Too far?

How far is "too far"? This is a question that is on the table in my department. If you read this blog regularly (all two of you), you might have seen some references to a student I call Dookie. Dookie is a problem just waiting to happen. He's a malignantly arrogant first year student with antisocial tendencies.

It began almost immediately with lab space issues. Dookie took over a very large chunk of the lab he was to share with three other grads. The other grads are a mid-40s white American woman, a mid-20s Asian man, and a 30ish white American man. Dookie and the woman are both first years. The mid 20s male student is in his second year, and the 30ish male student is an upper year. Before classes had even started, the others from Dookie's lab were complaining bitterly about his space use. Not only had he staked out a large and prime bit of lab real estate as "his desk", he had also moved several pieces of large equipment onto the small work areas left for the female and Asian grad student to share. I identify them this way intentionally, because I believe it was why Dookie chose to shove the shit onto their desks and not onto the white American man's desk.

The students complained to one another and to other grads. But they didn't complain to the faculty member whose lab it was, their advisor, or our department head. Eventually the complaints got back to Dookie. Dookie responded to the person who brought the issue to his attention by saying that I (yes, me, PFG, your beloved blogger) must have been relating untrue rumors about him, rousing the rabble, etc. When I heard this, I immediately went to Dookie to set him straight, to let him know that he had pissed off so many people it would be impossible to tell who had said what to whom at this point. We had a chat that left me feeling like I had to take a shower. His position was that if people didn't voice an objection even to what is generally considered poor and antisocial behavior (even in kindergarten), then they deserved to be used. I finally ended the conversation, abruptly because there is no other way to end a conversation like this. As I was leaving, Dookie said "I can see you and I will not be best friends, but it's good to know we can speak civilly to one another." I made a noncommital sound like agreement so I would not reinforce his mistaken notion that I wanted to continue a conversation with him as I proceded out of the building.

He then asked me out to dinner.

Fast forward....
Dookie stories kept coming.
The older female grad no longer feels comfortable working in the lab. A female international student mentioned that he had been hitting on her and had said something about women having the best place to keep a man's sperm. Dookie fell behind in his research and when he was called to task about it, he blamed his Asian lab mate for not being available to help him. My lab mate recounted Dookie's attempts to talk about his lecture to his lab on "the significance of the female orgasm". "It was disgusting!" my lab mate shouted, They shouldn't have to hear that!". A cross campus teaching assistant e-mail list practically shut down over Dookie's callous, personal attacks on other students who had used the list to discuss their distaste for a racist campus paper cartoon about international teaching assistants.

And now it has happened. He finally went "too far". Last week, Dookie lost his shit on another first year, a rather young white, middle class, suburb raised female. She happened into Dookie's lab looking for the Asian grad student so they could talk about class. The older white male grad was there alone when she arrived, and he said the Asian grad student would be back in a minute. She sat down at the Asian grad's desk to wait. Dookie returned and asked her to get out of his chair. When the female grad student said "But I thought this was ___'s chair..." Dookie told her he wanted to use the computer on the desk the chair was at (the desk Dookie had effectivly designated the Asian student's desk months ago). The young female grad moved to the chair next to it and said "Ok, I'll sit over here then," or something similar. And that's when Dookie called her a bitch. He addressed several statements about her to the older white male grad student, calling her a "little bitch" and "fucking bitch" repeatedly, saying she had "given him lip" in a class while he was proctoring the end of the semester evaluations. He accused her of flirting and using her feminine wiles to get other people to do her work for her, and said she couldn't think for herself.

She is bringing harassment charges against him. She sent an e-mail to several students in our department who have been so vocal with their complaints to ask if they would be willing to sign on to a group complaint with the dean of students' office. Among other things, this is what she got back:
I don't feel that I have one specific event that warrants some sort of "prosecution." I have had several...encounters...in which he has acted completely unprofessionally and has been a total jackass, but he has not said anything derogatory that would warrant a specific complaint.
Another response was similar. While these women will admit to having had problems with him, will refuse to work with him, will avoid him even if that means avoiding their common areas, they seem to feel his behavior is not reportable. In short, the responses were "I support your stand but refuse to stand with you because what happened with me and him was bad but not officially bad".

Where the fuck do they get this from? It's not from the harassment policies, I am sure of that. In both the workplace and education federal antidiscrimination laws, the terms are "severe, persistent, or pervasive". Meaning a pattern of what might appear as "isolated" encounters across several individuals can be argued to be pervasive. Further, sexual behavior is not a requisit. The guidelines on Title IX protection state: "It is also important to recognize that gender-based harassment, which may include acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex, but not involving conduct of a sexual nature, may be a form of sex discrimination that violates Title IX if it is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive and directed at individuals because of their sex."

