The XX Factor: What women really think.

Why, Exactly, Is Sexual Harassment—er, Sexual Terrorism—OK?

To your point: I am sorry you had such a brutal work environment, and sorry that the sexuality was "the least of it." I understand that low-wage jobs are brutal. Many in my extended family, and from my high school, have worked or do work Nickel-and-Dimed jobs: trucking, waitressing, cashiering, retail, construction. (Although the men's jobs regularly pay more than the women's.) Glad you don't have to live that way now.

But I have to say, reading your post, I'm not exactly sure why you think sexual harassment is OK. Because it's the least of it? Um, not always. And why should anyone have to tolerate the kind of sexual harassment that's brutal, grinding, daily terrorism? Consider the experience of a teen who worked at a Pizza Hut, whose co-worker rubbed his, um, "private parts" (as she put it in the deposition that I read) against her bottom whenever she was at the cash register, who held a knife to her throat when demanding sex and then said he was "just kidding," who threw her to the floor and dry-humped her and would have actually raped her except that the manager walked in. When the teen complained, her manager cut her hours.

Or the Peerless Park, Mo., Burger King workers whom I talked with at length, who were so traumatized by similar daily grindings and attempted assaults that one—call her "Ellen," because she asked me for pseudonymity—told me that whenever she saw a car like that of her former manager, she stopped being able to breathe, and had to go immediately home and lock herself in the house for a day. This was two years later. She'd never heard the term PTSD, and when I gently suggested counseling—although that's not a journalist's place!—she told me she couldn't afford it.  

Or how about the Montgomery, Ill., Dial factory cleaning woman who was assaulted by her manager—by assaulted, I mean an attempted rape that was interrupted when someone else came into the room (I read excerpts of this sworn testimony too)—in a case in which 100 different women went on the record about such horrific harassment as being stalked and threatened; grabbed by the crotch and lifted into the air; or circled by men on the factory floor, grabbed, their heads shoved toward some guy's unzipped crotch. Or was that last one the Ford case? Or Eveleth Taconite? Or Mitsubishi? Sorry, I have talked to so many of these women, and read the depositions and written testimony in so many of these lawsuits, that I get them mixed up. They're brutal. They're designed to keep women in the lower-paying jobs on the ladder. They're inexcusable.

And I haven't even gotten into what happens to women in the financial services industry—it's too gross to post. For the ugly details, check out Susan Antilla's stunning book, Tales from the Boom-Boom Room.

All this should be illegal. Oh wait—it is!—because it alters the "terms and conditions" of keeping a job, based on a woman's sex, making it impossible for her to earn a fair living.

The good news: Rachel Spicuglia got her job back. The bad news: Hundreds of thousands of other women still have to fend off exhausting and dehumanizing sexualized threats if they want to keep bringing home their skinny pink paychecks. And in a bad economy, that's very bad news for women. 

Who's Sexually Harassing Whom?

Well, E.J., having spent several years of my adult life working as a waitress, I take issue with your post. Over a two-year period, I worked at two restaurants. For most of that time, I worked at one of the most high-end restaurants in town. Sexual harassment? That was the least of it. When I was hired, there were 13 servers. Eleven were hard-core substances abusers: cocaine addicts, alcoholics, one crackhead. There were three drug operations. Pot, coke, and whatever else you wanted to get your hands on were sold by the valets, in the kitchen, and on the floor. One night, a buser went after a chef with a butcher knife; he was fired only after he didn't show up for work because he'd been shot. By the end of many shifts, most of the servers were coked out of their heads or too drunk to talk. To reiterate, this was a very upscale place. Some of the most high-profile people in the area dined there. Maybe it took getting high to deal with the never-ending demands of the wealthy patrons upon whom we waited.

So, sexual harassment? Uh, yes. Chefs in their 30s had sex with hostesses in their teens. Managers had sex with servers. One young, drunk waitress performed oral sex on the executive chef in the liquor closet during a shift. This extremely high-stress environment was virtually nonstop rife with sexual innuendo, grabbing, and harassment. Every table had to be served bread we cut in the kitchen, and it was a regular occurrence that the cooks would holler at us to "Shake it!" as we sliced the bread. We were regularly objectified, fondled, and solicited.

And the fact of the matter is that we women sexually harassed right back. We flirted with managers to get better shifts, we unbuttoned buttons on our uniforms to get bigger tips, we regularly used sexual innuendos, physical contact, and body language to squeeze as many dollars as possible out of the men with whom we worked and upon whom we waited. Why? For the money. Because we were desperate. Because we were broke. Because we could.

I was raised by two English professors in the most liberal place in America: Berkeley, Calif. I'm all too familiar with feminist rhetoric, with academics in ivory towers who point down at the masses to declare what the populace should and should not do, with those who seem to perceive the world as a place in which what "should" happen is what does happen. That's not reality. When it comes to sex—or sexual harassment, for that matter—the situations are often neither black nor white but decidedly gray. The idea that it's possible to eliminate or police human sexuality in any context is a fantasy.

For those of you interested in reading a moving, compelling, and insightful book about what it's really like to live and work in the trenches of America by a woman who found out the truth by sticking her head into the toilets of America's rich, buy yourselves a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.