“I don’t talk to women at work, or even make eye contact with them, for this very reason. Sorry ladies, but in your quest for making a quick buck by being a professional victim has marginalized and isolated you from men in the workplace.”
I use many of the same rules. I also keep, as much as possible, a 10 foot circle around me in which women are not allowed. I speak to women only spoken to and all answers are kept as short as possible.
It is not as bad as it used to be, but in the nineties it was really awful. I knew guys who had their careers destroyed for nothing more than an innocuous comment or look.
It was weird in the seventies too. The TV network I worked for had a west coast facility that recorded the shows out of New York, then played them back three hours later for the west coast. The videotape machines took a while to lock up, so you had to start recording half a minute early to make sure the picture was stable by the top of the show. After 10 weeks of training, where pre-roll was constantly stressed, one of our female techs was doing her first recording by herself so the super was keeping an eye on her. Thirty seconds before the 3:30 news feed, she was standing in front of the machines, staring off into space. The conversation went like this:
Super: “You need to start recording”
Tech: “Why? It’s not 3:30 yet.”
Super: “Because you need lockup time, go into record.”
Tech: “Well I don’t see why I have to.”
Super: “Just start recording, we’ll discuss it later”
Tech: “Well, I don’t see why you’re talking to me like that. You wouldn’t talk to a man that way.”
Super: (Seeing it’s now ten seconds to air) “Jesus Christ, get out of the way”!
He dove for the controls, hit the record button, and (miracle of miracles) one of the two machines recording the ONLY copies of the network news locked up with about a second to spare. In diving for the controls, he brushed against her. Three weeks later the harrassment suit for “unwanted touching” was filed. The network just paid her to go away, considering it a bargain.
On another note, one of the ironies of the Paula Jones case was that the legal provision that allows the plaintiff to examine the entire personal history of the defendant was pushed through Congress by Bill and Hill.