Pick your battles to win war on sex pests
ME TOO, obviously. It nearly goes without saying. In fact it might have been more instructive to invite people who haven’t experienced sexual harassment to come forward. Tumbleweed and crickets guaranteed. Like most women (and many men), I’ve been groped, catcalled, insulted and propositioned. I’ve had people not take no for an answer. I’ve had the fight-or-flight response, the scorch of humiliation, the split-second decision about whether to laugh it off or risk a scene, and yes, that inexplicable flicker of shame.
Several of the men responsible are now dead (although I hasten to add there’s no link between those two particulars), and the ones left are at least 80. They were older men, men of the generation of George H.W. Bush, who reportedly liked to pat women’s rears in ‘a good-natured manner’.
In contrast to George Bush’s prime, sexual harassment is now against the law, in the workplace at least. Until the 1998 Employment Equality Act, it was not only not illegal, it hadn’t even been defined.
So what did women do before then? We put up with it. We developed creep-radar early on, we warned other women, we removed wandering hands, and as we got more practice, we became more and more expert at deflecting unwelcome advances.
WHAT is now called sexual harassment was once part of the culture. Even sexual assault was considered acceptable. Look at James Bond – forcing himself on a female doctor as she examined him; subjecting the lesbian Pussy Galore to a roll in the hay; and all that routine bottomslapping. Women rolled their eyes at successive James Bond films; meanwhile the franchise was taking in over $7bn in the global box office.
That ‘men will be men’ culture was already fading by the time I came of age, but for women of a previous generation life must have been fraught. There have always been creeps (just as there have always been perfect gentlemen) but nowadays we have recourse to law. They didn’t. Nowadays we can expect to be believed. They couldn’t.
Imagine today, a doctor being grabbed while examining a patient. It would rightly be considered sexual assault, and both doctor and patient would know that perfectly well. But what about two or three or five decades ago, when a man might have thought it was okay to grab women, that it made him like Sean Connery?
As we approach peak #metoo, it is important to bear in mind that there are serious distinctions to be made along the ‘spectrum’ of sexual abuse. By crying #metoo because someone propositioned you, you risk trivialising the experiences of people, such as Harvey Weinstein’s victims, who have been raped and sexually assaulted and who’ve faced ruin if they went against their aggressor. You also risk undermining the experiences of people who have suffered serious harassment and bullying by people with power over them.
Similarly, making lewd remarks at work 30 years ago is not the same as making lewd remarks at work today. Thirty years ago it made you a creep. Today it makes you an offender.
Compared to sexual assault, sexual harassment is a rather grey area, with a weirdly woolly definition. Intent doesn’t matter under the law.
‘The fact that the perpetrator has no intention of sexually harassing… the employee is no defence. The effect of the behaviour on the employee is what is relevant,’ it says.
In other words, you don’t need to supply evidence of harassment; you need only feel harassed. Is there any other law where the burden of proof is so subjective?
Suppose you work in an office where some of the men have pasted Page 3 girls on the walls and refuse to take them down. What if you find the pictures offensive enough to constitute sexual harassment and a female colleague disagrees? Which of you is right?
Back in 1999, the late libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor was lamenting the use of legislation to protect against sexual harassment. Admittedly libertarians are wont to oppose legislation of any kind, but she made an interesting case. Sexual harassment protection, she said, fosters a Victorian view of women, and ‘spreads the assumption that women are too delicate to flourish in the workplace without government aid’.
AFTER all, nothing is going to do away with sexual predators entirely. In Paris and Rome, Beijing and Buenos Aires, men still sleaze all over women in public and expect them to take it as a compliment. And it’s only been a year since the p **** -grabbing Donald Trump was elected to the White House, and 53% of white women voters helped put him there. This is where we are. It’s pitchforks on Twitter over people winking at colleagues, or being vulgar back in the Eighties, and meanwhile an out-and-out misogynist is ‘leader of the Free World’.
At the risk of being lynched, I’m not sure it’s reasonable or helpful to conflate different degrees of abusive behaviour, or to judge 30-year-old transgressions by the standards of today. When fighting for a cause, it’s important to pick your battles.