Woman With Guts Puts a Scare Into America

Most people, if you are to believe the opinion polls, say Anita Hill was lying. They don’t know this, of course, but this is what their guts tell them.

This is what my mother told me the other day.

People say that Anita Hill, intelligent, poised and articulate, hardly acts like a doormat, like someone who would follow her sexual harasser around, like somebody who would need 10 years to finally get all the horror off her chest.

This just doesn’t jibe, they say. It just doesn’t make sense .

“The Anita Hill I knew was nobody’s victim,” is how one pro-Thomas witnesses summed it up last week.

The emotional shakedown from last week’s extraordinary Senate hearings is under way. It will likely be with us a while.

In the end, Clarence Thomas squeaked by, netting a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. And even as he survived the unseemly process, he didn’t win. Doubts about his character will trail him for years.

Speaking with passion, with emotion welling in his eyes and tension constricting his jaw, Thomas said that he had been falsely, maliciously accused. This may be true. Most Americans will never really know.

Anita Hill came forward--”out of the woodwork” say those who would rather that she did not--and was forced to supply the burden of proof.

This was something that she clearly could not do.

Get rid of all the chaff, the sleaze and the smears, and it came down to his word against hers. His carried more weight.

But Anita Hill’s burden was much heavier going in. She was an accuser, from the weaker sex. And from the start, the logic used to define the issue had a distinctively male tinge.

If Anita Hill had been sexually harassed, the reasoning went, why in God’s name didn’t she come out fighting like a man? Why didn’t she, at the age of 25, turn Clarence Thomas in? Why didn’t she submit to such grilling back then?

“The Anita Hill I knew was nobody’s victim,” the witness said.

Sen. Alan Simpson, the Republican from Wyoming, referred to the allegations before the Senate Judiciary Committee as “all this sexual harassment crap.” And this was on national TV.

The burden of millions of American woman is to put up with the likes of such sentiment, and then some, for years.

Sure, we joke. We say that if men got pregnant, or raised children, or got periods, or fill in the blank however you wish, that things wouldn’t be as they are today. Then we roll our eyes, and we go on.

Women like to get along. This is how we have been taught, some of us so well that we have come to believe that this is some sort of natural law. We, like men, need to be loved.

So we remind ourselves that “life is too short.” We want to have fun.

Still, we don’t go out alone at night. This is not safe. We don’t list our telephone numbers under our full names. No sense in giving anybody “ideas.”

We check our clothing for any unintended sexual messages we may be giving off. We don’t want to be accused of “asking for it,” even though we aren’t sure what “it” might be until a man lets us know.

On the job, women must not be “shrill,” or “haughty,” or act like we “have balls.” Or at least not too often. It gets on people’s, usually men’s, nerves. Women want to get ahead in a man’s world.

All of this is just common sense in this day and age, a feminine checklist for getting by. It becomes second nature. Women adapt, as they always have. Mothers tell their daughters about the things they had to put up with when they were young.

Men have a very different routine. As far as I know, nobody’s yet suggested that a man was assaulted because he was wearing shorts or because his sweater was too tight.

So what are people to make of sexual harassment? Is it, in the words of the senator, a lot of crap? I suppose that depends on your point of view. It remains, legally, a difficult thing to prove.

What if, perhaps like Anita Hill, it took years before a woman who had been sexually harassed actually pronounced those words out loud, before she told someone that it wasn’t right?

Does that mean this woman just fantasized about what went on? That maybe she wished it were true?

Not in your dreams.

Nobody wanted to believe Anita Hill because she is a nightmare come true. She is smart, black, articulate and morally upright. And, finally, she acted as if she had balls.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.