Archive for the ‘Sexual Harassment’ Category
British Prison Service Settles Complaint with Lesbian Guards
Great Britain’s Prison Service reached a settlement with nine lesbian prison guards who had accused the Prison Service of sexual discrimination.
Back in March 2002, the nine prison guards were transferred out of Holloway Prison after a five-month investigation claimed they were part of an organized group that was sexually harassing female staff at the prison.
At the time, the women were accused of harassing heterosexual female staff and trying to pressure them to become lesbians. Martin Narey, then director general of the Prison Service, said at the time,
The findings of the investigation report into bullying and intimidation of staff at Holloway have deeply concerned me. The findings reveal that sexual harassment, bullying and intimidation of staff have taken place, and have not, until now, been properly challenged. Behavior of this kind will not be tolerated in the prison service. Management should be tough. It should be robust. But it should never be intimidating. Bullying and sexual harassment are totally unacceptable. These staff who have been there some time effectively established themselves as an alternative management structure. They turned Holloway into an unhealthy place in which to be going to work.
Former Holloway staff member Terry White went further, telling The Observer,
They wanted the challenge of turning straight women. They would target the best looking and most feminine of the new recruits, especially the young ones from outside London.
The women responded with a complaint calling the allegations unfounded. In January, the Prison Service reached a settlement that explicitly stated the sexual harassment claims were in fact unfounded. The Prison Service also agreed to a six-figure settlement with the nine women and allowed them to apply for jobs at Holloway Prison in the future.
Sources:
Damages for lesbian prison guards. The BBC, January 28, 2005.
Lesbian Prison Officers Disciplined. The Observer, March 18, 2002.
Lesbian prison officers claim sexual discrimination. Dan Thomas, Personnel Today, January 13, 2005.
Tags: Great Britain
Library Settles Internet Sexual Harassment Case
A Minneapolis decided in August to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against it by 12 librarians. The case nails the final coffin in any pretension that sexual harassment law is anything but a call to censorship.
The librarians sued because the Minneapolis library decided to offer unfiltered Internet access. Inevitably some patrons of the library chose to use the Internet to view pornography.
At which point the librarians sued claiming that their exposure to the pornography viewed by library patrons constituted a hostile working environment.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission agreed in 2001 that there was probably cause that exposure to the INtenret pornography constituted a hostile working environment, but the Justice Department declined to sue the library on behalf of the plaintiffs. So they hired an attorney to pursue the case.
The library decided to settle by paying the librarians $435,000 and likely adding restrictions on Internet access for library patrons.
As Eugene Volokh noted in an article on the case back in 2001 for Reason, this case could have far reaching impact,
This is just the latest great leap forward for harassment law. Harassment law already forces employers to suppress sexually suggestive displays (not by any means limited to pornography), sexual jokes, politically offensive statements, and religious proselytizing.
During the Clinton scandals, employment experts sensibly suggested that employers had to suppress Clinton-Lewinsky jokes, because such jokes might have helped create a “sexually hostile work environment.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has argued that “educational harassment law” — a body of law developed by analogy to workplace harassment law — requires universities to implement student speech codes. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has likewise argued that public accommodations harassment law outlaws American Indian team names and mascots, on the grounds that such symbols are racially offensive. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination forced a Boston bar to take down a display that supposedly expressed racist viewpoints.
Ah what a brave new world harassment law has opened up.
Sources:
Library settles with workers who sued over hostile work environment. WCCO.Com, August 15, 2003.
British Gov’t Workers Required to Report Inter-Office Sexual Liasions
UK newspaper The Observer reports that fears of sexual harassment lawsuits have prompted many government agencies in Great Britain to require employees to report any sexual relationships they are having with their colleagues to their respective human resources department.
And such fears appear to be well-founded. According to The Observer,
Research by academics at the University of Sydney suggests that almost a quarter of failed office relationships end in sexual harassment cases, and a survey in America by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 52 per cent of companies believe they suffer in some way because of romance in the workplace. Nearly a third of employees quizzed said they feared office affairs would end in claims of sexual harassment. Small wonder then that 95 per cent of personnel managers said they believed office romances should not be allowed or, at least, should be discouraged.
