COLUMN ONE : When Sex Talk Goes Too Far : The law, and society’s standards, on sexual harassment have been turned upside down. Allegations against Clarence Thomas put the issue into a political arena.

Just before a press conference Monday in which she accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, law professor Anita Faye Hill said, she received a telephone call from a prominent male civil rights leader who described the actions attributed to Thomas as “normal male behavior.”

Until very recently, the law would have agreed with that view.

As more and more women have entered the work force, however, often in nontraditional jobs, the courts--which once dismissed sexual harassment cases--increasingly have come to see them as significant. Thomas’ case may become a test of whether the political system has changed as well.

“We are about to witness a national debate about how seriously we take cases of sexual harassment in 1991,” said Susan Estrich, a University of Southern California law professor. “Is this the sort of issue we take seriously and investigate fully or is it the sort of issue we pass away?”

For the members of the U.S. Senate, particularly the 98 male senators, the test already is becoming an uncomfortable one.

Not only must they consider conflicting statements--Hill’s allegations and Thomas’s denials--they also must weigh a problem that pervades many of the legal cases: Action that may seem perfectly innocent to a man may be devastating to the woman who must handle his advances. And they must consider the issues in the context of an area where the law, and society’s standards, have been turned upside down in the space of a decade.

Although job discrimination against women has been illegal since 1965, sexual harassment was generally not accepted as a form of discrimination until the late 1970s. And until a key Supreme Court ruling in 1986, the sort of conduct of which Hill has complained--lewd comments and other actions that create a “hostile environment” but which do not include direct demands for sex in exchange for a job--often was not considered against the law.

In fact, the nation’s capital, where Hill and Thomas worked, was one of the few areas where the law against sexual harassment was clear at the time the two were working together, a fact of which Thomas certainly was aware, since the agency he headed--the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission--was in charge of enforcing the statute.

In part, experts say, the legal system has been slow to confront sexual harassment because of how differently many men--including male judges and lawyers--have viewed behavior that women find highly disturbing.

“What happens is a lot of men think of these cases as private actions between equals,” said Georgetown University law professor Susan Ross. “Men are not often in the position where they have a female superior at work, a person who can hire or fire them, deny them promotions or give them bonuses and then make sexual come-ons to them. It’s difficult for many men to envision how uncomfortable that is, how totally trapped a woman can feel.”

In one prominent case, for example, a senior male lawyer in a major law firm on several occasions remarked to a younger, female attorney: “You don’t look so good today. What’s the matter? Didn’t you get laid last night?’ ”

When the woman eventually sued after being denied a promotion, the attorney defended his remark, noting, accurately, that he had been saying exactly the same thing to young male lawyers for years. “Are we supposed to treat women the same or are we supposed to treat them differently?” he demanded.

The problem, said attorney Mark Dichter, an expert on sexual harassment cases who defended the firm in question is that “what may be OK in one environment may no longer be OK in another. Sometimes you do need to change.”

A growing realization of the prevalence of sexual harassment has added impetus for such change. A survey by the federal agency that oversees civil service hiring found in 1982 that more than 40% of women reported that they had been sexually harassed on the job. Surveys of other groups have turned up similar findings. Those surveys have been mirrored in court, where the number of harassment cases has risen sharply, nearly tripling in California over the last seven years, for example.

And although the words “sexual harassment” may conjure up the image of burly male construction workers whistling at women, experts say that illegal conduct is at least as common in professional fields, particularly medicine, law and the financial industry, where aggressive, self-confident male behavior has long been encouraged as essential to success.

Yet the development of the law on this subject has been difficult, in part because sexual harassment cases require courts--and employers--to confront difficult questions about the proper social roles of men and women and the extent to which behavior should be regulated to achieve the goal of integrating women into the work force.

Increasingly, for example, the place where men and women meet is on the job, Dichter noted. An ever growing percentage of marriages are formed from relationships that began on the job. Courts and government regulators, therefore, have struggled to come up with rules that will proscribe unwanted advances without unduly interfering with innocent, even desired, flirtations.

And men and women do, often, simply see things differently.

On average, said management consultant Freada Klein, who has conducted extensive surveys of male and female attitudes about sexual harassment and has testified as an expert witness in harassment cases, men tend to see sexual remarks, jokes and gestures as something dramatically different from sexual assault or violence. Women, by contrast, tend to “see sexual conduct on a continuum” and as a result, often feel threatened by acts that men see as innocent, she said.

