FURTHERMORE

It's not sexual harassment, it's just bad manners

PETRONELLA WYATT

here is no such thing as sexual harass- ment. This is not to say that there is no such thing as rape. Forcible sex is a terrible thing and we are right to treat it very grave- ly indeed. But, I repeat, there is no such thing as sexual harassment.

Recently, Miss Karen Wade, a West Yorkshire policewoman, lost a sexual harassment case. Miss Wade claimed to have been 'on the verge of a breakdown'. She described how a male PC had rolled his tongue round his lips at her 'in a suggestive way'. After one parade he told her to 'put the kettle on, you're the f—ing woman'.

Miss Wade's claims were dismissed on the grounds of lack of evidence. But had the proof been conclusive, the judge would have been right to bring in the same verdict.

All that Miss Wade alleged she suffered was doubtless very unpleasant, but it was not sexual harassment — I speak from experience. A few weeks ago, I was travel- ling alone on a train in the same compart- ment as a group of football supporters. Their behaviour was very similar to that of Miss Wade's importunate PC. Indeed, one rolled his tongue around his lips in a sug- gestive way (he may, of course, have been suggesting he was hungry).

I would no more have dreamt of going to court over this behaviour than I would of leaping from the window of the moving train. Like PC Wade I was in no physical danger, but rather the subject of coarse remarks. It was not, for instance, the sort of conversation that one would have encoun- tered in an 18th-century Parisian salon.

But this is the whole point. The sort of thing that Miss Wade and a large number of women have to put up with is not 'sexual harassment', it is something far more old- fashioned than that. Its name? Bad manners.

Before this wretched age of Californian jargon, a ribald joke or suggestion was plain rude or impertinent — nicht in Anwe- senheit der Damen and so on. Let me quote from a Victorian guide to polite behaviour, published in 1881: 'Do not, in the presence of the fair sex, engage in allusions or humorous stories that are of a coarse or infamous nature.'

Well, there is a lot of coarseness about now. As for infamy, to quote from the clas- sics —Kenneth Williams in Cany On, Cleo — 'Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!' At least that is the conviction of women like Miss Wade.

But it is not that men are less 'moral', it is that they are simply more rude. So are we all. One of the reasons for this is the tendency towards democratic uniformity. Social behaviour is becoming standardised. A dan- ger of uniformity is that good qualities are easier to eradicate than bad ones, and the aim is most easily achieved, therefore, by lowering all standards. Miss Wade's male PCs are part of the grubby baggage of sexual equality — their rudeness is a symptom of their convulsive effort to adjust themselves to an environment which bears upon them too harshly for endurance.

'Stalking' is one of the more extreme exam- ples of this. Again, I speak from experience — I too have had a 'stalker'. It began a year ago with telephone calls to my office. These were followed by a series of gifts which gradu- ally rose in value. The first gift was a tape of Rudolf Valentino singing love songs — on which my anonymous admirer had superim- posed his voice. This was followed by a bottle of prohibitively expensive scent. When I joined The Spectator from the Sunday Tele- graph last October, the calls followed me. Around New Year, I received a Swiss leather briefcase. My initials were engraved on the handle, as were the initials of someone else. Inside the case was a gold Mont Blanc foun- tain pen. It was filled with blood-red ink. A few weeks later, I received another Mont Blanc pen in a matching colour. Only some- one who has been the recipient of pens filled with blood-red ink could imagine the full extent of my consternation.

I demanded that the 'stalker' collect the gifts from my office. A series of letters arrived soon afterwards, the gist of which could only be described as vaguely unpleas- ant. My pursuer, I was informed, was 'from a completely different world'. (Was he an alien, then?) The writer continued that he was a 'worldly man with a skill for turning the tables'. It was implied that they would be turned on me. I was accused of being destroyed by feminism, by fashionable les- bianism, for 'escaping to the island of Scyl- la'. After a further telephone altercation my 'stalker' was finally persuaded to leave me alone.

But none of this, I reiterate, was sexual harassment. It was bad manners. It is rude to bombard strange women with unwanted gifts after they have asked you many times to desist. It is insulting to write letters assuming an intimacy that does not exist, particularly when the writer knows this to be offensive to the recipient. It is doubly insulting to suggest that a woman may be a lesbian because she does not enjoy a man's attentions.

It is this general decline in manners that has lowered standards of social behaviour in offices and on the streets, and indeed- may well have helped to produce this con- temporary phenomenon of the 'stalker'. Oscar Wilde had a point when he said that manners were more important than morals, for manners are the source of all civilised conduct, without which society will eventu- ally disintegrate.

All this is highlighted in an excellent new book of essays, Gentility Recalled, edited by Digby Anderson and published this month by the Social Affairs Unit. One of the con- tributors is Rachel Trickett, the former Principal of St Hugh's. Miss Trickett points out that sexual equality has encouraged men to behave badly by eroding the old ideas of deference to women. The position of a 'lady', so derided by feminists, did not demean women, it protected them. 'When courtesy disappears, a condition of primi- tivism prevails . . . then men will inevitably prevail for the simple biological reason that they are stronger. Women, without some code of deference or respect, become increasingly victims.'

Thus, self-professed feminists like Miss Wade cannot escape a portion of blame for the consequences of all their drum-beating. If Miss Wade had been more sensible, she would have called a boor a boor, instead of running to a tribunal bleating about 'sexual harassment'. Alas, such are the inadequa- cies of the law that one cannot take a per- son to court for bad manners. Or perhaps that is rather fortunate. It would put behind bars two thirds of the population at the very least.

Pitt. God, how I love him. That slender figure, that hair you just want to run your fingers through, those great limpid eyes. No, not Brad Pitt, silly, William Pitt. Right now is heaven for girls like me, who love Pitt the Younger. All those reviews of John Ehrman's new biography, The Consuming Struggle. Pitt consumes me all right. I won- der whether in 200 years' time someone like Ehrman will write a life of Brad Pitt, feckless Nineties film star par excellence. The Struggle to Consume? Of course, if there's one man sexier than Pitt the Younger it's Pitt the Elder.