In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (48 page)

Thomas’s aggressively raunchy behavior, so obviously hurtful to Hill’s sensibilities, hardly befitted the image of a solemn deliberator on the Supreme Court. Wrinkling her nose during her testimony, Hill labeled it “disgusting.” As I watched and listened on my home TV, I thought “puerile” was a better label. The harassment Hill had sustained was particularly bizzare for having taken place at the EEOC, the federal agency empowered to protect people from job discrimination, but as harassment went, it was relatively mild. I’d seen and heard far worse and so had many women, particularly those making inroads in skilled labor and other “nontraditional” occupations, from brokerage houses to firehouses and points in between. On the other hand, their harassers weren’t up for jobs on the highest court in the land.

That same year, 1991, a shipyard welder named
Lois Robinson, one of a small handful of skilled females among several hundred men, aired a horrendous case of a hostile, intimidating work environment before a Florida court. Spread-eagle labia shots from porn magazines had festooned the locker room and dry-dock area of the Jacksonville shipyard where she worked. “Lick me you whore dog bitch” was scrawled on the wall where Robinson hung her jacket. “Pussy” and “Eat me” were spray-painted over her work station during a break when she went to get a drink of water. Male co-workers hooted in her presence, “Hey, pussycat, give me a whiff”; “I’d like some of that”; “The more you lick the harder it gets”; “Women taste like sardines.” The court ruled in Robinson’s case that a reasonable woman had a right to find such a working environment abusive, and that its corrosive impact would damage her job performance.

Anita Hill was a very proper, sheltered young woman who had been out of school for only three years when Clarence Thomas humiliated her with his sexual insinuations, while I was a sophisticated, politically
active New Yorker from a generation that had learned to survive by developing a hard shell. I had to admit that Hill was raising fresh questions for me. How much discomfort should a woman have to tolerate at work? To what lengths need she go to toughen herself in order to stay on a job and perhaps to advance and prosper? I doubted that Hill would have had a clear-cut, winnable case if she’d pursued her grievances in court. Her career had not been adversely affected; she had segued nicely from her government job into academia, helped by a recommendation from Thomas. Despite the humiliation she had endured, she would have been hard put to prove harm in a legal sense. But, like most women who suffer in offensive work conditions, Anita Hill had not tried to make a case of it. “Perhaps I should have taken angry or even militant steps,” she said in her prepared remarks. “I took no initiative to inform anyone. But when I was asked by a representative of this committee to report my experience, I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.”

Thus was the battle drawn between a judge and a professor, between a black man and a black woman, between the loyal teammates of President Bush, who had seen two earlier nominees for the high court go down in flames, and the flustered liberal Democrats whose list of serious objections to this nominee had not included, until that fateful Friday, his sexual behavior toward women at work. Clarence Thomas held a press conference to deny every piece of Anita Hill’s story and to call the hearings “a high-tech lynching.” Rallying after their momentary confusion, his Republican supporters regrouped to attack Hill’s credibility like criminal defense lawyers hammering away at a victim of rape. Through innuendo, conjecture, and ugly misstatement, Senators Orrin Hatch, Alan Simpson, and Arlen Specter led the charge to destroy her. Anita Hill was accused of seeking revenge because Thomas had spurned her romantic interest, of concocting bizarre fantasies gleaned from
The Exorcist
, of suffering from a delusional state of “erotomania,” and finally, of committing perjury. I’d never seen such hypocritical slander.

Hill’s accusations, Thomas’s denials, and the squalid, specious attacks on Hill’s mental stability played in the news as a “She Said, He Said” story. The reportage stoked the resentment of many African-Americans,
who noted that no white man of Judge Thomas’s stature had ever had his penis discussed in public (though that time would come soon enough, and on that occasion the man would be the president of the United States). Neither did the stories assuage the agitation of women who learned the steep price, if they hadn’t already known, of bearing witness in sexual matters. Pollsters reported that the majority of Americans felt the embarrassing spectacle had gone too far and accomplished little. (However, the hearings, which extended through the weekend, outstripped live television coverage of the baseball play-offs.)

But for all the hand-wringing about what the country was coming to, the Hill/Thomas face-off demonstrated, as had no other public forum before it, the vast gulf in perception between the two sexes—of behavior enacted by men as ribald fun, and behavior experienced by women as distressing, intimidating, humiliating, and degrading. Through an accidental chain of political events, Anita Hill had stepped unexpectedly into a glaring spotlight to stand in for every woman who had ever put up with a sexually toxic workplace. What the nation witnessed as she was pilloried by the Senate Judiciary Committee may not have matched the legal definition of sexual harassment, but it was close enough to be instructive. In the wake of Anita Hill, harassment complaints filed with the EEOC doubled; damages awarded in court cases soared dramatically, enabled by the Civil Rights Act of 1991; companies that previously had not addressed the problem hauled in employees for mandatory educative seminars and sensitivity training; and voters turning out for the 1992 elections doubled the number of women in the U.S. Senate.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas squeaked through his confirmation by a narrow margin; his subsequent record on the Court has been lackluster at best. Professor Anita Hill maintained her dignity, to emerge from her ordeal as a respected symbol of women’s rights.

Giving a name to sexual harassment, as the women in Ithaca did when they took up the case of Carmita Wood in 1975, put into bold relief a pernicious form of job discrimination that previously had been laughed at, trivialized, and ignored. In the process, the women set in motion a
new understanding in business corporations, in the halls of Congress, in the military, in the school systems, and in courts of law. The discourse surrounding this issue remains vigorous and expansive, if occasionally confused and contradictory. (I’m mindful that some people fear” sexual harassment” has become so broad a concept that it could encompass all sorts of innocent behavior, but I don’t think we need worry about a Jacobin terror just yet.)