Which, of course, takes further along the road to where Daphne Patai predicted the sexual harassment industry was eventually headed — to stigmatizing heterosexual relationships as inherently suspect.
Are two of your coworkers sleeping together? Well, clearly, somebody should be watching that situation to make certain it doesn’t get out of hand. As Patai put it, “Two fundamentally opposing world views are currently in collision. One of them sees sex (especially male sexuality) as a perpetual danger. The other sees sex as primarily a source of pleasure for both women and men.”
Clearly the former are in charge in the UK.
Source:
Personnel affair. The Observer, July 20, 2003.
Tags: Great Britain
Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Dismissed Over Plaintiff’s Loose Lips
Women’s E-News reports that a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against Ford Motor Company was dismissed by a judge after the plaintiff and plaintiff’s lawyers publicly talked about a prior sexual misconduct conviction by one of the defendants.
Justine Maldonado is suing Ford claiming that an inspector at one of its plants, Daniel P. Bennett, exposed himself to her and demanded oral sex. Several other women have filed similar lawsuits against Ford and Bennett. According to Women’s E-News, Ford maintains that it investigated the complaints and found them baseless.
Maldonado and her lawyer both gave interviews with reporters in which they discussed Bennett’s 1995 conviction for exposing himself to three women. Under the terms of that conviction, Bennett’s conviction was expunged after he met court-determined requirements.
Circuit Court Judge William J. Giovan dismissed Maldonado’s lawsuit saying that the plaintiffs efforts at publicizing the expunged conviction was little more than an attempt to prejudice any jury that might hear the case. In his decision, Giovan wrote that, “The behavior in question has been intentional, premeditated and intransigent. It was designed to reach the farthest boundaries of the public consciousness.”
According to a Detroit Free Press story, along with interviews with the press Maldonado and her lawyer also staged protests and handed out flyers detailing Bennett’s expunged conviction.
Sources:
Lawyer to file appeal in Ford case. Alejandro Bodipo-Memba, Detroit Free Press, August 27, 2002.
Judge Dismisses Sex Harassment Suit against Ford. August 31, 2002.
Does Michigan’s Sexual Harassment Law Violate the First Amendment?
Wayne State University Law School professor Kingsley Browne wrote an op-ed in the Detroit News earlier this month arguing that Michigan’s sexual harassment statute violates the First Amendment. He was specifically referring to Burns v. City of Detroit in which a woman won a $1 million judgment against the City of Detroit for the insulting and vulgar speech directed at her by co-workers. But, according to Browne, both the verdict and the statute are in violation of Constitutional protections of free speech.
A major problem with the Burns v. City of Detroit case, according to Browne, is that the jury heard testimony about both constitutionally protected speech and speech that was not constitutionally protected. But the jury was not informed that it could only decide on liability for speech that was not constitutionally protected.
Moreover, so far rulings on sexual harassment have engaged in obvious viewpoint discrimination. Browne writes,
Judicial scrutiny is at its highest when the government restricts speech based upon the viewpoint expressed, which is precisely what the harassment law does. Progressive statements about women are fine; Neanderthal statements are not. Statements praising women as a group raise no issue; statements critical of women do.
As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which covers Michigan, has said, harassment law requires “that an employer take prompt action to prevent . . . bigots from expressing their opinions in a way that abuses or offends their co-workers.” This is classic viewpoint regulating, which is almost always impermissible.
But the truly bizarre nature of sexual harassment statutes comes in with the whole idea of a “hostile environment.” As Browne notes, the hostile environment theory makes it all but impossible for individuals to tell whether or not their speech will break the law. Browne writes,
The vagueness of the harassment statute is made worse by the “totality of the circumstances” standard. A hostile environment can be created by a collection of different speech by different speakers even though no single statement by itself would violate the law.
One cannot know, therefore, whether a hostile environment exists without knowing the entire array of speech that will be challenged. Speakers are supposed to be given an advance warning of what can be said and what cannot, but the hostile environment standard is always assessed after the fact.
