Men Take 2nd Look at How They Act Around Women : The sexes: Harassment awareness may be redrawing the boundaries of propriety at work--and elsewhere.

Jim, a 38-year-old sales representative from Panorama City, said he never considered himself someone who could be accused of sexual harassment. Not, that is, until law professor Anita Faye Hill began testifying Friday in Washington about alleged sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Now, Jim said, he realizes that a comment he made to a woman co-worker about six months ago “might have been misconstrued.”

Jim, who insisted that his last name not be used, said the co-worker had a habit of licking her lips. One day Jim told her that he found her lip-licking to be “sensuous and exciting.”

The woman did not reply, but the conversation ended abruptly and was never discussed again. She later left the firm, but the memory--and pangs of conscience--linger.

“I’m going to be more careful now,” Jim said.

The sexual harassment drama unfolding in the nation’s capital is stirring the soul of the American male. Many men say they are reevaluating the way they relate to women at work and, perhaps, in their personal lives.

One of the most widely expressed concerns is that men and women often regard the same remarks or incidents so differently. As a result, some men are rethinking the boundaries of propriety in comments they make to female co-workers. One of the difficulties they face is that there are no set rules about what is--and what is not--appropriate to say.

“Everybody is talking about it,” said a top Hollywood executive who insisted on anonymity. “Everyone is saying, ‘What is the dividing line between asking someone out for a date and harassing them?’ ”

To be sure, the effects of this sudden course in sensitivity delivered to the American public may be short-lived. And many men who may have sexually offended women in the past remain unrepentant.

But observers see reason for hope that male attitudes are changing in ways that will reduce sexual harassment and other forms of sex discrimination.

“The fact this is causing such an uproar, and that the nomination is up for grabs, is a sign of progress,” said Mark Gerzon, the Santa Monica author of “A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Faces of American Manhood.”

“Men’s awareness of gender issues has lagged very, very far behind women’s awareness,” Gerzon said. “Now, we’re really starting to catch up.”

Although many critics say corporate America still is unconscionably slow to fire or otherwise properly discipline men guilty of sexual harassment, other experts in the field are more upbeat.

“The tolerance for sexual harassment in the workplace is very low compared to what it was 10 years ago,” said Carol Knox, a Boston-based negotiator and organizer for the United Auto Workers. “Most employers have woken up to the fact that it’s not acceptable.”

Gerzon, as a further sign of progress in male attitudes, pointed to the emerging “men’s movement”--a loosely connected effort to redefine what it means to be a man today, often involving weekend retreats intended to help men overcome cultural taboos against revealing emotions. Gerzon also cited the popularity of such recent best-sellers as Robert Bly’s “Iron John,” an unconventional analysis of male initiation rites based on a Grimm Brothers fairy tale.

But even for those who would dismiss the men’s movement as an indulgent, yuppie fad, the Senate hearings have been provocative.

Bob Mesrop, a lawyer at the downtown Los Angeles firm of McKenna & Fitting, recalled a conversation he had with another man and a woman last week. They were discussing Prof. Hill’s credibility in light of reports that other women who had worked with Thomas were prepared to testify that he had never approached them in an untoward way.

“Well, they probably weren’t attractive,” Mesrop’s male friend said, a remark to which the woman instantly took offense.

The man was surprised at her reaction, Mesrop said, because “he didn’t think anything of it. Many men just don’t appreciate that that type of remark could be offensive.”

“It’s a difficult time to be a male,” said Robert E. Richardson, a lawyer in private practice in Washington. “You don’t know what the rules of the game are. There are no bright lights saying: Stop! This is sexual harassment.

“The workplace conversation will be strictly business,” he said. “Compliments to women will diminish, and many casual conversations will stop. Bosses will keep doors open more if they have women in the office, like gynecologists always have a nurse in the examining rooms.”

In traditionally male-run businesses such as securities trading, where an aggressive tone is part of the game for workers of either gender, some men now worry that they will overreact and treat female co-workers too gently. That could backfire if the female staffers view such a change in tone as condescension.

Still, there is little doubt that more companies will be asking male employees to err on the side of much more sensitive conduct toward female co-workers, given the extraordinarily high profile now of the sexual harassment issue.

At the brokerage firm Jefferies & Co. in Los Angeles, chief financial officer Maxine Syrjamaki said the company circulated a memo last week “talking about refreshing everyone’s awareness” about male-female workplace relations, “and reminding people to exercise sensitivity.”

Most men, however, do not expect drastic change in the workplace. And, in many cases, it is clear that old attitudes die hard, even in the face of the current controversy.