Sexual harassment was conceptualized by the women’s movement as discriminatory behavior directed by men against women, and the law, in its reflection of popular thinking, followed that path for twenty years. In a major but salutary departure in 1998, the Supreme Court recognized same-sex harassment on the job as unlawful, too, when Joseph
Oncale, hired as an oil rigger on an offshore platform, won the right to sue his Louisiana employer and three crewmates for singling him out for crude sex play and threats of rape that intimidated him into quitting the job after four months. (Oncale’s slight build and sensitive disposition apparently led his tormentors to mistakenly assume he was gay.) Perhaps male-on-male harassment was not “a principal evil” in workplace discrimination, the Court remarked, and perhaps this particular form of harm had not been envisioned by the framers of Title VII in 1964, but it was discrimination nonetheless.

The 1998 ruling was long overdue.

THE PORNOGRAPHY WARS

The radical women’s movement was already flagging when feminists started fighting feminists in the terrible pornography wars. Our internecine struggles not only expressed deepseated philosophical differences, they hastened the movement’s decline. In retrospect, I don’t think the sororal collision could have been avoided. But I resent the view that antiporn feminists reflected a prudish strain of right-wing thinking while pro-porn feminists and their pornographer allies were an embattled vanguard holding the line against sexual repression and incursions on free speech. The pieces don’t fit.

By a miserable coincidence of historic timing, an aboveground, billion-dollar industry of hard- and soft-core porn began to flourish during the seventies simultaneously with the rise of Women’s Liberation. The door through which the purveyors of pornography raced was opened by a
1970 presidential commission report declaring the effects of porn to be harmless and inconsequential; the subsequent avalanche derived its legality from a 1973 Supreme Court ruling,
Miller v. California
, which replaced existing obscenity guidelines with a vague and selective approach called “community standards.” Did the men of the high court understand what their ruling was about to unleash? Interpreters in the press certainly didn’t, but unpredictable outcomes are typical in times of vast and swift social change.

The staggering rise in the production and consumption of over-the-counter
pornography in the wake of
Miller
was cheerfully analyzed by the pornographers themselves as a male counterreaction to Women’s Liberation. They had a good point. A significant part of porn’s appeal was its promise to reveal the ancient mysteries of sex, and its newer updates, to a threatened, confused audience at a moment when traditional masculinity was undergoing its most serious challenge. America’s war in Vietnam had collapsed in defeat, longhaired rock stars and flower children had capsized parental values by celebrating sensual freedoms, and women were demanding equality in the workplace as well as in bed. As a result, porn grew as feminism grew, and many of us believed that porn was acting to undo much that feminism was accomplishing.

Homemade porn in the left counterculture press had been one of many provocations helping to fuel the rise of Women’s Liberation. A special porn edition put out in New York by their male comrades precipitated the women’s takeover of
Rat
. The founders of
Tooth and Nail
in San Francisco hijacked and dumped a set of printer’s plates intended for a porn issue of
Dock of the Bay
. Robin Morgan’s invasion of Grove Press, and a flurry of zaps against
Penthouse
,
Playboy
, and Playboy Clubs in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, and Rochester, were significant early protests against the commercial exploitation of women’s bodies.

I witnessed the post
-Miller
explosion of porn more closely than I cared to while I worked on
Against Our Will
. The four-block walk from Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, my subway exit, to the New York Public Library on Fifth, where I did my writing, transmogrified during those years from a familiar landscape of tacky souvenir shops, fast-food joints, and kung fu movie houses into a hostile gauntlet of Girls! Live Girls!, XXX, Hot Nude Combos, and illegal massage parlors one flight above the twenty-five-cent peeps. It wasn’t just the visual assault that was inimical to my dignity and peace of mind. The new grunge seemed to embolden a surly army of thugs, pimps, handbag snatchers, pickpockets, drug sellers, and brazen loiterers whose murmured propositions could not be construed as friendly.

Running the gauntlet was too agitating a way to start the morning and too dangerous a way to go home at night. I coped by taking another route to the library that entailed a change of trains and a different
exit, an avoidance strategy that put the visual assault out of sight, if not out of mind. In fact, it was so much on my mind that it made its way into my book. In “Women Fight Back,” the final chapter, I defined pornography as one of the forces contributing to a cultural climate in which men felt free to rape. I called hard-core porn the undiluted essence of antifemale propaganda, said there could never be any equality in it for women, and challenged the liberal establishment, most specifically the ACLU, to pull off its blinders and acknowledge the danger in a virulent ideology that portrayed females as dehumanized objects to be used, abused, broken, and discarded.

A NOW chapter in Connecticut printed my pornography analysis in pamphlet form. Unfortunately, the retaliation from
Hustler
and
Screw
reached a far wider audience.
Hustler
, then a newcomer to the nation’s magazine racks, printed a smarmy fantasy that began “My palm massaged authoress Susan Brownmiller’s naked breasts,” and went on from there.
Screw
, a New York guide to massage parlors and X-rated films, superimposed my head on a toilet bowl, said something choice about my mother, declared that I made porno movies, and printed my home address.

A newsstand pornographic assault was not among the responses I’d expected to receive for publishing a book, but luckily for my emotional balance I wasn’t an isolated target. The smearing of outspoken feminists and serious, achieving women in all walks of life became a standard practice for the new porn moguls riding high on their free-speech protections. Gloria Steinem, Shere Hite, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Walters, and the actress Valerie Harper were among the popular celebrities selected for sexual humiliation by Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein, who gleefully distributed free copies of the
smears to the national media, and of course to the targets. When Rosalynn Carter, the president’s wife, and nine other prominent women, including Steinem and Walters, were offered a million dollars by Flynt “
to pose in the
Hustler
tradition,” it became a news story.