The Sexual Harassment Factor

Bill O'Reilly, the conservative talk show host whose "The O'Reilly Factor" is the highest-rated cable news show, has been sued for sexual harassment by his former producer Andrea Mackriss. Mackriss alleges that on many occasions, both in person and over the phone, O'Reilly engaged in lewd and lascivious conversation against her will. She goes so far as to state that O'Reilly unlawfully engaged in, and gratified himself with, phone sex, with Mackriss on the other end of the line. To be sure, O'Reilly enjoys the presumption of innocence in the suit, until proven otherwise.

I personally respect and enjoy O'Reilly as a broadcaster and I am sorry to see his public standing undermined by these allegations. While some of the content of Mackriss's affidavit seems possible, readers of it will discover that other parts seem directed squarely at Roger Ailes, the Chairman of the Fox News Channel, thereby undermining her credibility. Furthermore, Mackriss does not explain why she didn't just hang up when O'Reilly allegedly harrased her repeatedly over the telephone.

Be that as it may, this sordid and sorry tale brings to the fore all that is wrong with our increasingly perverse culture. The question that the growing phenomenon of sexual harassment in the workplace raises is this: Can we really expect to have a healthy office environment, where men treat women as colleagues and intellectual equals, when everywhere else in the culture women are being so completely sexualized?

Is it realistic to ask men to separate what they see on TV and in magazines from their interactions with women in the boardroom? With men being deluged in virtually every electronic medium with the message that women want to be recognized for their bodies rather than their brains, is it reasonable to expect that men will suddenly think differently the moment a woman dons a business suit?

Never in history have women been so sexually exploited as they are today. College girls expose their breasts in exchange for a T-shirt on the Girls Gone Wild videos. MTV has transformed the women's music industry away from an emphasis on vocals and onto to an emphasis of on cleavage. Posters of Victoria's Secret models, dressed in thongs and the most revealing lingerie, line our mains thoroughfares, billboards, and buses. Are men really expected to shut all this off the moment they stand in front of a copy machine? Can we really expect a pure office environment to emerge from a degenerate culture?

Indeed, in an environment where everything from the internet to sporting events is sexualized, it even becomes difficult to determine what exactly constitutes harassment in the workplace.

Let's see. If man watches "Sex and the City" and, knowing that his female colleagues love the show, mentions at the water cooler how much he enjoyed the previous night's episode of Samantha giving a stranger oral sex, is it harassment? Or is it small talk?

And let's say a boss comes into the office after watching the Super Bowl and asks his secretary if she saw Janet Jackson's breast pop out during the half-time show--is he making lewd and inappropriate comments? And if so, can we at least recognize that we have made a huge portion of American culture off limits in the workplace, because of how perversely sexualized it has become?

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