So how to fix sexual harassment statutes? Simple, says Browne — require that plaintiffs prove intent. Browne notes that a Michigan anti-stalking law was upheld because rather than simply describing behaviors that qualified as stalking, it also required that plaintiffs show the defendant engaged in “willful” conduct to harass the alleged victim. Such a similar standard should also be incorporated into sexual harassment statutes.
Source:
Harassment law chills free speech. Kingsley Browne, The Detroit News, July 9, 2002.
Columbia’s Sexual Harassment Policies and Its Status as a Private School
Wendy McElroy makes an interesting observation that I had not heard before about the controversy surrounding Columbia’s sexual harassment policy. If Columbia were a public university or college its policy would be clearly unconstitutional and the courts would take little time at all overturning it. Columbia is a private university, however, and so doesn’t have to abide by the Constitutional protections that a state institution would have to consider — the standard for private colleges is that it has to adhere to “fundamental fairness.”
But as McElroy points out, Columbia is using a federal grant to pay the university official in charge of administering the harassment policy,
Columbia’s Administration also points out that the University is a private institution and the courts have upheld its right to determine which procedures are appropriate to serve its needs. In short, students have no right to expect Constitutional protections from university procedures. Private or not, it is the government, which means the taxpayer, who will foot much of the bill for Columbia’s experiment with gender justice. As part of their Report, the Task Force mentioned that grant funding to finance a full-time officer responsible for disciplining sexual misconduct was available from the Department of Justice. The on-campus gender crusader is estimated to cost $125,000 of taxpayer money in the first year. Yet, according to Patricia Catapano, who chaired the Task Force, “The courts only have said that Columbia…has to have fundamental fairness” because it is a private institution.
If Columbia wants to maintain its Star Chamber-like system of student justice it may have the right to do so as a private university, but it certainly shouldn’t use taxpayer money to enforce a policy that would be unconstitutional at a public institution.
Source:
Gender Madness on Columbia’s Campus. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, March 20, 2001.
Tags: Columbia University, Wendy McElroy
Columbia University Refuses to Defend Its Sexual Misconduct Policy
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports that Columbia University is apparently refusing to publicly defend its controversial sexual misconduct policy. The new policy completely strips persons accused of sexual misconduct of any meaningful rights and has garnered a lot of unfavorable publicity for the university.
On February 23, the Columbia University chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union organized an event to discuss the policy. Along with opponents of the policy, such as Columbia Law professor Vivian Berger, the ACLU invited Charlene Allen, the administrator in charge of Columbia’s Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education, as well as representatives from the campus group that pushed for the new policy, Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER). SAFER declined the invitation, but Allen agreed to participate. Shortly before the event, however, Columbia issued a statement that Allen would not participate after all. Fox News recently aired a story about the policy, and again Columbia refused to comment on the policy.
FIRE’s Harvey Silvergate said,
Columbia cannot bear the public scrutiny. They didn’t show up at the ACLU event, nor for the television program, because there is no principled defense for their policy. How can they justify the stripping away of the due process protection deemed necessary for hundreds of years. HOw can they justify the stripping away of the due process protections deemed necessary for hundreds of years in a free and decent society? The policy is worthy of the kangaroo courts of the former Soviet Union, the current People’s Republic of China, or Spain under Franco. It is not worthy of a world-class class university in a free country.
A good insight into the sort of thinking that went into this policy was given last year by SAFER co-chair Sarah Richardson. Asked by a reporter about the rights of individuals accused of a crime, Richardson asked, “Why are we so concerned about the rapist?” Guilty until proven innocent is at the core of SAFER’s claims and the “justice” meted out by the Sexual Misconduct Policy.
Sources:
Columbia University unable to defend policy in public; activist enemies of due process censor FIRE, then make a U-turn. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Press Release, March 13, 2001.