What is driving these expressions of what counts as "too far"? I looked up "sexual harassment" and "reluctance" on google. I found this paper by a college undergrad. Yes, an undergrad. I wish she would come and lecture to my graduate peers. I can't fact check all of it, but her exposition calls attention to one factor that has been proposed to account for the reporting reluctance of the type my peers are displaying:

Brooks and Perot (1991) and Fitzgerald et al. (1988) agree that another contributing factor is that women need to view the behavior as offensive and serious before she [sic] will report sexual harassment. Jensen & Gutek (1982) suggest...that...women who believe that it is their fault that things "went too far" may not report incidents of sexual harassment unless they believe that the acts were very offensive and serious.

While this segment of the paper is couched in terms that suggest sexualized harassment as opposed to sexist mistreatment, it seems the underlying point is quite relevant here. How far is "too far" for an exchange that has progressed into incivility? If it goes there, if it goes too far, who is to blame? And what is the blame that is to be had?

If you have a sense of self worth, if there is nothing in your core that suggests you deserve shame, ridicule, derision, scorn, objectification, beratement, then when you are subjected to this in an exchange that has all the conventional assumptions of being a professional or polite social encounter, you are SHOCKED and horrified. If you do not believe you deserve this or that someone has an unspoken right to casual displays of this sort of behavior, when someone who makes a habit of shitting on people casually chooses to shit on you, the questions you might ask yourself shouldn't start with "well does this really count as shit?" For christ's sake, of course it's shit! And it's on you! And he put it there! Now make a fuss! Get angry! It's ok to not want to be shit on!

Why would graduate student aged women not understand this? Let's ask the undergrad.

Fitzgerald et al. (1995) reviewed research on behavioral responses to sexual harassment… Internally-focused responses included: ignoring the harassment and doing nothing to arrest it (endurance); pretending that the situation was not happening or had no effect (denial); reinterpreting the situation or interpreting the intentions of the harasser as non-negative (reattribution); and perceiving the harassment as self-induced (self-blame)...

Internal responses are victims' attempts to handle the situation on their own due to fears of retaliation, not being believed, hurting one's career, or reluctance to cause problems for the harasser. The study concluded that victims most often practice avoidance, emphasize the positives, and endure, hoping that the situation will disappear without the embarrassment or retaliation that often accompanies a formal complaint....Women will continue to use these mechanisms inadvertently perpetuating the problem of sexual harassment as long as real organizational protection from stigma and retaliation fails to exist (Fitzgerald et al., 1995).

One thing I must add to this (really comprehensive) discussion of motivation for the responses to harassment is that the "internal" responses may arise not just from a sense of helplessness. They could be interpretted as a dysfunctional attempt to establish control while denying the reality of the harm that the behavior has done. I see this kind of response as a logical outcome of the post-second wave feminist backlash of the late 70s and 80s. Popular strategies of invalidating feminist social complaint and critique entailed a variety of tactics, mostly involving ad femme attacks which portrayed the dissenter as pathologically disposed to chronic discontent, as a miserable, malicious, individual who whips up hysterical responses to even the "teensiest" behavior she finds personally nonadvantageous. These stereotypes made their way into our mainstream culture, as new terms like "feminazi" can attest to. A whole generation's acceptance of such portrayals and a concomitant desire to want to avoid not simply being labeled as but actually becoming such a hideously unacceptable (and unlovable!) monster is wrapped up in the bigger lie that the members of our society are equal. This is the monsterous gold leaf letter Lie that encompasses notions like institutionalized racism ended in the 60s; homocidal bigotry is not condoned or encouraged by our current social values; sexualized aggression is not sold side by side with all our favorite name brands; people from underdeveloped nations will benefit from "investment" by foreign (US) owned industry; and there is no gender or sex role war being waged on the battle fields of women's bodies and consenting adults' desires to openly love and be loved by each other.

If we unquestioningly accept key pieces of The Big Fat Lie, which so many of us do, we have a hard time extracting ourselves from it even when it threatens us quite directly. If we are threatened but refuse or can't let go of this lie, we have two clear paths.
a) We can acknowledge the afront, which brings the very real social threat of becoming (through being labled as) an unsympathetic perpetual victim or a troublemaking feminazi.
b) We can refuse to acknowledge the level, scope, or degree of the offense. We can put on a good face, be a team player, go on with the show. We can be feminine about this. We can acknowledge that there are real problems, real instances of harassment, but that our encounters do not even come close to those indisputably overt ones, like when a guy who shoves his hands up co-workers' skirts is elected governor of California. We might express sympathy for the women in those obviously clear cut circumstances of legally valid or at least highly publicized sexual harassment, cluck our tongues disapprovingly. We each can keep pushing how far "too far" is in our own lives until we wake up someday and there is nothing more than empty open space where there used to be a person.

Myself? I choose to reject the lie. I know that I will be called a troublemaker (been there, done that), a feminazi, and a perpetual victim. But those will be labels that others apply, and I will be me.

So how far is "too far"?
It's here.