Richard Cohen has a secret... (well, not so secret anymore)

7/31/1998, Washington Post

Now let's go to a different location, a different time. We are in a government office, say around 9 in the morning, and a young woman comes in to work. She walks in a certain way and dresses in a certain style. Is she a hooker? No way. She's a clerk-typist, and should she be treated like a hooker she just might file a sexual harassment complaint with a multitude of government agencies -- and the United Nations, for good measure.

Is it fair that she be treated like a hooker just because she dresses like one? On the other hand, is it fair that a man be condemned for responding to the signals he thinks she's sending? My letter writers and phone callers say yes to the former, no to the latter. Following a column I wrote on sexual harassment, which began with an offhand remark to a colleague who had worn a short skirt to work that day, I heard from many men (and some women) who insisted that I had been entrapped. My colleague, they said, should have worn a longer skirt.

In principle, I reject that argument. But I also reject the argument that women are never accessories to their own harassment, that the man is always totally wrong and the woman never, not even a tiny bit. Let's examine this by analogy. Just because you leave your keys in the car doesn't mean someone is entitled to steal it. But by leaving your keys in the car you have made it easier for someone to steal it. Similarly, you have a perfect right to flash your money, and should you get robbed, the thief has no excuse. But neither, really, do you.

Prudent women recognize the importance of dress and behavior, the subtle signals that clothes and mannerisms send. For instance, it's neither smart nor good manners to wear short skirts or shorts in most Third World countries. It's not smart to go sashaying down dark streets there alone at night. To do those things sends a signal. A woman might just be trying to keep cool, but her outfit would not be interpreted that way by many Third World men. They would find her insolently provocative. The response might be brutal.

American men and American women share the same culture. But even within a single culture, subcultures exist. Sometimes they're racial, religious, ethnic or geographic. But they can be sexual as well. A woman may think she is saying nothing by wearing a short skirt, but many men think otherwise. If the skirt is accompanied by flirtatious behavior, then the message is even stronger. The woman may be oblivious to what she seems to be saying. She also has the law on her side. But, to many men, she is saying something nonetheless.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2004/10/richard_cohen_d.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50050-2004Oct20.html

Oct. 20, 2004

"Let us dispense with the boilerplate denunciation of O'Reilly as an alleged pig and even more boilerplate about him being the all-powerful man and Mackris being the totally powerless woman. All of that could be true. It also seems true, though, that Mackris either skipped classes in common sense when she was at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism or was playing O'Reilly like the proverbial violin.

Whether Mackris was aware of her power is impossible for me to say. But I can say that she never went to Fox's human resources department to complain about O'Reilly. She never seemed to realize that by not complaining and, more specifically, by going to dinner with him, to his hotel room and then, upon returning to Fox News, accepting assignments and a salary increase not given to others, she was hardly telling O'Reilly that she found his behavior thoroughly repugnant, as she says in her lawsuit. I almost pity O'Reilly. Off camera, he must be a bit slow.

(...) (I)t was a young female television producer who suggested I write about this because, if I may paraphrase, lawsuits such as Mackris's infantilize women. They portray women totally as victims, without recourse or remedy at their disposal. It insults common sense. It rewrites nature.

I can understand the rage of women subjected to the sort of sewer O'Reilly allegedly opened up on Mackris. If he did it, it is wrong -- just plain wrong. But it is also wrong for a woman to be even a bit complicit and then act as if she played no role whatsoever in the oldest game known to mankind. I can appreciate that Mackris was in an awful bear hug. But she screamed for help a bit late in the game."

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/2601/index.html

WASHINGTON POST’S OFFICE SHUFFLE

Here’s one story out of the Washington Post’s New York bureau that won’t make it into the paper: It’s about columnist Richard Cohen and why he’s just moved his office from the twelfth floor of the paper’s New York bureau to the twenty-second floor of the Newsweek building. The New York-bureau chief, Blaine Harden, passed along to management a complaint against Cohen made by Devon Spurgeon, a 23-year-old female special correspondent in the bureau. One Post insider says Harden and others in the bureau witnessed several instances in which Cohen made inappropriately sexual remarks to the young assistant. Management took the situation seriously enough to fly to New York to talk with Cohen on April 3, the insider continues, while Spurgeon was asked to take a paid leave of absence during the negotiations. Eventually, management decided that Cohen’s office would be moved. Cohen vehemently denies the charges. “There was, for want of a better term, a personality conflict,” he explains. “It didn’t involve sexual harassment -- it didn’t involve sex, it didn’t involve harassment -- and no disciplinary action was taken.” Neither a Washington Post spokeswoman nor deputy managing editor Milton Coleman would comment on personnel matters, and neither Harden, Spurgeon, nor managing editor Robert Kaiser returned calls.