Tag: harassment

Can You Sexually Harass With a Public Lecture?

~ Clarissa ~ 20 Comments

If you haven’t been following Professor Gilbert’s story, here is a recap. This tenured professor at the University of Denver was banned from campus after two graduate students in his course “Domestic Consequences of the Drug War” complained that the professor sexually harassed them by the content of their lectures. Yes, I know that this sounds wackadoo, but it’s Denver, what do you expect?

The professor made these anonymous complainants feel harassed by – get this – bringing an art deco vibrator into the classroom during a discussion of how sexuality was theorized historically and by discussing studies linking masturbation to prostate health. Of course, the course unit where these egregious offences happened was titled “Drugs and Sin in American Life: from masturbation and prostitution to alcohol and drugs.” The prissy fools who find a scholarly discussion of masturbation to be intolerable could have chosen to skip the class. What fun would that have been, though? They chose to attend and feel harassed by the discussion.

This is a 75-year-old prof with an unblemished record who is being banned from campus and enjoined from having any contact with students because he talked about masturbation and showed an antique vibrator to graduate students. There was no formal investigation, the numerous pleas on behalf of this distinguished scholar by his peers at different institutions have been disregarded, the attempts by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to start a discussion with the university about this issue have been ignored:

In letter correspondences to DU, the AAUP and FIRE have not only urged the university to revisit its decision upholding the sexual harassment charges against Gilbert, but also the university’s policies for sexual harassment cases and the university’s case review process.

“The University of Denver is treating its adult students like children who are too fragile to hear academic talk about sex and drugs,” said Adam Kissel, the vice president of programs at FIRE, in an article published on the FIRE website on Dec. 12, 2011.

The situation is wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin. The very real issue of sexual harassment on campus is completely trivialized by a pair of officious idiots who don’t see the difference between a prof stopping them in the hallway to whisper “So how often do you masturbate?” and a prof discussing the societal perception of masturbation in the classroom. Vindictive students who dislike a prof for being a tough grader or committing the unpardonable sin of trying to make them think discover a perfect way to punish that pesky scholar. Profs are forced to start self-censoring for fear that, say, showing Goya’s famous painting “The Naked Maja” will be interpreted as distribution of pornography. I have a lot to say about this painting but I have excluded it from my lecture on Goya because  I’m afraid of idiots.

The good news is that Professor Gilbert will now resume teaching his “Domestic Consequences of the Drug War” course. He will require that all students sign a statement saying that they understand what the course will be about and what topic will be discussed. Of course,we all know that if some idiot wants to feel harassed by an intellectual discussion, they will do so in spite of signing any statement.

Saying Hello As a Form of Harassment

~ Clarissa ~ 65 Comments

We, the women, are victimized by everything. Which is why it is very easy to write an article about yet another instance in our daily lives that makes of us perennial, distressed, abused, coerced, miserable, powerless victims. Anything at all that happens is, by default, evidence of your subjection. (Why anybody in their right mind would want to think of themselves in this way is a subject for another discussion, of course.)

I know all this, but I’m still floored every time when I encounter yet another article on how women are abused by the universe. Reader Julie has alerted me to a post that discusses how being greeted can be abusive, offensive, harassing, and wrong:

So hello leaves me unsure, constantly second-guessing myself, not wanting to be all “uppity” but not wanting to leave myself open to uncomfortable situations. When I hear a vulgar comment on the street, I know how to react (or, rather, not react). When I hear hello, I feel caught. For as much as hello is a greeting, hello can also draw the lines clearly. Hello can mean: I am a man, you are a woman, and I am saying hello to acknowledge not your humanness but your womanness. Hello can mean: I feel I have a relationship with you, even though we’re total strangers, and the entire extent of that relationship is that I am in a role in which I am allowed to try to start a conversation and your choices are limited to appearing to ignore me or to play along with this conversation you made no indication of wishing to start. Hello assumes a familiarity; hello asks for acquiescence.

I have to ask at this point: is it possible for a man to breathe in a way that does not make a woman feel harassed? Observe also how the post’s author neatly inscribes herself into the very patriarchal stereotype of women as delicate flowers who cannot go through the simplest tasks without suffering an emotional collapse:

I’m tired of—literally, I am emotionally exhausted by—feeling as though I need to parcel out attention to people merely because they’ve asked. And because it’s not people but men who make up the vast majority of the askers—and women their answerers—it becomes a feminist issue.

If a woman is “emotionally exhausted” from saying “hi” to people on the street, what will happen to her if she has to lead a country, manage a huge corporation, conduct a triple bypass, fly an airplane? The poor little lady will surely just fall apart completely. Let’s just keep these weak, poor creatures locked up in the kitchen lest the emotionally exhausting business of having a life strains their puny little energies too much.

People have suggested that I react to things differently because of my autism. That might just be true. So I’d like to ask my neurotypical readers: do you also analyze every casual greeting at such length and see what you can read into it? I usually have so many things to think about that anybody’s “hello” barely even registers. If this is not the same for most other people, I’d love to know that.

Also, I want to draw everybody’s attention that all these posts about how a woman is victimized every second of the day come from completely different, unrelated blogs. So please don’t tell me that it’s just one freaky website that produces this garbage. It isn’t. This is what North American feminism has turned into. What’s tragic is that actual victims of harassment – which is a really nasty crime that hurts countless people – have their very true suffering trivialized by being put in the same category with folks who are victimized by a “hello.”