The Joy of Harassment

By

Andy Rooney

A few jerks around every business office have ruined what used to be a perfectly pleasant and harmless workplace activity – by-play between men and women. In any work place where there are men and women, there is inevitably a relationship established between them that is different from the relationship between the workers of the same sex. There is nothing vulgar or sexist about it. Men are men and women are women. It makes work more interesting and it’s too bad we’re being asked to behave as if we’re all asexual.

The average man doesn’t lust after every woman he sees who’s attractive to him. If there are thoughts that come to him unbidden, he suppresses those as quickly and surely as any inclination he might have to shoplift an attractive piece of merchandise in a store.

I was standing at the elevator on the seventh floor of my building when a young woman came along, noted that I had already pushed the DOWN button she smiled, nodded and stood near me. She was attractive and wearing what I perceived to be a new and quite short, dress.

“I like your dress,” I said and then I paused and added, “What there is of it.”

“I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or an insult,” she laughed.

It seemed to me at the time to be an inoffensive man/woman bit of conversation like ten thousand others I’ve had over the years but I got thinking afterwards that it’s the sort of thing I probably shouldn’t say anymore.

The necessity for being neuter in the office is difficult and women are doing their share to help make it easier for men. If men are not expected to take notice of the fact that a woman is attractive or even sexually interesting, then women have got to stop dressing in a manner that evokes such thoughts in men. Women’s clothes have got to change and become less interesting if men are to be disinterested. The clothes should stop putting so much emphasis on the difference between a woman’s shape and a man’s.

This suggestion assumes something that may not be true: that all women are as anxious and angry about sexual harassment in the workplace as the activists in the women’s movement are.

There. I’ve said it and I’m glad.