By standing up to Rush Limbaugh’s slur, Sandra Fluke shows how sex positivity is recharging feminism.

By Emily Bazelon for Slate

Sandra Fluke has pointed out that Rush Limbaugh tried to silence her when he called her a slut and a prostitute last week. But the oldest, hoariest trick for shutting women up didn’t work this time. Bolstered by her experience as an activist and a pitch-perfect call of support from President Obama, Fluke soldiered on in her efforts to persuade Georgetown University to include contraception in its package of health care coverage. She’s 30, not 14, and in her sober and smart TV appearances, Fluke is doing more than most of us ever will to take the sting out of slut shaming. Her forceful presence is the reason for Limbaugh’s apology over the weekend, utterly lame and inadequate as it was. How can he possibly claim that he didn’t mean to attack Fluke personally after hammering away at her for three days, even crazily suggesting that women who use birth control should post sex tapes online “so we can all watch.” May the advertisers who are running from Limbaugh, today joined by AOL, stay far far away.

Reclaiming the word slut is also the aim of the SlutWalks, the protest movement that started last spring in Canada and spread to more than 70 cities worldwide. Taking angry inspiration from a Toronto police officer who said the best way for women to prevent being raped is to “avoid dressing like sluts,” the women joining in SlutWalks have marched in all manner of bras, bodices, and other scanty dress. They won both enthusiastic applause and ambivalence from the feminist blogosphere. SlutWalks, and the broader reclamation projection they and Fluke stand for, represent a cultural shift that puts women’s sexual agency front and center rather than modestly cloaking it. Could that change also be the key to reforming rape law for the modern era?

That’s the thesis of Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at DePaul University who is one of the first in the academy to digest the SlutWalk phenomenon. In a new article, Tuerkheimer argues that the “rise of sex-positivity,” as she calls it, is “the most significant feminist initiative in decades.” What’s distinctive about this reclamation is that women are insisting both on sex without rape, and on sexuality without judgment. And that insistence, Tuerkheimer points out, directly challenges traditional rape law.

In the protest movement of my own college days, Take Back the Night, women marched to make it safe to walk alone in the dark. The primary concern was stranger rape and physical safety. The SlutWalks conception is about acquaintance rape or date rape—the category of sexual assault that accounts for 90 percent of the whole. When women (or men) accuse people they know of rape, it’s far trickier for police and prosecutors to address, because the legality of the encounter turns on consent rather than force. Traditionally, rape law focuses on the latter. It sounds retrograde, I know, but as Tuerkheimer reminds us, in a majority of states, “a woman’s non-consent alone is thus insufficient to establish rape.” This makes it very hard to win convictions in the he said/she said realm of date rape. And it also means that a judge or jury can deem a woman who is totally passive—because she is asleep or drugged, for example—to not have been raped, even if she said she was.

Rape law also still treats certain kinds of sexual conduct as unacceptable for women, by exempting it from the rule that places a woman’s sexual history outside the bounds of evidence that can be admitted at a rape trial. Rape shield laws prevent defendants accused of sexual assault from putting a woman’s entire past on trial to discredit her. But courts still allow in this evidence if the judge thinks it shows a pattern of behavior that’s in some way distinctive. In many cases, it’s deviance that’s deemed to make a woman’s history distinctive, allowing the court to give the jury the chance to conclude that a particular’s woman’s claim of rape is less legitimate. “Women whose pasts involve consensual sex of a disapproved kind are presumed to be unrapeable,” Tuerkheimer writes. “Most vexing are acts of prostitution, group sex, and sadomasochism.”

The women of SlutWalks, of course, reject all of this. They think women, not old-fashioned judgments rendered by the state, should define what sex they want and what sex they outlaw. In this feminist roar Tuerkheimer sees a way to shift the rape paradigm once and for all. She wants judges to stop treating certain women as not rapeable based on the kind of sex they’ve consented to in the past. And she wants a new crime of acquaintance rape that topples the rule that it’s only rape, legally speaking, if there’s force involved. On this front, there’s progress in the new definition for collecting local rape statistics announced by the Department of Justice in January. DoJ now defines rape as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus,” that occurs “without the consent of the victim.”

Tuerkheimer sees the wider feminist rebellion against slut shaming as crucial to forcing more changes along these lines from courts and legislators. Feminist consciousness, she says, could “enable a legal shift that would not otherwise be possible.” I’m not in the habit of imagining that feminists have such power, but in this season of uproar over Limbaugh, why not? Tuerkheimer urges the SlutWalkers to start talking to the law professors and lawyers, and vice versa. It takes a law professor to say that, of course, but maybe Tuerkheimer has pointed out a virtue of the muscular feminism that proudly rejects slut shaming that feminists themselves have so far missed.

