by Eurydice (c) 1999

A Short History of Contemporary Sexual Paranoia

     Our murky legal doctrine of sexual harassment came into being in 1964 in a last-minute amendment to the Civil Rights Act filed by conservative Southern Congressmen trying to kill that bill. It was not debated or enforced until 1977, when the feminist lawyer Catherine McKinnon convinced a Washington district court to award damages to a woman whose employer retaliated for her refusal to sleep with him; until then courts had ruled that sexual overtures in the workplace were 'personal' and didn't constitute sex discrimination. McKinnon defined harassment as 'quid pro quo'-'put out or get out' sexual blackmail-or 'hostile work environment.' She also argued that, in patriarchy, a woman's consent is inherently coerced, and no sex is free of harassment. Later, in the Indiana porn case, she contended that 'all men are rapists.' Because of this, sexual harassment came to be seen as a feminist battlecall and left-wing pet issue.
     The general public was introduced to it in 1991 during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Congressional hearings. Instead of restricting its attack on Thomas to his thorough judicial inexperience, confirmed by the ABA, the Democrats used his alleged sexual harassment of Hill to discredit his candidacy. Thomas's requests for dates and distasteful but legal office banter defined what made harassment sexual: the emphasis was placed on the grossness of his conduct and not its impact on Hill's ability to work. The Republicans who sponsored his nomination to the Supreme Court found it expedient not to quibble on the definition of sexual harassment, but to exonerate Thomas from a personal stain by attacking Hill's version of the story. (Afterward, Sen. Alan Simpson admitted lying about receiving negative information on Hill 'over the transom of his office.') That year Congress passed a civil-rights law allowing jury trials and punitive damages for sexual harassment. The Supreme Court ruled a hostile work environment 'can and often will detract from employees' job performance, discourage employees from remaining on the job, or keep them from advancing in their careers.' Verbal or physical sexual acts that created an atmosphere that would be offensive, intimidating, humiliating etc. to a reasonable person, constituted sexual harassment; the definition of 'reasonable' became the gray line. Since then, the conservative Supreme Court has amplified its definition of sexual harassment. In 1993 it ruled that a victim didn't have to prove psychological harm, only sexually inappropriate behavior.In 1993 1,500 people won $25.2 million for sexual harassment. Monetary settlements reached through the EEOC rose from $7.7 million in 1990 to $27 million by 1997, and complaints rose from 6,000 in 1990 to 15,300 in 1996.
     In 1991, a hostile environment involved a continuing course of pervasive offensive conduct; now it can be a slap on a butt. Now no one can make a pass without the risk of losing everything: respect, money, family, job, and the very rights that made lust a criminal offense. Rather than promoting women's empowerment and equality, the law merely protects women's sexual virtues and sensibilities, setting women off in a separate sexual category-a reverse discrimination. Designed to prevent gender discrimination in the workplace, the law instead preserves both the sexual objectification and the desexualization of women: it objectifies them by emphasizing the sexual aspect of their presence in an integrated environment, and desexualizes them by forcing them to be frigid or sexual casualties. Its sexually alienating dialectic encourages us to stay away from life's impromptu mating games and seek refuge in deceptions. It's an anti-sex law.
     This year the Supreme Court awarded damages to Kimberly Ellerth who filed after quitting her job when a vice-president made sexual advances at her, although she didn't submit to them, didn't complain at the time, and didn't suffer any consequences for refusing them. At stake is a substantial fine point: should the law presume that any sexual proposition causes harm, or should it require proof of injury? So far, the puritanical reading of this law has spawned a punitive climate where people don't dare express their desires, where companies, agencies, colleges, and busybodies police consensual sex, and employers assume control over private intimate conduct, replacing the Church as society's bedroom snoops. This surreptitious secularization of the ecclesiastic tradition of putting the fear of sex in us and turning us into pitiful snitches is what Clinton's scandal can put an end to.What has blurred the difference between consensual fun and harassment is the idea that sex in any unequal power relation entails coercion. So the current law, rather than promoting women's empowerment and equality in the workplace, merely protects women's sexual virtues and sensibilities, setting women off in a separate sexual category (a sexual discrimination). But the relations among lovers, just as between friends, relatives, or colleagues, are unavoidably unequal, mutable, and explosive. All seduction is coercion. A proposition is not harassment or discrimination. The only reason to stop or purge any consensual sexual interaction is our fear of sex.