Tags: American Civil Liberties Union, Columbia University, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Columbia’s Star Chamber
Columbia University recently decided it had a problem. All of the red tape that Americans come to expect when accused of serious crimes, such as the right to have a lawyer present, the right to cross-examine witnesses, and the right to confront one’s accuser were getting in the way of the university dealing with alleged rapists and sexual harassers. Fortunately Columbia found a solution — get rid of all the mumbo jumbo about the rights of the accused and simply throw the book at the bastards.
Columbia’s new guidelines for dealing with sexual harassment and assault charges leave those accused of such transgressions almost no ability to defend themselves. Under its old policies, accused students had to be given at least 48 hours notice of any hearing along with a list of witnesses who would testify. Now their is no requirement that they notify students in advance, and are not required to inform the accused of the charge or the witnesses until immediately prior to the accused testifying. It goes without saying that contrary to long-established principles of Western jurisprudence, accused students are not allowed to attend their trial — they aren’t even allowed to be in the room when other witnesses testify. Instead they are forced to rely on “summaries” of any testimony made by the three personal panel administering the case.
Even that wasn’t enough for the feminists on Columbia’s campus who complained that red tape was letting too many sexual harassers and others off. Only students or faculty who have undergone “special training” in sexual harassment and sexual assault will be allowed to preside over such cases. Columbia claims that this will make their panels more objective, but of course it will do just the opposite. As The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted, whether it be the witchcraft trials in the 16th century or the special drug courts in America today, “judges and jurors in such ’special’ courts assume that it is their mission to eliminate a widespread and specific social problem rather than to achieve justice for individuals.”
Columbia even went so far as to completely eliminate any standard of proof for charges of sexual harassment and/or assault. Under its old policy an allegation had to be proven by “clear and convincing evidence” and specified that the burden as on those making the accusation to prove their cases. The new policy simply omits any mention of standards of proof and who has the burden. As FIRE notes, “it is an invitation to trial by hysteria in a politically charged atmosphere.”
And Columbia certainly has a politically charged atmosphere. Law professor George Fletcher was warned by Law School Dean David Leebron that because one of his law exams included a question about case law that involves victims of violence who believe the net result of the violence against them benefited them that his exam was illegal and possibly constituted sexual harassment.
Columbia defended its policies in a letter saying that it was mandated by law to deal with sexual harassment, but if Columbia were a public university its sexual harassment police would be blatantly unconstitutional. Because it is a private institution, it is free to simply throw out even minimal safeguards for students accused of sexual harassment or assault.
Sources:
Columbia public relations official makes false claims to defend a fatally flawed policy. Press release, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, October 25, 2000.
Back to the Middle Ages on campus. John Silber, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, November 3, 2000.
Higher ed. Norah Vincent, The Village Voice, October 25-31, 2000.
Hail Columbia?. Edwin Feulner, The Heritage Foundation, October 27, 2000.
Academic freedom under assault at Columbia Law School. Press release, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, September 29, 2000.
Accused Rapist Gets Disability Benefits
The Washington Post recently reported (DNA Tested In Sex Abuse Case Against Ex-Fairfax Principal) on the case of former high school principal Anthony Rizzo Jr. A former student of Rizzo’s claimed he sexually assaulted her hundreds of times, but two separate trials have resulted in hung juries due largely to a lack of physical evidence against Rizzo.
The bizarre part of the case is that after he was fired, Rizzo filed for and now receives benefits from the state for a peculiar disability — Rizzo claims he has a “psychosexual disorder” that compels him to sexually harass any women that he supervises. After Rizzo was fired by his school in 1989 for sexually harassing female teachers he supervised, Rizzo filed for the benefits and won them on a technicality when the state of Virginia missed a deadline to reach a decision his absurd claim.
Virginia is now forced to try to demonstrate that Rizzo no longer has a compulsion to sexually harass female employees. It recently stopped his benefits after Rizzo’s lawyer advised him to invoke his Fifth Amendment right during a state psychologist’s examination to determine if he still suffered from his “psychosexual disorder.” Rizzo is suing to get the payments reinstated.
