When sexual harassment allegations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain began to leak out, my reaction was skeptical. I’ve been observing the political process long enough to know that many people consider sexual accusations—real or imaginary—a fantastic way to bring down a candidate they don’t like.
It’s not that I don’t believe sexual harassment is a problem. On the contrary, it’s a real issue that many women have had to deal with. Including myself.
I was 14 when a boy at my Christian school started insinuating himself next to me every morning, on the gym bleachers where we all waited for classes to begin, and saying filthy things to me in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. For weeks this went on, because I didn’t tell anyone. I simply could not bring myself to speak the words. I was too grossed out, ashamed, embarrassed, disgusted—you name the unpleasant and unwanted emotion, I felt it. All I could manage to do was to distance myself mentally from the whole thing and pretend it wasn’t happening. It was more than 20 years before I told my mother about it.
Of course, not all harassment is as clear-cut. Many a woman, in the office, at church, and elsewhere, has had moments of wondering, “Did he really just say what I think he said?” or “He didn’t mean it that way—did he?” What comes across as a flirtatious remark or gesture could be exactly that. But it could also be the result of a man’s cultural background, or what he was used to hearing in the era when he grew up, or just a thoughtless moment. Some remarks and gestures are simply too ambiguous to interpret without being able to crawl inside the mind of the person who made them.
As I write this, details in the Cain case are still slowly emerging, and many things are unclear. The accusations that have been made so far run the gamut—from what seems like a perfectly innocent remark about a woman’s height; to a “Darling, do you mind doctoring my tea?”; to an alleged invitation to Cain’s hotel room. The worst one came out Monday, when Sharon Bialek, the first accuser to reveal her name, accused Cain of groping her. We don’t yet know which of these accusations, if any, are factual and need to be addressed by the candidate and considered by the electorate. Even so, some women’s groups on both the Right and the Left are calling for Cain to come forth with more details.
But however things turn out for Cain, this is a good moment for us to reflect on how we as Christians tend to respond to sexual harassment. Too often, driven by a number of complex factors, we offer only a knee-jerk response. Depending on what we have or haven’t experienced in our own lives, or where our sympathies lie, we instantly assume guilt or innocence, as I did on Twitter. Some of us scoff at the very idea, or opine that the women involved are invariably making a big deal out of nothing.
In politics, particularly, it becomes all too easy to make a game out of the whole thing. As I’ve already mentioned, sexual harassment allegations can be a weapon unjustly used to take down a candidate whose views the accusers just don’t like. On the other hand, they can be dismissed out of hand by those who have a vested interest in a candidate’s success. And they can almost always be used to fuel charges of hypocrisy. If the candidate’s a Republican, people snicker, “So much for family values!” If a Democrat, “Gee, what happened to the party of feminists?” There’s a grain of truth in both remarks, but leaving the matter there doesn’t help much. (As a friend of mine observed, when you consider that we recently had a President who was not only an acknowledged adulterer but also faced allegations of rape, you have to ask yourself how seriously the public really takes any of this.) We need to go beyond glib reactions to ask: How should we think about sexual harassment?
I’ve made the case that pretending it doesn’t exist, as some writers do, doesn’t work, for the simple reason that it does exist. But incessantly sniffing it out in every interaction between a man and a woman, or assuming a man guilty until proven innocent, doesn’t help either; it only creates a culture of paranoia. If too many women know the fear of inappropriate and intimidating behavior, too many men have come to know the fear of being disciplined for an innocent remark that was taken the wrong way.
This is where Christians have a model to offer, if only we’re willing to step up and put it into practice. We serve a Master whose interactions with both sexes were conducted with respect and grace. As Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in the book Are Women Human?:
Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.
Decades after Sayers wrote that essay, we still see too much of the ugly attitudes she described. But imagine if interactions between Christians of both sexes were seasoned with that same respect and grace that she pointed out in Jesus Christ. Imagine if the church taught men and women, from childhood on up, that kind of attitude. My guess is, we would see more men treating women as equals in every way, and taking their concerns and feelings seriously. We might also see more women willing to give the benefit of the doubt in moments of ambiguity, especially in cases where the men had always shown themselves to be of good character. Probably there would be fewer moments of ambiguity in the first place. And in making these changes, we could show our society a higher standard and a goal to aspire to.
And that would be good for everyone, from the political candidate fighting to be heard, to the teenager unable to speak.
Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog, and author of ‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin. She wrote “The Good Christian Girl: A Fable,” “The Lost Virtue of Courtesy,” and “Abstinence Is Not Rocket Science” “God Loves a Good Romance” for CT online, and “Guarding Your Marriage without Dissing Women,” “Bill Maher Slurs Sarah Palin, NOW Responds,” “The Social Network’s Women Problem,” “Facebook Envy on Valentine’s Day,” “What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway?” “Why Sex Ruins TV Romances,” and “Don’t Think Pink” for Her.meneutics.
