Sexual Harassment and Sexual Consent

Roberto Refinetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138532465
• eBook ISBN: 9781351491136
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sexual Harassment and Sexual Consent serves as a compelling forum for the analysis of ethical, cultural, social, and political issues related to sexual relationships and sexual behavior. These issues include, but are not limited to: sexual consent and sexual responsibility; sexual harassment and freedom of speech and association; sexual privacy; censorship and pornography; impact of film/literature on sexual relationships; and university and governmental regulation of intimate relationships.The premier volume deals with a central theme: sexual harassment and sexual consent, with emphasis on academia. Theoretical articles, research reports, editorials, and book reviews analyze issues from psychological, sociological, political, and artistic perspectives. Contributions include: "Eight Reasons Not to Prohibit Relationships between Professors and Students" by Peg Tittle; "The Impact of Sexual Misconduct on the Reputation of Martin Luther King, Jr." by A. B. Assensoh and Y. Alex-Assensoh; "Homosexuality, Sexual Harassment, and Military Readiness" by Deborah E. Kapp and Gary A. Kustis; " and "College Students' Perceptions of the Relationship between Sex and Drinking" by Gwendell W. Gravitt, Jr., and Mary M. Krueger.Also included are reviews of Sexual Harassment on Campus edited by B. R. Sandler and R. J. Shoop; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture by S. B. Ortner; The Power of Beauty by N. Friday; Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America by L. Kipnis; and Mediated Sex by B. McNair. In addition, Warren Farrell reviews the film First Wives Club. This initial volume of Sexuality and Culture will be of interest to all those who participate in campus life as well as sociologists, psychologists, and government and university policymakers.

THEORETICAL ESSAYS

SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS: A CRITIQUE OF CURRENT RESEARCH AND POLICY

Christine L. Williams¹

University of Texas, Austin

Sexual harassment is a ubiquitous social problem in work organizations. However, much of the research on the topic is limited due to the failure to consider organizational context. The predominant research and policy focus is on discrete acts perpetrated by individual men against individual women. This approach obscures the many ways that organizations routinely and intentionally exploit the sexuality of workers. In this essay, I identify three problems with the conventional approach to the study of sexual harassment: (1) objective indicators are used to assess subjective meanings; (2) sexual harassment is defined as an individual behavior and not an organizational norm; and (3) the predominant focus on the (hetero)sexual harassment of women by men ignores the sexual harassment of persons in other social groups. Each of these problems is linked to a general failure to examine organizational context. I argue that researchers should broaden their definition of sexual harassment to include both individual and organizational forms of sexual harassment.

Introduction

In 1979, my sister and I were hired by a catering firm to wait tables at the grand opening of a ballroom dance hall in Oklahoma City. When we arrived at the hall, we were told to put on uniforms consisting of a tight red leotard with spaghetti straps and matching clingy skirt. I was outraged by this sexual objectification; my sister didn’t mind. I decided to take the job anyway. As a struggling college student I wanted the money to buy Christmas presents, but I didn’t feel right about it. Halfway through the evening I put on a cardigan because I grew cold, thus provoking a fight with the caterer. He let me wear the sweater (although he moved me to the “coat check” station), and he vowed never to hire me again.

Was I sexually harassed? Was my sister? Granted, this took place before the 1986 Supreme Court ruling that declared sexual harassment an illegal form of workplace gender discrimination. According to the Supreme Court, sexual harassment occurs when submission to or rejection of sexual advances is a term of employment, used as a basis for making employment decisions, or if the advances create a hostile or offensive working environment. In 1988, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued the following guidelines to clarify the legal definition of sexual harassment:

Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when: submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s employment; submission to or rejection of such conduct…is used as a basis for employment decisions…; or such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment. (Tamminen, 1994, p. 44)

At the ballroom dance hall, my sister and I were explicitly required to wear a sexual outfit that I considered to be degrading and offensive, and I lost out on future employment because I resisted this rule. Thus, my experience seems to fit the legal definition of sexual harassment. Nevertheless, it is not obvious to me that either of us would have labeled our experiences sexual harassment, even if this law had been in place in 1979. Many people today work in jobs in which they are routinely subjected to deliberate or repeated sexual behavior that is unwelcome, as well as other sex-related behaviors that they consider hostile, offensive, or degrading. They rarely label their experiences sexual harassment, however, because they are institutionalized as part of their jobs.

In this essay, I discuss several ways that sexual harassment can be institutionalized in work organizations. Drawing on recent studies of organizational sexuality, I argue that organizations can be perpetrators of sexual harassment. I describe several ways in which organizations subject workers to unwanted sexual advances, use sexuality as the basis for making employment decisions, and create and/or tolerate a hostile or offensive working environment. I contend that, unless the organizational forms of sexual harassment are recognized and understood, there is little possibility of eradicating sexual harassment from the workplace.

