Evolving Our Approach to Sexual Harassment

Part 1: When Liberation Becomes Limitation (Free!)  Right click to download mp3  Right click to download m4b AudioBook  Duration: 48 minutes

Part 2: Understanding the Feminine Shadow  Right click to download mp3  Right click to download m4b AudioBook  Duration: 47 minutes

Part 3: What Should Women Do?  Right click to download mp3  Right click to download m4b AudioBook  Duration: 27 minutes

Diane Musho Hamilton talks with Ken Wilber about an essay she recently wrote with Vanessa Fisher, titled "Evolving our Approach to Sexual Harassment: A New Role for Women". They discuss the origins of sexual harassment policies in America just a few decades ago, created to transform the prevailing attitudes of chauvinism that tended to dominate the workplace during the 1950's and 1960's. It was a "man's world" no longer—more and more women continued to enter the workforce for the very first time, and the "public sphere" needed to grow into an environment of safety and respect for women. And as any fan of Mad Men already knows, this was a very good thing.

But we were missing something. It took us awhile to notice the subtle but insidious ways these laws were actually placing restrictions upon women's identities, preventing them from fully owning and expressing their own sexual power. The wide-open "hostile environment" laws often fail to differentiate invited sexuality from uninvited sexuality, creating a legal quagmire of mixed signals, slippery slopes, and faulty interpretations. When no distinction is made between invited and uninvited sexuality, all sexuality becomes suspect—and before too long, the entire relational dimension of the workplace itself comes under attack, suffocating the very dimension most women tend to thrive in. Meanwhile, women continue to be perceived as perennial victims and treated as if their sexuality never actually belonged to them in the first place, but entirely possessed and defined by the men that surround them.

The time has come for men and women alike to stop relating to women as if they were perpetual victims, fragile creatures who need to be protected at all costs from the pains and perils of the world. Of course most "real" men would risk their own lives to protect a woman from violence--but when we create legislation that presupposes woman as victim, we reinforce the real-life oppression men and women both experience every day. It is time for both sexes to come to terms with and take responsibility for their own sexuality, and avoid the temptation to reduce one another to bankrupted stereotypes of power and weakness.

This is the focus of Diane Musho Hamilton and Vanessa Fisher's essay, "Evolving our Approach to Sexual Harassment: A New Role for Women", which is part of an unpublished anthology tentatively titled Emerging Visions of Women and Men: An Integral Exploration of Sex, Gender and Spirit, to be published by SUNY Press. This book will be published with a larger series with SUNY on Integral theory and practice (click here for more information.)

Text by Corey W. deVos

From the essay:

Abstract: Vanessa and Diane explore both the positive benefits that have come out of the institution of sexual harassment policy (the increased rights of women in the workplace and society as a whole) as well as the shadow side of what feminist Daphne Patai terms "the sexual harassment industry", which has inadvertently limited the possibilities of women's fullest empowerment by fostering a heightened sense of victimization around women's sexuality.

Through an examination of many controversial topics related to power, sex, and the law, Vanessa and Diane reframe the sexual harassment debate through the vantage point of an integral perspective, attempting to hold the full complexity that surrounds these issues while simultaneously calling us all into a higher level of awareness and compassion in how we deal with our sexual challenges.

A Note from Vanessa and Diane: It is important for us to make explicit at the outset that we have chosen for the purposes of this conversation to focus mainly on one particular dimension of the sexual harassment debate: the role of women in evolving this conversation forward. We believe that in our time and culture, it is empowering to women to presume that we have the capacity, the opportunity, and the responsibility to contribute to evolving the dynamics of sexual exchange in our environment. Our discussion is a recognition of the power that women have access to today, precisely because of the work that has been done by feminists in the past.

Our dialogue is not an attempt to deny the real work that men still need to do in clarifying their own sexuality in order to free women and themselves from its unconscious impacts. It is, rather, our intent to explore a dimension of the conversation that we feel is rarely spoken to when these discussions are engaged. Hopefully in being upfront about this intention, we will curb some of the agitation or anger that might arise if readers interpret our approach as potentially blaming women and making men the victims.

This is precisely our integral challenge: to have a conversation which acknowledges the developmental arc of this issue, and doesn't succumb to a "pre-trans fallacy" that confuses a new position of feminine empowerment and strength with an archaic tendency to blame the victim. In other words, we're working toward a map of developmental direction in which both women and men may participate fully in owning their power and responsibility.