In addition, men tend to view such behavior as basically about sexuality and are reluctant to judge others on those grounds. Women more often view the case as being about abuse of power.

For all those reasons, the earliest harassment lawsuits to succeed in court concentrated on cases where a supervisor had made a clear demand of an employee: Have sex with me or lose your job.

Even in those sorts of cases, women’s prospects of victory were often dim. In the mid-1970s, for example, a group of Latina women working at a cannery in Hayward, Calif., found that there was only one easy way that they could get off the assembly line and into one of the less punishing jobs at the plant: They had to have sex with the boss. To add insult to injury, the boss insisted that the women have sex with him in his van in the cannery’s parking lot.

But after sizing up their legal options, the cannery workers became distressed over their prospects for winning a quick solution through the courts or a government agency. So, they took a more direct approach--they called the supervisor’s wife and told her was what going on.

“That put an end to that,” said Amanda Hawes, who lawyer who counseled the women at the time.

Today, cases of what courts now call quid pro quo sexual harassment are routinely accepted. What has been more difficult, for both courts and employers, have been charges of the sort Hill has made--that the actions of a supervisor or co-worker created the “hostile environment” which made work impossible for female employees.

Hill alleged that Thomas created such an environment for her by repeatedly asking her to date him and by making sexually explicit comments and suggestions, first when the two worked together at the Department of Education and later at the EEOC. Among the comments, she told the FBI, were descriptions of pornography he had seen, including scenes involving sexual relations between women and animals.

The EEOC accepted the “hostile environment” theory of sexual harassment in 1980, two years before Thomas and Hill came to work at the agency. The federal courts in Washington accepted the theory about the same time.

The issue came to the Supreme Court in 1986, brought by a female bank employee, Mechelle Vinson, who charged that her supervisor repeatedly made sexual advances.

Since then, the chief issue for courts has been deciding how objectionable actions must be before they can be considered to create a hostile environment.

“I work with this all the time and I’m still shocked” by the conduct that comes up in the cases, said Ellen J. Vargyas, a lawyer with the National Women’s Law Center in Washington.

An Illinois woman, for example, sued after the supervisor at the insurance company where she worked repeatedly propositioned her, described the size of his penis and asked if she swallowed when she engaged in oral sex.

A female secretary from Ohio sued after her supervisor, who she said had long made sexual gestures in her presence, told a salesman that she “gave good service.” The salesman later called her with sexual requests.

And last October, the EEOC filed a sexual harassment complaint against the New York office of the Los Angeles-based law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. The complaint charged that a senior lawyer at the firm had subjected a former associate to “numerous unwelcome comments about his sexual experience and desires” and that women at the firm were referred to as “toots,” “honeybunch” and “other vulgar and derogatory terms.”

The complaint was quickly settled and the terms have not been disclosed. But Robert G. Lane, a partner for the firm, said that Paul, Hastings has “emphasized” a special training program for partners and associates intended to prevent sexual harassment in the office.

Despite the increasing number of suits and the growing receptiveness of the courts, sexual harassment cases remain relatively difficult to win, according to lawyers familiar with the field. The first problem, Estrich noted, is that, as in rape cases, the lack of a third party who can serve as a witness turns many cases into tests of credibility.

A second difficulty is that federal law, at least, provides only limited chances for a woman who successfully sues to win damages.

California, and several other large states, do allow extensive damages under state law. Under federal law, however, a woman who wins a discrimination case can receive only an award of back pay to cover lost wages.

Hortensia Bohen, a firefighter from East Chicago, Ind., took a nap on her first night in the fire station and awoke to find her supervisor pressing his hands against her crotch. Over the next several months, a federal district court later ruled, she “endured extreme and ongoing sexual harassment” including co-workers frequently describing sexual fantasies to her, a supervisor who insisted that she leave the bathroom door open while she was inside and a department captain who suggested that her attitude would improve if she were raped in the bushes outside.

But although Bohen won her sexual harassment claim, the court decided that she was not entitled to a monetary award because she had not lost any wages as a result of her colleagues’ conduct.

Women’s rights groups have been pressing Congress to change the law as part of the current debate over a civil rights bill. Employer groups and the Bush Administration have strongly opposed any such change.

Lauter reported from Washington and Silverstein from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Laurie Becklund and Donna Walters and researcher Molly Selvin in Los Angeles contributed to this story.