Earth 1 and Earth 2.

So the New York Times published a story about how movie executive Harvey Weinstein has allegedly been sexually harassing women for many years. I could link to a number of other news reports about other powerful men allegedly doing similar things. Without resorting to Google, Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes lost their positions at Fox News recently for similar allegations. Moreover, I think everybody knows about the allegations against Bill Cosby by now.


I do not know how many times I have interviewed for a job. To the best of my recollection, I have been hired for 17 jobs (18 if you count the Navy) since I started working in junior high. None of those jobs were conditioned on my doing anything remotely sexual with the person interviewing me. I am pretty sure that 99.9 percent of men have the same experience, lack of an experience, in job interviewing as me. Part of my confidence in that figure is that in 14 years of practicing primarily in the area of employment law, I have never spoken with a man who has had that experience. Unfortunately, there are a lot of women who have had to deal with sexual situations as part of a job interview or job. The Times article I linked to at the start of this post has a quote from Lauren O'Connor, one of Mr. Weinstein's employees who wrote about trying to be a professional and instead being "sexualized and diminished."

Now, Ms. O'Connor is talking about a work experience and about how the power dynamic in that work relationship (like almost all work relationships) is completely in favor of the boss. The article also quotes the actress Ashley Judd trying to figure out how to extricate herself from one of Mr. Weinstein's lewd proposals without offending him because of the same power dynamic. So it might be easy for a lot of men to think, well those powerful men are just bad apples. I am not so sure.

On April 1, one of my favorite people and I went to see the Minnesota Timberwolves play the Sacramento Kings. Although the Timberwolves lost, my colleague and I had a great time and I heartily encourage folks who like basketball to take in a Timberwolves game at the Target Center if possible. Lynx games are also awesome (and with lots more championship winning seasons), but I digress.

One part of the evening struck a discordant note with me. Like many professional sports teams, the Timberwolves employ dancers to help fill time during TV commercial breaks and the insane number of timeouts that the NBA gives coaches to use. As one might guess, the dancers are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, scantily clad (although one sees people more scantily clad on beaches in the summer). As the dancers perform, one can see people filming the performance either because they are fans of the dancing (some routines appears to be quite complex) or perhaps because they are fans of scantily clad women. It does not bother me that people film the routines performed by the Timberwolves Dancers. Given that the Timberwolves Dancers post videos of themselves practicing or performing the routines, I assume that it is okay with them if people film the routines at the game.

While I wasn't bothered by filming the routines, I was bothered by some of the filming I observed. At one point several of the dancers lined up on the stairs in my section of the Target Center as they were waiting to perform their next routine (I can't recall what the routine required for them to be on the stairs, it may have been they were there to thank a member of the armed forces). The dancers were facing the basketball court so fans in my section would see the backside of the dancers if the fans were also looking at the court. Two grown men in the seats in front of me promptly switched on their smartphones and began filming/taking pictures of the backside of the dancer closest to them. They did not ask the dancer if she wanted to be filmed or photographed they just took the pictures. It seemed that the gentlemen knew what they were doing crossed some kind of boundary because as soon as the dancers started to turn around, the men hurriedly put away their smartphones. Later, however, I observed one of the men texting pictures of the backside of a dancer to someone.

The incident bothered me for several reasons. First, as I indicated above, it bothered me that the men did not ask the dancer if it was okay to take a picture of the dancer's backside. I do not have a problem with someone admiring (or photographing) another person that someone finds beautiful. But it seems like one should get the permission of the person being admired prior to taking pictures of the person and certainly prior to disseminating those picture. The way the men quickly put their smartphones away sure made it seem like not only were they not interested in getting consent but that they knew consent would not be given. The lesson here is if  one can't offer a good explanation for one's actions, then maybe the action was a bad idea  and do not do that action. I learned that lesson the hard way and maybe those men have not had my experience or similar experiences. 

The second reason the incident bothered me springs from the thing Ms. O'Connor was talking about when she mentioned being "sexualized and diminished." Maybe the men did not ask for permission because they did not think they needed to ask. Maybe the men thought that the dancer's feelings on whether the men could take their picture did not matter. Maybe it did not occur to the men that the dancer's had feelings at all. Maybe the dancers were just objects for the men (who, to be clear, where old enough to be married and probably old enough to have teenage or adult daughters). A friend of mine suggested that the reason the men took the pictures is that the men were excited by the idea of taking pictures of the dancers without their consent. My friend's suggestion has the benefit of explaining why the men took the pictures even though their smartphones presumably gave them access to an Internet full of dancer backsides (139,000,000 images/hits when I googled the term dancer backsides).  

Third, to borrow a phrase from Tina Fey, can't we be better than that? I am bothered by the fact that I did not politely tap on the men's shoulders and suggest they find something better to do than take the pictures/videos they were taking. I should have been better than I was. The men also should have been better then they were acting. I assume the men consider themselves to be, and probably are, good people. I am sure that they have people who love them and would think highly of them. But they made a bad decision. I do not mean to suggest they are bad people or that they have bad hearts. I do not know them and did not speak to them. But they, and I, made poor decisions with respect to taking those pictures.

