Deconstructing Sexual Harassment
by
Howard Richler
Alas, the year 2017 was
marked by words that denote the ill-treatment of women by men. Following the
revelations of the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein and his predatory ilk, the
adjective “inappropriate” saw a large spike in usage. People soon realized that
this word, often applied to the misbehaviour of a child wasn’t quite suitable
to describe the level of misdeeds. Before long stronger terms such as “abuse”
and “harassment” became the most common used descriptions. And if one considers
it as a word, the hashtag #MeToo became a rallying cry from many women to describe
their own similar experiences of sexual harassment. Underscoring this lexical
recognition of the plight of women, Merriam-Webster
named the word “feminism” as its word of the year for 2017 and stated that it
was the most searched-for-word in its online dictionary showing a 70% increase
from 2016. Also, the word “persisterhood,” defined as women who join forces to
persist against sexism and gender bias, was nominated as one of the “words of
the year” of 2017 by the American Dialect
Society. (The winner was “fake news.”)
Writing in 1991,
Rosalie Maggio in the Dictionary of
Bias-Free Usage remarked that “sexual harassment was not a term anyone used
20 years ago; today we have laws against it.” Actually, it was exactly twenty
years earlier that we find the first citation of “sexual harassment” in the OED,
and it comes from the Yale Daily
News of April 19, 1971: “ We insist…that sexual harassment is an integral
component of discrimination. Men perceive women in sexual categories and not in
professional categories.” The OED defines the term as “harassment
(typically of a woman by a man) in a work place or other professional or social
situations involving the making of unwanted sexual advances obscene remarks,
etc.” Maggio’s point was that while
sexual harassment obviously occurred prior to 1971, its lexical recognition
gave it greater force to be countered by laws or social norms. Before long
sexual harassment was recognized as a phenomenon in the legal arena. In 1986,
the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that employers could not permit an
employee to create a hostile work environment for someone else or base
advancement on a quid pro quo for sex. In 1989, the Supreme Court in Canada ordained
that sexual harassment represented sexual discrimination and thus could not be
tolerated.
Most academic institutions have definitions of
sexual harassment and invariably they contain hard to define adjectives such as
“unwanted,” “unwelcome” “vexatious” and “obscene.” Adjectives by definition are
descriptive and depend largely on a consensus of a shared reality which
unfortunately does not exist in analysing sexual harassment. For what is deemed
unwanted or unwelcome by one person may be wanted or welcome to another. Also, what qualifies as an obscene comment
or joke can be highly subjective. One definition of sexual harassment includes
the phrase “verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature that tends to create
a hostile or offensive work environment.”
Again, we’re dealing with thorny adjectives such as “hostile” and
“offensive.” Almost everyone, male or
female, accepts that sexual favours can’t be a condition for a job or
promotion. Large majorities consider “unwelcome” touching as improper but often
women and men disagree on what constitutes sexual harassment, such as what counts
as sexualized remarks or what qualifies “ogling.” And although younger men’s attitudes
approximate those of women to a much larger extent than older males, the gap in
the positions of the sexes endures.
It is also important to register that there is
a hierarchy of offenses related to the term sexual harassment. Last December, actor Matt Damon in an interview with
Peter Travers of ABC Television, stated
“there’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child
molestation, right? Both of those
behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they
shouldn’t be conflated, right?” Those comments were met with anger and
frustration online, where many women, including the actress Alyssa Milano,
rejected attempts to categorize various forms of sexual misconduct. After
Damon’s interview, Milano wrote on Twitter: “They
are all connected to a patriarchy intertwined with normalized, accepted — even
welcomed — misogyny.” Last December in a panel discussion of seven feminists in
the New York Times on sexual
harassment, broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien came down squarely on Damon’s
side in this dispute referencing the various meanings of the term: “ I think we
conflate the many different definitions of sexual harassment — the legal
definition, someone’s personal interpretation. Some things are legally a crime.
Other actions would clearly violate a company’s standards, inappropriate
language, physically grabbing a woman, pressuring an underling for sex. They
are all bad and should be stopped, but I think they deserve different levels of
punishment.”
Interestingly, on some university campuses the term “affirmative consent”
has gained currency It postulates that at every stage of a relationship that a
verbal agreement but as Daphne Merkin points out in a Jan 5, 2018 article in
the New York Times, “asking for oral consent
before proceeding with a sexual advance seems both innately clumsy and
retrograde.” And so the debate on what constitutes sexual
harassment and how to combat it rages on.
Richler’s latest book is Wordplay: Arranged and Deranged
Wit.
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