Halloween harassment and victim-blaming

Posted at 2:04 PM Oct 27, 2009

By Andrea Grimes

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Do I think less of people who wear sexy-for-the-sake-of-sexy Halloween costumes because they show gross unoriginality and a false consciousness about sexual objectification and power? Yes. Do I think sexy Halloween costumes mean these same people deserve to be sexually harassed because they're somehow asking for it? Absolutely not. No woman deserves to be harassed. Period. End of story. No matter what she's wearing.

But don't tell that to a Massachusetts court, which has upheld a ruling allowing racy Halloween party photos of a woman who filed a harassment suit against her employer to be used in court. The woman's costume: a "provacative and seductive" see-through Empire State Building costume. (Sadly, there are no photos.)

The ruling says that Cognex, the company against which defendant Kimberly Dahms filed suit, has a right to show pictures of Dahms in "provocative or seductive" clothing to show whether or not she was "subjectively offended" by the harassing behavior. Let the victim-blaming begin!

I'm with SiouxsieLaw on this:

In any event, the court held that the evidence was proper -- not to determine whether Ms. Dahms was a "'loose' woman predisposed to welcome any advances" but to determine whether Ms. Dahms had been subjectively offended by the behavior. The distinction is completely lost upon Siouxsie. But so be it.

I would expand this logic as follows: if a slut gets sexually harassed, who cares, she's a fucking slut, right? Again, ladies, let me reiterate: you should strive to be sexy, but only if you are also powerless. If you think you have the right to be sexy on your own terms ... oh god, the thought is too terrible to entertain.

I'm glad our courts of law are determining whether or not laws have been broken based on whether or not a certain limited moral code says the victims deserved what they got. This reminds me, I need to get my Sexy Broken Justice System costume ready to roll. How do you turn a judge's wig into a merkin?