Sandra Fluke plays a role here, too. By making the case that women need insurance coverage that includes birth control—to protect their health in some cases, and in others, yes, simply to have sex—she is reminding us that of course this is part of who we are. We don’t have to modestly avert our eyes from that reality or keep quiet about it, either. That’s what President Obama understood when he told Fluke her parents should be proud of her. Feminists have plenty to be proud of Fluke for, too. For standing up to Limbaugh, for sure, but also for helping to make the revolt against slut shaming as mainstream as she is.

Women’s Media Center’s exclusive:

The author, professor emerita of Penn State University, describes the culture that produced the recent scandal—and suggests a path to a needed focus on the victims of such abuse.

This book and its empathetic engagement will be a treasure to anyone working with victims of sexual abuse. And if we want to truly understand the failure in the Penn State scandal, we will look closely to its victims.

I was once summoned to my dean’s office to justify comments I made in a radio interview upon publication of my book Prostitution of Sexuality (1995). I had said that one in ten women in the United States is raped, and that figure—which has since doubled—was an undercount because only 10 percent of rapes are reported. The interview angered a Penn State alumni, who demanded that the university president take action against me. In all seriousness, the president forwarded the complaint to my dean, who expected me to explain myself. My answer didn’t satisfy apparently so I was called in once again. This time I told the administration that the call was likely coming from a sexual predator, and I walked out of the dean’s office.
Penn State caters to an alumni whose donations are a major source of income, and whose presence is a major segment of the crowd that fills the 100,000-plus capacity football stadium every home game. In such an atmosphere, coach Joe Paterno, as the lead draw for alumni contributions, was beyond question. So, for a time, was Rene Portland, the Penn State women’s basketball coach whose explicit “No Lesbians” team policy and attendant sexual harassment wreaked havoc on many young women’s lives and college careers. When Penn State, under pressure from feminist and lesbian/gay rights groups, mandated sexual harassment training for all coaches in the 1990s, Paterno and Portland, with the arrogance of the untouchable, showed up for only the last 15 minutes of the program.

More:

Occupy Wall Street and Slut Walk NYC

I’m a feminist because I believe in equality based on gender.
I’m a feminist because I believe that no one has the right to touch you without your consent.
I’m a feminist because I believe that all women should have free and unfettered access to reproductive health care and abortion services.
I’m a feminist because I believe women deserve equal pay for equal work.
I’m a feminist because I believe that women should be able to wear what they want to wear without fear of being assaulted or harassed in the street.
I’m a feminist because I believe that when a woman is sexually harassed or sexually assaulted, we should be asking what the perpetrator was doing or wearing so we can catch him, not what the woman was doing or wearing, so we can blame her for inviting it.
I’m a sex-positive feminist because I believe that sex and sexuality is not the problem, lack of consent is the problem. Clothing is not consent. Consent is consent. The only person responsible for a rape, or for sexual harassment, is the rapist or the sexual harasser.

I’m a feminist because I have faith that once we individually and collectively harness our feminine energy sufficient to offset the pure masculine ethos of the unregulated corporate person, with its unlimited billionaire underwritten speech—we will get back to a relatively lush, safe and sane America where we all share in the beauty of the commons and we all share the costs of maintaining our general welfare.

My name is Jack Tuckner; I’m the co-founder of Tuckner Sipser, a women’s rights/employee rights law firm in NYC, and I want to talk about two significant and related protest gatherings that occurred simultaneously in NYC on October 1, One was SlutWalk NYC, and the other was Occupy Wall Street, but they’re both really protesting the same pathologies afflicting our body politic.

The “Slut Walk” started in Toronto when a cop told a group of female university students to “not dress like sluts in order to avoid being victimized.” This victim-blaming mentality catalyzed a long overdue movement, as sexual violence and sexual harassment are still widespread in our culture and have been for far too long.

In our Rape culture, the rapist/harasser/assaulter fails to control his own impulse to molest, violate, humiliate, harass and/or abuse a female subordinate, for example, or a woman walking down the street, or date who is raped, because he feels little to no empathy, respect or equality between himself and his target object; like Wall Street’s Ayn Randian view of living in perfect selfishness, the rapist is a sociopath, he seeks only his own gratification, and sees his victim as an object, as other, as less than, so her pain, fear, shame, or death is of no consequence to him.

