Questioning Transphobia

Update: See Natalia Antonova’s entry for more information. The article below is not entirely accurate (and I admit I didn’t catch the “100% of women are sexually harassed” line.

Per Natalia’s findings, the judge is female, but still unnamed. Many of the numbers in the below article are inaccurately reported or misleading.

I’m still seeing shades of Judge Deni.

Or so says a Russian Judge:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

“He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

This is right up there with judging rape as theft of services.

But this isn’t just about a pithy quote: The article says that the woman hoped to become the third woman in Russian history to successfully bring a sexual harassment case to trial. This is institutionalized thoroughly as the way things are:

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

As Natalia Antonova writes on GlobalComment:

For many women, the post-Soviet reality is one were opportunities are scarce. Anti-discrimination laws may be on the books, but are rarely enforced, especially wherein women are concerned. Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, much beloved by many Westerners, delivered a sexist and ridiculous speech about the “magic” of women on March 8th, International Women’s Day, this year, and only the truly committed among us called him out on it. Alla Dovlatova, a popular TV figure, recently spoke about how a woman’s best self-defense is either “a disarming smile, or a man.”

When I read that, I remembered the day that Olympian Lilia Podkopaeva, Ukraine’s pride and joy, was robbed and beaten up in in the center of Kiev. Should have the diminutive gymnast greeted her attackers with “a disarming smile”? Was she asking for it because she was not accompanied by a man? I understand Dovlatova’s position, armed defense against a group of thugs can make things much worse for a woman, but the way in which it was stated felt deceptive.

It’s my belief that Dovlatova knows full well the dangers of being female in the post-Soviet landscape, but in public, even an independently successful woman must pretend that men will protect her, that her looks will protect her, because otherwise her feminine magic will dissipate like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight.

Thanks to The Hedonistic Pleasureseeker for pointing this story out on IBTP.