Hostile environments

I spent a year getting out of debt by doing corporate training — lots of three-day weekends in hotel meeting rooms with our account managers talking about sexual harassment and not creating a hostile workplace environment.

If I were still working in that capacity, I would have to advise our managers not to hang this recent Pat Oliphant cartoon in their office. It’s exactly the sort of misogynist garbage that would get the company sued. And we would lose the lawsuit. And we would deserve to lose the lawsuit.

Creating a hostile workplace environment is stupid. It’s not about being “politically correct,” it’s about good business. Not only does creating such an environment expose a company to lawsuits, it restricts whole categories of employees from feeling free to contribute their experience and opinions — thus making the company dumber than it needs to be. It coarsens the atmosphere, lowering morale and leading to higher turnover, both of which lead to poorer service and increased training costs. And for every employee it offends or alienates, it does the same to two potential customers who will likely choose not to deal with a bunch of neanderthals whose parents seem to have failed to teach them common decency.

Yet this cartoon ran in The Washington Post and was syndicated, running in many other papers around the country, including the one where I work. The pages of all those newspapers thus became hostile environments for their readers — not just for every woman reading them, but also for every male reader who doesn’t share Oliphant’s bilious anxieties.

If you didn’t click on the above link, let me describe the cartoon. It’s a drawing of Hillary Clinton sobbing uncontrollably as she sits across the table from a rogues gallery of male menaces including Osama bin Laden, Ahmedinejad, Kim Jong Il and Pervez “It was Bhutto’s fault she got killed” Musharraf. They’re making comments about pant-suits and buying her flowers. The whimpering Clinton, referred to as “Madam President,” says “You guys are mean!” In the corner of the cartoon is a tiny Bill Clinton, saying “This is when PMS goes nuclear.”

So the cartoon isn’t about Hillary Clinton, it’s about women. All women. It’s about how all women are weak and emotional and unable to fend for themselves and unstable due to “PMS” and otherwise generally incapable of “wearing the pants.”

And The Washington Post and my paper and dozens of other papers were fine with that. If you’re not fine with that, it would be good to let the Post and those other papers know. If they hear from enough readers, they might think twice about running this trite nastiness in the future. (Or, at least, they might think once — since they don’t seem to have even started thinking yet.)

From where (and when) I sit at my paper, I can’t even see the offices where the decision to run this cartoon was made. My complaint was addressed with the explanation that the selection of Oliphant’s cartoon was a matter of “free expression.” And so it is. But that still doesn’t explain why, of all the things one might choose to freely express, one would choose to freely express this. I do admire the chutzpah it takes to claim that running such a cartoon is some kind of brave exercise in free speech. As though afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable were a newspaper’s job. As though speaking lies to the powerless was just as admirable as speaking truth to power.

Mithras put his hipwaders on to compile a whole series of Pat Oliphant’s creepily Freudian diatribes against Hillary Clinton as Everywoman. Feministe points out that Oliphant seems confused about human anatomy. Ampersand chimes in with a Tom Toles cartoon about Clinton that’s really more about Pat Oliphant and the men who like his perspective. And Echidne of the Snakes offers both a timely quote from Germaine Greer and, helpfully, the e-mail address of the ombudsman at The Washington Post: ombudsman@washpost.com.

One last thing needs to be said about the collection of Oliphant cartoons Mithras has assembled: They’re simply not funny. Not ha-ha funny. Not witty, wry, sardonic, amusing, thought-provoking, diverting, sarcastic, satiric, whimsical, playful, imaginitive, creative or otherwise in any way humorous. Funny isn’t the entirety of Pat Oliphant’s job as a political cartoonist, but it’s a big part of his job, and the guy ain’t funny.