Ellen E Jones: So what actually constitutes sexual harassment? Let my handy hack steer you through the grey areas

Ellen E Jones
Ellen E. Jones25 October 2018
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Mine is Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Yours might be your old history teacher or the BFG. It doesn’t matter who you choose as your Sexual Harassment Spirit Guide. As long as he’s older and respect-worthy, he’s the one to help you navigate the grey area.

Specifically, we’re talking about the grey area which moves in like an eerie sea mist, any time efforts are made to tackle the culture of sexual harassment. This week’s call by women and equalities select committee chair Maria Miller, for the Government to take more action, was met with the usual reaction. But Maria, they asked, what about telling a woman that her hair looks nice? Does that count as sexual harassment? Isn’t it a free citizen’s inviolable right to watch porn on public transport or wherever else he pleases?

The definitions of sexual harassment are always changing, they claim, and the risk is that many well-meaning men will be criminalised for innocuous compliments or acts of innocent flirtation.

But how difficult is it really to avoid accidentally slipping, falling and sexually harassing someone? Probably about as difficult as it is to avoid harassing someone in a non-sexual way. Because setting aside those extreme, unambiguously criminal acts, this is all sexual harassment is: a subsection of ordinary bad manners. Think of it this way, and there is obviously no need to compile an exhaustive list of unacceptable behaviour in public places. By definition, any functional member of society implicitly understands.

Yet the confusion is more than just a convenient rhetorical device for men’s rights activists. Many people — men and women, old and young — feel genuinely wrong-footed by the current mood of zero tolerance. Society has long felt comfortable ignoring or excusing certain behaviour — provided, that is, they are directed towards women and girls.

It’s not that standards of behaviour have changed in the decades since the harasser’s heyday, it’s that women are now insisting that they too be treated according to the same standard. But how do we redress an inequality which is, as Miller put it, so “deeply ingrained”?

That’s where my Sexual Harassment Spirit Guide comes in. Should you ever you find yourself drifting into the grey, imagine Mike Ehrmantraut (or Dumbledore, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands or Sir David Attenborough…) is right there in the room. Would you still be looking at porn on the bus with Mike in the seat next to you, raising a world-weary eyebrow? Would you pass comment on how Mike’s bum looks in his new jeans? Would you chance your luck asking Mike when he lost his virginity during downtime on a company away day?

Should you ever find yourself wondering how to behave, imagine David Attenborough is in the room with you

You may argue that since you’re not sexually orientated towards old, white dudes the situation would never arise but that’s exactly the point.

In a public space, everyone is worthy of the same respect we habitually afford society’s most respected. If you wouldn’t do it to Mike Ehrmantraut, don’t do it to anyone.

How to make Wireless the best in its field

What has the number of F-words in a Drake song got to do with anti-social behaviour in Finsbury Park? The Wireless music festival will go ahead next year but only on the condition that “performers do not sing … any vulgar, obscene … songs” nor wear “attire which expose the groin, private parts, buttock or female breast(s)”.

This must be Haringey council’s twist on the NYPD’s controversial “Broken Windows” theory. This posits that a crackdown on minor crime (for example, on-stage mankinis) creates an atmosphere of orderliness which prevents more serious crime (such as festival-goers treating local residents’ gardens like public urinals).

“Broken Windows’’ efficacy is much debated in New York but at a north London music festival it might just work. Indeed, here are some other indirect actions to consider before that ban on chaps: more female performers on the main stage means a less macho atmosphere and fewer punch-ups. Plus, however many Portaloos there are currently on site, simply double it.

You just can’t have too many.

Florence's struggle

“I refuse to be a slave to the patriarchy,” says Charlie (Florence Pugh), just as she unwittingly falls prey to a conspiracy of shadowy men in the new Seventies-set Sunday night drama, Little Drummer Girl.

Florence Pugh (Getty Images )
Getty Images

Off-screen too, 22-year-old Pugh seems to embody the struggle of modern young women to escape old-fashioned mores.

Her complaints about TV industry prudishness have been widely reported: “I’m like: ‘Arrrgh! Just let me get my breasts out, I don’t care!’ But America does care.”

Tits out or in, it seems her performance is key to Little Drummer Girl.

She exudes sexual charisma even in a floor-length gown.

Material? Seventies polyester.

Colour? Gen-Z yellow, of course.

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