     Ironically, the sexualization of our public lives started with feminists who infuriated conservatives by advocating in the 1960s that the personal is political-and litigable. Liberals argued that sex involves an abuse of power at the expense of women (the weaker and less horny gender); their objective was to enable women to seek refuge from sexual inequality in the law. Religious fundamentalists and family-values advocates took up the cause because it coincided with the conservative urge to judge the sexual probity of others. The result is the current convergence of two ideologically opposite forces in an extensive conspiracy to conquer, even deny, human nature.  Ironically, the sexualization of our public sphere started with Anita Hill, the pubic hair on the Coke bottle and Long Dong Silver. By now the scandal list is endless: Tailhook, O.J., Troopergate, Jennifer Flowers, Dick Morris, Marv Albert. The theory is that sex is about an uncanny abuse of power, usually at the expense of women, who are still assumed, in a most unfeminist way, to be the weaker and less horny sex. It encourages women to seek refuge from sex in the law. I find it disempowering to deny women their own free mating will. The purges and laws which protect women from predatory men perpetuate women's positions as sexual victims. Sexual harassment, designed to prevent gender discrimination in the workplace, preserves both the sexual objectification and the desexualization of women: it objectifies them by emphasizing the sexual aspect of their presence in an integrated environment, and desexualizes them by forcing them to be frigid or sexual casualties. It is in effect an anti-sex law.
     All sexual coercion is repulsive. But not all sexual relationships are or should be 'equal' or black-and-white simple. The democracy of the body is that sex renders equally vulnerable people of all kinds. We now risk losing a vast dimension of existence, namely the language of our bodies, through which women and men ask and answer questions about each other, suggest and manifest wonder, admiration, tenderness, defiance, arousal, delight. I doubt that professors can teach and students can learn effectively without bodily signals in the classroom, that bosses and employees and colleagues can interact effectively without their bodies being present in the office or factory, and that armies can function sensibly without moral laxity and sexual freedom. The assumption that every woman is in a position of sexual weakness and needs to be protected discredits equality and threatens our sexuality. And the loss of intimacy in the workplace, where we best know each other, limits the pool of available mates in a workaholic society. We don't want to live in a desensitized world where life at school, on the job, in the neighborhood, in the cafeteria, on base, on a daily basis, is robbed of spontaneous sensuality, where the human body is an apathetic, feared boundary. Loss and hurt and personal conflict are central parts of life. Sex is about oddsmaking. Ambiguity is inherent in human relationships. The unexpected is the beauty of life. There is no rule of moral conduct more important than mutual generosity. And this we learn, and improve on, by trial and error.
     It now seems that a man couldn't make a pass without risking to find himself in a court of law and lose everything: his self-respect, money, family, job. It seemed the day was near when a man who asked a woman at a party to go home with him would face an undercover cop reading him his rights, the very rights that had made our sexuality a criminal offense. It struck me as the anachronistic revival of the misogynist honor code that had once pitted brother and father of the coveted woman against the brave lover who made a pass at her, when, if the suitor persisted after being refused or was unwilling to proceed to marriage, the family males had the right to see to moral justice, often with guns. The assumption was that the female in question was a familial and social property to be bartered, and that female sexuality should be incapable of initiative. My own father had first come to America to hide from relatives of girls he had dishonored by desiring them. Now a feminist law had reestablished that senseless, sexually alienating dialectic: being rejected by an available woman was criminal harassment, being accepted was love, and courting a legally unavailable woman was sheer villainy. Facing this impossible trap, men (and women) are staying away from the risks of life's improptu mating games and seeking refuge in the safe boundaries of designated sex clubs like jail inmates.Fear of lawsuits more than empathy with women's sensitivity to insult is the reason. Still Americans fear that workplace relations are getting worse as downsizing, competitive pressures and the new laws are shredding the reciprocal ties of loyalty that used to exist, and women are increasingly resented by male colleagues.
