The Complaints of Anita Hill
O'ROURKE, P. J.
The Complaints of Anita Hill The Memoir of a Self-Appointed Martyr By P.J. O'Rourke Acertain conservative journalist created a fuss by praising Hillary Clinton. A certain left-wing...
...And wouldn't we all...
...What does Anita Hill propose should be done...
...You will just be bored and puzzled...
...She offers few statistics, and they do not make much sense, e.g., "only 3 percent of the harassment claims filed are baseless while 97 percent of the cases go unreported...
...One must admit that gender is not a construct but a biological difference and sometimes an ugly one...
...Sexual harassment is immoral and pervasive in the world...
...Before the hearing the press gave little attention to my background...
...And, Lord, how the querulousness flies: "I found the remarks particularly insensitive...
...She leaves, "praying that I could find a gynecologist who'd be both responsive to my condition and covered by my health plan...
...Nor will you be inspired to hang around locker rooms saying, "What's more important, a Supreme Court justice with a potty mouth or the fate of the Constitution...
...Contravening sexual harassment rather than complaining about it for 368 pages means doing the kind of thinking unlikely to be fashionable in communities held together by outrage and a deeply felt cause...
...There's a reason that most societies have different roles for men and women...
...Hill goes from a two-room elementary school to Oklahoma State University to Yale to a well-connected D.C...
...The Hills are a large, hard-working, amiable, and admirable family with impediments...
...You won't emerge from this long, dull read convinced she didn't lie or did...
...She teaches for a while at Oral Roberts University, "but it became evident that I did not have the support of all of the students...
...But, whatever the facts of the Clarence Thomas case, Hill has found the perfect grievance...
...Hill says the technician who gave her a lie-detector test—taken on her own initiative—had a stern face and tone...
...And she complains that the plants have been shut down...
...If you are a determined opponent of Anita Hill, leave the volume alone completely...
...Speaking Truth to Power is a book purporting to be about sexual harassment...
...And although Hill continually poor-mouths (or, as we should say of a woman with her career accomplishments, "middle-class-mouths"), she has a marvelous-ly large sense of the me...
...And here at last the male, Republican reviewer is allowed to be contrarian—at least among some of the Republican males he knows...
...If you are an ardent supporter of Anita Hill, purchase the thing so she can get her royalties, then throw it away and save your eyes and evening...
...some have been hostile...
...Or maybe it's city planning, because she keeps mentioning a "community" of sexually harassed women...
...Each of the documents contained a reference to me or something on which I had worked...
...When she returns to acade-mia, the atrium in the College of Law building "is horribly noisy and energy-inefficient...
...O'Rourke is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard...
...This is the mark of the truly expert complainer...
...Here is the stuff of an affirmative-action Angela's Ashes...
...One may even need to go along with poor David Boren's proposal to restore tradition...
...You won't feel compelled to march on legislatures carrying "Men Just Don't Get It" signs...
...To get full benefit from complaining, the complaint can't be answerable—or there might not be anything to complain about...
...There is nothing in here that Nina Totenberg hasn't told you...
...She insists on calling the confirmation process the "Hill-Thomas hearings...
...Much of civilization is devoted to keeping inappropriate maleness from popping out...
...She complains that "prior to the time of OSHA regulations," the work in local food-processing plants was dirty and dangerous...
...I had come to expect no better...
...She addresses an EMILY's List gathering and "noticed that Senator Mikulski had tears on her cheeks...
...She says twice that since age 6 she has spent all but three years of her life in schools—she resides in a land where words are deeds...
...Says Hill, "I would have been afraid to live in the country if George Bush had been re-elected...
...Kum-baya...
...What the expert complainer likes best in grievances is how they focus attention on the self...
...I am certain that, as a black woman, I challenged their notion of authority . . ." She goes to the University of Oklahoma, but former Democratic senator David Boren becomes president there...
...She is mad at reporters for asking "Do you have a comment...
...Blither...
...law firm to good jobs at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and, by the time she is 35, she is a tenured law professor at the University of Oklahoma...
...A certain left-wing journalist—looking about him for decent, courageous people to criticize—made a bigger commotion by slagging Mother Teresa...
...I assumed that she was crying because I had survived the hearing and in a way prevailed by having a part in the election of women who were being celebrated...
...She calls for unspecified "policy, procedures, and accountability to deal with harassment" as though the issue were some kind of food stamp...
...When sexual harassment is directed at men, as it is in prisons, it makes them kill...
...His books include Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance...
...Ah, we all know the emptiness of apologies...
...She complains that men and women are seated separately in her girlhood church, "most likely out of . . . denigration of women's roles...
...Though he probably meant traditions of quality, he simply assumed that I would see tradition in the same way he did, forgetting that when he was a student, there were few women and few students of color, and no black or female faculty...
...At the University of Oklahoma, a secretary "discovered two clean-cut middle-aged white men dressed in dark suits and ties rummaging through the recycle bin...
...Thus I come to you, male and Republican, with a heartfelt desire to call Speaking Truth to Power by Anita Hill an important and illuminating book that will make each of us reconsider our underlying preconceptions about . . . About buying books or, at least, about reading them...
...Sexual harassment makes all women angry, "good sports" included...
...The discussion was enlightening, lively and compelling but drenched in pain...
...Bones may knit, abrasions may heal, but the heart never mends...
...Perhaps...
...It was only fair that we trade tears...
...And unwanted male sexual attentions will exist as long as men have things it would be insensitive to mention...
...And she declares, "Some of my classmates have been more than insensitive to my situation...
...Just as Hill prefers abstract, intellectually contrived, and insoluble problems to the concrete hardships she was able to surmount, so she prefers ridiculous fears to real ones...
