Another milestone in my path to Chauvinism

Take a look at the article in the link below.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/240/20090810/1301/twl-6751773.html

Now this is some seriously maddening stuff!! Go ahead and read the article above, and tell me if at some point you feel in your gut that something’s not quite right! I know I did. I felt at one level that even with the first example of the woman in her hotel room, there was something wrong. And no, please do not mistake this as merely a show of sympathy for the poor working woman! Hell no, how about a little show of faith in the drunk working man!!

It was an office party in the bar downstairs. A coworker with more ‘power’ than the woman called her and asked her to get outta bed and come enjoy the party. She felt threatened by it? Oh yeah, so the next time the guy in charge asks to you to come and chill with everybody else, that’s a threat? You know, I’m gonna look at this from a few angles. Say the guy was drunk and in the mood to fool around. So he called the woman and asked her to get down to the bar. She said she needed to sleep and hung up. Guy told himself, “Oh crap, guess I’ll look to the other chicks for a nightcap.” Or maybe something like, “That chick’s boring as hell! She oughtta let her hair down a lil’.” How about, “I think it makes sense if she came and mixed with everyone else. Good for the team.” Or, for the paranoid, “Goddamn that bitch!!! Here my thingy’s getting all steamed up, and she hangs up on me??? I’ll show her at work tomorrow!!!” Admittedly, there is a possibility that if that last option was a fact, AND it was followed up by some bullshit by the guy at work against the woman, then we’d have a problem. But basically, all that the woman really thought was that the guy was drunk, that he was someone with ‘definitely more power’ than her, and that he was calling her to the Bar at 2 a.m. to party with the rest. And she felt threatened by it.

Bloody hell, I’d be pissed off if some asshole called me at 2 a.m. and asked me to come party. That’s cuz I love my sleep. Now, I’m not a woman, so I don’t have to go through various indignities that they face as a consequence of their gender. Now I feel for them, I really do. Their lot has a tendency of being seriously crappy at times, too many times, really. But for God’s sake, do they have to be threatened by every drunk human with a penis?

It’s in the West, and it’s flowing into the East. No, no, sexual harassment very much exists here, and we don’t need the West to teach us that men here can be pigs too. But the idea of sexual harassment is evolving, and the stuff that’s accepted as unacceptable there is just automatically espoused here. Part of our modernization, perhaps? Just as we meekly accept Microsoft Word converting our ‘s’ to ‘z’ (yeah, I do it too), we’re beginning to accept concepts that might simply be considered a whole lot of bullshit when looked at objectively.

Look, ladies. The guys will think sexually of you whether you like it or not. And my God, that article practically says flirting is illegal!! What the hell is going on here?? We spend a pretty big part of our lives in the workplace, and we can’t even flirt?? If we do, people will start looking for a pattern? Sheesh, get a grip. Anybody got a problem with being made to feel pretty or attractive?? Stop a guy before he drools into your cleavage, sure, but if he thinks your haircut is looking great on you, and he seems to be checking you out, do you seriously have to be threatened by it?

I used to work in this activist place, once. We used to have these little office meetings to discuss issues. Once, the meeting was on sexual harassment at the workplace. We saw a video on the issue, and then began discussing the policy apparently existing in the office. There was no hard copy of the policy, and I don’t know what the fuck we were talking about. There was only one point that people (read: the women) wanted to be firm on; the fact that the policy existing in the office should protect women only. There was a (defunct) wing in that office which was to be working for the rights of the LGBT community. My ‘Boss’ jokingly said that we have LGBT people often working in the office, so what if a gay dude makes unwelcome advances on a male coworker? The women said that the male coworker wouldn’t be protected, which set me off, since I complained that harassment can certainly come from women as well. The entire group of females in the office started fighting with me, saying that women had faced decades of subjugation in society, so our office policy should protect only women, and why should we be any different? Because you’re trying to make a difference, you sloganeering hypocrites! One of the men in that group summed it up perfectly; he said that as long as there are more women than men in that office, the policy would never be gender neutral. I bloody laughed out loud!! Fucking activists!!! For over a week after that day, all the women looked at me like I’m Judas or something, and would whisper snide remarks behind my back. I felt harassed too for a while, but I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Sexual harassment is a real and terrible problem. But when labour lawyers start advising offices about non-fraternisation policies in the office, the need to lighten up a little seems to arise. Goddamn, in my current workplace, one of my earliest assignments was to edit a sexual harassment policy that some female had prepared before I joined. That crazy policy was so bad, that it banned any kind of physical contact between male and female colleagues in the office. If that shit were the norm, we wouldn’t even be able to shake hands!!! Luckily, my Boss trashed it and asked me to make a new policy from scratch.

That news article speaks of how the internet and new communication technologies have allowed for the smallest thing to be potentially ‘misconstrued’. That’s like a way of saying that if you’re a guy, and you have sent a winking emoticon, you’re potentially fucked (in the not happy way)!!! Really? Maybe we shouldn’t hyperanalyse every damn thing we receive as a message or email. Otherwise, what the hell am I supposed to believe when you consider the fact that my Boss’s WIFE sent me that link to that article with the message, “Bikram, for your information”???!!!!