Sexual harassment uses the erotic to conceal what it really is: bullying. I don’t deny that bullying may be erotic for the bully, and that sex as bullying might be even more exciting. But why should we who are trying to solve the problem concede that sexual harassment is sex?
What’s confusing about banning sex in the workplace is that erotic feelings, when experienced reciprocally, are a source of great pleasure. Thus, the idea that sex should, or could, be banned from our professional lives seems arbitrary and impossible. But we can ban bullying and sexual violence that is part of the bully’s toolbox.
Why do I think sexual harassment is bullying? Well, show me a sexual harasser and I’ll show you a bully who likes to make everybody squirm. Harvey Weinstein, the founding father of the #MeToo moment, was a well-known bully before he was accused of being a sexual harasser.
Noteworthy in his own world for widespread cruelty and violence, he was a screamer, and used his size, influence and explosive rages to intimidate both men and women. Weinstein publicly assaulted at least one person who crossed him, a man who attempted to intervene during a verbal tirade aimed at the reporter Rebecca Traister. He also bullied people with money, using his immense wealth to create a web of legal restraints designed to silence critics and potential truth-tellers inside and outside his company.
Submission to bullies, as anyone who went to high school in the United States knows, not only allows but encourages the bully to continue. Therefore, organizations must create conditions whereby not submitting to the bully is a viable option. Confidential reporting, shifting a bullied worker to another office in the company, and putting the bully on leave for retraining and therapy are all possibilities for a company that cares about its culture.
As management professionals know, enabling a bully damages a work culture. As the Stanford business professor Robert Sutton points out in his book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (2010), one organization calculated that in one year it had paid over $160,000 in costs associated with a workplace bully. This cost did not include the “suffering and heartache, so much time wasted by talented people”, and the “emotional and physical toll on witnesses and bystanders”.
The company decided to deduct the money lost from the bully’s violent behaviors from his compensation, shifting some of the consequences of the anti-social, violent behavior back on to the bully. Notably, this is very different from strategies that shielded Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and other media figures, in which the corporation made a continuing investment in the bully by paying complainants off, disposing of them, and hiring new employees.
Perhaps a more important outcome of fining the bully is to shift the stigma to the bully. This is an important step, even prior to ending it. Even when a sexual harasser is fired, what can be most troubling to victims of sexual harassment is the uncertainty of whether, in order to keep their jobs and move beyond the experience, they have actually submitted to, or involuntarily agreed, to a transaction that may have been well beyond their control.
Many victims report intense fear as they try to process an encounter in the moment, a fear that is so intense it results in a feeling frozen, paralyzed, or leaving their own bodies. One of the broadcaster Matt Lauer’s targets reportedly became physically ill and fainted: it seems like a metaphor for an entire company being sapped of its health by a single bully.
Harvey Weinstein's bullying and a company culture that presumed it was a cost of doing business, set the stage for his alleged sexual violence. His victims were merely players on that stage. But it didn’t have to be that way.
Investing in the health of the many rather than knuckling under to the most powerful among us is not only the key to ending sexual harassment, it charts a clear path to a workplace that says no to bullying.
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