漫長的斗爭：女性對抗職場性騷擾簡史

The phrase most commonly used to describe a particularly noxious form of workplace aggression is sexual harassment. But sexual predation is more apt in many instances. What is it if not predatory when a male boss abuses his power to demand physical gratification from a female employee?

有一種危害特別大的職場攻擊形式，最常用來描述它的詞語是“性騷擾”。但在很多情況下，“性掠奪”這個詞更為恰當。當男性老板濫用職權，要求從女性員工那里獲得肢體上的滿足時，這還不算是掠奪嗎?

The problem is age-old. But as is obvious to anyone reading or watching the news, concerns have intensified lately with allegations of serial predation by the moviemaker Harvey Weinstein. He joins a parade of celebrities and business powerhouses accused of treating women as mere pleasure providers: Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Uber and Amazon Studios employees, swaths of Silicon Valley — a quorum of indecency. Not to mention that a man who boasted of grabbing women by the genitalia sits in the White House.

這是一個歷史很悠久的問題了。但是，對于那些閱讀或收看新聞的人來說，近來有關電影制片人哈維·韋恩斯坦(Harvey Weinstein)的一系列性掠奪指控的報道，加劇了人們的擔憂。被指將女性視為純粹樂趣提供者的其他名人和商業(yè)巨頭，還有比爾·科斯比(Bill Cosby)、羅杰·艾爾斯(Roger Ailes)、比爾·奧雷利(Bill O’Reilly)，以及優(yōu)步(Uber)和亞馬遜影視工作室(Amazon Studios)的員工，還有硅谷的一些公司——都是一群下流胚。更不用說一個住在白宮、炫耀抓握女性生殖器的男人了。

 

Retro Report, a series of video documentaries that examine the enduring impact of major news stories of the past, explores the unfolding of this issue across several generations, starting with how it came to be labeled. You have to go back to the mid-1970s, when a writer named Lin Farley was teaching a course on “Women and Work” at Cornell. “I kept thinking we’ve got to come up with a name,” she recalled, “and the best I could come up with was sexual harassment of women on the job.” The phrase stuck.

本報的“歷史回眸”欄目(Retro Report)以視頻紀錄的形式重新審視過去的重大新聞事件及其持久影響，該欄目從這個問題被貼上標簽開始，探討了它在幾代人中的發(fā)展。在1970年代中期，有一位名叫林·法利(Lin Farley)的作家在康奈爾大學教一門“女性與工作”的課程。“我一直認為我們必須給它取個名字，”她回憶說，“我可以想出的最好名字就是女性在職場上遭受的性騷擾”。這個表達方式流傳了下來。

New laws and workplace regulations came to pass in the hope of addressing the problem. Nevertheless, it persisted. Fast forward to 1991. That was when the lawyer and academician Anita Hill testified before an all-male — and strikingly unsympathetic — Senate committee that was holding hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court. Ms. Hill described having been sexually harassed by Justice Thomas when he was her superior at two federal agencies, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He denied the accusations, and ascended to the Court. Yet Ms. Hill struck a chord that still reverberates.

為了能夠解決這個問題，頒布了一些新的法律和職場規(guī)定。然而，問題仍然存在。時間快進到1991年，律師及大學教師阿尼塔·希爾(Anita Hill)在一個完全由男性組成的——而且是毫無同情心的——參議院委員會作證，那是提名克拉倫斯·托馬斯(Clarence Thomas)進入美國最高法院的聽證會。希爾說，托馬斯大法官在兩個聯(lián)邦機構——教育部和公平就業(yè)機會委員會(Equal Employment Opportunity Commission，簡稱EEOC)——擔任其上司期間對她進行性騷擾。而他否認了這些指控，并進入了最高法院。然而，希爾卻引發(fā)了很多人的共鳴，影響延續(xù)至今。

“One of things about my testimony, I believe, that resonated so much with women was that it seemed so regular, so much like what was going on in their day-to-day lives,” she told Retro Report.

“我認為，我的證詞中有一點引起了女性的很大共鳴，那就是這種事情太多了，就像她們生活中的常態(tài)一樣，”她對“歷史回眸”欄目說。

A quarter of a century later, the Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson became a new symbol of the issue when she sued the network’s chairman, Roger Ailes. It was as if nothing had changed through the years. Ms. Carlson said that Mr. Ailes, who died in May, had demanded she have sex with him. Like Justice Thomas, he denied the charges. But the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, settled the matter by paying her a reported $20 million. More women at Fox News then stepped forward with allegations of a corporate climate of sexual aggression.

四分之一個世紀后，?？怂剐侣?Fox News)女主播格雷琴·卡爾森(Gretchen Carlson)成為了這個問題的新象征。她起訴了該電視臺董事會主席羅杰·艾爾斯(Roger Ailes)。這些年來，情況好像沒有任何改變?？柹f，今年5月份去世的艾爾斯曾要求和她發(fā)生性關系。像托馬斯大法官一樣，艾爾斯否認了這個指控。但是，該臺的母公司21世紀福克斯(21st Century Fox)和她達成了庭外和解，報道稱給了她2000萬美元。隨后，?？怂剐侣劦母嗯哉境鰜?，指控那里存在一種性攻擊的職場氛圍。

“I never ever expected to be the face of sexual harassment,” Ms. Carlson said. But she is.

“我從來沒有想過要成為性騷擾問題的代言人，” 卡爾森說。但她現(xiàn)在就是。

She is also aware that sexual hostility on the job falls most heavily on women who are far less privileged than she or than many of the women in movies, television, high tech and other glamorous industries who also report being hounded by predatory bosses. Victims are more likely to be lower-paid workers whose plight rarely makes headlines: waitresses and female bartenders who have to fend off employers and customers with hyperactive hands, or women just trying to get through the day unscathed in the male-dominated construction industry.

