestingly, I was only hearing from men on the matter. Fortunately, Ms. E.J. Barnes weighed in (a weight comment! Harassment!) with the following:
As a woman and a feminist, I agree with you wholeheartedly that outcry against sexual harassment has been applied far beyond the genuine wrongdoing it was reasonably intended to fix, while failing to address other forms of harassment in the workplace. Instead of being simply one facet of a general defense by employees against abuse of power, it has become the first refuge of prudes, crybabies and, yes, sexists.
I was pretty young when the late 20th century wave of feminism hit, in the 1960s and 70s, but I was acutely aware of the excuses that many men used to keep women out of their privileged workplaces, from unionized shop floors to boardrooms. Among these excuses was the claim that the ethos of the workplace, the old-boys’ camaraderie, would have to vanish in the presence of “ladies.” Now, a lot of that old-boys’ ethos should have died the death for a number of reasons having little to do with things you couldn’t do or say in “mixed company.” But I didn’t become an engineer expecting that the men who were my comrades would be afraid to say (four-letter-word-referring-to-copulation) in my presence. (Quite the contrary–I’ve had a few male old-timers who were quite uncomfortable hearing the same language that didn’t bother them coming from men, coming from women.)
As you noted, a lot of the problems have come out of university campuses–some of the same campuses, in the 60s and 70s, that were breeding young women who were boldly (some sourpusses said “stridently”) challenging the boundaries of sex roles, including women’s supposedly traditional role as arbiters of social propriety. In these neo-Victorian days, when a female professor of Gender Studies–the very sort of person whose job it is to help young people view critically the sources of our assumptions about sex, sexuality and sex roles–is muzzled because of female students’ complaints about allegedly offensive remarks, it’s become clear that “political correctness” and sexual harassment” have become Frankenstein’s monsters. Likewise, the nude Berkeley student last year, whose actions were intended to illustrate, among other things, the over-sexualization of nudity in our culture, made his point most significantly when it was female classmates who complained of feeling threatened by his presence.
We’ve entered a period characterized by an overall sexual witch-hunt–as should be obvious from some of the commentary coming out of the Clinton/Lewinsky flap. What should be a discussion about whether fraternizing with willing groupies is unprofessional conduct has become an arena to bash Clinton for his sexual appetites. To their credit, some wags have gasped in mock horror at the rumor that the President has actually had sex with his wife.
As for the gender apartheid that may emerge from the new prudery–NOW, wisely, decided against supporting a Massachusetts all-female exercise club in a sex-discrimination suit brought by a man. NOW saw that, should an appeal succeed and exceptions be granted, supposedly for women’s protection, it could turn back many gains that women have made in entering formerly male-only establishments over the past 40 years.
I don’t believe that genuine cases of sexual harassment–those in which the aggrieved party’s career is threatened by pressure or retaliation by the harasser–can or should always be dealt with strictly between the involved parties. After all, not every dispute between male coworkers can, or should be resolved with a fist-fight, let alone something so subtle as an exchange of barbs or of pranks. This goes double for disputes between employees and bosses . But the 1970s women’s movement encourages women’s self-defense–including programs for physical self-defense. The spirit, if not the muscle of self-defense and self-reliance should be the first resort, whenever possible. (And yes, the muscle, if the offender is himself willing to use physical force. This has come in handy for me, as it has for your daughter.)
As you correctly saw, the current abuse of sexual harassment accusations is merely a playing-out in adulthood of the sex-role stereotyping that parents still nurture in childhood: Little girls are conditioned to run to Mommy or Daddy, and they’ll take care of it. A little boy gets told he has to learn to stand up to bullies on his own.
I think Ms. Barnes has summed it up rather well.
Any of you wussy guys have a problem with that?
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
• 
I think that whatever problem there is derives from the underlying statute being (essentially) judge-made law. There is no statutory definition of sexual harassment in the workplace and no statutory prohibition. What the statute prohibits is “discrimination” on the basis of sex, nothing more.
Everything else has been graftred onto that by judges, who sometimes use common sense, sometimes rely on feminist ideas, and sometimes adopt outright feminazism. The employer is left at sea, because he never really knows what is over the line and what isn’t, with the result that, to be “safe,” the employer imposes even more restrictive behaviors. That becomes the new standard for a new flock of judges, who then move the goal posts again, obliging the employers to react in kind.
It’s a never-ending cycle.
Without asserting that there is no problem worthy of correction, I would declare the current statute unconstitutional for being an improper delegation of power, in that it does not set up a cognizable standard of what “discrimination” is. In addition, the current law is at war with itself, since it also prohibits similar “religious” discrimination. Although rationalists may protest, it is a fact that many of our ideas re what is right or wrong about sex derive from religion, so there is the added problem of whether claims of “sexual” discrimination really constitute an attempt at “religious” discrimination going the other way.
