Wallace Associates: way of looking at sexual harassment
Have you ever watched old movies and noticed how certain habits previously taken for granted in the past would no longer be tolerated in our invariably overhauled contemporary environment? Take, for instance, how casually and often some scenes show actors lighting up a cigarette indoors in the presence of other people. We know that in polite company today, one would need to go out of the room or the building entirely. Or you don’t smoke at all.
Except in those overly romantic Romeo-and-Juliet type flicks, the male-female relationship has also evolved into a rather complicated game whose rules have been encroached upon by not only social restrictions but also legal, political and technical considerations. Prenuptial agreements are a must, especially among those who have the wealth to safeguard, in the first place; although it might eventually become a required side-marital contract for most people in the future.
One particular issue that concerns relationships, in general, is sexual harassment, especially when it occurs within the workplace. And it no longer has to be between a man and a woman but between any two individual, regardless of gender. Oftentimes, however, it occurs between a male and a female, although it has also become common between a male or a female and an LGBT-type person.
To appreciate the essential principles involved in instances of sexual harassment, we need to remove from the equation all the accompanying “signs”; that is, just as Math allows us to disregard positive and negative signs when using Absolute Values, we can also “forget” about a person’s gender. In short, we can look at people as, well, like angels who are supposedly sex-less or “neither marry nor are they given to marriage”. Let us look at people as people who have the same basic needs, wants, aspirations and struggles in life.
If we took the paradigm of “no male nor female” (and no LGBT either), we might be surprised how much liberating it might be and how much fairly we would treat one another. So, how does that affect sexual harassment? Well, first of all, we would all go back to the most fundamental principle of compassion when it comes to dealing with another person, hence, removing the temptation to harass a person because we would then be motivated by love and not selfishness or greed. Harassment would all but cease altogether. Just like bullying would stop if we treated one another with respect, so would sexual harassment. It may be quite a while before we can actually attain this ideal condition; but it would be worth working for.
