What to Do When You Don't Want to Call the Cops : A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment

by Taylor, Joan Kennedy

• ISBN13: 9780814782323
• ISBN10: 0814782329
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

Does it really help women to think of sexual harassment primarily as a legal issue?High-profile sexual harassment suits, such as that of Paula Jones against President Clinton, are often life-changing events, with all parties coming away with careers, reputations, and lives profoundly affected. Women have long suffered on the job from sexual extortion, now called quid pro quo harassment, but today the controversy centers on "hostile environment" harassment. Every one has an opinion about it; managements spend more and more money training people not to do it; and still the suits strike like lightning-devastating and seemingly random. Women and men often feel polarized in the workplace by what they perceive to be general hostility couched in sexual terms.What to Do When You Don't Want to Call the Copsquestions establishment assumptions that women are, by definition, passive victims who require government help. It sees instead a period of transition toward a more balanced population of women in the workplace, with accompanying disruptions that can be minimized by understanding. Joan Kennedy Taylor presents what we know about the workplace and interviews managers, labor experts, and workers in such male-dominated fields as construction, engineering, business, and medicine to shed light on the male group culture that exists without women. She illustrates expressive behaviors that may be objectionable but are not sexual harassment and proposes specific strategies by which these objectionable behaviors can be countered, including a new feminist approach in company training programs. Taylor examines traditional and nontraditional workplaces, and female on male as well as male on male harassment, in order to apply these strategies to the entire picture.Lively and anecdotal, Taylor's balanced, non-adversarial study fills an important gap by providing strategies for businesses and employees, as well as for those who find themselves the target of sexual harassment.

Author Biography

Joan Kennedy Taylor is the national coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, a founding member of Feminists for Free Expression and author of Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(12)
PART I: The Scope of the Problem
The Starting Point	13	(16)
What Sexual Harassment Is and Isn't: History and the Law	29	(16)
It May Not Be a Legal Problem	45	(14)
A Failure to Communicate	59	(14)
How to Communicate Your Concerns	73	(18)
PART II: Male Group Culture
Sticks and Stones	91	(12)
Seeing Sex as Dirty	103	(8)
Pictures That Embarrass	111	(8)
Competition and Hierarchy	119	(10)
Indoctrination into Society	129	(12)
PART III: What's to Be Done?
Can Sexual Harassment Be Forestalled?	141	(18)
What's Wrong with Sexual Harassment Law?	159	(8)
The Larger Picture	167	(12)
Training for Success	179	(14)
Towards a Feminist Theory of Training	193	(12)
Notes	205	(18)
Index	223	(10)
About the Author	233