Heterophobia:
Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism
by Daphne Patai
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In 1998 a sexual harassment lawsuit against a sociology professor at the
university my wife attends caused no small amount of handwringing by both the
university and the student newspaper. The paper expressed outraged that the
university tolerated sexual harassers, even though the university fired the
man after a cursory investigation. The university was eventually forced to rehire
the man after an arbitrator ruled he had been dismissed without just cause.
The professor?s alleged victim asked a court for several hundred thousand
dollars in compensation to compensate for lost income; she claimed she was unable
to continue her studies after the incident, even though she kept taking classes
and got rather good grades. The judge handling the case did eventually award
her $50,000, but that probably didn’t even begin to cover her legal fees.
The most fascinating part of the case, however, was the nature of the alleged
sexual harassment. For a young woman to be so shattered as to be unable to continue
her academic career, many assumed the harassment must have been rather extreme
? perhaps he offered to give her better grades in exchange for sex or maybe
he repeatedly asked her out implying she might not do well in his class otherwise
or maybe the professor was an inveterate pervert who laced his conversations
with foul anecdotes and obscene comments.
In fact, the charges centered on four or five statements the professor made
which the student (and the university, before the arbitrator forced it to back
down) claimed constituted sexual harassment. What sort of horrible things was
the professor saying? Once, while meeting with students before the beginning
of a class, a woman student who was pregnant complained that she felt ugly because
she was gaining weight. The professor replied that he thought pregnant women
were sexy. The student making the harassment allegation claimed that simply
overhearing this comment transformed the classroom into a den of oppression
in which no learning could take place.
On another occasion during class, the professor started to draw a diagram
on the board, stopped, joked that the drawing looked a bit too much like a penis,
erased the drawing and redrew it, and then continued with his lecture.
If that weren?t enough to send any virtuous woman screaming to be protected
from this lecher, the alleged victim suffered from a medical condition known
as “lazy eye” in which poor motor control in the eyes results in one
or both wandering. The student complained to the professor about not getting
any relief for the problem from her physician. The professor consulted a journal
on the problem and photocopied a list he found giving several remedies that
some people had found worked for them ? one of those remedies, which apparently
does work for some people with the condition, was sexual intercourse.
These three incidents were presented in courts as the depraved rantings of
a man displaying a pattern of exploitation toward his female students. On the
basis of these and similar incidents, the university tried to fire the sociology
professor from his job and a judge entered a judgment for $50,000 against him.
Welcome to the bizarre world of academic sexual harassment that Daphne Patai
dissects and exposes in her astonishing book, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment
and the Future of Feminism. Patai is certainly not the first person to examine
how what she calls the Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI) has spiraled out of
control, but hers is the first book to go beyond the outrageous incidents and
come up with a convincing — and oftentimes unnerving — explanation as to why
sexual harassment has become such an obsession at universities and colleges.
Her provocative thesis is this: within radical feminism there is a group of
scholars and activists who view heterosexuality and heterosexual behavior as
inherently oppressive to women. In often complex ways, the views of this radical
minority are being incorporated by and in turn drive the sexual harassment witch
hunts. In Patai’s view, then, sexual harassment regulations and enforcement
is becoming the activist arm of a philosophy that seeks to deconstruct and destroy
heterosexuality (even though those obsessively pursuing sexual harassment cases
are often unaware of the origins or logical outcomes of many of the ideas and
philosophies driving their activism).
That’s quite a thesis, and to be honest it?s one I doubted Patai could deliver,
but by the end of the book not only does she deliver in spades but Patai has
written one of the most concise and penetrating analyses of radical feminism
available. This is one of the few books I’ve ever read that gave me that so-called
“click” experience feminists are always talking about — Patai gets to the core
of radical feminist philosophy and exposes its assumptions like no one else
has.
