By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
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Feminism has latched onto sexual-harassment laws as a successful way of 
bringing men to heel, says a University of Massachusetts professor and 
sometime feminist in a new book.

In "Heterophobia," Daphne Patai says that sexual-harassment law, once a 
useful tool to identify outrageous behavior, is now an albatross.

"Sexual harassment seems often to be little more than a label for 
excoriating men," she writes. "It has become the synecdoche for general male 
awfulness."

University students are schooled in "the patriarchy" and "compulsory 
heterosexualism," she says, and schools, such as her own, hire 
"sexual-harassment consultants" to help them avoid lawsuits. One of her 
footnotes details how one firm charged her school rates of $1,250 to $1,800 
per trainer per day, plus $10,000 for hotel, travel and meals, to offer 
courses in sexual-harassment prevention and risk management.

Empowered by court rulings and legions of academicians, harassment law 
has become a tool for implementing the most bizarre feminist world views, she 
adds, such as the suggestion that heterosexuality is not natural.

"I believe that heterosexuality is natural," she said during a recent 
lecture in Washington, D.C. to the Independent Women's Forum. "Now that seems 
like a fairly obvious thing to say, doesn't it? I mean, are you wondering why 
I'm bothering to say it? Isn't that what everyone knows? Well, no. It's not 
what you know in women's studies and within feminism."

Ms. Patai spent 10 years in women's studies, bringing to the fore 
feminist scholars such as law professor Catharine McKinnon, who equates all 
sexual intercourse with rape. "That was quite a shock to newly married women 
in my feminist-theory class," Ms. Patai said.

She was often invited to speak at women's studies programs until 1994, 
when she co-authored "Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange 
World of Women's Studies."

This internal critique of the feminist movement effectively blacklisted 
her. This past July 2, she won the dubious honor of being featured in a 
Chronicle of Higher Education piece about "academic pariah" professors 
shunned because of their unorthodox views.

"In women's studies, there's very little respect or tolerance for 
divergence," she says. "There are people who tell me to go to hell or shut up 
because I am the enemy."

And so Ms. Patai, who is married, dedicates her book "To the men in my 
life . . . all of them as much sinned against as sinning, who made it 
impossible for me to abide grotesque caricatures of manhood, even when 
asserted by feminists."

She adds: "I've met a lot of nice men. There's no way one can agree with 
the general tenor of the comments made about men in feminist literature -- 
comments no one could make about blacks or Jews."

Were she to pinpoint the origin of the sexual-harassment "industry," it 
would be during the Senate confirmation hearings and the vote on Clarence 
Thomas to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the period of 
Oct. 1-15, 1991.

Those hearings, which gripped the nation for several days, were the 
trigger of a movement that she says seeks to drive a wedge between women and 
men.

That, in turn, has led to heterophobia, which has worked itself out in a 
hatred of marriage. She remembers one telling incident at a university she 
visited.

"One day, a member of the group announced she was going to be married," 
she writes. "There was an absolute dead silence in the room. Obviously as 
feminists, both lesbian and straight, we were far too sophisticated to shriek 
and gush happiness, and no one knew what response to make as an alternative.

"So stunned silence for far too long greeted her declaration. She did, 
incidentally, redeem herself by getting divorced a couple of years later. I 
have no doubt that if her news had been that she'd fallen in love with a 
woman and was about to move in with her, the reaction would have been quite 
different."

This "passionate rejection of men" is the one thing that unites 
feminists, a group normally splintered by lesser identities: white vs. black, 
straight vs. lesbian, Western vs. Third World.

Ms. Patai lists Ms. McKinnon, writer Andrea Dworkin and Boston College 
professor Mary Daly as the most notorious heterophobes because, she writes, 
"they manifest a pathological aversion to men."

For 25 years, Miss Daly refused to take in male students, a situation 
the college allowed to transpire until a male student threatened to sue them 
over it. In response, the college ousted the 70-year-old professor. Thus, "a 
political movement that holds half the human race in contempt . . . cannot 
seriously aspire to succeed in the long run," Ms. Patai writes.

What has succeeded are several court decisions that have codified sexual 
harassment. These include Meritor Savings Bank vs. Vinson, a 1986 U.S. 
Supreme Court case that established how a working environment may be hostile 
to women. A 1991 case, Elison vs. Brady, established a "reasonable woman" 
standard in sexual-harassment cases.

What became at issue was not the man's intent to offend or discriminate, 
but whatever a "reasonable woman" feels is discriminatory toward her.

"In sexual-harassment law, therefore, the 'authority of experience' has 
been given a place of honor," Ms. Patai writes. "Such a move should have 
caused feminists everywhere to rejoice, for a fundamental tool of feminist 
analysis --the concept of subjective experience -- was thereby elevated to 
law."

Two Supreme Court cases handed down last year have added to the mix. In 
Faragher vs. City of Boca Raton, Fla., employers were made liable for sexual 
misconduct of their employees, even if the employer knew nothing about it. 
Then in Burlington Industries vs. Ellerth, the court declared that employers 
were not liable for on-the-job harassment if the employee had not pursued the 
right complaint policies.

What these rulings create, Ms. Patai says, is a paranoid atmosphere in 
the workplace. Employers find themselves prohibiting the most innocent words 
and deeds and employees, who might have ignored the occasional word or 
gesture, now feel bound to complain immediately at the slightest hint of 
harassment.

And the typical university campus is worse, she says, because it offers 
latter-day versions of the Grand Inquisition, where heretics were tortured 
for their disagreement with the prevailing mentality.

The result, she says, is not increased freedom for women; it's more the 
advent of Big Sister ruling over a 20th-century totalitarianism of thought.

"These institutions are trying to change the fabric of our social life," 
she says. "All this stuff is not treated as fringe ideas, but serious 
suggestions. I am amazed Americans are voluntarily throwing away precious 
freedoms in the name of comfort."