But the Jones case didn't just drain our collective attention span. It alerted us to just how much the law of sexual harassment had expanded over the past decade. We moved from a time when a boss asking a woman to get the coffee or meet him in the file closet was neither a cause nor a cause of action, to a time when one pass or one bad joke is enough for a lawsuit. Plaintiffs can go on fishing expeditions so extensive that consensual affairs are fair game and totally innocent bystanders can be subpoenaed to prove that they were promoted on merit and not because they slept with the boss. Many corporations are adopting protective policies designed to cleanse the workplace of any sex, in hopes of preventing the actionable kind.
Power is presumed to contaminate all workplace relationships.
That means someone in an inferior position is thought incapable of freely agreeing to one, and an executive who wants to get involved with an underling does so at his peril. Since work is where we spend most of our time and where many of us meet our spouses, you have to wonder whether all this regulation isn't threatening the propagation of the species. Other freedoms, like speech and association, were getting shortchanged in the rush to protect women from sexual harassment. Almost everyone was alarmed when one guy was fired for repeating a Seinfeld joke at the water cooler. Feminists did not realize how much the law had tilted in favor of the victims until they found themselves on the side of the accused.