Now take Wall Street culture, part and parcel of Rape culture, only on the Street, the faceless rape “victim” is the poor, the weak, the young, the old, the sick, the middle class; the female, almost all us, really—99% of us, in fact.

In Rape culture, the male cannot or will not reign in his sexual and/or gender- conflicted impulses, so he acts them out on each woman who comes within his destructive path, and in the Wall Street (rape) culture, the boys continue to rape, pillage and plunder Main Street while its enablers victim-blame teachers, cops, fire fighters, factory workers, students, Medicare recipients, immigrants, the EPA; seniors and the unemployed whose benefits are running out–these are the victims that Wall Street blames–the greedy, needy $40,000 per year worker trying to pay her bills, never mind the 2 billion dollar per year hedge fund manager who pays way less percentage of his “earnings” into the common coffer than the rest of us poor folk.

Rape culture and Wall Street culture are symptoms of Male Privilege run amok. No Yin, All Yang. All brain and balls; no heart and no soul.

As women’s rights advocates, we support Occupy Wall Street, as well as drastic changes to our criminal crony corporate culture. Women should not have to face deep cuts to the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program to cut down on low infant birth weights, so that another American company can join the other 18,000 companies incorporated in the same building in the Cayman islands to avoid paying federal taxes to help our country pay its bills. Is that patriotic?

And kids shouldn’t be kicked out of Head Start programs, and young people shouldn’t have to give up their Pell Grants and therefore college, so that the million dollar an hour hedge fund manager who wrecked the economy on purpose can continue to pay a 15% marginal tax rate on his “capital gains” cause he skims other people’s money for a living. And we can’t let these hoods in Congress get away with vilifying, scamming, investigating and destroying Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care provider, just because they take care of our American girls and women. Shame on those bastards.

Social, economic and gender injustice affects and poisons everything. Look at this bleak landscape we’re living in—and the reason is simple—the billionaires and giant transnational corporations increasingly own and control our commons, and they own the elected leaders through the use of 37,000 highly paid lobbyists in Washington, yet they steadfastly refuse to join us in the fight to keep the jobs in America, to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure by investing in this country they profess to love. Wall Streeters and the politicians they own are stingy, greedy, selfish, small-minded and mean-spirited, and they’re dumb too, as they apparently aspire to living filthy rich in a poor country.

As corporations are now “persons” under the Supreme Court’s grotesque 2010 ruling, yet we still can’t get the Equal Rights Amendment for women passed into law, let’s never forget that first and foremost, we must vigilantly strive to raise the status of women while lowering the status of corporations, if economic, social and gender justice is our goal.

Now that the case against D.S.K. seems to be falling apart, many in the media are pondering what the future holds for women’s rights in France. As an American living in Paris, I was curious to get to get the perspective of French women on this. In speaking with French friends and colleagues, every woman has a personal story about hostile work environments and harassment. It’s important to note, however, that not all companies where women work are hostile. As a young woman in France, you’re not guaranteed to come across harassment in every workplace; but, you are almost certain to experience it at some point in your career.

The most common form of harassment is described as “flirtation” here. Male bosses and colleagues will compliment women on their bodies, nag them for dates, etc. In general, men only say “positive” or complimentary things about women’s bodies at work. As one French consultant put it,

Even powerful women in France being interviewed about important policy matters are introduced as ‘the beautiful’ or ‘the charming’ . . . Unless you’re not pretty, then you don’t get anything.

The unwritten rule is women should be flattered and thankful for the attention. Of course, if your boss is harassing you for dates and telling you how great you look in those pants, feeling grateful probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. This type of unwanted flirtation at work is irritating, belittling, and can have long-term repercussions. In short, it’s harassment.

Women here generally feel like they’re under pressure to put it up with this kind of harassment. If they don’t, they’ll be ridiculed and stigmatized for “making a big deal” of it, and the harassing behavior will continue. What does this look like in practice? It can be a challenge for women to get respect. And when the culture of a company is permissive, it can lead to unacceptable and surprisingly adolescent behavior. For example, at one company men in the office would turn up the air-conditioning when an attractive woman wore a light blouse, in hopes they’d be better able to see her nipples. The woman who related this story, said she had complained about similar incidents in the past at that company and was repeatedly brushed off. So in this case, she felt there was nothing for her to do… except to turn off the air-conditioning in the future. Protests are, for the most part, quiet and understated. (Cf. Marche des salopes (“Slut Walk”)).

