Ordinary People

HARVARD AGREED more than a year ago that there was something called "sexual harassment" and that, on the simplest level, it was bad because it placed a woman in a position where her sex, not any other attribute, dominated the way others dealt with her and dictate the things that happened in her life.

To most people, that philosophical distinction is not acutely evident. At times it gets downright muddy: What's wrong with noticing what a girl looks like? You want everybody to be asexual? Confusion increases when one leaves the rarefied turf of Harvard for the fuzzy ground on which the American woman stands. "Oh, sure, women have rights...and I know you're not supposed to say they're not the same as men."

But like many conundrums, the vexatious problem of woman-as-person becomes clear only when taken to extremes. Cross the Atlantic and you find yourself struggling on a whole different level.

Outside America there is no sexual harassment--there is only treating women like women, and what could be more natural? Think of a junior high school dance, or, better yet, one of those dances where they throw together 12-year-olds from separate single-sex summer camps. Nobody knows anybody, but everyone is eyeing and being ever; it is obvious why they are here. Now, imagine being there for the rest of your life.

One of those bits of cultural trivia rarely dwelt on is the way female foreigners are treated on Continental streets. A woman may visit Paris, to be sure. With a man to accompany her, she may even walk the public streets, sit in a cafe, pause to enjoy a famous sight or rest her legs. If the man is missing, things will be equally simple: she will merely be presumed, at every moment of every day, to be holding open auditions for the role.

I tried that experiment this summer. Three weeks after the plane first deposited me by myself on French soil, the school where I was taking a course offered an orientation movie for its newest arrivals. The film was sweet; three interwoven plots presented the theme "Discovering Paris" by tracking three sets of starry-eyed tourists from their arrival at the Gare du Nord through their respective monument studded days. The most romantic segment followed a beautiful blonde model from Copenhagen en route to a day's shooting. Arriving early in the morning, the model wandered happily up the Champs Elysees, down the busy thoroughfares...paused at outdoor boutiques to finger exotic clothes...turned her impressive dreamy profile to gaze out at the Seine and Notre Dame and a extravagant floodlit fountain.

I knew immediately who was doing the laughing. The occasional sardonic chuckles in the dark were female, not male, and they came from the women who, like me, had already been in Paris for at least a day--enough time to try stopping on the street to state at a monument. They knew what Miss Copenhagen's day would really have been like. It would be a day requiring endless ingenuity, especially in dodging. Being tall, slim, and blonde, she would probably get the full treatment starting about 10 a.m. First the friendly calls from the men she passed: "Bonjour, madame." "Come have a drink with me, madame." "Got a boyfriend, madame?" "Wanna come over, madame?" It would be no more irritating than a construction worker's whistle, except for its frequency. More troublesome would be the men who fell in step with her, getting her attention by touching hre arm, and acting aggrieved when she shrugged them off: "Why won't you talk to me? Why are you running away? You don't even know me."

Once she stopped to look at that charming sequined blouse, the game would be up. Whatever man stopped first would have a natural opening line--"Oh, c'est belle, c'est belle"--which would be enough to get his arm around her shoulders. If he happened to be under 16, he might poke her nipple instead, by way of expressing approval of the blouse. Or by then she might already have hung it back up, sighed, and strode out of range.

MEN CAN LIVE in Paris for months without noticing the local phenomenon, since women with male companions are left respect fully alone. Women who have had the temerity to try to travel as if they were ordinary people, like men, quickly grow thick-skinned. They commiserate in shorthand: "It's worse in Rome." "At least you're not blonde." They occasionally long for a male companion or a large styrofoam dummy of one. Guidebooks, including the one put out by Harvard Student Agencies, warn them in passing that it's hopeless to get mad at an entire culture. They are rarely in any real danger--any more than at home--and righteous indignation proves extremely difficult to maintain.

Considered in terms of manpower, this game must be a staggering investment of energy. Imagine as many men as there are street corners, each of them doggedly propositioning every one of an infinite succession of out-of-town women passing by. Or imagine Luxembourg Gardens, where white metal chairs sit in pairs around a vast stretch of pink and cobalt flowers, and the same men walk round and round the flowerbeds each evening in summer, sinking into deep earnest conversations with whichever women will sit still for them. Occasionally my curiosity got the better of my irritation and I tried to make sense out of the spectacle by actually answering. Even allowing for the language barrier, the circularity of such conversations boggled the mind.

"Don't you want to have a drink and get to know me?"

"Not really, I am writing postcards."

"That's a terrible thing to say."

"Why do you think that just because I am sitting here, I want to meet a man?"

"But all the women want to meet men. How else will they know they are still pretty?"

"Maybe they're thinking about something else. I am. You're being unfair,"

"You are wrong to push me away. You are lonely. Of course they are thinking about love,"

IN ARE WOMEN HUMAN?, Dorothy L. Sayers notes that Latin, which helped shape Western thought, provided two words for "man"--homo, meaning person or being, and vir. referring to the sexual side. For women there was only one word, femina. It carried the second, sexual sense; no way existed for referring to a woman merely as a person. French has preserved but varied the gap; the only formal words for female people are those which also mean "daughter" or "wife," In English, as it happens, we lack such an immediate, glaring linguistic wrong. But that happenstance merely makes the gap more difficult to see; subtler equivalents abound.

When asked "What does he look like?" most people, male or female, will answer with specifics--height, hair color, eye color and so forth. Asked, "What does she look like?" one tends to preface the same facts with a value judgment; "Well, pretty cute." "Actually, she's sort of ugly." The invisible subtext runs through everything, like any other type of discrimination people have grown up with; what matters first in a woman is her looks, her rating as a sexual creature or as a member of the amorphous sub-sex of the unattractive.

The French have long been celebrated for their enthusiastic worship of The Woman--the femina who is perfect, whose beauty and sex rating is sky-high. The petty irritation of what happens on their streets inevitably reflects that. But it also holds up a focusing lens to something we in this country are unable to perceive clearly from where we stand. We live with the same assumption, more wavery and ungraspable but just as deep-rooted, that separates women from people.