...At Yale, "Legal training, with its focus on 'objective analysis,' created a dissonance in me...
...She merely notes this...
...This is a bad, sad, empty book, made worse by a good story Hill hardly tells...
...Or am I being insensitive again...
...One in particular, a man with whom I was close in law school and since, has not returned several phone calls...
...At a university dinner, Boren has the misfortune to say to Prof...
...Hill imagines public reaction to the Thomas confirmation hearings: "anger, confusion, disappointment, distrust, and more anger reached the boiling point...
...She says, "I was angry and disappointed when Katie Couric of NBC asked me to address David Brock's allegations about me...
...She would rather concentrate on phantom security agents, Men in Black scenarios, and the world's most incompetent arsonist...
...Men are violent...
...She watches the 1992 Democratic convention: "Tears rolled down my cheek as I faced the fact again of the involvement of elected officials in what happened to me...
...And if you are neutral about Anita Hill, also eschew the tome...
...Like too many doctor's visits, this one was frustrating and disappointing...
...Anyway, civilization is not created by whining or gab...
...And, for a grievance to be most effective at focusing attention on the self, it must be of an emotional kind...
...when Thomas is confirmed...
...You'll feel sympathy for Anita Hill, be exasperated by her, and end up in that modern low-salt-in-the-wounds version of the tragic stasis—frozen between pity and annoyance...
...She derides the media's "brevity of coverage allotted...
...In this case, don't bother...
...Anita Hill is a woman who has had people promise to kill her, who has been menaced with physical assault, and who is to this day excoriated in the vilest language by right-wing nuts and nuts of other flavors...
...Anita Hill's friend Judge Susan Hoerchner has said that Hill did not choose the issue of sexual harassment, it chose her...
...She wants heightened "awareness" of sexual harassment, but the American public could hardly be more aware of it if ABC News caught Bill Clinton chasing Barbara Mikul-ski around the White House naked...
...And nothing so incurable...
...Made or unmade, they leave the emotional grievance wonderfully intact...
...She inveighs against presumption of innocence for Judge Thomas, using the logic that "EEOC guidelines presume nothing of the kind...
...Nothing is so personal as emotion...
...They left abruptly as she approached, leaving behind several of the documents they had retrieved...
...Speaking Truth to Power swamps in emotion...
...There's a reason some distance is usually kept between the sexes, especially during their most awful hormonal stages...
...Sex is damn emotional...
...It's "held together by outrage and a deeply felt cause...
...Each day the workers left me a new coat of plaster dust, a final reminder that they had control of my space...
...She talks about women "finding our voices and breaking the silence forever...
...One must accept the relative powerless-ness of the legal system—let alone the political system—in matters of psychological tort...
...Once the subject of the Clarence Thomas hearings is taken up (as it is in the first sentence of the first page and never put down), Anita Hill's complaints rise in pitch and goofi-ness...
...Her brother believes he sees "the same Secret Service man throughout the weekend at various spots throughout the city...
...But, on the other hand, if this meant never having to listen to Anita Hill while the port was being passed, it might be worth considering...
...Italics added by a secret government agency...
...The health-care profession is no better than the construction industry...
...And sexual harassment is the ideal acid bath...
...Speaking Truth contains no self-contradiction or prurience to improve your calumny...
...They are poor, black, rural, and Anita is female...
...She harangues the Washington Post, of all institutions, for "lack of sensitivity in and ignorance about handling claims of sexual harassment...
...All of which indicated a hos-tility—at the least a criticism—as though he were on the verge of chastising me...
...It is impossible to understand journalism without recognizing the fundamental contrarian instincts of the trade...
...But the hardscrabble farm existence, the grueling study, the social agonies, the homesickness—Anita Hill doesn't complain about these...
...She says, "Much more needs to be done in politics," but also says, "I dislike and distrust politics," and states, with odd diction but clear insight, "politics controls over any moral or ethical sense of right and wrong...
...In its very mildest form, it is grossly rude...
...Nobody can propose going back to the sexual segregation of a century ago...
...But in the majority of post-paleolithic endeavors—and certainly in the endeavor of dating—that violence is inappropriate...
...In forms only slightly less mild, it is vicious bullying...
...She is miffed that "Thomas' family life and personal background were explored quite positively by the press for weeks...
...Even supposing she did everything of which you accuse her, she has been vilified ad libitum and by experts...
...She says, "I once engaged in a discussion of gender inequity with some local leadership in an African Canadian community...
...At her law firm, she was one of only two black women "until late in our first year there...
...He had voted to confirm Clarence Thomas...
...I concluded that someone must have broken into the house and attempted to set a fire...
...A friend goes to Hill's house and finds a pillow case draped over a lighted bedroom lamp...
...She is too busy complaining about everything else...
...And home is no relief...
...When she goes to work for the government, "the ceiling leaked in the Education office building" and "the ventilation was poor in the EEOC...
...I suspected that I would have been treated differently had I had political contacts, money, title, or any other indicia of power...
...Hill, by way of small talk, that he will be "restoring tradition to the law school...
...All the very reasonable paranoia of Speaking Truth to Power ends in bathos: "Then someone else sent me fruitcakes as a gift, and despite my apprehension in the face of death threats, I ate some...
...When she receives a copy of the special prosecutor's report on the leak of her Senate deposition, she is "stung by the fact that nowhere in the letter was there any acknowledgment of my cooperation in the investigation—there was certainly no 'thank you.'" And an "Open Letter to the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee" tacked on to the end of the book scolds, "none of you has apologized to my parents...
...Sex is very personal...
...Such drenching is the real theme of Speaking Truth to Power...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 8