     In a country where even the President has spent $1.5 million in two years to fend off a former Arkansas state employee's sexual harassment suit (she sought $700,000 in damages, he sought presidential immunity), the public has grown desensitized to sexual scandal, because there has been so much of it.  Paula Jones' complaint is strikingly, crudely old-fashioned: Clinton's raw demand for sex, his self-exposure, his remark about her boss being his friend, are rare in the post-Anita Hill U.S.A. After Anita Hill raised the nation's consciousness with her 1991 testimony during Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings, people learned of the legal concept of a "hostile environment." That year Congress passed a civil-rights law that allowed jury trials and punitive damages for sexual harassment. In 1993 the Supreme Court made winning a sexual harassment case easier, ruling unanimously that a victim didn't have to prove psychological harm, just that the sexually inappropriate behavior took place. By the time in 1995 when Bob Packwood was expelled from Congress after 27 years in the Senate when female staffers accused him of unwanted kissing and inappropriate innuendoes, the public was numb to the issue. Clinton's success, while facing Jones' suit, is proof that public disgust with official philandering had started to wane as the barrage of revelations made it seem commonplace. 
     In Sep. 1996, Jonathan Prevette, a first-grade 6-year-old boy in Lexington N.C. got suspended on the ground of sexual harassment after kissing a—willing—female classmate on the cheek. "Unwelcome is unwelcome at any age," said the school-district spokeswoman Jane Martin, but America was outraged. The incident became an object of national derision. But a month later 7-year-old De'Andre Dearinge was suspended for "sexual harassment" after kissing a girl in school in Queens, N.Y. The resulting media frenzy was viewed as an effort by "anti-P.C." forces to paint sexual harassment as a paranoid fantasy. The number of student complaints investigated by the government Office for Civil Rights increased to 200 cases a year in the 90s. A study of boys and girls in grades 8 to 11 conducted by the American Association of University Women, had 81% say they had been sexually harassed. A growth industry of training packages, videotapes and school guidelines regarding conduct labeled as illegal sexual harassment, has been born. Afraid of liability, school boards like one in Millis, MA, forbade hand-holding. In California a jury awarded 10-year-old Tianna Ugarte $500,000 because her school failed to correct a schoolboy who taunted her in sixth grade. When the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of two Texas eighth-graders who were groped by boys on their school bus, the backlash began. A March 28 1997 segment of 20/20 exposed that a Brown University student, Adam Lack, was expelled after an unsubstantiated accusation of date rape by a fellow student; undergraduates who were interviewed claimed that a burden of proof wasn't necessary for the dismissal of a student against whom a complaint was filed. America was angry and worried about the educators creating a totalitarian America of the future. The public worries that sexual harassment control has gone too far, that bureaucrats had put one-size-fits-all prohibitions without accounting for human nature. Many Americans feel there is too much rulemaking in civic life. Some even see a witchhunt.
     Following the landmark Supreme Court unanimous decision in June 1997 to let Paula Jones' suit against the President to go to trial, Anita Hill herself, in a Newsweek article, admitted that if Paula Jones "is proved to be lying, then we must accept that we pushed onto the public agenda an issue that is vulnerable to manipulation by alleged victims."  Conventional wisdom holds that Clinton should settle with Jones, but in practice it's nearly impossible to construct legal language that isn't an implicit admission of guilt.
     Many people believe the line between harmless sexual flirtation and sexual harassment is blurred. Men complain that they "can't compliment women anymore." Women too are feeling the heat, as more get accused of lesbian harassment. 15% of all people who filed sexual harassment complaints against their employers the past few years were men. 90% of Fortune 500 companies have at least one complaint filed a year. Acc. to the Wall Street Journal, 1,500 people in 1993 won $25.2 million from employers for acknowledged sexual harassment. Monetary settlements reached through the EEOC rose from $7.7 million in 1990 to $27 million in 1997, and the annual number of complaints went from 6,000 in 1990 to 15,300 in 1996. In the cases that go to court, juries are invariably strict. A case in point: Rena Weeks was a new secretary in a San Francisco law firm in 1990 assigned to a senior partner who pulled back her arms "to see which breast was bigger." When she complained to her office manager, she was witched to a different partner within a month, and the offending lawyer was fired. Still, the jury that heard the case in 1994 decided that because there was a history of similar complaints against the lawyer, the firm hadn't done enough; it awarded Weeks $7 million, later reduced to $3.5 million, or 10% of the firm's total worth.
     The line between acceptable flirting and sexual misconduct should be simple: flirting is mutual. Harassment is one-sided, often repeated, always embarrassing to the receiver who's asked the harasser to stop. In Nov. 1993 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the topic of sexual blackmail (sex in exchange for career advancement), that a hostile working environment "can and often will detract from employees' job performance, discourage employees from remaining on the job, or keep them from advancing in their careers." A classic hostile-environment case involves a continuing course of pervasive offensive conduct. (But some courts have held that someone may be found liable for harassment for a single unusually severe episode, like a slap on a woman's buttocks.) When verbal or physical behavior with a sexual content creates an atmosphere that would be offensive, intimidating, humiliating etc. to a reasonable person, it constitutes sexual harassment. 'Reasonable": this is where the gray line comes up.
