Don’t call it a comeback: Sexual harassment is once again making headlines thanks to Confirmation, a new HBO movie that revisits Anita Hill’s testimony at the 1991 hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. It's a convenience that the film starts a freshing conversation on the subject, considering that the original hearings played in raising awareness about sexual harassment to the American public.
At the time, many people had never really considered the issue of sexual harassment. If they had, they thought of it as necessarily involving assault, rather than the way that Hill described as having unwanted advances, constant badgering, and vulgar conversation. Hill’s testimony, which conjured a shockingly hostile workplace opened the public’s eyes to what goes on behind office doors, infuriating and emboldening many women. Her words are credited for driving more women into public office and unleashing a surge of sexual harassment complaints. But that was 25 years ago. The question now:
What’s the current state of workplace harassment, and what progress have we made since Anita Hill’s case?
Anita Hill getting sworn in at her testimony
Only 30% of the claims received by the EEOC are made up of harassment claims, including sexual harassment. Race is actually the most frequent basis of harassment charges and sex-based harassment is the second most frequent. Last year, there were over 6,800 charges alleging sex-based harassment; that can include unwelcome advances or it can include gender-based harassment, which might be comments that are demeaning to a particular gender. About 17% of charges are filed by men- this shows that it is not an issue that only faces women. Same-sex harassment cases are also on the rise. For example, the EEOC v. Boh Bros. Constr. Co. LLC case involves a supervisor who sexually harassed an worker inferior to him because he thought this male employee was feminine and didn’t conform to the gender stereotype of a “rough” iron worker. Although that case serves as an example of same-sex sexual harassment, the most common trends occurring in cases of sexual harassment still mostly involve women.
Many cases have involved the restaurant industry and particularly young women. There is a case against Burger King and [franchisee] Carrols Corporation that shows an example of how most of the cases reported to the EEOC involve the restaurant industry and young women. This specific case involved 89 women, including many teenagers. Based on this example, we can conclude that sexual harassment usually occurs in work environments where isolated work is involved and there is a severe imbalance of power. Many sexual harassment cases occur in white collar fields, including finance like the case against JP Morgan Chase in 2014.
Not long after Anita Hill’s case, in 1998 the EEOC resolved one of their most transformative cases. This case involved a real environment of systemic discrimination. It was the largest-ever resolution of any sexual harassment case. According to Jenny Yang, Chair of the EEOC, “it really raised awareness of the problem of environmental sexual harassment and the ways in which employers can allow that to occur.”
The EEOC considers a number of factors before getting involved in a case. This includes: the seriousness of the violation, what legal issues are raised in the case, and the wider impact the lawsuit could have on our efforts to combat workplace discrimination. There are so many women are afraid to come forward. There have been studies that say that about 25% of women say they’ve experienced harassment at work, but among that percentage, 70% said they never reported it. Many times, people experience retaliation for coming forward and because of that, the EEOC gets involved because of how big of an issue that is.
There are many misconceptions that people have towards sexual harassment. People primarily think of sexual harassment involving sexual advances, but while that is certain, it also can include lewd or demeaning comments that can create a hostile environment. I think that majority of the population doesn’t recognize that sexual harassment can affect men as well. This goes back to gender norms and masculinity. Because of masculinity and the expectations that society has of men, many people don’t believe that it is possible for a man to be sexually assaulted (also rape culture mentality). Another misconception is that often, people don’t realize that harassment doesn’t have to be perpetuated by a supervisor or even by a co-worker. It can also be the result of a customer, a third-party supplier, or others whom an employee has to interact with. For example, there is a case against Fred Meyer, a grocery chain involving a male customer harassing female employees daily. The employees reported it, but the employer really didn’t take action. Many won’t associate this as sexual harassment in the workplace because there is a misconception that it has to occur from employee to employee or supervisor to employee.