In recent months though, protests are getting louder. Where it was formally considered inappropriate or unwise for women to speak up, there is now mounting evidence of women challenging harassment and assault. One anti-harassment organization—Association Europeénne Contre les Violence Faites aux Femmes au Travail—reported a 600% increase in sexual harassment complaints after D.S.K.’s arrest in New York was made public. Women are making complaints against other high-profile men, including French government minister Georges Tron. And, writer Tristane Banon announced, through her attorney, her intent to file a complaint against D.S.K. in France for attempted rape. When she first made a public statement in 2007 about the incident, D.S.K.’s name was bleeped out. Times have changed.

D.S.K.’s arrest is not the only catalyst for change, just the most sensational one. Globalization and multi-national corporations are having an impact on the work culture of France. Sexual harassment training is a normal for French companies that do business with the United States. Moreover, the younger generation of French women is less tolerant of casual misogynism and more willing to stand up for their rights. As these women enter and gain prominence in the workforce, they are bringing in higher expectations and changing the culture.

(Sonya Ziaja, is an American attorney living in Paris, France. She writes regularly for LegalMatch’s Law Blog and Shark. Laser. Blawg.)

By TOM LLAMAS
For NBC New York

It’s not a crime to be beautiful or dress well, but if you ask 33-year-old Debrahlee Lorenzana they both can cost you your job.

“They pulled me aside and said I could not wear pencil skirts, turtlenecks, I cannot wear business suits that were fitted. Basically they said it drew too much attention,” says Lorenzana.

The single mom used to work for Citibank as a business banker at their branch inside the Chrysler building. She says her outfits for work were deemed “too distracting” by her male managers. They allegedly pointed to her rear and said her pants were too tight.

“Very uncomfortable,” is how Lorenzana describes those confrontations.

She says when she complained to human resources, her managers retaliated. According to her lawsuit Citibank gave her targets she could not meet because she was not properly trained. Citibank cited her work performance as a reason for termination. Left without a job Lorenzana struggled to pay the bills

“It was very hard,” says Lorenzana who fought back tears when describing a recent Christmas she celebrated with her son with no presents.

Her lawyer Jack Tuckner says at its base this case is about gender discrimination.

“It was about her being too good looking for us to bother to contain ourselves. So that’s shirt’s gotta go,” says Tuckner hypothesizing what Lorenzana’s managers thought about her clothes. “Why should we have to deal with what a babe you are? Fix it.”

In a prepared statement Citibank tells NBCNewYork:

“We believe this lawsuit is without merit and we will defend against it vigorously. We do not condone or tolerate discrimination within our business for any reason.”

Citibank also points out that all workers who face employees are given dress guidelines.

When Lorenzana was hired she signed a contract which prevents her from directly suing Citibank. So an arbitration hearin will be held. It could be months if not years before a decision is made. She is seeking future earnings, back pay, and damages for mental and emotional distress.

Tuckner says if the roles were reversed it would be very difficult to see a man being asked to changed his wardrobe for dressing and looking well in his opinion.

“Maybe they were uncomfortable with her because they didn’t feel like they could not hit on her over long periods of time. So instead they wanted her to wear a tent or a Burka,” says Tuckner.

(MYFOX NEW YORK STAFF REPORT)

Debbie Lorenzana says she lost her job at a Citibank because the men who worked there couldn’t handle her hot body.

Lorenzana, 33, is a single mom who says she has a long track record of high marks and awards from the companies where she has worked. She says her bosses at a Citibank branch in at the Chrysler Building in Manhattan told her that they couldn’t concentrate because she is too sexy.

Lorenzana says she was told she wasn’t allowed to wear turtlenecks, pencil skirts, or fitted business suits. She requested a transfer and got it, but was then fired.

Fox 5 News has contacted Citibank for a response, but as of Wednesday evening had not heard back.

The Village Voice showcased her plight with a cover story in its latest issue.

Jeff Pegues reports for Eyewitness News (ABC):

NEW YORK (WABC) — Debrahlee Lorenzana, 33, says she’s just a regular woman. But at 5’6″ and 125 pounds she definitely has movie star looks and that’s what she says got her fired from a $70,000 a year job at Citibank.

“In their exact words? Too distracting,” Lorenzana said.

Those are the words she says her bosses used to describe her. She claims that numerous times over a year long period two years ago her superiors at a Citibank Branch in the Chrysler Building would regularly demean her and discriminate against her.

She alleges the focus wasn’t on her job but on what she was wearing.