     81% of polled 8th to 11th graders felt they had been sexually harassed. Antioch College in Ohio published a code of sexual conduct for students that required verbal consent at every stage of intimacy. Army recruits, corporate suits and Mitsubishi factory workers in Normal Ill., were made to attend sexual ethics seminars. New Haven masons were made to abide by a 'five-second rule'; if they looked at a female colleague for more than five seconds it could be sexual harassment. An executive was fired for recounting a Seinfeld episode to a female colleague. A Nebraska graduate student was forced to remove from his desk a photo of his wife in a bikini. The Supreme Court allowed an Arkansas woman to take the U.S. President to court on uncorroborated charges of sexual harassment; and since she had not been fired, demoted, or deprived of any benefits, her essential charge was that of sexual impropriety. Having shed the stranglehold of sin, modern America was devising more sexual rules than were proscribed at any time in this century, all in the name of liberation. The ever broader definitions of rape signaled a compulsion for regulation that followed each sexual deregulation. These mushrooming draconian guidelines were redefining the private desires of citizens as issues of public legal control, marking the reincarnation of America's inherited puritanism in a more modern, tolerable garb, and instilling in us the fear of vague retributions for being sexual.
     The overwhelming pervasiveness of sex as the central issue in our public life over the past decade, in Congressional hearings, epic criminal trials, constant scandals, in our entertainment and daily news, defines the critical bafflement over what is public and what private of a culture in flux. And talking about sex provides our culture with the means to regulate sex. We talk to tell each other what we shouldn't do. Politicizing sex is a conservative strategy. The scheme for trans-forming sex into discourse was devised two millennia ago in monasteries to keep us controlled. For centuries, Christianity prescribed the task of putting everything sexual—not only consummated acts, but sensations, gazes, remarks, thoughts—to speech as a fundamental duty. Like the therapist, the confessor didn't judge, but warned and advised. The Enlightenment secularized the practice. Now the media has made it its focal point. Our society has become more tolerant of wayward sexuality because it can convert the sex instinct into the instinct to consume. Sex is now socially useful as a floating image that sells everything from milk to news. This impersonal market overrules our worst moral pretensions, but also the best American freedoms. We are self-exploited, getting our kicks from watching ourselves and hearing each other confess. This is the apogee of repres-sion: our puritanism has been pared down to its naked core: public voyeurism—with impunity.
     Our outspokenness is not a victory for sexualities that are no longer invisible, a proliferation of legitimate sexual options; it is a frustrating, meaningless struggle to conquer, even deny our nature. As our sexual freedom generates our censorship of our sexuality, and as sexuality shoulders an increasing weight of meaning in our culture, sex is no longer a subject people simply associate with a good time.It's now synonymous with gender war, paranoia, a panacea, or a thesis for our general being, so inextricably linked to our sense of self that the basic joys of tactile, olfactory, visual, aural immersion in one another, are becoming neglected. Goal-oriented sexuality is supplanting unspeakable ecstasy. And our confidence is misleading; our public veneer of predatory sexuality masks a growing passivity.
     I now appreciate the value of what theologians call 'wise ignorance': the willingness to acknowledge that what we know increasingly reveals what we don't know. Human sexuality involves unruly passion, intuitive irrationality, unchartable nuance. Sex predates our reasoning, and may always, and at best, stay inaccessible to it. So I think that an attitude of enlightened wonder should be our new morality. 

A TYPICAL SEXUAL HARASSMENT CASE

     Complaints of sexual harassment by women at the Mitsubishi automotive plant in Normal, IL., prompted an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In 1996 a class action lawsuit against the management was filed. It was the biggest sexual harassment suit in US history. The EEOC held a press conference to announce the lawsuit, which brought much media attention and prompted Mitsubishi to label the agency's action as political and unwarranted. It could take years to bring the case to trial (depositions are currently being taken), unless Mitsubishi decides to settle out of court. In April 1996, in protest of the suit, over 2700 workers took a 3 hour bus trip to Chicago to show their support for the company, wearing their Mitsubishi maroon shirts and chanting in front of the EEOC office.