If you are being sexually harassed at work, the EEOC suggests that it is very important to explain to the harasser when their behavior is bothering you and to stop. Make sure that is very clear. It can also be helpful to keep a journal of what’s happening to you- when the harassment occurred, how, were there witnesses, who perpetrated it- so that the timing and the substance is very clear when you’re reporting it. It’s also important to look at and be updated with their employer’s anti-harassment policy and to report the harassment according to that policy. People are also encouraged to contact the EEOC promptly to learn more about their rights and to file a charge.
As a nation
we’ve progressed a long way regarding negative race and gender issues. Uncle Ron has been around for a few days, and
I’ve witnessed a great deal of change in my life time. However, we’re still
dogged by some of the old stereotypes, gender, and communication norms that
hamper the agency of others. With some
new found enlightenment, at least to a degree, why are we still participants in
a system that hampers equality and affects the agency of others?
Right now you’re likely saying I don’t
participate in that! Well my friends
it’s time for another chat, or reading for you, with Uncle Ron.
I will say now that if you watch TV, movies,
read, or play video games you most likely are a participant. I only say “most likely” instead of slapping
you in the face and stating “you are” to allow for some wiggle room and perhaps
make everyone a bit more comfortable and willing to chat. After all with this
type of issue a person must first realize they are a participant, understand how
they are, and then come to a form of self-realization, and change from within
if required. I can’t do it for you, or
force you to understand. All I can do is
present information, and then you my friend must come to your own conclusions. Now the question you’re begging to shout out
is, ok assuming I am Mr. smarty pants, how am I a
participant in stealing the agency of others?
Do you even know that you are? My friends most people would not say that
they are racists, or participate in rape culture, or sexism in any way. However, due to cultural/societal norms, most
of us do participate but it’s become transparent to us. This is particularly true within the hegemony
of mass media, and this is how we become agents affecting the agency of
others.
We indirectly steal the agency
of others by supporting movies, TV shows, books, and video games that depict
others in demeaning ways. These things
we watch and read do affect, over time, our judgments and thoughts.
Yes, our good friends’ pop culture and
cultivation theory are back.
To rehash from my
last blog:
pop culture is a means of
engaging in everyday life; it’s how we interact with the world. It’s our
fashions, fades, tastes, likes and dislikes and shapes our thinking. Cultivation theory generally focuses on the
cumulative influence of consuming media.
In other words what we consume in the way of media influences, over
time, our thoughts and beliefs.
Since we’re now in
school house mode, I’ve been saying agency like a broken record, so what is
agency? Go ahead and click on the link
to read Wikipedia’s definition of agency.
Really, click on the link now! Listen to me now and understand me later.
Now that you’ve got the definition of
agency, in Uncle Ron’s words it’s a person’s power within society. In yet more words, agency is a person’s
power/ability to conduct and accomplish what they wish in their lives and in a
way their value.
We should also take a brief look at
cultural gender norms. In a nutshell,
cultural gender norms are how we expect a person to act/speak within their
roles. Men are supposed to be manly men,
and women soft spoken and loving, right? WRONG!
We’ll get into these a bit further into our chat today.
Now that we’re all schooled up on some definitions
we’ll be touching on today, and some ground work has been laid, let’s get to
it.
The objectification of women is still prevalent
in our society, and in this humble heterosexual guys world it’s more open than
in past generations at least media wise.
What I mean by media wise is that female dress codes, if you will, on
the screen have gotten sexier. Moreover
the female body is portrayed in a much sexier way than previously shown. This is one area where I think we may have
gone backwards. Although I would say
sexist talk in the work place has decreased to an extent, at least openly, but
the portrayal of women as sex objects in media has increased in my opinion. Sex sells, and Hollywood is capitalizing on
this. Check out these film clips:
Marilyn’s
subway scene was very sexy and risky’ at the time, but did you notice any difference
in clothing items between the two clips? The clothes got smaller,
less of them, and the increase in provocative postures? This day and age we
accept more “skin” and provocative gestures than in previous generations. I
would argue this is cultivation theory in action.