And the major assumption of radical feminism is that heterosexuality is inherently
oppressive to women. Patai concedes that the number of feminists who actively
maintain this position is relatively small (if widely and repeatedly published),
but on the other hand she demonstrates they are rather influential and more
importantly that their assumptions, if not yet their conclusions, have gradually
seeped into the world view of those waging the war against sexual harassment.
Of course the radical feminists who view heterosexuality as inherently oppressive
include the usual suspects. Patai notes University of Michigan law professor
Catharine MacKinnon’s view that sexual harassment is simply a more extreme version
of the way men normally treat women. Patai also quotes from Michigan State University
communications professor, Marilyn Frye, who summarizes the critique of heterosexuality
in straightforward language:
Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual
woman’s erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens
to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices
defined and regulated by patriarchal kinship systems, by both civil and religious
law, and by strenuously enforced mores and deeply entrenched values and taboos.
Those definitions, regulations, values, and taboos are about male fraternity
and the oppression and exploitation of women. They are not about love, human
warmth, solace, fun, pleasure or deep knowledge between people.
For those women who might profess to enjoy being heterosexual, Frye notes such
objections should be taken no more seriously than one would take a slave who
maintains he enjoys his status and thus opposes abolition. Frye’s views are
reflected in writings by other radical feminists such as E. Kay Trimberger (“‘compulsory
heterosexuality’ is part of a power structure benefiting heterosexual males
at the expense of women and homosexuals”), Andrea Dworkin (“intercourse
with men as we know them ? requires an abortion of creativity and strength,
a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death”), Robin
West (who argues women are like hostages suffering from Stockholm syndrome who
identify with their heterosexual male captors), Bell Hooks (“the context
of these[heterosexual] intimate relationships is also the site of domination
and oppression”) and others.
The genius of Heterophobia is to demonstrate how the extreme views
of these radical feminists underpins much of the current regimen of sexual harassment.
As Patai notes, the SHI is not simply interested in stopping this or that particular
incidence of sexual harassment but rather many of its advocates seek a total
transformation of society through regulation of sexual expression.
Patai gets a lot of mileage out
of the popular sexual harassment manual, Sexual Harassment on Campus: A Guide
for Administrators, Faculty, and Students edited by Bernice Sandler and
Robert J. Stoops. Like similar such manuals, Sexual Harassment on Campus
argues that sexual harassment is pervasive at universities and colleges
and so must be rooted out with particular vigor. To back up the claim that sexual
harassment is pervasive, however, it must be converted into a totalizing ideology
so that just about every interaction between men and women can be interpreted
as sexual harassment — and the book obliges with a laundry list of items from
sexual innuendoes and jokes to email with any sort of sexual content to “not
taking seriously someone who experience sexual harassment” to “asking for sexual
behavior” right through and including outright acts of violence and rape. Not
believing a woman who alleges sexual harassment is placed on a continuum with
violently raping that woman.
As Patai aptly points out, the reason for this sort of laundry list is to
make everything from a professor’s attempt to cheer up a pregnant student to
interest in a student?s academic performance seem as suspect and offensive as
a violent rape (in fact Sandler herself claims rape is just an extreme form
of peer harassment).
To cover all the bases, the SHI even invented the concept of “grooming” to
ensure any and all possible comments or actions by a professor are captured
by its net. On this charge, a professor who tells a student that a paper she
wrote is rather exceptional or that the point she made in class was very good
can be accused of “grooming” or attempting to soften that student’s
resolve in order to later take advantage of her for sexual purposes.
Once sexual harassment leaves the realm of quid pro quo arrangements, in which
a woman’s job advancement is tied to her acquiescence to sexual acts, or truly
egregious examples of hostile workplaces, and instead becomes obsessed with
the sort of sexual banter and flirtation that both men and women regularly engage
in, it is already a long way toward internalizing the radical feminist claim
that heterosexuality itself is a danger to women. If, for example, asking a
woman if she would like to have sex can be considered harassment even when there
is no hint of a quid pro quo relationship, the radical anti-heterosexual feminists
have gone a long way toward achieving their goal of stigmatizing heterosexuality
itself. The underlying assumption of Sandler and her ilk is that heterosexual
sexuality is inherently dangerous for women.