“Turtlenecks and pencil skirts, too distracting? Maybe she should wear a burqua?” Lorenzana wondered.
Lorenzana’s attorney says it’s pretty obvious what the problem was. And that’s why they’ve filed a lawsuit.

“They didn’t want to have to see a body like this,” attorney Jack Tuckner said.

But Citibank officials have responded with this statement: “We believe this lawsuit is without merit. Citi is committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and providing a respectful environment in the workplace.”

The company acknowledges that they encourage employees to dress a certain way. But Lorenzana says she dressed like other Citibank employees.

“They just said my body shape and theirs was different and mine was too distracting,” Lorenzana said.

Everything about Debrahlee Lorenzana is hot. Even her name sizzles. At five-foot-six and 125 pounds, with soft eyes and flawless bronze skin, she is J.Lo curves meets Jessica Simpson rack meets Audrey Hepburn elegance—a head-turning beauty.

Debrahlee Lorenzana. Photo by Saswat Pattanayak || WomensRightsNY.com

In many ways, the story of her life has been about getting attention from men—both the wanted and the unwanted kind. But when she got fired last summer from her job as a banker at a Citibank branch in Midtown—her bosses cited her work performance—she got even hotter. She sued Citigroup, claiming that she was fired solely because her bosses thought she was too hot.

This is the way Debbie Lorenzana tells it: Her bosses told her they couldn’t concentrate on their work because her appearance was too distracting. They ordered her to stop wearing turtlenecks. She was also forbidden to wear pencil skirts, three-inch heels, or fitted business suits. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, pointed out female colleagues whose clothing was far more revealing than hers: “They said their body shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention,” she says.

As Lorenzana’s lawsuit puts it, her bosses told her that “as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly ‘too distracting’ for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear.”

“Men are kind of drawn to her,” says Tanisha Ritter, a friend and former colleague who also works as a banker and praises Lorenzana’s work habits. “I’ve seen men turn into complete idiots around her. But it’s not her fault that they act this way, and it shouldn’t be her problem.”
Because Citibank made Lorenzana sign a mandatory-arbitration clause as a condition of her employment, the case will never end up before a jury or judge. An arbitrator will decide. Citibank officials won’t comment on the suit.

Her attorney, Jack Tuckner, who calls himself a “sex-positive” women’s-rights lawyer, is the first one to say his client is a babe. But so what? For him, it all boils down to self-control. “It’s like saying,” Tuckner argues, “that we can’t think anymore ’cause our penises are standing up—and we cannot think about you except in a sexual manner—and we can’t look at you without wanting to have sexual intercourse with you. And it’s up to you, gorgeous woman, to lessen your appeal so that we can focus!”

This isn’t your typical sexual-harassment lawsuit, if there is such a thing. For one thing, such suits often claim that women are coerced into looking more sexy or are subjected to being pawed. Lorenzana claims that her bosses basically told her she was just too attractive. And when she raised hell and refused to do anything about it—as if there was anything she really could do about it—she lost her job.

Debbie Lorenzana—whose mother is Puerto Rican and father is Italian—came to New York from Puerto Rico 12 years ago. She was 21 and pregnant, and had a degree as an emergency medical technician from a technical college in Manatí, a small city on the northern coast. The father, she says, didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the baby. So she moved back to the States, where she had lived in her mid-teens (pinballing between relatives’ houses and group homes), and took care of her elderly grandparents in Connecticut. After her son was born, she moved to Queens to stay with a friend. Then she got her first job in finance: working as a sales representative at the Municipal Credit Union, in 2002. She moved to Jersey City and worked long hours. She was successful.

In April 2003, the Municipal Credit Union named her its sales rep of the month. On the other hand, she says, a manager once called her into his office to ask her opinion of a photograph. The picture he called up on his computer was of his penis. She complained about the incident. In her June 2003 resignation letter—written just two months after she was honored as a top employee—she wrote, “Due to the complaint I made regarding sexual harassment, my work environment has become hostile, painful, and unbearable.”

She moved on to other jobs in the financial-services industry. After a stint selling health insurance to immigrants at Metropolitan Hospital in Queens, the hospital cited her in November 2003 for “providing world-class customer service” and for being the number one enroller in the office.
In August 2006, the district managers at Bank of America gave her a Customer Higher Standards Award on diploma paper, on which they wrote: “Debrahlee: You deserve to be recognized for going above and beyond.”

