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Thread: Sexualharassment is a good thing!

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[quote=KATRINA,317325]Extracted from Financial Times.

Sexualharassment is a good thing: the human race would die out without it.

This was the verdict of a judge in Russia last month, dismissing a case brought by a  22-year-old woman in advertising. She had claimed that her boss had told all his female underlings to “signal with their eyes if they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table”. She hadn't realised that he meant this literally and her eyes may have given an inadvertent twitch at some point; when she refused his subsequent and most unwelcome advances, he locked her out of the office. The judge did not dispute the evidence but told the woman that her boss had done nothing remiss: on the contrary, he was simply being gallant.

Another story: The story began on a July evening when a group of City lawyers from Shearman & Sterling went out drinking, as City lawyers so often do.  After a few drinks, the group fragmented, and an associate peeled off to the Windmill strip club in Soho, taking with him the summer intern, a young female Oxford graduate. It isn't clear what happened once inside but, as a result, the girl filed a complaint to the firm's HR department, claiming that the associate had made suggestive remarks and tried to touch her. The firm looked into the matter, decided the associate had acted in a way that was “deeply inappropriate” and fired him. However, it was also made clear that, as the event was a private one, the firm itself was not liable.

What did people react?

Half think the story is a savage indictment of life in the City, and shows how wretched it still is for female lawyers, especially young ones. The other half are angry with the stupid woman, and furious that, in a wildly PC world, a lawyer lost his job without having done anything wrong.  “HOPE SHE IS PLEASED WITH HERSELF FOR DESTROYING HIS LIFE,” went one post.

What's the author's view?

I don't think either is, but they share wrongness equally. The man was an idiot. You don't need to be a lawyer to know that strip club, summer intern and clumsy pass all add up to trouble. The intern was an idiot too. Once she realised she was being taken into what its website calls an “upmarket tableside dancing venue” she should have said: “Thanks for a pleasant evening but it's been a long day and I must go home now”, and taken herself off. In itself, this was a story of two silly people on a squalid little night out in London, and is of no particular interest.

The sexual harassment in Russia:

In that country, only two women have ever won cases for sexual harassment and, in one survey, 100 per cent of women claimed to have been harassed at some point.

What do you think of sexual harassment? Is it a good thing?
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