Sexier clothing and actions were slowly
introduced and seen more often, so over time we as a society began accepting it. It’s caused the objectification of women to
become transparent to us. This had the effect
of causing women to be viewed as sex objects, and in a large portion of female
media roles displaying sexuality is expected.
It would be in response to what the audience wants, what we want, or
media producers wouldn’t portray women in this way as we wouldn’t watch the
movies and they’d lose money. Simply
stated, they are giving us what we want.
Now this plays into rape culture which was a really hard pill for me to
swallow personally when I came to the realization I participated in it. Yes, that’s right Uncle Ron is guilty as
charged. I enjoy the look of a beautiful
woman, and in a way that’s ok, but when these women are reduced to nothing more
than their body parts therein lays the problem.
When women are reduced to nothing more than sexuality it robs them of
their agency in society. Men take on
the idea that women are for pleasure only.
This line of thinking takes from women their ability to be seen for
their brain power and abilities outside of the bedroom. It limits their prospects at being taken
seriously for many roles outside of sex.
As a guy, at first, it seems like it would be great if the roles where reversed and I were objectified by
women. However, I think I would grow
tired quickly at being viewed as nothing more than a penis with legs and
therefore not taken seriously about much.
I’m sure women are tired of this form of objectification if not downright
angry over it.
I can’t help to mention
here that in the majority of female movie roles they don’t have much in the way
of serious roles with conversation. Have
a look at this article: Female roles in film.
Apparently
most female roles are for attractiveness, or window dressing so to speak, so
what’s that got to say about how society views women as objects? As soon as we dehumanize someone, it becomes OK to harm them which is why this objectification of women is part of the rape
culture and therefore so dangerous to them.
It makes women objects for pleasure not people with feelings and
intelligence.
Another area
for me that relates to men is the emotional repression of males. How men are taught as boys not to show
emotion. Come on fellas, how many times
did you hear growing up that “big boys don’t cry?”Other fun sayings such as “act like a man”, “take
it like a man”, “grow some balls” along with others have created a society of
male repression.It’s still prevalent
today that as a man it’s not ok to show emotion, other than anger, and these
types of emotional repressions have caused a lack of feeling and emotional anesthesia,
or numbing, of men.
With that numbing in
mind, half of our society doesn’t feel or rather can’t show what they feel, now
is there any surprise at the level of “acceptable” violence in society today?More of cultivation theory here with the
emotional repression and the acceptability of violence towards others; go ahead
and say you don’t see that from films and shows.Say it!!!Check this clip out, it’s funny but sad in a way:
If you’ve
said some of those things, as I did to my boys, then yep you guessed it, you’ve
participated in taking agency away from others.
Communication
and gender norms are part of why we do these things. These few things I list are far from complete,
and just meant as a very quick over view. Women are expected in their roles to speak
softer, be more relationship oriented blah blah blah.
Men are supposed to be straight forward,
hard, strong of character, and non-emotional.
These are accepted U.S. American roles that we are taught as we grow and
are ingrained in our society and thereby our psyche. Here’s a link where you can read up a bit on
gender roles: Gender roles.
These roles
can change and are different within different sub-cultures, but are a broad
sweeping brush stroke to some of our gender roles in the good old U. S. of A. …Murika…
I know Uncle
Ron is rambling on a bit here, but this stuff is important to all of us and I
would be seriously remiss if I didn’t at least touch on racial stereotypes.
Thanks to Hollywood, what’s the first thing
you think when you see a group of men of color walking towards you? Is it danger?
How are most men of color depicted in media? I bet more often than not you’ve seen them
depicted as thugs, criminals of some variety, or just general trouble makers. Here’s a clip of some popular films that do
just that:
Now some
more school time, so put on your thinking cap.