“I don’t think it changes anything,” said John Glazer, a 35-year-old Simi Valley electrician. But Glazer said he sees a marked difference between the way male construction workers treat women professionals and co-workers compared to the way they behave toward other females who might pass by while they are working.

“We harass women who come by the job site” with wolf whistles and catcalls, he said. But women contract managers “get real good treatment. We’re talking a lot of dollars for us if we get kicked off the job site,” he said.

“I’m not going to change my behavior,” said Randy Fugate, 38, a commercial photographer based in Woodland Hills. “People are people. That’s just the way they are.”

Fugate said many women are just as guilty of making sexually oriented comments as men. “They say: ‘What a nice ass.’ They speak about a man’s frontal area. I hear that from women all the time,” he said.

Not everyone is convinced that sexual harassment is an all-pervasive problem.

At the Flower Street Bar at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, where two television sets were tuned to the Senate hearings Friday afternoon, banker Richard Gomez watched the testimony and remarked that sexual harassment is probably less of a problem in his industry than in others.

“In the banking game, one is very proper,” he said, “so things like that I would say do not occur as much as in other walks of life.”

Gomez, a vice president and supervisor in commercial lending at Security Pacific Bank, occasionally tells what he calls “blonde jokes”--mildly off-color stories that don’t use bad language but “might be considered defamatory toward blonde females.”

“I’ve told these jokes to some young ladies in my office, also to some of my peer-level females, and there was no issue about it,” Gomez said, adding, “As a supervisor, I know of no one who’s come back to me and said, ‘Gee, I don’t appreciate that.’ ”

Nevertheless, he said the Thomas hearings have sensitized him to the problem, and he said he will probably “be more careful--I won’t be quite as open with my jokes.”

Others are worried about an overreaction to the new attention to sexual harassment. Jack Mele, a vice president with the computer supplies firm Data Impressions in Southgate, said he has been circumspect in his conduct with women co-workers. But, Mele says, innocent remarks he may have made years ago could boomerang. “Anything can be taken out of context. That’s what I’m worried about. It could have been a joke, a story,” he said.

Brian Kardon, a marketing consultant with Braxton Associates in Boston, also says he has behaved honorably in his conduct with women at work and elsewhere. But he worries about comments or jokes that he may have made in the past about gays--without realizing that someone within earshot at the time was gay.

“Maybe I said something like, ‘He’s a little effeminate, isn’t he?’ and rolled my eyes,” Kardon said.

Insensitive remarks and gestures toward women, blacks, gays and Jews, Kardon said, “is something that will haunt a lot of us.”

But Kardon, too, is worried about the potential for overreaction. “The Thomas case is opening up a can of worms. People will be much more reserved about their feelings and thoughts and they’ll save certain types of jokes for private settings.

“You’ll always be on at the office, and it’ll only be at your home when you can relax and let loose.”

Mele added that “it may force a manager to be a little more distant with employees. Because, the more familiar you are (with employees), the more apt you are to make comments that might be taken out of context later on.”

Clyde Johnson, president of the Black Employees Assn., an organization that handles complaints of racial and sexual discrimination in Los Angeles County, applauded the fact that the Thomas-Hill controversy will raise men’s awareness of sexual harassment. But he, and other men, expressed concern that the publicity might prompt some women to bring false charges of sexual harassment in reprisal for interpersonal conflicts.

“That’s one of the concerns,” Johnson said. “Companies need to thoroughly investigate these kinds of charges. They shouldn’t assume that a woman is telling the truth.”

Although there have been cases of men accusing women, or even other men, of sexual harassment, an overwhelming majority of the cases involve women with complaints against men. “Generally, men are still in positions of power, not women. And women tend not to abuse power because their positions are more precarious,” said Judith E. Kurtz, managing attorney for the public interest law firm Equal Rights Advocates.

That’s a point that Roger McCarthy, president of the consulting firm Failure Group Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif., knows all too well. McCarthy used the occasion of a company party last week to give a talk on sexual harassment, saying he was motivated by concern that Hill had been subject to such a public display as a result of her allegations against Thomas that other women would be loathe to come forward if they found themselves in the same position.

McCarthy said he learned about sexual harassment long ago when his girlfriend at the time, a hospital dietitian in Boston, ran into the problem.

“A doctor started drawing pornographic pictures and sending them to her,” he said.

A burly former amateur hockey player, McCarthy took one of the drawings to the hospital, had the physician paged, and confronted him.

“He said: ‘You don’t understand the context.’ I said: ‘You’re right, I don’t.’ ”

It never happened again.