On Sexual Harassment

It seems about time. It is about time. It had to come from the female sector. "Sex Harrassment - What on Earth is That?" NY Times "In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks," by Katie Roiphe, Opinion, November 12, 2011.


The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose: when I was at Princeton in the ’90s, the guidelines distributed to students about sexual harassment stated, “sexual harassment may result from a conscious or unconscious action, and can be subtle or blatant.” It is, of course, notoriously hard to control one’s unconscious, and one can behave quite hideously in one’s dreams, but that did not deter the determined scolds.

One can gather, easily enough, from the unlucky, the serious undermining of life and morale wrought by the insidious charges, even barely suggested, of those days, the atomic bomb dropped to eliminate a squirrel. Such a charge, insinuated or direct, puts a mark upon one's honor to be remembered every day of his existence, even as he is not entitled to feel any possible injustice for being so charged, as if the Kafkaesque had, unwittingly, come to rule over the deeper aspects of personal life.

Blinking at this new light outside the cell he's long been relegated to, one almost feels confused. What? is it sunspots? Is it the same wave that wrought Arab Spring, toppling dictators? The so-called perfectly reasoned liberal, secretly almost fascist, stiff (almost Inquisitor-like) arbiters of taste and proper behavior are crumbling, and now it's okay to be male, not just male but a male of the refined sort who has benefitted enough from previous history and basic human nature to be vulnerable, to be not such a complete prick or the usual tool who's so full of himself he somehow tends to get forgiven even if he does indeed to do bad stuff because of his supreme self-confidence? Now male randomness (he does have to produce however many billions of individual sperm cells each swimming with personal vitality, after all) is now more inclined to be understood and maybe even politely welcomed? I don't know, it almost seems like the end of the world must indeed be coming.

Life's already ruined, I don't even want to hear it, one is tempted to say.





Being a fellow of some humor, or once was, I wrote a book about a fellow who falls into such a situation, a college kid who seems adept at offending sensibilities, thereby leading to the attitude upon the part of 'the princess' that he is an harasser. One point of this tale being--taking place in the setting of a liberal arts college--that dreams at that age are a group of things, a field, a body of hopes for career and love, art and professional fulfillment all tied together. Like an atom, I suppose, a core with energy spinning around it. And in this particular setting he finds, if not a general disappointment, his dreams beset upon in a number of areas, on a number of fronts, at several crucial junctions of dreams and goals on one hand, and whatever we actually encounter in 'this practical age,' on the other. Fortunately, he does find the things that sustain and nourish him.

I have to wonder, about the cost to the economy, to productivity, a society makes in the process of sorting out and judging the efficacy of a kid's dreams. I think of the imperviousness of certain types back in that era of 'sexual harassment' charges for whom such charges didn't matter, i.e., the computer-tinkerer, who knows he is a geek anyway and doesn't have to bother with girls of a particular haughty sort. Nerdy techie guys are doing well these days, and so is the high tech sector of the economy. And similarly, a certain type finds success within the mafias of current academia, those too gifted at convoluted language experiments to chat up the opposite sex. (Being a deconstructionist post-Modernist doesn't seem like much of of a grand dream to me, anyway, and I can't see much as far as what it all has produced beyond lip service. And we wonder why our age has not produced any Shakespeares, for a Shakespeare would be exiled, his productivity discouraged, stifled. And it shows, if something is too complicated for the basic masses, such as this Average Joe, how does it help us face the every day, the need to go off and do some kind of productive work?)

And then on the other side, you had whole sectors of people shrewd enough to just avoid being weird enough to fall into behavior leading to the judgment of 'sexual harassment,' i.e., those who had their minds fixed on getting into banking and making tons of money through long hours, as if all that stuff about liberal arts was just window dressing, not pertaining to what they should do with life, the choices they should make. Never having found themselves outside of societal approval--the very colleges themselves coming to praise them--for their money making skills, they never had to question what they were doing. whether anything they did was right or wrong (and now look what came of all that, those heady days of happy money, if not the failure of the entire Western World, enchanted by numbers, profit and greed.) Banks sold packaged housing debt securities to pensions, then bet against those securities and walked away with the profits. Where is behavior like that going to lead us? Take a good look at economies that aren't very healthy or moral, like a Russia under thugs and oligarchs approved by powers that be, where everything, including virtue, is for sale to the highest bidder. You can forget harassment.

Yes, I wrote a book about those days of the idol of the 'level playing field,' of a young man who, rather than being praised, is being blamed for having dreams and also for the very tragedy of his dreams, as if having dreams was a crime itself. A Hero For Our Time, available on Amazon. It is, properly, in art that we first come to terms, to explain, to 'go there,' preceding general opinion and conventional wisdom.

Dreams, yes, they go together, the girl you liked, the kind of life you thought would be good for you, the kind of vocation you felt calling you. Dreams, after all, are fragile things. To discourage an honest mind, and a good heart, well, what purpose does it all serve, except some kind of Orwellian world as Ms. Roiphe points out. It's all just sad. Very very sad.


One hopes there is a basic underlying decency in humanity, worth putting some trust in, worth placing come confidence in, worth acknowledging, that makes the faulted forgivable and even quite redeemable.