When Will It End...

This is prickly subject in South Africa and I suspect, everywhere in the world where there are women that work.

South Africans have found a way of dealing with it and it’s called women’s month. It is not something you can discuss before or after the month of August. It’s uncomfortable and both men and women shy away from it. And yet any female who has a job outside her home will either encounter sexual harassment in the future, is encountering it or has encountered it.

I’m not talking about consensual adult relationships where both parties are comfortable with their relationship. This is about that dark area where one party is bombarded with sexual commentary and propositions and doesn’t particularly like it. This is a subject that bothers me, and it pains me that so many young women are still forced to enter the workplace where they are protected by laws of this country which are almost impossible to enforce. 

One girlfriend of mine is constantly bombarded with proposals from her married overweight boss. He occasionally has the nerve to walk into her office and tell her that she looks like she hasn’t gotten laid in a while. The sad thing is, in a male dominated industry that my friend works in the only person she can report this vile man to is most probably another man. Worse still, I suspect if there was a woman around who she could tell the woman would tell her that she needs to suck it up.

Another friend of mine sent me a text message. She’s recently started a new job, which is great. But she had barely gotten comfortable when some man came up to her and said: “your lips are nice and juicy so I assume that you won’t be a disappointment down there.” Of course I do not need to expand on where down there is.

And of course, I need to draw from my own experience as well. I had been working for a year, and this guy I worked with was using the copy machine behind me and as I was busy with stuff on my desk he grabbed by booty.

It was a shocking moment and I decided to tell someone about it and they asked, “and you did nothing?” I found this a little strange, and I kept on thinking: could I have stopped it?  prevented it from happening? I think this is where men are slightly dim and what they don’t get about sexual harassment.  If a man makes an inappropriate comment or touches you inappropriately, unless you have a recording to prove this and also prove that you were not a willing recipient, you are basically powerless. More women have left their dream jobs to escape the embarrassment of being scorned by all and sundry while the men who harassed them have been patted on the back in sympathy and masculine solidarity   have kept their cushy jobs and have most probably gone on to repeat these transgressions on each new piece of “meat” in the company.

Men make sexual innuendos woman are so eager to fit in as one of the boys, to prove your mettle lest you be deemed to be too sensitive for the job, ignore the comments or laugh them off.

This is a battle women will never win for the following reasons:

There are still women in the workplace who place a higher value to their sex appeal than they do to being competent. As long as if it’s okay with you that all the men in the office call women “sexy Thandi” and those women basking in it. While in the same work place you have a Grace, who has a nice booty and is uncomfortable with men calling her, “Bootilicious Grace”. The principle is while a guy might preen at having the size of their packages attached to their names not all women want this sort of notoriety.

As long as we women still say to the next woman, “I survived it so can you” it will still go on. If your bonus is attached to you having to grin and bear it while your boss feels you up and your senior female colleague telling you, “he also did it to me”, as if it’s a tiny price to pay, who are you going to call?

Women need to start telling guys they work with, no matter how stuck up it’ll make you look, that the joke is totally inappropriate. They’ll scorn you and call you a cold bitch, but that is better than them thinking you are fair game.

It is still a mans world. Guys will stick together. Your closest male colleague will say: “I know he was out of line, but he is still the best negotiator on the team.” Or you’ll be reminded that you once said that the guy who is harassing you is attractive or that “he meant it as a joke.”

And as long as male managers still risk having female subordinates throwing themselves at them and crying sexual harassment when the affair gets sour, and organisations are forced to spend millions investigating how the affair started in the first place only for it to emerge that the women had told half her colleagues how “happy she is in the relationship”  it is never going to end.

Women don’t set boundaries when it starts. Men always test the water. When we are new and desperate to fit in we laugh along to the bawdy jokes, and later when it turns against us we want to stop it.

You are not obligated to meet your boss in a lobby of a hotel for a drink after work if you are not comfortable. Tell your boss “I’m not comfortable, we can work late in the office, but not out of it.” Your contract says your report to this person, but it doesn’t say that you’ll be working at midnight in his home or that you need to climb into his car after work and go to a hotel.

If it gets bad, call your mother or your girlfriend and talk it out. Tell a female colleague. Document the incidents word for word (include your responses). Action by action. Don’t take the “hey, you sexy thing” comments lightly in the beginning. Keep the text messages. Get your call register and highlight each time this man has phoned you after work hours to ask you out or hit on you.

Keep the evidence until you feel it has become unbearable or you leave the company. Even if it looks like it has stopped, hold on to it. Remember, the higher you go in a company the bigger your responsibility is to the young women who will work with you. You need to listen to them and be a shoulder for them to cry on. Advice them, but don’t enforce your opinion and lifestyle choices on them. After all, some girls go into these relationships willingly.