A very wise comedian friend of mine, who, by the way, I have spent many hours laughing with, to the point where tears are streaming down my face and I’m unable to catch my breath, once told me that the term “get a sense of humor” is the retort of the unfunny.
However, when you’re harassed, “get a sense of humor” is the almost inevitable response of the harasser.
As a woman who has spent much of her life in male dominated industries, “Get a sense of humor” and “Lighten up” were phrases I avoided like the plague. How did I avoid them? By laughing. I laughed when my boss invited me to a sex party. I laughed when I had a bad day and a couple of the guys told me I needed to get laid, and offered their assistance. I laughed when they commented on the tightness of my top or the thinness of my bra. I laughed at their racist or homophobic jokes, which made me uncomfortable even though I was not the target. I brushed off their actual sexual advances as though they never happened.
Why did I laugh it all off? We live in a litigious society, right? To hear the right frame it, I should have been heading to a lawyer at the first nipple joke. Well, as any victim of harassment, sexual or otherwise, will tell you, it just ain’t that easy. I had a fairly decent job. I made a nice middle class income. I was moving up the ranks, albeit more slowly than my male counterparts. I wasn’t about to risk it, plus, maybe it was just me.
Maybe their jokes were their way of bringing me into the fold. Maybe they saw me as ‘one of the guys’ (somehow that made sense at the time). I was cool. I could take a joke.
Even if I had tried to pursue legal action, the deck was stacked against me. It would have ruined my career. The settlement would certainly not have been enough for me to retire or even start my own business. I would have been blacklisted in the industry and what would I tell future potential employers about why I left my job? What would have happened if I had stayed with the company?
Here’s the real kicker, what I experienced might not have been sexual harassment, at least by the legal definition. The burden of proof is on the accuser, which is the way it should be, but in order to prove a case, an accuser must prove:
- He or she suffered intentional, unwanted discrimination because of his or her sex.
- The harassment was severe or pervasive.
- The harassment negatively affected the terms, conditions or privileges of his or her work environment.
- The harassment would detrimentally effect a reasonable person of the same sex.
- Management knew about the harassment, or should have known, and did nothing to stop it.
It’s possible I could have won, but it’s very possible I would have lost. It simply wasn’t worth it. Even if I had filed a complaint with management, my work environment would have become even less tolerable.
I am no longer with that company. Perhaps not coincidentally, after years with the company, I hit a glass ceiling. Only men made it into the upper echelons of management, and I realized that I was not going to be the exception.
It can be argued that I worked for a really fucked up company, and maybe I did. But since the revelations of Herman Cain’s sexual harassment case, I’m thinking it’s more common than I realized.
Cain, along with much of the right-wing media, is sticking to the meme that sexual harassment is subjective, in the eye of the beholder. There’s a tiny grain of truth to that. For me, advances from the Matthew McConaughey lookalike were flirtation. The advances of the guy who looked like the super from my friend’s building? Uncomfortable.
But here’s the thing. There are steps that need to be followed. First, I have to prove that they are making me uncomfortable. It’s pretty reasonable that I should first tell them they are making me uncomfortable. If a harasser continues after that point, they really are an asshole. It’s no longer subjective. The next step I would need to make is to report it to management. If management does nothing and the harassment continues, the harasser is nothing short of pathological. That’s when a lawyer might become involved.
But you see, the game is still rigged against the victim. Even pointing out that an environment is becoming uncomfortable can cause a lot of tension in the workplace. Coworkers can become distant and uncooperative. Reporting harassment can make the workplace worse than experiencing the harassment.
That’s why people who do come forward should be lauded for their bravery, not blamed for their victimhood. One of Herman Cain’s victims reportedly received a settlement of $35,000 and the other, $45,000. Both lost their jobs and obviously, neither of these women got rich. It’s likely that both have had difficult times recovering in the “good old boy network” of Washington DC lobbyists.
The problem is not with the women who come forward, it is with the men who believe that they wield so much power that they think the rules don’t apply to them. If a settlement is reached, the likelihood is that the situation was pretty unbearable for the woman.
So, here’s a good rule of thumb. If you think a joke could be offensive, tell it to your buddies at the bar. Keep it out of the workplace. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if the next joke is about your receding hairline, growing girth or shrinking dick. Oh, come on! Get a sense of humor!
Oh, and if the victim of your jokes is not finding your jokes funny, there might be two reasons, 1.) Your jokes have a victim and 2.) They’re not funny.