There is a thing called the looking glass self which in general talks
about how people shape the idea of themselves out of what others think of
them. Check out the Wikipedia definition
just in case you think I’m still off my rocker: Looking glass self.
Ok, with the looking glass self in place,
if you were viewed as a “gangster” or thug do you think you’d start taking on
that persona? The odds are that you
would. Therefore, if we are projecting
that image onto those of color are we not in some way contributing to those
that do develop this way? That’s one way
we are robbing them of their agency.
Hard
questions aren’t they? This plays into some societal views of both men and women of color.
They have been viewed as hyper-sexual, so back to women and
objectification for a moment. A woman of color in the
work place, with objectification thrown on top of it all, then isn’t it easy to
see how they may be viewed as sex objects?
Are you participating? A lot of
questions here I know, but that’s part of self-realization. Self-realization requires you to ask a lot of
hard questions of yourself and when I asked them of myself I didn’t like my
answers.
Reflect on
your thoughts and reflect on your actions.
Folks, it’s not my place to say you do or do not participate in taking
agency away from others. However, with
what I’ve laid down for you I think it’s hard to argue against it. In my humble opinion we all participate in
stealing the agency of others through the media we consume. Grant it most of our participation is not
intended, and in my case I didn’t even realize it. However, one wise old professor relayed to the effect of: it's not the intention so much as the impact of what's said or done.
As mentioned during the talk regarding the
objectification of women, so many of these things are transparent to us and
therefore most of us don’t know we’re participating. It took the hands of a professor and an
awesome group of class mates to help peel my eye lids back so I could REALLY see what was transparent to me. This from the perspective of a guy that thought his eyes were wide open.
I have to
say that sometimes education is painful, and my realization that I was an
indirect participant in rape culture hurt and shocked me to my core! In my particular case, this was the right
kind of pain in that my awareness was increased.
My friends,
it’s my hope that this little chat we’ve had today has helped to make you just
a bit more aware. One thing’s for sure,
once you’ve seen and heard the truth you can’t un-see or un-hear it, but you
can choose to ignore it. Now the only
question that remains is what will you do with the knowledge? After all it really doesn’t matter what I
think; what do you think?
Race and gender are some identities that are the
most visibly seen. Society has constructed a list of rules and ideologies for
how one should act if you are that certain identity.
This week in class I thought that ideology was an
important concept that needed to be more defined and covered, so I chose to
focus on how identity influences the ideologies we belief . . .
“Ideology” is basically an intellectual
belief system imposed upon reality, while “Identity” today is not something
given by nature or tradition but something chosen.
•Identity
is a socially and historically constructed concept. We learn about our own
identity and the identity of others through interactions with family, peers,
organizations, institutions, media and other connections we make in our
everyday life.
•Keyfacets of identity—like gender, social class, age, sexual orientation, race and
ethnicity—play significant roles in determining how we understand and
experience the world, as well as shaping the types of opportunities and
challenges we face.
•Social and cultural identity is inextricably linked to issues of power, value systems,
and ideology.
•The media uses representations—images, words, and characters or personae—to convey
specific ideas and values related to culture and identity in society.
According to Karl Marx and Engels, ideologies
perpetuate the power of the elites. Ideologies are often used with politics but
there are also gender and racial ideologies. If Western civilization continues
to use these traditional ideologies, then this favors the heterosexual white
male identity, thus keeping them in a power position.
“I say keeping men in a power position because in
the great chain of being, the white man was the being next to god, then is
woman and then animals. Transgender were not even considered.”
Gender role ideology
Gender role ideology is defined as the attitudes
and beliefs about the proper roles of women and men in the family or society.
In March of this year (2016) the American College
of Pediatricians released a statement saying that, it is child abuse to allow
children to belief that they are the opposite sex if they have normal XY and XX
sex chromosomes.
Why would some say yes?
Some critics that say gender ideology is harmful to
children would argue that No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a
biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is
a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.
