Feminist Harassment: Nebulous Boundaries

By Catharine Muscat | Thursday, July 8, 1999

I have experienced what some people would call 'sexual harassment' several times in my life. Just during my first year at Dartmouth, a few men have admired my appearance, touched my hair, or even looked at me with more than a passing glance. Once, I was privy to a certain lewd joke about a priest, a woman, and her cat. Most people would consider these trifles routine in normal relations between men and women: a casual touch, an awkward romantic overture, and a harmless joke that reveals more about the narrator than it does about women.

Most people, however, aren't the ones crafting sexual harassment rules.

As Daphne Patai explains in Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Politics of Purity, current sexual harassment codes endeavor to purge human relations of any and all elements of harassment, including simple discomfort, to women.

These laws were once necessary measures to ensure equal status for women in the workplace and the academy. Yet, they have become powerful weapons wielded by feminists to realize a sterile, utopian vision, which represents 'the ultimate triumph of ideology over humanity.'

Patai, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, held a joint appointment in the university's women's studies program before she wrote Professing Feminism in 1994, her first public criticism of feminist ideology. About five times a year, she would be invited to speak about the discipline.

'I've gotten three invitations in the last five years' to speak at women's studies programs, Patai told The Chronicle of Higher Education last week. 'There's a lot of implicit blackmail going on in academe.'

The excesses of sexual harassment law have reached the public consciousness in recent years. In 1996, six-year-old Jonathan Prevette was charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate on the playground.

Patai, disillusioned by the oppressive grip of the anti-sexual harassment culture, demonstrates that modern feminism persistently broadens the definition and interpretation of 'sexual harassment' so that even an innocent kiss is sinister.
Nothing is accidental or innocent according to current proponents of sexual harassment legislation. More disturbing is that the guilt of the 'perpetrator' is entirely dependent on the 'victim's' subjective reaction to the incident. The perpetrator's intent, whether malicious or benign, is irrelevant.

There is, argue feminist ideologues, 'a concerted effort to keep women in their place as an inferior social group,' of which men, as a group, are the perpetrators and beneficiaries. All interactions between men and women should be viewed as power relationships—not only between employer and employee or professor and student—but also between the empowered male and the oppressed female.

Whether or not a particular perpetrator is aware of this situation is beside the point. Catharine MacKinnon, a prominent feminist and author of Sexual Harassment of Working Women, has famously argued that 'violence against women is merely a variation of men's normal interaction with women.' Thus, the slightest social transgression is denounced with as much severity as rape. An accidental touch and a sexual assault are of the same breed—just in a different degree.

The ramifications of this institutionalized outlook are startling: the burden of proof in sexual harassment cases has been shifted from the accuser to the accused, a manifest violation of due process rights. The threat of legal sanctions against employers and universities has created an incentive structure that promotes the claims of alleged victims above the rights of alleged harassers.
Because sexual harassment suits are processed in the civil court system, the accuser need only provide a preponderance of evidence to pin liability on the defendant. Punishment for sexual harassment, however, bears a striking similarity to the penalties for criminal convictions. 'Convicted' harassers stand to lose their careers and respectability, becoming social outcasts much like criminals. Sexual harassment has become the scarlet letter of the twentieth century.

What is most shocking about Heterophobia is that Patai is only one of a few intellectuals willing to publicly criticize the extremism of the anti-sexual harassment culture. Patai's indictment of radical feminism in the academy is intuitive in light of recent excesses, the intelligentsia have been largely silent.
Boston College has finally decided to force notorious feminist professor Mary Daly to open her classes to men. The move, long overdue, resulted when a male student changed the incentive structure and sued for discrimination.

Slowly, but surely, the tide has begun to turn against feminists who seek to impose their utopian vision on others. While Patai congratulates the women's movement for increasing gender equity in the workplace and in the academy, she condemns those feminists who have built an industry around searching minutiae for sexual transgressions.

We live in a world where professors must examine every word for innuendo and men must consider the legal consequences of a romantic advance. Heterophobia is driving a wedge between men and women.

Patai, however, foresees a dreary future even for those self-same feminists who are the cause of the litigious relationship between the sexes. As she writes in her conclusion, 'a feminism deeply compromised by hatred and scorn, pious and narrow, scurrilous and smug, dismissive of those it injures and derisive toward those who disagree—this is not a feminism with a future.'

Feminist scholars often marvel at mainstream women's frustration with modern feminism. Finally one of their colleagues has explained it. A reformer rather than a reactionary, Patai strives to save feminism from itself by bringing this explosive issue to the forefront of intellectual discourse.

Feminist Harassment: Nebulous Boundaries

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