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Let's face it. It didn't take Anita Hill's coming forward for the rest of us women to know that sexual harassment in the workplace is a problem. After all, men have been harassing women for ages. (It's still mostly men who do it.)
What Anita Hill did do, however--and for this, I think it would be fair to say, many women are grateful--was to give a more public voice to what once had been a little-talked-about topic.
Witness the proliferation of books, newspaper and magazine articles, and broadcast reports on the subject, not to mention the I BELIEVE ANITA pins and bumper stickers that have cropped up since the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings in the fall of 1991. Also, stop and think for a moment about all of the women who have since come forward with their own stories of being victimized. It's become apparent how widespread the problem really is. Since the hearings, it seems that every time you turn around there's yet another sexual-harassment scandal in the news. For a while, it was the Navy's Tailhook convention. Then Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon stole the spotlight.
Thanks to Anita Hill, I got the chance to throw my two cents into the ongoing media discussion as well as to try to come to terms personally with something that had happened to me several months before the Hill-Thomas hearings.
Eight months or so before the hearings, I had tried pitching a story on this subject to my editors. No dice, "We've done that before." After the hearings, I got to do my story.
As for the personal part: I was propositioned by a source--someone I regularly depend upon to get my job done. Whether or not it constituted harassment may be up for grabs, though I certainly know where I stand on the matter. Over drinks--a business meeting, I might add--he told me he had been wanting to sleep with me ever since he first met me. I wasn't flattered. Rather, I was stunned. For the next split second, which seemed like an eternity, my mind raced back over our three-year "relationship." Had I been too friendly? Too suggestive? Did I lead him on?
Then I became angry. All those years he had tipped me...