This essay is organized around a critique of current sexual harassment research. The prevailing research and policy focus—on discrete acts perpetrated by individual men against individual women—obscures the many ways in which organizations routinely and intentionally exploit the sexuality of workers. I identify three problems with this research: (1) most studies use objective behaviors as the primary indicator of sexual harassment, not the subjective interpretation of those behaviors; (2) researchers typically define sexual harassment as an individual behavior problem; and (3) most studies focus exclusively on the sexual harassment of women by men. Finally, I criticize the policy recommendations that typically accompany research on sexual harassment. Each of the problems I identify with sexual harassment studies is linked to the general failure to examine organizational context. The ultimate goal of this essay is to encourage researchers to develop a broader research definition of sexual harassment that can address both individual and organizational forms of sexual harassment.

Objective Behaviors and Subjective Meanings

Many social science researchers have found the legal definition of sexual harassment vague and difficult to operationalize in part because it focuses on the subjective experience of hostility and offensiveness, and not objective behaviors (Folgero & Fjeldstad, 1995). Consequently, many social scientists interested in ascertaining the frequency of sexual harassment have devised lists of what they consider proscribed behaviors. According to Arvey and Cavanaugh’s (1995) review of this research of the past five years, these lists of behaviors vary considerably among researchers. They cite one 1994 study that asked respondents to report on how frequently they were stared at, and referred to as a “girl, hunk, doll, babe or honey,” and another that only included acts of intercourse or genital stimulation in its definition of sexual harassment.

Not surprisingly, this method of ascertaining the frequency of sexual harassment produces incomparable and inconsistent results (Arvey & Cavanaugh, 1995). Estimates of the percentage of women who have experienced sexual harassment range between 42% and 90% (Terpstra & Baker, 1989). A far smaller percentage of women actually call what happens to them sexual harassment, however. In a recent Defense Department survey, for example, 78% of the women soldiers surveyed said they had experienced some type of offensive sexual behavior in the previous year, but one-third of these respondents did not consider the incidents sexual harassment (San Francisco Chronicle, 15 June 1996, A7). Paludi and Barickman write that “the great majority of women who are abused by behavior that fits legal definitions of sexual harassment—and who are traumatized by the experience—do not label what has happened to them sexual harassment” (Paludi & Barickman, 1991, p. 68).

At least part of the discrepancy between researchers’ estimates and employees’ self-reports of sexual harassment can be attributed to organizational context. Some of the behaviors that researchers define as constituting sexual harassment are in fact requirements of some jobs. A great many jobs in the service and entertainment industries require that employees submit to hostile or degrading sexual stares, language, and even occasional touching. Obviously, this is the case in the “sex trades,” including prostitution, phone sex, and strip bars. In these jobs, submission to such behaviors is a virtual condition of employment (Allison, 1994). But recent studies of restaurant work (Giuffre & Williams, 1994), the hotel and tourism trade (Adkins, 1995), and hospital work (Foner, 1994) suggest that these sexual behaviors are widespread and normative throughout the labor market.

In some cases, organizations actually mandate the sexualized treatment of employees. For example, many waitresses work in a highly sexually charged atmosphere where sexual expectations are embedded in their jobs. Giuffre and Williams (1994) cite the example of one waitress, who claimed that customers often “talk dirty” to her:

I remember one day, about four or five years ago when I was working as a cocktail waitress, this guy asked me for a Slow Comfortable Screw [the name of a drink]. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if he was making a move or something. I just looked at him. He said, “You know what it is, right?” I said, “I bet the bartender knows!” (laughs)…There’s another one, “Sex on the Beach.” And there’s another one called a “Screaming Orgasm.” Do you believe that? (Giuffre & Williams, 1994, p. 387)

This waitress works for an organization that subjects all employees to sexual comments as a condition of employment. Although she personally finds sexy drink names offensive, she neither complains about it nor labels it sexual harassment: Once it becomes clear that a “Slow Comfortable Screw” is a “legitimate” and recognized restaurant demand, she accepts it (albeit reluctantly) as part of her job description. The fact that the offensive behavior is institutionalized makes it beyond reproach in her eyes.

This problem of labeling behaviors as sexual harassment is not eliminated by specifying in questionnaires that respondents report only “unwanted” sexual behaviors. This term is paradoxical for many workers. By agreeing to work in a specific job or industry, many people understand that they will be subjected to sexual innuendo, bantering, ogling, and other sexual behaviors as part of their jobs. In some highly sexualized organizations, employees actually are required to sign consent forms promising that they will not sue their employers for sexual harassment. “Consenting” to this treatment does not necessarily make the specific behaviors any less hostile or degrading to the individual, but it does make the process of identifying sexual harassment more complex because they are endorsed or at least tolerated by organizations. The current definition of sexual harassment in research and in policy requires employees to distinguish between sexual behaviors that are organizationally sanctioned and those that are not, a process fraught with ambiguity.