She says she loved to work, and eventually was earning close to $70,000 a year. “My ex-boyfriend says it’s my Spic pride,” she says. “As long as I have two hands and two legs, and can still walk, I will always work, so my son will have a roof over his head and food.”

And she will be well-dressed. Lorenzana is, by her own admission, a shopaholic. She shops for her work clothes at Zara, but when she has money, she says, she spends it on designer clothes. She has five closets full of Burberry, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Roberto Cavalli. In her son’s closet, there’s a row of tiny Lacoste, Dolce & Gabbana, and Ralph Lauren T-shirts. She says her love of fine clothes is a result of her growing up poor—she recalls running a high school marathon barefoot because she couldn’t afford sneakers.

Lorenzana left the workplace to get married, but that relationship went sour after a brief time, and in September 2008, she was ready to go back to work. It was the height of the Wall Street crisis, but she lucked out. She got an interview with Citibank for a job at its recently opened branch in the Chrysler Building.

At the interview, she recalls, she wore a black Armani wrap dress and simple Christian Louboutin pumps. (The dress was form-fitting and tight in the bust: She says one size up would have been too big for her.) She remembers that the branch manager, Craig Fisher, was polite, asking her about strategies for acquiring new business and whether she had other job offers. Since she already had an offer from Washington Mutual, Fisher proposed a salary of $70,000 with three weeks’ vacation, she says. Her job title was business banker, providing services to small businesses. There were three business bankers at the Chrysler Building branch; Lorenzana was the only woman.

When she started the job, she says, a colleague told her that the branch was “pretty much known for hiring pretty girls,” and that she knew Lorenzana was going to be hired from the moment she came in for her interview. “So here I am,” Lorenzana recalls, “thinking I got hired because of my capabilities, and now you’re telling me it’s because of my physical appearance? Oh, great.”

However, she liked the job, the pay, and the prospects for advancement. For the first two months, she says, she was hardly in the office—she was either out drumming up business or attending training sessions. But once she started spending more time in the office, things began to go downhill.
Interviews and her lawsuit, which was filed in November 2009, tell her story: Fisher and another manager, Peter Claibourne, started making offhanded comments about her appearance, she says. She was told not to wear fitted business suits. She should wear makeup because she looked sickly without it. (She had purposefully stopped wearing makeup in hopes of attracting less attention.) Once, she recalls, she came in to work without having blow-dried her hair straight—it is naturally curly—and Fisher told a female colleague to pass on a message that she shouldn’t come into work without straightening it.

Other problems also popped up. In order to provide services to a client, a banker needs to become certified to do things like open a checking account or take a loan application. Lorenzana says Fisher didn’t send her to enough of the required training sessions, which meant she wasn’t authorized to do something as simple as order a debit card for a client and was forced to rely on her colleagues for favors. “When I complained,” Lorenzana says, “Craig would say, ‘Just go ahead and bring in new business.’ So I went out every day and looked for business.” But then, she says, when clients would come into the branch asking for her—or would fax papers to the branch with her name on them—Fisher would give those hard-won accounts to male colleagues.
In late 2008, she recalls, the two managers called her into Fisher’s office. She remembers that she was wearing a red camisole, beige pants, and a navy suit jacket. This is how she tells it: “They said, ‘Deb, we need to talk to you about your work attire. . . . Your pants are too tight.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, my pants are not too tight! If you want to talk about inappropriate clothes, go downstairs and look at some of the tellers!’ ”

Citibank does have a dress-code policy, which says clothing must not be provocative, but does not go into specifics, and managers have wide discretion. But Lorenzana points out that, unlike her, some of the tellers dressed in miniskirts and low-cut blouses. “And when they bend down,” Lorenzana says, “anyone can see what God gave them!”

Then the managers gave her a list of clothing items she would not be allowed to wear: turtlenecks, pencil skirts, and fitted suits. And three-inch heels. “As a result of her tall stature, coupled with her curvaceous figure,” her suit says, Lorenzana was told “she should not wear classic high-heeled business shoes, as this purportedly drew attention to her body in a manner that was upsetting to her easily distracted male managers.”
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Lorenzana recalls. “I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ I was like, ‘Too distracting? For who? For you? My clients don’t seem to have any problem.’ ”

The managers instructed her to wear looser clothing. Lorenzana refused. “I don’t have the money to buy a new wardrobe,” she says, referring to her work outfits. “I shop where everyone else shops—at Zara!” Lorenzana recalls leaving the meeting feeling humiliated. Other female employees “were able to wear such clothing because they were short, overweight, and they didn’t draw much attention,” she later wrote in a letter describing the meeting to Human Resources, “but since I was five-foot-six, 125 pounds, with a figure, it wasn’t ‘appropriate.’ ” She was also furious. “Are you saying that just because I look this way genetically, that this should be a curse for me?”