Only in America could you simultaneously have a sexual harassment witch hunt that attempts to criminalize all sexual speech in the work space, while at the same time financially rewarding a man who admits he attempts to coerce sex from female employees.
The War on Heterosexuality: A Review of Daphne’s Heterophobia
Heterophobia:
Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism
by Daphne Patai
Amazon.Com Price: $17.47
(follow link above to order)
In 1998 a sexual harassment lawsuit against a sociology professor at the
university my wife attends caused no small amount of handwringing by both the
university and the student newspaper. The paper expressed outraged that the
university tolerated sexual harassers, even though the university fired the
man after a cursory investigation. The university was eventually forced to rehire
the man after an arbitrator ruled he had been dismissed without just cause.
The professor?s alleged victim asked a court for several hundred thousand
dollars in compensation to compensate for lost income; she claimed she was unable
to continue her studies after the incident, even though she kept taking classes
and got rather good grades. The judge handling the case did eventually award
her $50,000, but that probably didn’t even begin to cover her legal fees.
The most fascinating part of the case, however, was the nature of the alleged
sexual harassment. For a young woman to be so shattered as to be unable to continue
her academic career, many assumed the harassment must have been rather extreme
? perhaps he offered to give her better grades in exchange for sex or maybe
he repeatedly asked her out implying she might not do well in his class otherwise
or maybe the professor was an inveterate pervert who laced his conversations
with foul anecdotes and obscene comments.
In fact, the charges centered on four or five statements the professor made
which the student (and the university, before the arbitrator forced it to back
down) claimed constituted sexual harassment. What sort of horrible things was
the professor saying? Once, while meeting with students before the beginning
of a class, a woman student who was pregnant complained that she felt ugly because
she was gaining weight. The professor replied that he thought pregnant women
were sexy. The student making the harassment allegation claimed that simply
overhearing this comment transformed the classroom into a den of oppression
in which no learning could take place.
On another occasion during class, the professor started to draw a diagram
on the board, stopped, joked that the drawing looked a bit too much like a penis,
erased the drawing and redrew it, and then continued with his lecture.
If that weren?t enough to send any virtuous woman screaming to be protected
from this lecher, the alleged victim suffered from a medical condition known
as “lazy eye” in which poor motor control in the eyes results in one
or both wandering. The student complained to the professor about not getting
any relief for the problem from her physician. The professor consulted a journal
on the problem and photocopied a list he found giving several remedies that
some people had found worked for them ? one of those remedies, which apparently
does work for some people with the condition, was sexual intercourse.
These three incidents were presented in courts as the depraved rantings of
a man displaying a pattern of exploitation toward his female students. On the
basis of these and similar incidents, the university tried to fire the sociology
professor from his job and a judge entered a judgment for $50,000 against him.
Welcome to the bizarre world of academic sexual harassment that Daphne Patai
dissects and exposes in her astonishing book, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment
and the Future of Feminism. Patai is certainly not the first person to examine
how what she calls the Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI) has spiraled out of
control, but hers is the first book to go beyond the outrageous incidents and
come up with a convincing — and oftentimes unnerving — explanation as to why
sexual harassment has become such an obsession at universities and colleges.
Her provocative thesis is this: within radical feminism there is a group of
scholars and activists who view heterosexuality and heterosexual behavior as
inherently oppressive to women. In often complex ways, the views of this radical
minority are being incorporated by and in turn drive the sexual harassment witch
hunts. In Patai’s view, then, sexual harassment regulations and enforcement
is becoming the activist arm of a philosophy that seeks to deconstruct and destroy
heterosexuality (even though those obsessively pursuing sexual harassment cases
are often unaware of the origins or logical outcomes of many of the ideas and
philosophies driving their activism).
That’s quite a thesis, and to be honest it?s one I doubted Patai could deliver,
but by the end of the book not only does she deliver in spades but Patai has
written one of the most concise and penetrating analyses of radical feminism
available. This is one of the few books I’ve ever read that gave me that so-called
“click” experience feminists are always talking about — Patai gets to the core
of radical feminist philosophy and exposes its assumptions like no one else
has.