In another example, Adkins found that women hired for several different jobs in the British tourism industry were required to engage in sexualized interactions with customers and co-workers (see also Gherardi, 1995, p. 43). A catering manager describes the work of her female assistants:

She “expected” women workers to be able to cope with sexual behaviour and attention from men customers as “part of the job.” She said that if “the women catering assistants complain, or say things like they can’t cope, I tell them it happens all the time and not to worry about it…it’s part of the job…if they can’t handle it then they’re not up to working here.” (p. 130)

While some women may enjoy and even profit from sexualized interactions at work, resisting these behaviors may be impossible. For instance, in this particular case, reporting sexually offensive behavior to the catering manager would not result in a complaint of sexual harassment; more likely, it would result in the loss of a job. In many service jobs, customers or clients have carte blanche to treat workers in sexually degrading ways, and workers are required to flirt with them. These organizationally sanctioned behaviors are codified in two maxims of successful marketing: “The customer is always right,” and “Sex sells.” (For analyses of employer liability for sexual harassment by customers, see Deadrick, Kezman & McAfee, 1996; Garvey, 1996.)

In some service jobs, sexualized behavior is not mandated, but it is tolerated, as is the case in medical and nursing work. According to Nancy Foner, aides who work in nursing homes are frequently subjected to “sexual overtures and fondling” from the residents:

Aides tend to laugh off such actions from confused residents, but they are often hostile if the resident is alert. “I can’t stand that man,” said one aide, referring to a patient deemed to be “90 percent all there.” “He put his hands all over you. Now Welch, he massages your thighs when you wash him, but he don’t know what he’s doing.” Another aide said she was initially horrified when after washing a resident known to be a lesbian, the woman loudly proclaimed, “You fucked me, now you want me to fuck you?” “I ran to tell the nurse,” the aide explained. “I said I have something to tell you. And she said, Oh, yeah, she does that all the time.” (Foner, 1994, p. 37)

Supervisors were well aware of this treatment of aides by the residents, but did nothing to stop it or prevent it from recurring.

The growing popularity of so-called “Gentlemen’s Clubs” among salesmen is another example of organizational tolerance of an offensive sexual behavior. There are now over 100 high-end clubs in twenty-two U.S. cities that cater to businessmen (Katz, 1995, p. A16). According to a recent survey by Sales and Marketing Magazine, nearly half of the salesmen responding admitted to entertaining clients at a topless bar (Zeiger, 1995). In the following account, Zeiger describes going to a bar in Detroit with two businessmen (a salesman and his boss) who were entertaining a client (a representative from a trucking company):

We hand the waitress credit cards and ask for a cash advance of $600. She brings us 60 ten-dollar bills, which we hand over to [the company salesman]. [The salesman] makes a big show of riffling through the plank-thick stack of cash, stands, and begins hollering, “Hey, we got the money! Where are the girls?”…A petite cheerful young woman [appears] at our table. The salesman and his boss grin at each other in satisfaction, then motion the woman over towards the trucking rep…. The woman yanks at [the trucking rep’s] shirt, baring his chest, and begins grinding against the rep in time to a Van Halen song, pushing her tongue into his ear, pressing her naked breasts into his face. Her attire, at this moment, consists of a G-string and high heels…. As the woman lowers to her knees on the floor, licking her way delicately down to the rep’s stomach…, the boss whispers to me…. “I like to think of this as cementing the business relationship.” (Zeiger, 1995, p. 48)

Taking clients to strip-tease bars is offensive to some saleswomen (and salesmen), and may informally bar women from participating in some sales occupations, but to date, there have been no suits filed with the EEOC citing these bars as the cause of sexual harassment (MacKinnon, 1995). Workers do not and perhaps cannot label this practice sexual harassment because it is endorsed by their work organizations.

The focus on specific behaviors in definitions of sexual harassment also ignores the possibility of ambiguity and ambivalence that workers experience in interpreting interactions (Fiske & Glick, 1995; Hollway & Jefferson, 1996). Sexual behaviors rarely have unambiguous meanings, and they typically evoke ambivalent responses. Women who are eager to fit in and be accepted by co-workers may interpret offensive acts as initiation rituals or similar tests of their dedication to the group. In an underground coal mine studied by Vaught and Smith (1980), the women who were new to the work group were stripped from the waist down and “greased” by their male co-workers, which involved tying down the novice in a spread-eagle position, and applying coal grease to the genitals. When one of the women filed a suit against the company, she was met with open hostility from the work group. According to one woman’s account:

Us older women don’t have anything to do with her except to tell her to drop the whole idea and not get our brothers in trouble. She was crying in the bath house the other day about how we treated her, and Babs slapped her and told her to drop her damned suit and behave herself and everything would be all right. Today in the union meeting [she] arose and tearfully apologized to her brothers and sisters for the hard feelings she had caused, and announced that she was dropping her lawsuit against the company and the men of Number Six Unit. (Vaught ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• EDITORIALS
• THEORETICAL ESSAYS
• EMPIRICAL ESSAYS
• REVIEW ESSAYS
• ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• BOOK REVIEWS
• Contributors