她也意識到，職場性敵意的最大受害者是這樣的一群女性：她們的條件遠不如卡爾森，也遠不如電影、電視、高科技和其他光環(huán)籠罩的行業(yè)中同樣也舉報過被掠奪成性的老板騷擾過的很多女性。受害者更有可能是低收入的工作者，她們的困境很少成為頭條新聞，比如女服務員和女酒保，她們必須擋住雇主和顧客的咸豬手;又比如一些女性，她們只想在男性主導的建筑行業(yè)中毫發(fā)無損地度過每一天。

The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission — Justice Thomas’s old workplace — reports receiving more than 12,000 allegations of sex-based harassment each year, with women accounting for about 83 percent of the complainants. That figure is believed to be but the tip of the iceberg. In a study issued last year, the co-chairwomen of a commission task force said that roughly three of four people experiencing such harassment never tell anyone in authority about it. Typically, they said, what women do is “avoid the harasser, deny or downplay the gravity of the situation, or attempt to ignore, forget or endure the behavior.”

公平就業(yè)機會委員會——托馬斯大法官之前工作過的地方——每年會收到超過1.2萬份涉及性騷擾的指控，其中女性約占投訴者的83%。這個數(shù)字被認為只是冰山一角。在去年發(fā)表的一項研究報告中，委員會一個工作團隊的聯(lián)合女主席說，遭受性騷擾的每四個人中，大約有三個從未向當局舉報此事。他們說，女性通常只是“避免騷擾，否認或淡化情況的嚴重性，或試圖忽視、忘記或忍受這種行為”。

Think about the vulnerability of a single mother holding down a minimum-wage job or working two jobs, Ms. Carlson told Vanity Fair last month. “There’s no way in hell she can try and come forward,” she said.

卡爾森上個月告訴《名利場》(Vanity Fair)雜志，想像一下吧，一名只拿最低工資，或者打兩份工的單親母親在職場上有多脆弱。“她完全沒有辦法去試著站出來，”她說。

Even when women do try to speak up, they can effectively be silenced. Some may receive fat settlements, as Ms. Carlson did, but routinely they are forced into nondisclosure agreements that keep them from discussing the details of what happened. Mr. Weinstein is reported to have a history of insisting on those sorts of arrangements. If one accepts that sunlight is the best disinfectant, as an old saying goes, then pathogens inevitably abound in this atmosphere of secrecy.

即使女性試圖站出來說話，她們的聲音也可能會遭到壓制。有些人可能會像卡爾森一樣，收到大筆錢達成庭外和解，但是她們常常被迫簽訂不公開的協(xié)議，其中禁止她們討論事情的細節(jié)。據(jù)報道，韋恩斯坦一直就是靠這樣來擺平的。有一句老話說，陽光是最好的消毒劑，如果你同意這個說法，那么在這種保密氣氛中，病原體存在就是不可避免的。

“We really aren’t helping push society forward because nobody’s hearing about these cases,” Ms. Carlson said. She added, “So many times — well, almost all times — society does not find out how prevalent sexual harassment is in the workplace.”

“我們真的沒有幫助推動社會前進，因為沒有人聽說過這些案例。”卡爾森說。她還表示，“在很多時候——幾乎所有時候，這個社會都沒有發(fā)現(xiàn)職場性騷擾是多么普遍。”

One remedy suggested by some advocates is to stretch the bounds of so-called “sunshine in litigation” laws that several states have enacted. Applied to tort cases in general, they essentially nullify the confidentiality clauses of legal settlements if the result is to hide conditions that qualify as “public hazards.” Some advocates argue that a workplace pattern of sexual harassment deserves to be called such a hazard, but this approach has yet to be tested in the courts.

一些倡導者建議的一個解決辦法是，擴大已在幾個州通過的所謂“陽光訴訟”法律的范圍。它們適用于普通侵權案件，本質上是在結果會隱藏造成“公共危害”的情況時，使和解協(xié)議的保密條款失去法律效力。一些倡導者認為，職場性騷擾值得被稱作這類危害，但這種方式尚未在法庭上接受過考驗。

There seems scant reason to expect the Trump administration to play a leading role in tackling the problem. After the Fox News scandal broke in the summer of 2016, around the time Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president, he was asked by a USA Today columnist what he thought should happen if his daughter Ivanka were to fall victim to similar treatment. Mr. Trump did not call for rooting out the harassers. Instead, he said, “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case.”

看上去幾乎不能指望特朗普政府在解決這個問題上發(fā)揮帶頭作用。2016年夏天，就在唐納德·J·特朗普接受共和黨的總統(tǒng)提名前后，爆出了?？怂剐侣?Fox News)的丑聞。之后，《今日美國》(USA Today)的一名專欄作家問特朗普，如果他的女兒伊萬卡成為類似遭遇的受害者，他認為應該怎么辦。特朗普沒有要求開除騷擾者，而是說，“如果屬實，我會認為她應該換個職業(yè)或換一家公司。”

Half a century ago, the makers of Virginia Slims cigarettes pitched their product to women with a slogan that spoke of new empowerment: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” At all too many workplaces they’ve come a long way, maybe.

半個世紀前，弗吉尼亞女士香煙Virginia Slims的制造商在向女性宣傳產品時，使用了一個帶有新賦權色彩的口號：“親愛的，一路走來辛苦了。”也許，她們是在太多工作場所太辛苦了。