And the major assumption of radical feminism is that heterosexuality is inherently
oppressive to women. Patai concedes that the number of feminists who actively
maintain this position is relatively small (if widely and repeatedly published),
but on the other hand she demonstrates they are rather influential and more
importantly that their assumptions, if not yet their conclusions, have gradually
seeped into the world view of those waging the war against sexual harassment.
Of course the radical feminists who view heterosexuality as inherently oppressive
include the usual suspects. Patai notes University of Michigan law professor
Catharine MacKinnon’s view that sexual harassment is simply a more extreme version
of the way men normally treat women. Patai also quotes from Michigan State University
communications professor, Marilyn Frye, who summarizes the critique of heterosexuality
in straightforward language:
Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual
woman’s erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens
to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices
defined and regulated by patriarchal kinship systems, by both civil and religious
law, and by strenuously enforced mores and deeply entrenched values and taboos.
Those definitions, regulations, values, and taboos are about male fraternity
and the oppression and exploitation of women. They are not about love, human
warmth, solace, fun, pleasure or deep knowledge between people.
For those women who might profess to enjoy being heterosexual, Frye notes such
objections should be taken no more seriously than one would take a slave who
maintains he enjoys his status and thus opposes abolition. Frye’s views are
reflected in writings by other radical feminists such as E. Kay Trimberger (”‘compulsory
heterosexuality’ is part of a power structure benefiting heterosexual males
at the expense of women and homosexuals”), Andrea Dworkin (”intercourse
with men as we know them ? requires an abortion of creativity and strength,
a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death”), Robin
West (who argues women are like hostages suffering from Stockholm syndrome who
identify with their heterosexual male captors), Bell Hooks (”the context
of these[heterosexual] intimate relationships is also the site of domination
and oppression”) and others.
The genius of Heterophobia is to demonstrate how the extreme views
of these radical feminists underpins much of the current regimen of sexual harassment.
As Patai notes, the SHI is not simply interested in stopping this or that particular
incidence of sexual harassment but rather many of its advocates seek a total
transformation of society through regulation of sexual expression.
Patai gets a lot of mileage out
of the popular sexual harassment manual, Sexual Harassment on Campus: A Guide
for Administrators, Faculty, and Students edited by Bernice Sandler and
Robert J. Stoops. Like similar such manuals, Sexual Harassment on Campus
argues that sexual harassment is pervasive at universities and colleges
and so must be rooted out with particular vigor. To back up the claim that sexual
harassment is pervasive, however, it must be converted into a totalizing ideology
so that just about every interaction between men and women can be interpreted
as sexual harassment — and the book obliges with a laundry list of items from
sexual innuendoes and jokes to email with any sort of sexual content to “not
taking seriously someone who experience sexual harassment” to “asking for sexual
behavior” right through and including outright acts of violence and rape. Not
believing a woman who alleges sexual harassment is placed on a continuum with
violently raping that woman.
As Patai aptly points out, the reason for this sort of laundry list is to
make everything from a professor’s attempt to cheer up a pregnant student to
interest in a student?s academic performance seem as suspect and offensive as
a violent rape (in fact Sandler herself claims rape is just an extreme form
of peer harassment).
To cover all the bases, the SHI even invented the concept of “grooming” to
ensure any and all possible comments or actions by a professor are captured
by its net. On this charge, a professor who tells a student that a paper she
wrote is rather exceptional or that the point she made in class was very good
can be accused of “grooming” or attempting to soften that student’s
resolve in order to later take advantage of her for sexual purposes.
Once sexual harassment leaves the realm of quid pro quo arrangements, in which
a woman’s job advancement is tied to her acquiescence to sexual acts, or truly
egregious examples of hostile workplaces, and instead becomes obsessed with
the sort of sexual banter and flirtation that both men and women regularly engage
in, it is already a long way toward internalizing the radical feminist claim
that heterosexuality itself is a danger to women. If, for example, asking a
woman if she would like to have sex can be considered harassment even when there
is no hint of a quid pro quo relationship, the radical anti-heterosexual feminists
have gone a long way toward achieving their goal of stigmatizing heterosexuality
itself. The underlying assumption of Sandler and her ilk is that heterosexual
sexuality is inherently dangerous for women.