     Looming over the farm fields of Central Illinois, surrounded by cornfields, the Christian Coalition, State Farm Insurance and other better-known horizon-blockers, the Mitsubishi auto plant rises oddly out of place. Forty-two hundred people work at the plant producing 800 cars a day. It's the largest employer in the twin towns of Normal and Bloomington. Twenty per cent of the employees are women. Fifty-four per cent of Mitsubishi buyers are women.
Executives in both Tokyo and Normal have indicated an interest in settling with the victims. Settlement of the complaint has been delayed because Mitsubishi contests the EEOC claim of the 'pervasiveness' of sexual harassment in the plant. Because the amount of damages the women can collect is limited by law, Mitsubishi faces at most $120 million. Expectations are that both suits could be settled for $30 million after the company implements a no-tolerance approach to sexual harassment. If the company fails to address its critics, it could risk its entire $2 billion US car operation investment. Mitsubishi hired a high-profile law firm—Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone of Detroit—to represent it in the two lawsuits; they have subpoenaed thousands of pages of documents, including the complete health records of the 30 women involved in the private lawsuit.
      Mitsubishi spokesperson Gary Schultz admitted to isolated incidents of harassment, but said the company had a zero tolerance policy which was effective in deterring such behavior since the day the plant opened. (Schultz  had urged employees to "parade in the thousands at the rally and paint Chicago maroon.") Mitsubishi also installed a bank of telephones in the plant with several numbers preprogrammed—the White House, local Congressmen, and media—for use by employees at work, ostensibly to protest the suit.
     Civil-rights attorney Patricia Benassi (middle-aged, glasses, hair-salon wave-set shoulder-length hair, suits) says the stories first brought to her by 29 women were so disturbing that she filed a lawsuit against the company in December 1994. She says there may have been areas in the plant where women were not harassed; but 'people in that plant often don't know what constitutes sexual harassment. Up until recently there was no training, so women who work in an environment where they hear the word 'bitch' and see sexual graffiti written on the fenders of cars as they come through, where they see dirty jokes and pornographic pictures and they might hear statements like 'women don't belong here,' often don't identify that as sexual harassment.'
John Rowe, Chicago District Office EEOC (nerdy, mustached, suit-and-tie Richard Dreyfuss type): 'There were hundreds of instances of sexual harassment that covered a wide spectrum of activities from graffiti on walls and on car parts to unwelcome physical contact. We believe that the individuals harmed by this conduct number in the hundreds. Numerous women were victimized by violations of federal law [Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964]. The women, not the company, were the victims.' The women have been urged to join Women Employed, a support group for women in the work place, because of the stress and depression they experienced after they filed their complaint.
     Most Normal-Bloomington locals are pro-Mitsubishi. Most blue-collar workers are very defensive about the issue, while local feminists and University denizens demonize the company. This town just voted down a gay rights initiative, after city councilmen quoted from the Bible that homosexuality was "an abomination..[done by people who] the Bible says should be put to death.." Many local people's hobby is "Christian political action." A few brag of contacts with the Northern Illinois Minutemen and Patriots Alert.
     Twenty-eight year old Sandra Rushing (Farah Faucettish hair, a bit overweight, big teeth, challenging gaze) spent two years on a production line in the plant and left in disgust in 1991. She said that her male co-workers not only touched her, but they used their wrenches and their airguns, put them in between their legs pretending they were extensions of themselves and nudged her between her legs with them. 'They were very large wrenches,' she said, 'good-sized wrenches, and they thought it was hilarious. The management didn't care so long as the work got done.' She left the job due to the stress.
     An anonymous woman who still works at the plant and is afraid of losing her job said she was often slapped on the butt and men put bananas in their mouths and simulated oral sex. Half the women in the private lawsuit still work at the plant. Some have experienced retaliation: one found a death threat ("Die Bitch!") stuffed in her locker at work. And despite the investigation and lawsuits, old habits haven't died. It was only recently revealed that for years plans have been made at the plant for off-site private sex-parties where prostitutes are hired and pictures taken and then spread at the break areas. Acc. to the women's lawyer P. Benassi, this is pornography in the work place, which greenlights people who might not otherwise have a proclivity to engage in sexual harassment to do so. Mitsubishi failed to obtain a gag order against the women's lawyers.
