Ray Pratt
Political Science
Montana State University-Bozeman
As Heterophobia demonstrates, in a short three decades the concept of sexual harassment has seeped into every institutional cranny of society in response to demands for recourse for women victimized by the sexual aggressions of men. It also is a powerful and disturbing work that raises searching questions about the unintended consequences of well-intentioned social policy and administrative practices in organizations and universities.
Patai, a professor of Brazilian literature at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, held a dual appointment in Women's Studies for a decade. She has written or edited nine books in a distinguished academic career. In 1996 she announced her intention to write this study over an Internet list for Women's Studies, asking particularly for the testimony of those victimized by false accusations of sexual harassment stemming from what she characterizes as "heterophobia." (The term comes from what the author sees to be a growing hostility to male heterosexuals and heterosexuality generally among many feminists).
Because modern sexual harassment law places the liability burden on employers rather than harassers, there are powerful economic incentives--especially for universities, the focus of Patai's book--to restrict a lot more speech and behavior than the law actually forbids, in order to avoid expensive lawsuits and judgments. As a result, as Jeffrey Rosen points out in a recent article, "prudent companies have little choice but to restrict a great deal of sexual expression that no jury would ultimately condemn. The law has transformed inquisitions into the emotional lives of employees into an ordinary matter of corporate self-interest" (The New Republic, June 29,1998).
All sorts of heretofore "normal" male-female interactions such as dating and sexual relationships (or attempts at them) are rendered problematical by becoming a major category of potentially illegal behavior. As Patai argues in her book, one can be charged with "sexual harassment" and lose one's employment because of it, even without doing anything precisely illegal.
For centuries women have suffered from harassment in the workplace. To deal with this problem, what Patai calls "the sexual harassment industry" has emerged--a vast and proliferating body of literature, manuals, training, trainers, specialists, and advocates. This industry seeks to recognize and establish the dimensions of this problem and also turn it into a social issue. By a process of "domain expansion" and Supreme Court decisions, ever-greater numbers of women have been encouraged to complain about perceived harassment that, as they experience it, creates intolerable or hostile work environments. But in recent decades, what was a widespread problem has been significantly redressed through education and changing attitudes. Now what we have, Patai argues, is a situation of overkill.
While the phrase "Sexual Harassment Industry" (or the "SHI") initially seems to be unnecessarily derisive, Patai's extensive analysis of manuals and publications and statements of its leading practitioners suggests that this a fair characterization of a bureaucratized movement that constantly seeks to expand its domain. This section of the book (Chapter 2), while long, is especially insightful and informed by thoughtful secondary theoretical works. It suggests the professional interest of those consultants and experts in the field is not to solve problems, but to continue to expand the domain of what constitutes sexual harassment, in effect creating ever-larger categories of the problem.
Patai contends "feminism has in fact been remarkably successful in creating a climate in which men's words and gestures are suspect, and in which it is now women's charges that are given prompt credibility, or at least the benefit of the doubt." She supports her claims with an impressive, intensive, and detailed reading of the leading theoretical works and training manuals in the field of sexual harassment, significant legal cases, and a lot of largely anecdotal case evidence collected from a number of men (and some lesbian women) who contacted her.
Any social scientist might question the representativeness of such self-generated testimony, but there is so much of it, and it so profoundly disturbing for what it suggests of the complete reversal of hard-won standards of due process and freedom of speech, that a real threat does seem to have developed. A few years back, philosopher John Fekete's Moral Panic presented a catalog of cases, largely from Canadian universities, that demonstrated the hysteria that could be generated against men accused of "sexual harassment," and the ways academic careers (also the focus of Patai's book) could be derailed or even destroyed on thin or nonexistent evidence, simply because the accusation had been made.
Subsequently, I learned of other male academics who had fallen victim to what were seen as false accusations and were summarily dismissed. One, in Los Angeles, was charged with sexual harassment by a woman in his evening class after he had simply massaged his sore back and side with his hands while walking around the classroom monitoring an essay examination. His department was on the point of dismissing him, when an administrator (female) who had known him for many years threatened to resign if he were terminated.
