Rachel Thomas
Sexual Harassment
Throughout my psychology classes the topic of women and sexuality has become a passion of mine. I remember watching a clip from a speech about sexualizing women and the speaker said something along the lines of a woman is battered by a man, and she becomes a battered woman, and all the focus is on her and her battery and how it effects her. When really, the focus should be on the adult doing the assaulting, and the therapy should focus on WHY they treat women this way and how to CHANGE it. A woman, no matter her shape, size, ethnicity, how pretty she is, or what she is wearing, should be able to walk down the street without feeling uncomfortable or objectified. We should not be telling women, you shouldn’t go to a certain place, wear certain clothes, talk to a certain kind of man, accept a drink from someone, or let their guard down at any moment. This isn’t what we need to be focusing on nor will it ever fix the problem. We should be focusing on helping men not feel inclined to overpower a woman, see her as a sexual object or a prize to be won, and ultimately have respect and understanding of true equality. I have thought all of these things since before taking this class, and I only grow more secure in these feelings as time goes on. The problem with getting people to stop objectifying women is that it is such a common thought process, is all over the media that we see every day, and a lot of it unnoticed, ignored, or without consequence. I have always felt that their needs to be a change made, but have never been able to come up with a plan or even a starting point, because it is such a huge problem. However, when I was reading the textbook, one area in particular stood out to me: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace. The book outlines that there are two types of sexual harassment, one includes submission to unwanted sexual advances in order to gain something in your career, and the other includes any type of unwelcome sexual behavior that creates a “hostile” work environment or interferes with you psychologically. I think that it is important for people to realize that sexual harassment is ANY type of sexual advance that is unwanted by someone, and no matter if any physical action is involved sexually objectifying someone is harmful. Although each person’s insecurities or past, or whatever led them to become a sexual predator, is different, I think that it all comes down to power. Ultimately, someone who needs to sexually harass someone else is looking for some type of control, or feeling of superiority, and choose to do it in a victim, usually a woman, that they see as weaker or less than. The reason that sexual harassment in the workplace caught my attention is because I think this would be a great place to start trying to change things. The places that men feel most comfortable abusing power are the places where they are already comfortable and in control, like there workplace mostly dominated by men. If we started doing more, and effective, sexual harassment trainings and programs in companies, and taught people about how harmful even the smallest dose of sexual harassment is to the victims of it and the work environment as a whole, then we might see a decrease in the amount of sexual harassment within the workplace. Also, if zero tolerance policies were implemented in companies, and individual jobs were at stake, it might be seen as a more serious issue. Its ambitious, but hopefully the change in action that we would see in the workplace would evolve in to a lifestyle and attitude change. If the working generations of today learned to see women in a new and non-objectified way then they would start to teach their children, or at least wouldn’t be setting bad examples for them. I think if we started in the workplace, where people spend most of their time, and most of their life depends on, and we teach them what we know about how harmful sexual harassment truly is, then it would trickle down and hopefully my beautiful great granddaughters would never know what it feels like to be catcalled at.
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