The Talk of the Town: Sexual Harassment

Op-Ed

The worldwide issue of sexual harassment has hit Georgia too, thankfully! The discussion of the problem was accidentally instigated here by the currently disputed case of one Hollywood luminary who was recently diagnosed with this pernicious malady of human society. The overall democratic environment; freedom of media, level of the feminist movement and protecting human rights in Georgia are certainly allowing for a hot discussion of any contemporary global issue, including sexual harassment.

By the most commonplace definition, sexual harassment is bullying or coercion of a sexual nature, or the unwelcome or inappropriate promise of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. Let us put it this way: sexual harassment is bad, it hurts people, it needs to be fought and it has to be curbed. Having said this, let us also underline that what we hear via our media is not inclusive, to say the least. Probably, and hopefully, the conversational completeness of the issue is still on its way to finally reach our newspaper pages and television screens. The problem is multisided with numerous angles and vectors, and it cannot be solved by one momentary wave of a magic wand. It is heartbreaking to admit that regardless of our efforts to humanize the world, it still remains relentlessly cruel and unforgiving; no matter how much and how persistently we try to equalize the members of human society, it continues to defy egalitarianism; despite our endeavor to feminize the humankind, the world still wants to maintain its patriarchal rules of existence; and notwithstanding the severity of the law and the acquired veneer of civility, men and women around us are still prone to perpetuate their perverted ways and means.

With the growth of human intellectual ability and the global enhancement of standard of living, the dirt has not diminished – it has augmented as a matter of fact. The dirt is not going away. This is the way we the humans are. Sexual harassment is one of the persisting filthy sides of our life, but it does not seem to be plain one-way traffic, as it is often perceived. Biologically speaking, we are a bisectional society with a duo character, within which joint male-female exertion provides for procreation and the corollaries thereto. They say that the incidence of male aggression is higher in numbers than the female one against the opposite sex, but this does not change the nature of the issue: sexual harassment is a two-way street and it has to be discussed only from that viewpoint. Otherwise, we are going to be faced with the unfairness of the entire discourse and its presumable blunders too.

Sexual harassment is an old topic in America, which has now overwhelmed the States. The wide popular discussion of the issue and its elevation to the level of law enforcement has done its job: it has definitely changed the human behavioral model, but it has not eliminated the male-female tendency to harass each other sexually; it has only wrapped the harassment propensity in latency. People have simply learned how to behave to remain safe before the law and stay invulnerable when judged by society. The human nature and instincts remain untouched. We are simply learning new rules of interaction, and that’s not bad at all.

Certainly, it is time for Georgia to be exactly like the rest of the world, which makes us readier for international coexistence and cooperation. We cannot be very different from others. And in case of sexual harassment, our attempt to eliminate the difference is something very timely and welcome. On the other hand, it would also make sense to eschew the overdoing and exaggerations we’ve seen in the Unites States. Get online and have a look at the headlines: ‘First-Grader Labeled a Sexual Harasser’ and read further: ‘In schools across the country, kids as young as three and four are now facing charges of sexual harassment that will stay with them permanently on their school records’. Proper legislative steps are probably inevitable to solve the problem of sexual harassment in Georgia, but staying away from sounding as weird as that might also be helpful to a certain extent.

Nugzar B. Ruhadze