     Jeanette Portzeba (blonde, young, thin, cute) also works on the production line with 17 men and says she's never been sexually harassed. 'Yeah, we all laugh and joke and try to have a good time, ..I'm with these guys, you know, eight hours a day. I get to see them more like family, and it's very tight-knit. I don't want this suit filed on my behalf because I haven't experienced it.' A high-school graduate, Portzeba made $5 an hour as a secretary before she was hired at Mitsubishi, and now brings home $50,000 a year for herself and her two daughters. She admits she's fighting hard for the company because she couldn't make that money anywhere else. So are most of her co-workers.
     Most of the workers also worry for their reputations. They bristle at the inaccurate media portrayals and jokes at their expense. They maintain they are not all harassers or all victims of harassment. Most of them still steadfastly defend the company. The story of an employee who coaches his daughter's softball team being called a racist is recited as an example of the effects of their own harassment by the media.
     Female workers like Portzeba, Rochelle Fry and Anna Rogers demonstrated against the EEOC in April 1996: 'We asked them to handle it on an individual basis instead of a class action because we don't feel this represents the plant's working force,' they said. Rochelle Fry agreed: 'I absolutely don't want to be part of a class-action suit. The EEOC should do it one by one.' That sentiment was echoed by Jim Bartholomew, Don Langnes, Eldon Berg, Don Kraft and Bruce Henricks (mustached, chubby, tough guys): 'I myself feel like I've been tried and convicted already through the media. Any place you go, people say those are the guys that harass the women. It's not right.' 
     Troy O'Hare was one of the few workers who didn't march, feeling that there had been some sexual harassment that hadn't been dealt with correctly; he didn't want to seem like he was supporting it and standing up for those men. He and 25 other people stayed behind and had sexual harassment training for that day after the buses left. An employee committee organized the trip; the company paid for 50 buses for the workers who went to protest in Chicago, and provided lunch and a day's pay.
     The home of Mitsubishi's director for human resources burned to the ground the night after he spoke to workers about the Chicago rally. Police said it was arson.
     Employees, pro or against the lawsuit, worry that the negative press will affect car sales. And "if we don't sell them, we don't build them. Straight pure and simple." (The plant builds the Eclipse and Eclipse Spyder, the Galant, and the Avenger and the Sebring for Chrysler.) The plant's high wages brought unprecedented economic growth to the area. New homes line the streets of Normal. Employees fear losing the best jobs they ever had. It's why the EEOC chose not to put Mitsubishi out of business in the first place.
     That is also why Bloomington Mayor Jesse Smart gave unprecedented support to the auto plant. He told the Chicago media his community was rallying behind Mitsubishi and urged his town to put pressure on the Clinton administration which was "showing off" at the expense of the community that could end up losing the plant's 4,000 jobs. 'We worked too hard to get the plant located here to let the government come in and do this.'
     Nevertheless, after the employees'  march, both NOW's (National Organization of Women) Patricia Ireland and Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH and National Rainbow Coalition called for a national consumer boycott of Mitsubishi products and organized informational pickets outside Mitsubishi dealerships across the country. (Because of the boycott protests, Mitsubishi began a program to recruit more minorities and women for dealer ownerships; minorities and women had owned 9% of the firm's 503 dealerships.)
     U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., held a press conference in Washington D.C. to criticize Mitsubishi's response to the EEOC suit. Schroeder and 9 other Congresswomen sent Mitsubishi and the Japanese ambassador to the U.S. a protesting letter. They warned the ambassador of the serious negative implications of the image of Japanese businesses in the U.S. They warned Mitsubishi that 'the women of America will be watching your actions' and 'the low road you are now taking.' Takahisa Komoto, the president and chief operating officer of Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America responded to the congresswomen in a letter claiming to share their concerns and to have been misrepresented by the media; he claimed that the company did not warn people they would lose their jobs if the allegations caused sales to drop, did not organize the rally or the free calls but only responded to employee demand, and was 'a responsible corporate citizen.' He invited Schroeder to visit he plant. She did not.
     Lynn Martin, former US secretary of labor under Bush and a five-term Congresswoman from Illinois, was hired by Mitsubishi in May 1996 to solve the problems at the plant. Mitsubishi asked her to conduct a one-year review of the company's workplace policies and practices. She went to Tokyo to tell the men who run Mitsubishi Motor Corp. that the board of directors would have to implement her recommendations for dealing with sexual harassment at the US auto plant. 'I'm putting my name on the line,' she warned. Tokyo too worried about the Mitsubishi name in America. They promised her independence in creating "a new workplace master plan."
