Who’s Reasonable When Sexual Harassment Charges Fly?

My husband and I met and fell in love on the job. We didn’t want anyone to know.

We thought that dating someone you worked with was unprofessional, a bit unseemly and probably stupid too.

The question of sexual harassment, however, never came up.

We were colleagues, both journalists, reporting to the same editor, both single, no kids. And both of us had said yes. No ulterior motives, or implied threats, were involved.

Beyond the matter of how uncomfortable we’d be if things didn’t work out, neither of us considered any political what ifs.

So ours was just another modern story of boy meets girl and then something clicks. We knew we’d kept our secret well when our boss, totally in the dark, called us in separately to offer us separate jobs. His was in Cairo and mine was in Madrid. We both said yes, then later, I do.

This was more than eight years ago. My guess is that dating at the office is still going strong, if not stronger, than before. Bars are out; cruising supermarket aisles is still very hit or miss.

What that leaves is the workplace, where most of us spend an inordinate amount of time. Yet something important has changed between the sexes on the job. It is the law.

Prospective suitors, and certainly your garden-variety lech, should proceed with care--if at all. Actions that create a “hostile environment” are legally taboo. Men, especially, are thinking twice.

Sexual harassment, long an ignored staple of working life, is a very serious charge. It’s evidence of a revolutionary change in consciousness, at least on the books.

Nobody knows this better, now, than Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court nominee. Through a spokesman, he denies the accusations of law professor Anita Hill, his former employee at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then adds that he is experiencing torture because they have been aired.

Now consider the case of Kerry Ellison, an IRS agent in San Mateo, who said that her co-worker, Sterling Gray, wrote her several love letters and talked about sex. Ellison filed a sexual harassment complaint in 1987, which was denied by the IRS, then later rejected by a federal district court.

The court said the evidence just wasn’t there.

But earlier this year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that decision.

“A reasonable woman could consider Gray’s conduct, as alleged by Ellison, sufficiently severe and pervasive to alter a condition of employment and create an abusive working environment,” the appellate court said.

Note the use of the term reasonable woman. This is believed to be a first.

Circuit Judge Robert R. Beezer, who wrote the opinion, said the court adopted its perspective “primarily because we believe that a sex-blind reasonable-person standard tends to be male-biased and tends to systematically ignore the experiences of women.”

Now Judge Beezer, please meet the good ol’ boys of Capitol Hill.

Putting aside the question of whether the sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas are true, this reasonable woman wants to know why the Senate Judiciary Committee was so quick to dismiss them out of hand. Only with extreme reluctance have the boys agreed to give them a second look.

So it seems that nearly everybody but the senators is aware of how things have changed, on the job and in the consciousness of the land. And that is giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Now I will be less kind.

Perhaps the senators did know about sexual harassment and they just didn’t care. Or maybe they thought that any alleged sexual innuendo communicated by a single man to his attractive woman employee is part of the job, or maybe just part of being male.

Perhaps they thought they smelled a political rat. Then again, maybe they just believed that nobody would leak the contents of Anita Hill’s transcript to the press.

In any case, they were wrong.

The charges of sexual harassment are a political bomb. And it is the perception of their importance that is key. Who is “reasonable” here? Man or woman? Accuser or accused? The senators, who kept the allegations to themselves, or the media, who brought them out?

Careful how you answer. Your responses form a Rorschach test of sorts.

Yet most of us know that the reality of sexual harassment is a penumbra of very fine lines. The same gestures, the same words and tone are differently perceived. We all didn’t grow up in the same house.

And human beings, by nature, are sexual. Flirtation, light and breezy, is a release--when it’s wanted, when it comes from someone that you like, when it is appropriate on the job.

These are subjective standards, surely. They are open to interpretation and naturally, ripe for abuse. Who is reasonable, me or you? Such are the loopholes of which legal nightmares are born.

I know this from experience and from listening to people talk.

One caller to a radio station said he once gave a woman he worked with some doughnuts because she seemed very nice. Then he said the woman complained, saying he was coming on to her in a sexual way. He says a videotape of the incident later proved her wrong.

Another caller, commenting on the troubles of the Supreme Court nominee, pointed out over and over that Thomas was a single man at the time. This, the caller implied, seemed to make any alleged sexual badgering OK.

And then there are my friends, reasonable women all. One told me that a co-worker asked her if she’d pose nude in front of his lens. Another said a boss told her that having sex with him would get her ahead.

It seems that everybody has a story, about language and tone, about being looked up and down, about touching on the shoulders, the hands and knee, about inquiries as to who you went out with last night. These are all incidents crisscrossed with fine lines.

Which is why something should be said about them, out loud.

Those who are giving offense should be told. Perhaps actions were simply misperceived. Then again, the offender and the offended usually look at things through very different eyes.

I am offended that accusations of sexual harassment made by a “reasonable woman” against a nominee to the highest court in the land didn’t merit much concern among the good ol’ boys of Capitol Hill.

Judge Beezer had it right. Women’s experiences are still systematically ignored.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.