Sexual Harassment Fiasco: San Diego Mayor Bob Filner May Have Done Us Harm

Up until recently I did not care about the sexual harassment exploits of San Diego’s mayor, Bob Filner. I don’t occupy my time and mental energy with middle-aged and elderly men engaging in sexual harassment. If I did, I wouldn’t have any time left for myself.

But, the tide has turned. Filner has put most of us in an alarming amount of danger with his recent statements. He needs to be denounced and disappeared. Let the NDAA bill be put to use here. Here’s why:

The attorney for San Diego’s embattled mayor says the city failed to provide Bob Filner state-required sexual harassment training and therefore should pay to defend him against a lawsuit by his former communications director, who alleges he asked her to work without wearing panties.

Have you ever, as an employee (or a wage slave) been forced to sit through a government or corporate sexual training exercise? It is painful and unnatural. A waste of time for any thinking human being. And the intrepid sexual harasser doesn’t think the information applies to him, anyway, because what woman in her right mind would turn down an advance from him?

Frasier Crane, in his eponymous hit TV show, highlighted this sexual harassment drudgery in an episode from the penultimate season of the series. Frasier mistook a fellow co-worker’s hostility as her way of dealing with her intense lust for him. This was not the case, and when he asked her, after a fight, if she was as turned on as he was, she filed a sexual harassment suit, and every employee at the radio station had to sit, begrudgingly, through hours of retraining.

Filner’s argument about his lack of training puts us all in a similar sort of jeopardy. If San Diego has to pay to defend him in court, that means every government and corporate employee is at risk for even more rigid, nonsensical hours-long training sessions about what is inappropriate in the workplace. No company or government institution is going to want to take the risk of having to defend their hornball employee in court, because they didn’t adequately train him how to leave his caveman mentality at his home.

Like asking females to work without panties, for one. That’s bad. Not mentioning panties on the job at all, to anyone. That’s good. Hinting that you’d like to pull her ponytail from the back. That’s bad. Complimenting your fellow worker on a job well done and a smile. That’s good. Unless you put a hand on her back and rub, and rub and rub and rub. Then, that’s questionable. Moving your fingers to her lower back to prod and press on her tailbone? That’s bad.

Bob Filner is probably a great guy to get a beer with, but if he’s responsible for mandatory stricter sexual harassment programs, and I somehow get caught up in that whirlwind of gender neutrality training in the upcoming years and decades of my blooming life, I’ll have to throw that beer back in Bob’s face.

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