This can make for one very expensive legal mess.
As soon as you used the term “feminazism,” you rendered anything else you may have said a complete waste of time to read.
As for there being “no statutory definition of sexual harassment,” let’s see what the EEOC (that’s the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission–look ’em up) has to say about “sexual harassment”:
—It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.
Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.
Both victim and the harasser can be either a woman or a man, and the victim and harasser can be the same sex.
Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).
The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.
—–
I’d say that’s a pretty good definition.
1. The EEOC is an executive agency. It does not enact “statutes.” It does publish rules, and because the STATUTE does NOT define “discrimination on the basis of sex,” the EEOC has stepped in to establish its own UNELECTED determination, valid to the extent an APPOINTED judge elects to agree with it.
That’s the problem:
2. A primary characteristic of Nazism (real Nazism) and the very procedure by which Hitler consolidated his power in Germany was the transfer of legislative power to the executive, enabling the executive to rule by decree. This was precisely what was declared unconstitutional in the “sick chicken” and “hot oil” cases, but of course those precedents were ignored under the second WPA and many of the Court’s cases during the World War (e.g., Wickard v. Filburn, Yakus v. United States), when the Roosevelt Administration once again experimented with formal fascism.
So, if we’re not going to call such procedures (when imposed in the area of employment discrimination) “feminazism,” what precisely are we going to call them?
The fact is that there is a WIDE SPREAD of opinion re just what should or should not be covered pursuant to statute or rule. If your doughty wife’s boss prefers his lover (or even his sexy secretary) for the big promotion, is that “discrimination” against your wife “on the basis of sex?” Appellate opinions are all over the place, and that’s a fact.
It’s also the problem. Businessmen cannot anticipate which judge will decide the case, and it easily can cost half a million dollars to defend it (even if one “wins”). So what happens is that businessmen set standards in the workplace which pander to the most extreme “feminist” view, and the result is that the rest of us get subjected to a lot of feminazi nonsense which can be (and often is) off the wall.
Your own citation of the current EEOC definition proves the point. The “harasser” can be “…a client or customer” — individuals the employer does not really control in terms of supervision. Let’s illustrate the problem with an equally extreme position: “Nìggárš are inferior!” Yes, wrong, racist, I would add foolish, and certainly not supported by the biological evidence; but, some people do still believe it. So, are we to hold an employer responsible because, perhaps, one of his customers elects to wear a pin on his shirt which says, “Repeal the 13th Amendment”?
That, I think, was Peter’s point: Nazis do have a right to march in Skokie, and that this affronts the people who live there constitutionally is irrelevant. But, feminazis are interested in suppressing speech inconsistent with their views, and that is one reason why the subset of “harassers” has expanded.
Is that good? Is that bad? Whatever the answer, the bottom line is that such is not statutory. Rather, it is the result of the ideology of whoever elects to work for the EEOC or put him- or herself forward as a candidate for the federal bench.
Such a process is not democratic; rather, it is the very manifestation of what nazism was — arbitrary rule from arbitrary definitions. It would be like passing a law which says, “No shotgun may have a barrel longer than 18 quatloos.”
You tell me: What is a “quatloo,” and how do I know up front whether the weapon is legal or not? If the answer be: “Whatever I decide it to be after the fact,” then we don’t have a system of laws and we do have the beginnings of a neo-nazi state.
When you get older and look back on your life, you inevitably wish there were things you could of done better. Especially so if you’re a parent. I am very proud the young women my daughters turned into, though. While I could have easily let them wrap me around their little fingers and been “the great protector” I knew that wouldn’t help them in life when they were on their own. Not putting up with helpless behavior, and encouraging them never to define themselves by others – especially a boyfriend – helped their confidence more than running to authority.
In middle school my oldest daughter’s gym class had a boy who thought it was great fun to grab the girls’ bottoms, who would shriek and do little else. When he tried it with my daughter, he got a bloody nose. And quit the harassing from that point on.
Later in high school she was being threatened by a bigger girl. I told her she had to stand her ground, and went over how to follow through with a punch. My wife was livid – you were supposed to report this sort of behavior! I was adamant – if you want any respect from bullies later on, you will not take it. The day came when the girl picked the fight, and I was called to school. I made it clear to the counselor I had encouraged my daughter to stand up for herself – fully aware she would probably be suspended due to a “zero-tolerance” policy. The counselor basically shrugged, said, “Yeah, what’re you gonna do?” and that was basically it. And my daughter was never bothered again throughout high school. Of course I made it clear fighting wasn’t the only answer and nothing to be proud of, but sometimes…you just have to resort to it.
So now I’m lucky enough to feel my daughters can take care of themselves, even while they’re out of state and 8 hours away. You never stop worrying – there are monsters out there. But it’s comforting to know that they will draw a sword instead of cowering behind someone.