Fourth,I presume women join the Timberwolves dancers because they like/love to dance and want to make money doing something they like/love. Or maybe the dancers like the Timberwolves and want to support their team. Perhaps the dancers view dancing for an NBA team as a step on a path to fame and fortune. After all, singer Paul Abdul was a dancer for the Los Angeles Lakers before she became famous. I am sure that there are as many reasons as there are dancers. I am also sure that none of those reasons is that the dancers wanted to be surreptitiously photographed while they were at work and about to do their next routine.  

Just like with the job interviews, I am highly confident that no one has ever taken a picture of me working without my consent. My confidence level is even higher if we limit the inquiry to pictures of my backside. I bet those men also have not had their rear ends photographed without their consent. Put another way, the Timberwolves Dancers have to do their jobs while trying to ignore stuff that I, and most men, do not experience.

Now our Reader(s)™ might think that comparing the Timberwolves Dancers to balding-and-close-to-middle-aged-lawyer is a terrible comparison. But the experience I am trying to describe is limited to dancers in the employ of NBA teams. I am friends with some lawyers, male and female, that many people would say are exceedingly attractive. On the occasions, when I find myself walking with the female lawyer, I am frequently struck by how many men turn into slack-jawed gawkers when they see her. I do not have similar experience while walking with my exceedingly handsome male lawyer friend. There is no way my female friend is unaware of the stares she receives, she had to learn to navigate the world without acknowledging them.

The experience that I am trying, and probably failing, to describe is not limited to my friend. The Law is Cool blog has a post about a panel of judges who spoke at a 7th Circuit bar association event and who admit to being distracted by some women's appearance in court. Notably absent from the post or the source article is any discussion of judges who are distracted by men's appearance. Once again, women lawyers have to deal with an experience that male lawyers do not. One can infer from the judge's statements that this is a negative experience. Assuming one is trying to be a zealous advocate, one probably does not want one's appearance to distract from that advocacy.

Recently, a female friend of mine who has made her career in the military, commented on how often she is interrupted when speaking by men who have the same rank that she does. The fact that this happens by males of equal rank is significant because a superior ranked individual can probably interrupt a lower ranked person as a matter of military protocol and a lower ranked person should not be interrupting a higher ranked person for the same reason. My friend specified that the interruptions were not times when a response was critically needed. Instead, the interruptions were simply the men deciding what they wanted to say was more important than what my friend was trying to say. As with the attractiveness issue, my friend has to do her job navigating an obstacle that the men doing her job do not (she is great at her job, by the way).

One might excuse the experience my friend has by saying "the military is mostly male so what is one to do." But my friend's experience is one that the female justices on the United States Supreme Court would recognize. As Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers write over at Scotusblog, in 2015 "65.9 percent of all interruptions [of questions by a Supreme Court justice by another justice] were directed at the three women on the bench." The three female justices did not make up 65.9% of the Supreme Court in 2015. They were a 33.3% of the Supreme Court bench.  Jacobi and Schweers further note that in "the last 12 years, when women made up on average 24 percent of the bench, 32 percent of interruptions were of the female justices, yet only 4 percent of the interruptions were by female justices. That means each woman was interrupted on average three times more often than each of her male colleagues."  The article also points out that female justices were more likely to be interrupted by lawyers too (interrupting a justice asking a question is against Supreme Court rules). The whole study is worth a read and probably shorter than this post. In any event, this is an example of women at the pinnacle of their profession having to deal with something that their male peers do not have to address.

Another example is how differently the world works for women is Twitter. If a woman tweets something mildly controversial, odds are high that she will receive replies that suggest that her views are unimportant because she is unattractive,  or that she has needs to have heterosexual sex, or go back to the kitchen and make a sandwich.  It is hard to be more sexualized and diminished than that. You know what happens when I tweet about something? At worst someone corrects my spelling or grammar.

The final example-for now- is Sandra J. Fowler. Ms. Fowler wrote about what she called a "very, very strange year at Uber." In the linked post, Ms. Fowler talks about how people at Uber did not take her claims of sexual discrimination and retaliation seriously. If you look at the comments section of her post, you will see men start casting doubt on her claims at the sixth comment (including a nit-wit with whom I get to share a first name). Why does that happen? I think it happens because, like the guys taking the pictures, the men making the comments do not care what Ms. Fowler thinks.

There's this joke about how a man comes up to a stream and sees two fish swimming. The man asks the fish "how's the water." The fish don't reply to the man but one says to the other "what the hell is water?" When I think about the things women have to deal with that are not issues for me, I don't want to ask "how's the water" but I am sometimes astounded that they are moving through the water at all.



In case you were not a comic book reader from the late 1960s-1970s, the title of the posts refers to a DC Comics concept used to explain how Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and other heroes had changed or not changed since their creation. Basically, there were two identical worlds, one had the heroes created in the 1930-1940s and another had the heroes created after that.