As Patai sums it up, “Two fundamentally opposing world views are currently
in collision. One of them sees sex (especially male sexuality) as a perpetual
danger. The other sees sex as primarily a source of pleasure for both women
and men.” Much of the SHI clearly endorses the former proposition, especially
in its incorporation of overtly radical feminist ideas of power. Like the radical
feminists, the SHI operates on the assumption that women are always in a subordinate
relation to heterosexual men. In fact whereas male professors are seen as harassing
their female students, the concept of contra-power sexual harassment has been
developed to explain away sexual interaction between female professors and their
male students ? even when in a relationship with someone in a superior position
on the hierarchy, it is the man who is see as having all the power.
Patai sums up the SHI project correctly when she writes that “male sexual
interest is not simply being construed, or interpreted as “power.”
It has actually been redefined as such.”
And once this happens, who?s going to risk losing his job over a stray comment?
Many of the professors my wife deals with now refuse to meet with students of
the opposite sex behind closed doors. A woman professor I remember having several
fascinating discussions with behind her closed (and locked) door now refuses
to meet with students unless the door is wide open. The SHI has introduced the
paranoid style to the world of academia. Openness about feelings, honest detailed
evaluation of a student’s progress and other important parts of human, much
less academic, interactions are being curtailed by professors who feel they
need to cover themselves rather than end up denounced in language generally
reserved for violent rapists.
Of course like other totalizing social movements this one is doomed to failure,
as Patai recognizes; radical feminists are extremely unlikely, to say the least,
to make much of an inroad into stigmatizing sexuality before both men and women
rebel against such a stultifying ideology. But before that happens the main
victim of the SHI, besides the many men and a few women destroyed by it, is
likely to be feminism itself. The SHI is doing to feminism what its ultraconservative
opponents could only dream — it is turning the young women (and men) the movement
needs into its most effective opponents. Although radical feminists blame young
women’s disenchantment with feminism on a right-wing “backlash,” in fact it
is largely due to their accurate perception that too many feminists hold their
heterosexual lifestyle choices as inherently inauthentic and oppressive. This,
I believe, explains why so many young women hold political views that are traditionally
considered feminist, but at the same time refuse to self-identify themselves
as feminists. They endorse sexual equality, but (rightly) are uncomfortable
being associated with a movement increasingly beholden to its lunatic fringe.
As the principles of the radical feminists have filtered into mainstream feminist
organizations and philosophies, the turn away from feminism by young people
(and feminist veterans such as Patai) has only accelerated. If all these men
and women turned away from radical feminism and back to the goals of sexual
equality (the demand to treat men and women as individuals and not as cardboard
cutout representatives of their gender) this might be a good thing, but many
of these people are increasingly turning toward traditionalist conservative
anti-feminists such as F. Carolyn Graglia or Wendy Shallit who locate contemporary
feminism’s errors not where it belongs, in its rejection of sexual equality,
but instead in feminism’s rejection of traditional sex roles and sexual modesty.
It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that the biggest obstacle to sexual
equality in our society comes from the radical feminists and their mainstream
allies. Unlike the radical right, ridiculing the ideas of the radical feminists
is still not considered “politically correct.” When Pat Robertson
or Jerry Falwell tell us women aren?t making authentic choices by working outside
the home, pundits rightfully lambaste them. When radical feminists and the SHI
portray heterosexuality as inauthentic, dissent is suppressed (in fact it can
be construed as sexual harassment itself) in the name of being sensitive to
women. Heterophobia cuts through the myths and exposes the SHI?s totalitarian
agenda. It is an accurate warning of the dangerous road down which feminism
and the SHI are headed down. Hopefully reason will yet prevail and get feminism
back on the road of sexual equality rather its current obsession with sexual
correctness. Heterophobia points out where to begin for those willing
to listen.
Tags: Catharine MacKinnon, Daphne Patai