Women Would Have Known

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Imagine giving a group of guys that includes Ted (Chappaquiddick, Palm Beach) Kennedy a case of alleged sexual harassment to review. I have the greatest respect for Kennedy's stalwart liberalism and even for a few of his fellows on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but isn't this a little like asking Michael Milken to monitor the SEC? The Senators, after all, occupy a world where women figure less as friends and colleagues than as dangerous, Donna & Rice-like characters, capable of decimating a man's career. In the locker rooms of the U.S. Senate, it's the male who is likely to be seen as a "victim" and the female as a wrecker from hell or the enemy party.

Of course, they "didn't get it," as millions of American women screamed in chorus when they found out that the committee had read Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment and tossed them into the circular file. Probably nobody ever asked Joe Biden why a cute little number like him would want a career in politics. Chances are no officemate ever let his or her hand drift languorously over John C. Danforth's derriere or inquired as to Orrin Hatch's vital dimensions.

One can just see them sitting there, when Hill's charges first came to their attention, stroking their chins and clearing their throats. Well, he didn't actually touch her. (Harrumph, harrumph.) She waited all this time. (Shifting in seats.) She seems to have kept in touch with him for years afterward. (Rolling of eyes.) Pretty vague anyway, this sex-harassment business: one woman's "harassment" could be another one's turn-on. (Snickers and elbowings, man to man.)

Well, let's consider what sexual harassment is, starting with the grossest, most obvious case, the kind in which there is both "touching" and an explicit quid pro quo: Do this, and you'll get an A. Come in here with me for a moment, and then we'll talk about that promotion or that bonus or whether you're going to have a job tomorrow. Even a Senator, I should think, would see the crime in this. At best, it's sex for pay. At worst, it's a nonviolent variant of rape in which sex is extracted under threat of economic destruction.

But suppose there's no explicit quid pro quo, just a friendly invitation to party. As either of our two female Senators could have explained without reference to notes, men and women do not yet meet on what is exactly a level playing field. Nine times out of 10, it's the male who has the power, the female who must flatter, cajole and make a constant effort to please. If she turns him down, her career may begin to slide. She won't get the best job assignments. He might not be around when she needs help someday -- as Hill apparently did -- in getting a job or a grant.

Now suppose that the alleged harassment includes no physical touching, no hands-on (at least, let us assume hands) sex. Even with all hands flat on the desk or table, a peculiar kind of sex can be enacted. If our hypothetical - harasser should, hypothetically speaking, memorize the screenplays of porno flicks for the delectation of his female underlings, he is in effect asking them to participate in a sexual tableau of his own devising. Some men pay women for the same service or patronize 900 numbers devoted to dirty talk. To have to listen to a man's sexual fantasies is to be forced, at least for the moment, to share them. (With animals? No kidding.) And that is a level of intimacy that even married people, in couples, often choose to forgo for the sake of their mutual illusions.

Finally, suppose there's no touching, no tableau, no quid pro quo -- just a crude exploratory gambit along the lines of "Hiya, babe, you wanna . . . ?" Here too some moral Rubicon has been crossed. Intimacy in a public setting is not just "inappropriate," in the prissy, yuppie sense. It can be deeply insulting, which is why a misapplied tu in French or du in German can be a fighting word. When we leave our homes to go to work, we assume an impersonal role like "teacher," "secretary" or "judge." We may even don a special costume (black robes, skirted suit) to get the point across: "This is the public me -- not the mommy or the sweetheart or the wife, but the secretary or the judge." To be sexually harassed, even verbally, is to have that robe ripped off and the pearls torn from around your neck. The message of the harasser is, You're not a secretary, judge, whatever. Not to me you aren't. To me, you're a four-letter word that this magazine refuses to print.

There's hardly a woman alive who doesn't know how it feels to have her dignity punctured, her public role ripped away, by some fellow with a twinge in his groin. You feel naked. You feel that you (yes, you) have made some ghastly mistake, sent the wrong signals, led him along. At first you try to pretend it didn't happen. You may do what I once did and keep lifting his hand off your knee as if it were some object that happened to fall there. You may even maintain the fiction of friendship for years, because anything is better than being demoted, in your own mind, to a deletable four-letter word.

Given the views of Judge Thomas and his supporters, it is a glorious irony that his confirmation process provides such a powerful argument for affirmative action, starting in the U.S. Senate. Fourteen guys could have seen sexual harassment as a charge worth following up on from the moment it crossed their desks. At least there is no anatomical defect that prevents the male $ brain from thinking the thought: "Sexual harassment is a serious offense. Sexual harassment by the one man responsible for investigating cases of sexual harassment would be worse than a serious offense -- it would be proof of a brazen contempt for the law."

But they didn't think that. They thought "big deal," or some fancy legal version thereof. And there could be no better proof of the need to start populating positions of power with people of more than one sex. On some subjects, for reasons both historic and tragic, women know best.