This is saying that if you don’t meet the standards
of what constitutes “being a man” or “being a woman” then you are wrong for
thinking the way you do. They also bring up how children that believe so, may
have gender dysphonia, formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID).
Summing it up to saying you have a mental disorder for thinking you are the
opposite sex, because of your make up biologically. So making a child act a certain gender role leads to oppression. This is saying that our sex
is the only one valid identity we can associate our self with because that is
how we were created.
Why would some say no
Some people criticize the credibility of the
American College of Pediatricians; they say it is not a legit organization, but
it is just a group of people spreading their biases to public. Another argument
given proves that
usage of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are harmful. (It is
possible for someone to be completely accepting of this gender ideology while
also opposing the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.) According
to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused
girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through
puberty.
This document came from the American College
of Pediatrics, which can commonly be mistaken for the
American Academy of Pediatrics. There are clearly differences between
the two organizations of Pediatrics. Some say that the college is a hate group!
Even in the document it states that a great percentage of individuals will often
eventually identify their sex. To me this says that you can let the individual
believe what ever they want to believe and they will still turn out the way
they are supposed to be.
(Below is the American College of Pediatricians
versus The American Academy of Pediatricians)
^^^
The argument some may have is that The American Academy of Pediatrics is more distinguished than The American College of Pediatrics.
Racial Ideology
Racial ideologyis a set of fixed beliefs about one
or more races. It's almost always utilized to
promote racial superiority over others, rather than just discussing racial
characteristics. This can also relate to how we (humans) divide the human
species into races on grounds of physical characteristics and behaviors. Within
some racial ideologies comes hegemony and colorism.
Using
hegemony, an example of race superiority would be the Ku Klux Klan and how they
believed that the white race was the superior race and all others could die.
They even did the killing them selves using bible verses to justify there
doing.
Colorism
is very complex because these racial ideologies that one may have determines
how they might treat some one based on race. An example of this could be the
ongoing “war” between light skinned blacks versus the dark skin blacks. Proving
which of the same race is more authentic by acts of masculinity, relationships with women and skin color.
^^^^
In this
video above this woman goes on a "rant" about how there is colorism within the black
race and further talks about what it means to not be black enough . . .
Dark
meaning you are more masculine (tough) and authentic
Light
meaning you are soft and not really black This is another example of hegemony that happens within the same race with the darker skinned blacks believing they are more superior than the lighter skinned blacks.
Sometimes
this leads to kids acting tougher than they really are to fit in and “hang”. Leading them to a path of trouble and mistakes made. What makes this so complex is that this could even apply to the white race,
like if the environment you grew up in is made up of a mostly black population. The white kids only friends would be blacks and in order for him to 'hang" he has to talk a certain way and act a certain way.
Another
example of colorism could be successful men of color (no matter the shade of
skin). If you make it and you are surrounded by the opposite color (whites)
that are also rich, then you “sold out” on your race and you are a “uncle tom”
for conforming to white standards.
There is also race gender roles and each culture has different norms on the roles that man and woman play. Some things are masculine and feminine to other cultures. Western ideologies often mistake the exception for the norm(ideologies).
In a
podcast we listened to in class the ladies mentioned that slave owners created
these “ideologies” to turn slave against each other. Since mentioning the slave
mentality the term “uncle tom” was also used during the slavery times often referred
to blacks that turned against their own kind and conformed to the slave master.
This brings me to my question
Does one’s identity influence the ideologies they believe
in or should gender and race ideologies be enforced?
I think that this is becoming an interesting time in history when the
traditional ideology of western civilization is slowly being changed, but not
just with race but also with sex and gender.
From a previous psychology
class that I took I learned that no matter what you force on a child, the child
would grow up to be what they are meant to identify with. The environment does
have a factor in your human experiences, but also so does the role you look
like you play; is often how one will be treated in this society. Therefore
creating and living through their own personal ideologies.