     Some saw this as a brilliant PR ploy to salvage its reputation, considering Mitsubishi's holding company operates 28 separate companies in the US selling everything from cars and chemicals to real estate and banking services. Mitsubishi is Japan's second largest keiretsu, or group of companies, with 150 companies worldwide. Richard Recchia, executive VP and chief operating officer of Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America, the company that markets Mitsubishi cars in the US, acknowledged that the sexual harassment suit against the sister company damaged the overall Mitsubishi name in the US and Mitsubishi car sales fell 7.2% in 1996. Failure to implement change would hurt business.
     Lynn Martin hired pollster Peter Hart to survey the Mitsubishi work force, began a series of focus groups to discuss workplace issues and suggested mandatory sexual harassment training for everyone from the chairman of the board to the lowest ranking assembly line worker. By February 1997 everyone in the plant had taken a one-day training course in what constitutes sexual harassment. Only 40% of American businesses provide sexual harassment training for their employees.
     Marcia Kropf, VP at Catalyst, a NY firm that consults with management on women's issues, helped prepare a 75 page research report, outlining the best practices among US corporations who are committed to eradicating sexual harassment. She said 'The critical piece is how you implement the policy you have.' Mitsubishi had had a policy against sexual harassment but not a direct complaint-response mechanism.
Martin reorganized Mitsubishi's Human Resources Dept. in September 1996. The dept. had been the target of numerous complaints by women interviewed by EEOC during a year long investigation before the lawsuit. Osamu Ito who had held the post before, was brought back from Tokyo to run the revamped Dept. Ito set up a joint labor-manage-ment board, like ones at the Big Three US automakers, to deal with sexual harassment complaints within 48 hours. Day to day control of "quality of life" issues at the plant was given to the newly created Office of Opportunity Programs, which oversees the resolution of all discrimination and harassment complaints. Gloria-Jeanne Davis, an African American woman with 12 year experience handling affirmative-action and equal-oppor-tunity programs at the neighboring Illinois State University, was hired to head the office.
     Martin, who spends several days a week working out of a cramped office at the plant, seems confident that Tokyo will approve all her changes. It is expected that Martin will suggest that Japanese managers at the plant be "retooled," and more Americans be hired in top management positions—as Japanese work ethics are, by U.S. standards, sexist. Martin and her aides are quick to chafe at the term "test lab" for the array of costly programs they established at Mitsubishi and prefer to call it a "model" factory. The programs are now being implemented at a time when the company needs to reduce production costs and manufacture more than this year's 130,000 cars, in order to turn a profit.
      Some employees said the new programs and training were helpful; others were skeptical. One black employee said he had witnessed severe sexual harassment in the past but had been impressed to see union leaders and managers join the eight-hour training session, signaling to workers to take this seriously. He said "overt harassment" of women and blacks had stopped. But one of the female employees suing the company said that, despite the training, harassment was still a problem, and another female employee had complained of it to the new managers and trainers, but no action had been taken to stop it.
     Since the Mitsubishi lawsuit, Texaco paid a record $176.1 million to settle a race discrimination suit; Lockheed Martin agreed to pay $13 million to settle an EEOC age discrimination suit; the chairman of the US subsidiary of Sweden's Astra AB was forced to resign in the face of sexual discrimination charges. Corporations have established strict no-touching office rules. Fear of lawsuits more than empathy with women's sensitivity to insult is the reason. Still Americans fear that workplace relations are getting worse as downsizing, competitive pressures and the new laws are shredding the reciprocal ties of loyalty that used to exist, and women are increasingly resented by male colleagues.
      In a country where even the President has spent $1.5 million in two years to fend off a former Arkansas state employee's sexual harassment suit (she sought $700,000 in damages, he sought presidential immunity), the public has grown desensitized to sexual scandal, because there has been so much of it.  Paula Jones' complaint is strikingly, crudely old-fashioned: Clinton's raw demand for sex, his self-exposure, his remark about her boss being his friend, are rare in the post-Anita Hill U.S.A. After Anita Hill raised the nation's consciousness with her 1991 testimony during Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings, people learned of the legal concept of a "hostile environment." That year Congress passed a civil-rights law that allowed jury trials and punitive damages for sexual harassment. In 1993 the Supreme Court made winning a sexual harassment case easier, ruling unanimously that a victim didn't have to prove psychological harm, just that the sexually inappropriate behavior took place. By the time in 1995 when Bob Packwood was expelled from Congress after 27 years in the Senate when female staffers accused him of unwanted kissing and inappropriate innuendoes, the public was numb to the issue. Clinton's success, while facing Jones' suit, is proof that public disgust with official philandering had started to wane as the barrage of revelations made it seem commonplace. 
