A Case Of Classism, Double Standards

After arguing for years that sexual harassment is serious sex discrimination, feminists are defending a dubious double standard.

It’s sexual harassment if a conservative man makes crude remarks to a woman who works for him - especially if she’s got a Yale University law degree. But it’s not sexual harassment if a liberal paws, pulls down his pants and propositions a woman who works for him - not if she’s got “big hair” and a working-class background.

Last week, Paula Jones’ lawyers had a day in the U.S. Supreme Court to argue that she deserves a day in court to argue her sex harassment case against the president. Bill Clinton says he’s too busy being president to defend himself now; she doesn’t want to wait four more years to be heard.

A man may be a sexual harasser and still be a better president than, say, Bob Dole would be. But you’d think the women’s movement would put women first, not politics. You’d think it would defend women’s hard-won gains in the fight against sexual harassment.

You’d be naive and you’d be wrong.

Many people believe sexual harassment has been defined too stringently, turning every casual remark or joke into a cause for legal action. Some resent the implication that women are too delicate to handle the tough, competitive, “hostile” workplace.

I share those concerns. But I don’t want to go back to the days when powerful men could prey on female employees, when women who complained were labeled “flirts” or “sluts.” If what happened to Paula Jones in that hotel room is no big deal, what is?

Like everyone else writing on this topic, I’m heavily influenced by an article in the November issue of American Lawyer by Stuart Taylor Jr., who argues that Jones has a strong case, far stronger than Anita Hill ever had.

In 1991, Jones was a $6.35-an-hour clerk for an Arkansas state agency; she was 24 years old. She was assigned to hand out badges at a state-sponsored seminar at the Excelsior Hotel when a state trooper told her Gov. Clinton wanted to see her in his hotel room.

Her co-worker and friend, Pamela Blackard, confirms this. So does the trooper.

Blackard also says Jones returned 10 minutes later, obviously distressed, and said she’d been groped and asked by the governor to perform oral sex.

“If someone goes up and comes back in 10 minutes and is shaking, she didn’t have time to make all that stuff up,” Blackard told Taylor.

Jones confided in another friend that day, giving the same details. Then she told her sisters, brother-in-law and mother.

She swore friends and family members to secrecy, saying she feared losing her job. She said nothing during the 1992 presidential campaign.

She spoke up only after a 1994 magazine story quoted the trooper as saying a state employee named Paula had offered to be Clinton’s “girlfriend” after being escorted to his Excelsior Hotel room in 1991.

If Jones was trying to defend her reputation, it was a disastrous mistake.

Clinton’s crony, James Carville, said, “You drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.” Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, sneered at “trailer trash.”

The media got spun.

In part, it was bimbo overload after the sordid “Troopergate” stories. In part, it was politics. Reporters and editors feared serving as agents of a right-wing attack on a president most journalists had voted for.

And a large element was the classism of “new class” journalists, very few of whom grew up in trailer parks or, like Jones, in a working-class, Bible-believing, small-town Southern family. The same prejudices that slanted reporting on Richard Jewell, the man suspected in the Olympic bombing but since cleared, affected reporting on Paula Jones. More was written about Jones’ hair and her makeup than about the witnesses who supported her story.

Feminists who’d made Anita Hill into a hero let Paula Jones be portrayed as a tramp. They publicly questioned her motives and blamed her for going to the governor’s hotel room. They quietly sat by while her dress, her manner and her sexual history were used to imply that if anything had happened, she was “asking for it.”

Or feminists said it wasn’t sexual harassment because she hadn’t been forced into a sexual act or fired for saying “no.”

It was just a CEO fondling a good-looking clerical employee, exposing himself and requesting sex after reminding her that he’s friends with her immediate boss. No big deal.

There are a lot of women in this country with big hair, bold makeup and crummy, low-paying jobs that they’re desperately afraid of losing. They “just don’t get” feminism.

Why should they?

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