T A B L E++T A L K

"I've had a mother-of-a-day!" Vent, bitch and cry in Table Talk's advice-free zone

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A L S O++T O D A Y

The silence is deafening
By Jonathan Broder
Anne Northup asks why her Democratic sisters are letting President Clinton off the hook

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R E C E N T L Y

Giving experts the Big Slammu
By Beth Levine
No rest for the expert weary
(03/02/98)

Slaves in the family
By Maryanne Vollers
A white man's odyssey into his clan's secret history is a searing look at the most shameful event in America's past
(02/27/98)

Wise women
By Jonathan Broder
Three women cross the Israeli-Palestinian divide
(02/26/98)

Drama Queen Candidates
Back-stabbing, ankle-biting sluts ... and the women who loved them
(02/25/98)

Wild Thing
By Polly Shulman
Love and justice: Two teenage novels
(02/24/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Win
Sign up for our newsletter and win a free copy of "Birthday Letters," by Ted Hughes.

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s e x u a l__h a r a s s m e n t__l a w:
____RELAX AND TRY TO ENJOY IT

BY LAURA GREEN | I have to begin with a confession: The topic of sexual harassment wearies me. I've done my best to avoid this 1990s cultural cataclysm as much as possible. By using extreme caution when opening the newspaper or turning on the television, I've managed to avoid precise knowledge of what revealing detail of presidential anatomy Paula Jones possesses. I'm still confused about why someone would tape telephone conversations with a friend. If I didn't think it would destroy my cultural credentials, I would even confess to not having watched a single moment of the 1991 Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings.

Given this attitude, I spent much of this weekend's Sexual Harassment symposium at Yale University longing for some green, remote planet -- a planet with no America, no lawyers and no talking heads -- where words like "unwelcomeness," "accountability" and "dispositive" have never been uttered.

The symposium -- a gathering of some 40 law professors, federal judges and other experts on sexual harassment law including Catherine MacKinnon, a Yale J.D./Ph.D. -- marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of MacKinnon's monograph "Sexual Harassment of Working Women." Groundbreaking though it was, MacKinnon's work, with its dedication to a stark male/female opposition, partly explains my distaste for the subject. On the one hand, we have MacKinnon, for whom sexual harassment is just one more instance of the principle that men unilaterally and everywhere dominate women. She has written that "male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other." In her opening remarks at the conference, she summed up her view of the achievements of sexual harassment law in typically polemical terms: "Droit de seigneur is dead. Women are citizens."

On the other hand, we have critics of sexual harassment like New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin, who seem to think that the most likely victims of sexual harassment are men oppressed by the law's scrutiny of sexual behavior. These two positions form the shrill, point/counterpoint battle of the sexes that is what I object to about the public debate over sexual harassment.

In that context, the academic seriousness of the symposium made a refreshing change. Its 72 hours of citations of case law, cautious policy recommendations and illustrative anecdotes erred, in fact, on the side of sobriety. The opening session took place in a wood-paneled, mullion-windowed auditorium filled with nicely dressed academics. In her opening remarks, MacKinnon's fellow anti-pornography activist, Andrea Dworkin, voice trembling with rage, decried the fact that "when [in prosecuting pornography] we try to go after a bunch of pimps, everyone rears up and says no, no, no." The audience clapped politely. Later, when appellate Judge Guido Calabresi paternally reminded the audience that "women have represented some things that have been essential to society," the audience clapped politely again.

N E X T+P A G E: Parody: It's almost too easy

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ILLUSTRATION BY JOHANNA ST. CLAIR