     In Sep. 1996, Jonathan Prevette, a first-grade 6-year-old boy in Lexington N.C. got suspended on the ground of sexual harassment after kissing a—willing—female classmate on the cheek. "Unwelcome is unwelcome at any age," said the school-district spokeswoman Jane Martin, but America was outraged. The incident became an object of national derision. But a month later 7-year-old De'Andre Dearinge was suspended for "sexual harassment" after kissing a girl in school in Queens, N.Y. The resulting media frenzy was viewed as an effort by "anti-P.C." forces to paint sexual harassment as a paranoid fantasy. The number of student complaints investigated by the government Office for Civil Rights increased to 200 cases a year in the 90s. A study of boys and girls in grades 8 to 11 conducted by the American Association of University Women, had 81% say they had been sexually harassed. A growth industry of training packages, videotapes and school guidelines regarding conduct labeled as illegal sexual harassment, has been born. Afraid of liability, school boards like one in Millis, MA, forbade hand-holding. In California a jury awarded 10-year-old Tianna Ugarte $500,000 because her school failed to correct a schoolboy who taunted her in sixth grade. When the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of two Texas eighth-graders who were groped by boys on their school bus, the backlash began. A March 28 1997 segment of 20/20 exposed that a Brown University student, Adam Lack, was expelled after an unsubstantiated accusation of date rape by a fellow student; undergraduates who were interviewed claimed that a burden of proof wasn't necessary for the dismissal of a student against whom a complaint was filed. America was angry and worried about the educators creating a totalitarian America of the future. The public worries that sexual harassment control has gone too far, that bureaucrats had put one-size-fits-all prohibitions without accounting for human nature. Many Americans feel there is too much rulemaking in civic life. Some even see a witchhunt.
      Following the landmark Supreme Court unanimous decision in June 1997 to let Paula Jones' suit against the President to go to trial, Anita Hill herself, in a Newsweek article, admitted that if Paula Jones "is proved to be lying, then we must accept that we pushed onto the public agenda an issue that is vulnerable to manipulation by alleged victims."  Conventional wisdom holds that Clinton should settle with Jones, but in practice it's nearly impossible to construct legal language that isn't an implicit admission of guilt.
     Many people believe the line between harmless sexual flirtation and sexual harassment is blurred. Men complain that they "can't compliment women anymore." Women too are feeling the heat, as more get accused of lesbian harassment. 15% of all people who filed sexual harassment complaints against their employers the past few years were men. 90% of Fortune 500 companies have at least one complaint filed a year. Acc. to the Wall Street Journal, 1,500 people in 1993 won $25.2 million from employers for acknowledged sexual harassment. Monetary settlements reached through the EEOC rose from $7.7 million in 1990 to $27 million in 1997, and the annual number of complaints went from 6,000 in 1990 to 15,300 in 1996. In the cases that go to court, juries are invariably strict. A case in point: Rena Weeks was a new secretary in a San Francisco law firm in 1990 assigned to a senior partner who pulled back her arms "to see which breast was bigger." When she complained to her office manager, she was witched to a different partner within a month, and the offending lawyer was fired. Still, the jury that heard the case in 1994 decided that because there was a history of similar complaints against the lawyer, the firm hadn't done enough; it awarded Weeks $7 million, later reduced to $3.5 million, or 10% of the firm's total worth.
      The line between acceptable flirting and sexual misconduct should be simple: flirting is mutual. Harassment is one-sided, often repeated, always embarrassing to the receiver who's asked the harasser to stop. In Nov. 1993 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the topic of sexual blackmail (sex in exchange for career advancement), that a hostile working environment "can and often will detract from employees' job performance, discourage employees from remaining on the job, or keep them from advancing in their careers." A classic hostile-environment case involves a continuing course of pervasive offensive conduct. (But some courts have held that someone may be found liable for harassment for a single unusually severe episode, like a slap on a woman's buttocks.) When verbal or physical behavior with a sexual content creates an atmosphere that would be offensive, intimidating, humiliating etc. to a reasonable person, it constitutes sexual harassment. 'Reasonable" is where the gray line comes up. And the repression builds up.