That same afternoon, she says, she called Human Resources. “I felt it was inappropriate for two male managers to pull me aside like that,” she says. “I felt they were attacking me. In most places, if you are going to address a woman about anything that has to do with her personal appearance, you want to address it with a female employee there.”

In the weeks that followed, Lorenzana says she called HR up to three or four times a day. An e-mail, she says, finally brought action: A human resources manager named Morgan Putman came to the branch in January and interviewed employees. Lorenzana says she had taken two pictures of female colleagues to show HR officials. One was of a woman wearing a grayish—and very short—silk dress. The other was of a woman wearing leather boots with three-inch spike heels. “Some tellers would wear their pants so tight, it was like they had a permanent wedgie,” says Lorenzana. “It was totally inappropriate.”

After the HR visit, she says, things got markedly worse. Lorenzana says her bosses made incessant comments about her clothes. She tried to dress down in ways that didn’t involve clothes—pulling her hair back, coming to work some days without makeup, but it didn’t make a difference. “I could have worn a paper bag, and it would not have mattered,” she says. “If it wasn’t my shirt, it was my pants. If it wasn’t my pants, it was my shoes. They picked on me every single day.” Still, she continued to dress up for work—her brand of femininity is also cultural. “Where I’m from,” she says, switching into Spanish to explain it, “women dress up—like put on makeup and do their nails—to go to the supermarket. And I’m not talking trashy, you know, like in the Heights. I was raised very Latin, you know? We’re feminine. A woman in Puerto Rico takes care of herself. The Puerto Rican women here put down our flag.”

According to court documents and her letters to HR, Lorenzana continued to ask for more training sessions, but didn’t get them. Meanwhile, clients whose business she had drummed up were being handed off to her colleagues. An April 2009 quarterly report showed that she was behind the other business bankers in monthly sales credits. On June 24, she received a letter saying that she was being put on final notice, that she was bringing in too little business. But there was something strange about the letter, which was signed by Craig Fisher, and which put her on probation for six months. The letter said she had come in late on June 6 and 7. This struck her as odd. She looked at the dates. They were a Saturday and a Sunday—the branch was closed on those days. In addition to raising the issue of her bosses’ unfairly giving her business to colleagues, she pointed out those incorrect dates to Human Resources.

One day in late spring 2009, Lorenzana says, Craig Fisher told her to move some files into storage in the basement from the second floor. The previous day, she recalled, a male colleague had been given the same instructions, and because there were a lot of heavy files, he came into work in flip-flops and jeans. So she brought in flip-flops. But Fisher told her that she had to take off the flip-flops and wear high heels while moving the heavy, paper-filled boxes, her suit alleges.

The high-heels incident infuriated her, she says. She was getting worn down. On June 25, at 3:30 p.m., she sent a long-winded e-mail to two regional vice presidents whom she had never met, bypassing Morgan Putman at Human Resources. It was the kind of e-mail that could have used a proofreader, one a lawyer might advise a client not to send without some serious editing. (English is not her first language.) But she summed up her experiences with Fisher and Claibourne well and talked about “the cruelty of a hostile work environment,” where she was harassed “on a daily basis.” She ended by writing that “Mr. Fisher stated he is good friends with lots of people in the organization giving me . . . reason to believe that nothing will happen to correct the situation going on at branch 357. I have requested for the second time a transfer. . . . I came to Citibank with high expectations. Please I just want to work in a fair work environment where everyone is equal. Thank you in advance for your attention in this matter.”

The VPs never responded in writing, but she sent follow-up e-mails in which she continued to report incidents at work. Less than a month after her June 25 e-mail, she was transferred to a Citibank branch at Rockefeller Center. The way she looked or dressed didn’t draw any comments there, she says, but that branch didn’t need another business banker. In mid-July, she e-mailed Morgan Putman, thanking her for the transfer, but pointing out that she was working as a telemarketer, which wasn’t her job title.

In August, her manager at the Rockefeller Center branch—a woman—sat her down and fired her. The female manager mentioned the problems related to her clothing at the previous branch. She did not mention work performance, Lorenzana says. The manager said she was sorry, but Lorenzana wasn’t fit for the culture of Citibank.