As Patai sums it up, “Two fundamentally opposing world views are currently
in collision. One of them sees sex (especially male sexuality) as a perpetual
danger. The other sees sex as primarily a source of pleasure for both women
and men.” Much of the SHI clearly endorses the former proposition, especially
in its incorporation of overtly radical feminist ideas of power. Like the radical
feminists, the SHI operates on the assumption that women are always in a subordinate
relation to heterosexual men. In fact whereas male professors are seen as harassing
their female students, the concept of contra-power sexual harassment has been
developed to explain away sexual interaction between female professors and their
male students ? even when in a relationship with someone in a superior position
on the hierarchy, it is the man who is see as having all the power.
Patai sums up the SHI project correctly when she writes that “male sexual
interest is not simply being construed, or interpreted as “power.”
It has actually been redefined as such.”
And once this happens, who?s going to risk losing his job over a stray comment?
Many of the professors my wife deals with now refuse to meet with students of
the opposite sex behind closed doors. A woman professor I remember having several
fascinating discussions with behind her closed (and locked) door now refuses
to meet with students unless the door is wide open. The SHI has introduced the
paranoid style to the world of academia. Openness about feelings, honest detailed
evaluation of a student’s progress and other important parts of human, much
less academic, interactions are being curtailed by professors who feel they
need to cover themselves rather than end up denounced in language generally
reserved for violent rapists.
Of course like other totalizing social movements this one is doomed to failure,
as Patai recognizes; radical feminists are extremely unlikely, to say the least,
to make much of an inroad into stigmatizing sexuality before both men and women
rebel against such a stultifying ideology. But before that happens the main
victim of the SHI, besides the many men and a few women destroyed by it, is
likely to be feminism itself. The SHI is doing to feminism what its ultraconservative
opponents could only dream — it is turning the young women (and men) the movement
needs into its most effective opponents. Although radical feminists blame young
women’s disenchantment with feminism on a right-wing “backlash,” in fact it
is largely due to their accurate perception that too many feminists hold their
heterosexual lifestyle choices as inherently inauthentic and oppressive. This,
I believe, explains why so many young women hold political views that are traditionally
considered feminist, but at the same time refuse to self-identify themselves
as feminists. They endorse sexual equality, but (rightly) are uncomfortable
being associated with a movement increasingly beholden to its lunatic fringe.
As the principles of the radical feminists have filtered into mainstream feminist
organizations and philosophies, the turn away from feminism by young people
(and feminist veterans such as Patai) has only accelerated. If all these men
and women turned away from radical feminism and back to the goals of sexual
equality (the demand to treat men and women as individuals and not as cardboard
cutout representatives of their gender) this might be a good thing, but many
of these people are increasingly turning toward traditionalist conservative
anti-feminists such as F. Carolyn Graglia or Wendy Shallit who locate contemporary
feminism’s errors not where it belongs, in its rejection of sexual equality,
but instead in feminism’s rejection of traditional sex roles and sexual modesty.
It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that the biggest obstacle to sexual
equality in our society comes from the radical feminists and their mainstream
allies. Unlike the radical right, ridiculing the ideas of the radical feminists
is still not considered “politically correct.” When Pat Robertson
or Jerry Falwell tell us women aren?t making authentic choices by working outside
the home, pundits rightfully lambaste them. When radical feminists and the SHI
portray heterosexuality as inauthentic, dissent is suppressed (in fact it can
be construed as sexual harassment itself) in the name of being sensitive to
women. Heterophobia cuts through the myths and exposes the SHI?s totalitarian
agenda. It is an accurate warning of the dangerous road down which feminism
and the SHI are headed down. Hopefully reason will yet prevail and get feminism
back on the road of sexual equality rather its current obsession with sexual
correctness. Heterophobia points out where to begin for those willing
to listen.