Patai suggests the climate in academic life has so changed in the last two decades that "we are in the presence of a powerful orthodoxy" so pervasive that academic civility has been severely damaged, and people are fearful of giving offence to the guardians of that politically correct orthodoxy. At another more real and profound level, the situation is one in which one can lose one's job for doing something within the ever-expanding category of offenses that are not illegal but can be judged "harassment" in terms of existing policies and practices.
Through a comprehensive critique of these now standard practices, Patai demonstrates that simply to lodge a charge or claim of "harassment" means the whole weight of institutional policy assumes the accused is "guilty" and must prove his innocence, often after a protracted and secret investigation is undertaken without ever informing the person charged. She suggests the anti-male bias of all this is confirmed by the few cases where women who have been charged have not lost jobs.
As Patai describes it, "an unwelcome and dangerous shift in both law and custom" has taken place with the rise of the present "judicial, quasi-judicial, extra-legal, and administrative application of sexual harassment law, especially as manifested in the 'hostile environment' doctrine...as practiced in colleges and universities...." Such "hostile environment actions are now based upon the subjective experience of 'unwanted' or 'offensive' conduct (including speech) as perceived by the accuser and tested by the 'reasonable woman' standard." (It apparently does not matter what a reasonable man might conclude.)
The danger to everyone in this development, Patai argues, is that it "transfers the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused," in violation of long-standing American concepts and practices of due process. It also has profound and deleterious repercussions on the conduct of daily life in universities in terms of the potential intimate personal relations of men and women, as well as same-sex relationships.
Whether such harassment occurs, Patai argues, increasingly comes down to the perception of the accusers. Chapter 3, "The Accusers," provides cases where individuals brought false or misleading accusations. Sometimes, given the total bad faith attributed to the accusers here, one wonders if alternative readings of the same events might not be possible. Chapter 4, "The Fruits of Injustice," describes a number of striking cases that are clearly examples of misleading or even malicious accusations which cost people their jobs and effectively ended their academic careers. It is not clear how often such profound miscarriages of justice occur, however.
In a long (pp. 129-161) Chapter 6, "Heterophobia," the author describes her view of a "manic" theory (i.e., one that does not know its own limitations) characterizing one subspecies of feminism hostile to all forms of heterosexuality. The argument here--one that begins to get far from the central substantive and procedural rights questions that are the most important contribution of the book--seems to be that a "man as the enemy" view has come to the fore in academic feminism, not just among lesbians but among many other women who are presented as feeling their heterosexuality is somehow politically incorrect.
Here, as a male, I feel ill equipped (in more than one way) to assess the argument. For 20 years or more I have appreciated some of the thinkers critiqued: Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and Jane Caputi. Patai's comments from this point on (particularly the inclusion of statements by males who have, out of apparent feelings of collective guilt, rejected not just heterosexuality but all forms of sex) seem a major, often bizarre, diversion from what seem to be the real contributions of earlier chapters.
Patai's great contribution in Heterophobia, then, is to point to disturbing legal trends and internal administrative practices in American universities that are negative outcomes of the alleged gains of what she calls the Sexual Harassment Industry. These trends undermine hard-won American legal principles of due process and free speech. It is especially disturbing if even a small minority of radical feminists she cites see the First Amendment as an oppressive device for perpetuating male privilege.
In the book there are also many profound and searching criticisms of trends within and among the diverse schools of feminism and regarding the implications of identity politics (raised in the past by such thinkers as Todd Gitlin in Twilight of Common Dreams) that are beyond the scope of this review and which seem a diversion from its major insights on the effects of the Sexual Harassment Industry on the academic climate. Ultimately, the argument Patai makes is a telling one: the "women are victims" approach that seems ascendant in American universities ultimately infantilizes not simply all women who have persistently sought greater social autonomy, but all responsible adults, in its undermining of long-standing principles of due process and freedom of speech.