Christopher Caldwell has a striking take on sexual harassment in his column in the Financial Times. He takes the examples of Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton, and Isiah Thomas to argue that sexual harassment is no longer about the use of power by powerful people to obtain sex, but rather about the coming back of Puritanism in an American society that has a problem with sex and doesn’t want it to happen in anything, but proper situation. I think that the examples, which Caldwell uses to make his point are too different to be the illustration of the same point and that although it is true that American society does have a strong puritanical side because religion too easily permeates through every part of society, most Americans are on the side of Caldwell on the issue of sexual harassment. Americans tend to believe that sexual harassment is rarely a serious issue and that it gives too much power to women over men who are too willing to use it to destroy a man out of that legendary female vindictiveness, which makes people scream in front of the types of situation that Hell Hath no Fury like a Woman Scorned. The point is that rape and sexual harassment cases are ones where the accuser is, more often than not, refused the status of victim even after a court recognized that a crime or a tort was committed. There is always the suspicion that she asked for it, that she was too sensitive, that she placed in a situation where what happened to her was unavoidable or that she should just accept manliness and the laws of nature. Sugary excerpt:
But it has become a feature of sexual-harassment cases that actual and imputed torts are hard to disentangle from personal gripes and political agendas. “What I did here I did for every working woman in America,” said Ms Sanders. This is not the sign of a strong argument. If a serious wrong has been done, it should not matter if the victim is the only one on earth. To allude to comrades-in-suffering shifts the focus from the case’s merits to the social change it can effect.
[…] Ms Sanders wept when she described how Stephon Marbury, the Knicks’ 30-year-old star, had had a consensual fling with an intern, 24. “They basically had sexual relations,” she said. The feminist writer, Rebecca Traister, complained in New York magazine that Marbury “wasn’t held accountable” for the tryst. But accountable to whom, one might ask, besides Mrs Marbury? One suspects “sexual harassment” is being used as a euphemism, and that what its promoters really want back are the old laws against fornication. […] Reviving puritanical mores is not what the concept of sexual harassment – as originally laid out by the University of Michigan legal philosopher Catharine MacKinnon – was meant to achieve. The core of sexual harassment is “sex forced by power”. Women are often in a position of “hierarchical vulnerability” where they cannot respond to sexual advances as fully free agents. There is nothing absurd or revolutionary about this idea. Hierarchical vulnerability is obvious in the offence of “sexual abuse of a ward”, which applies, for instance, to a prison guard propositioning a prisoner. […] The problem is that this logic is hard to translate to a broad public. The Isiah Thomas case shows that juries are seldom subtle enough to figure out when hierarchy is being abused to get sex. Instead, they use sexual-harassment law to criminalise either hierarchy per se or sexuality per se. The Clinton impeachment and the Hill-Thomas affair, meanwhile, show that sexual harassment – because it often combines the gravest accusations of immorality with the lowest standards of proof – is ideally suited as a weapon of unaccountable defamation.
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