Professor in sexism row after cracking ‘ ladies lingerie’ joke in busy lift
BY the saucy standards of popular BBC sitcom Are You Being Served?, the humour is decidedly tame.
Yet a professor’s off-the-cuff comment in a packed lift at an academic conference has landed him in hot water.
When asked which floor he wanted, Richard Ned Lebow jokingly requested the ladies’ lingerie department.
The professor of international political theory at King’s College London describes his own comment as lame and inoffensive. But it was enough to outrage another occupant of the lift, Simona Sharoni,a professor of women’s and gender studies.
And Professor Lebow has now been ordered to apologise to her after she made a formal complaint. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is refusing, saying that he has nothing to apologise for.
Professor Lebow, 76, made the remark at the International Studies Association’s annual convenfessor tion in San Francisco last month. The joke was overheard by Professor Sharoni of Merrimack College in Massachusetts and a female colleague.
Professor Sharoni, 57, said she was too shocked to confront Professor Lebow but she later filed her complaint. ‘It took me a while to figure out that this man thought it was funny to make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference,’ she said in her complaint.
‘I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that we froze and didn’t confront him... As a survivor of sexual harassment in the academy, I am quite shaken by this incident.’ The ISA said ProLebow had violated its code. It added that an email he later sent to Professor Sharoni, calling her complaint ‘frivolous’, was an even bigger violation.
In the email, he wrote: ‘Like you, I am strongly opposed to the exploitation, coercion or humiliation of women. As such evils continue, it seems to me to make sense to direct our attention to real offences, not those that are imagined or marginal. By making a complaint to ISA that I consider frivolous – and I expect, will be judged this way by the ethics committee – you may be directing time and effort away from the real offences that trouble us both.’ Professor Sharoni, who said she did not know Professor Lebow before the incident, said she would have reacted the same way no matter who made the joke. The ISA has given Professor Lebow until Tuesday to apologise to Professor Sharoni. However, he claims that if he were to apologise it would be an acknowledgement that ‘ an innocent remark in an elevator is somehow wrong’.
He said: ‘The elevator was jampacked and claustrophobic, which may be why I made my admittedly lame, but inoffensive, remark.’
Professor Sharoni disagrees, saying that the incident demonstrates how ‘political correctness becomes the blanket excuse for those who refuse to rethink and change their racist, sexist and homophobic beliefs and practices’.
She added that powerful men are outraged at being held accountable even if the penalty is as minor as an apology.
Professor Lebow, who lists his interests as conflict management and the psychology of decisionmaking, insists he has ‘ always supported women’.
His joke harks back to a bygone era when lifts in large buildings had their own operators. The theme tune for Are You Being Served had a voiceover listing the departments in the fictional Grace Brothers store. Famed for its innuendo, the show ran for 13 years from 1972 and had audiences of up to 22.5million.
‘Lame but inoffensive’