Sexual Harassment in the United States. Mary Welek Atwell

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Sexual Harassment in the United States - Mary Welek Atwell


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Just as racial discrimination grows out of assumptions about African-Americans or Hispanics as a group, sexual harassment emerges from assumptions about women as a group. The absence of treatment based on individual qualities, MacKinnon contends, is the essence of discrimination. She sees much of sexual harassment “enforced by unconscious, heedless, patronizing, well-intentioned, or profit-motivated acts.” But such behaviors are “no less denigrating, damaging, or sex-specific for their lack of invidious sex-based motivation.”34 Unwelcome sex talk or unwelcome sex acts (the mainstays of sexual harassment) exclude, segregate, subordinate, dehumanize, violate the human dignity of their targets, and deny them equality of opportunity.35 As Dorothy Roberts argues, such harms are collective. They affect the status of all women in the workplace, in the labor market, and in society. They constitute a social harm and a social injury. Why? Because other women will see themselves as potential targets. Because sexual harassment helps maintain women in subordinate positions and because it disrespects women as a group and treats them as inferiors.36 If sexual harassment claims can be viewed not as allegations by mere individuals but by individuals who are members of a group (women), the parties are not just “bad men and virtuous women but dominating men and subordinated women.” The activity is not just bad behavior but part of a “social system of gendered group-based inequality that produces injuries of second class citizenship.”37 Thus the laws prohibiting sexual harassment are ←12 | 13→not simply restrictions on personal conduct. They are elements in the structure of anti-discrimination law designed to facilitate the promise of equality in the workplace and in the larger social context.

      However, women have not always been the ones to decide what constitutes their oppression. As the later chapter on the Supreme Court’s rulings will show, the justices have not necessarily agreed with feminist legal analysts about responsibility for sexual harassment, although they have found it to be a violation of the Civil Rights Act. Nor has Congress believed in the truthfulness of women who claim to be victims of sexual harassment, as the case of Anita Hill demonstrated most vividly. Members of Congress have been casual and inconsistent in disciplining their own colleagues who engage in harassing behavior. Other patriarchal institutions such as universities and the military have also been erratic in their responses to harassment. But there is a case to be made that the issues resonate differently now. Some have argued that inspired by the election of Donald Trump—someone who could brag about sexual assault and still win the presidency—women have insisted through the #MeToo and Times Up movements that harassers be held accountable. They should answer to the court of public opinion if not to the judicial system. If the outrage and determination of the current movement persists and if the current attitude toward sexual misconduct and harassment does have a lasting effect, it will mean fundamental change in the relationships of women and men, in the workplace and in the larger society.

      Notes

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