“It’s so tiring,” Lorenzana tells the Voice. “My entire life, I’ve been dealing with this. ‘Cause people say, ‘Oh, you got a job because you look that way.’ So you gotta work four times harder to prove you are capable. To prove you didn’t get this because of the way you look. First, I’m a woman, then I’m an immigrant, and I have my accent. At Citibank, when they were picking on me for every little thing, I couldn’t take it anymore!”
After she was fired, she became depressed and began panicking about how she would afford her car payments and rent, and she applied for unemployment. Last Christmas, she and her son skipped gift-giving.

Meanwhile, she continues to receive unwanted attention. She says she gets hit on constantly and walks on the street as if she were wearing body armor: forward and straight, avoiding everyone’s gaze. “If being less good-looking,” she says, “means being happy and finding love and not being sexually harassed and having a job where no one bothers you and no one questions you because of your looks, then, definitely, I’d want that. I think of that every day.”

In preparation for the lawsuit, lawyer Jack Tuckner had a professional photographer shoot her in various work outfits in his office near Wall Street. There’s nothing wrong with the clothes—they’re proper business attire. And there’s nothing wrong with Lorenzana, who looks really, really good in them.
Obviously, that shouldn’t have anything to do with how she’s judged in the workplace. But things may not be so clear when the case goes into arbitration. The practice of making employees, as a condition of employment, opt out of their right to sue the company is a common corporate strategy. Under the city’s Human Rights Law, she has to prove that “it’s more likely than not” that Citibank created a discriminatory and hostile work environment based on gender. She must demonstrate that she was treated differently based on her sartorial choices as a female and that she was fired in close proximity to her complaints of being treated differently. Citibank also has a burden of proof: that it specifically did not create a hostile work environment based on her sex and that it fired her for legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons.

Lorenzana can rely on her testimony, her letters to HR, and the testimony of witnesses. Citibank can point to its disciplinary action—the final notice letter—but the letter punishes her for being late on days the bank wasn’t even open. (That’s the only disciplinary paper trail the Voice is aware of in this case.)
Lorenzana could prevail on either or both of these issues: a hostile work environment or retaliation. Tuckner says that in his experience with gender-discrimination cases, juries tend to be more sympathetic than arbitrators, if only because the typical arbitrator is a middle-aged man. There’s always the possibility that he’ll be too distracted by Lorenzana to focus on the evidence.

The US National Committee for UNIFEM and the National Council for Research on Women Join Forces on a National Conference to Promote Efforts Aimed at Ending Violence against Women. The conference is a collaborative initiative between two preeminent organizations working towards ending this global pandemic.

The US National Committee for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM USNC), and the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) have announced plans for a joint-effort to raise awareness about violence against women and girls as well as the latest thinking and strategies on how to confront it. Together the two organizations will produce a national conference, Strategic Imperatives for Ending Violence Against Women: Creating Linkages to Education, Economic Security, and Health, hosted by The Women and Gender Studies Program at Hunter College, CUNY (The City University of New York) in New York City, to take place June 11-12, 2010.

The conference will gather experts and advocates connecting and strategizing to overcome violence against women. By convening leaders from business, academia, philanthropy, advocacy, nonprofit and policy communities, the partners will offer an environment where participants can create action plans while gaining a better understanding of both UNIFEM’s work and the NCRW network’s groundbreaking research. A variety of experts will explore strategies to reduce gender-based violence and their intersections with social investments.

“The most compelling means of demonstrating the immediacy of ending violence against women are the soaring recent statistics on this issue. When 70% of women worldwide are affected by gender-based violence, we must take action.” said Carol Poteat-Buchanan, President of the US National Committee for UNIFEM. “Our upcoming national conference will create a forum for ideas and action plans to enhance our work to end violence against women.”

“We need to look at the myriad circumstances that fuel violence and cultures of violence, including political and economic insecurity, inadequate education, and social inequality,” said Linda Basch, President of the National Council for Research on Women. “In this conference, we want to identify and develop solutions that address these challenges.”

The conference is open to the public. More information as well as online registration can be found later this month on the US National Committee for UNIFEM’s website.

About the partners:

The US National Committee for UNIFEM (UNIFEM USNC) is one of 18 national committees that support the mission of UNIFEM. Chartered in 1983, the US National Committee expands support and raises funds within the United States for UNIFEM. Through the help of the Board of Directors, Advisory Council, local chapters and members, the UNIFEM USNC proudly supports UNIFEM projects in over 100 countries around the globe. Local chapters promote advocacy and education through planned events focused on gaining a broader understanding of issues facing women on a global scale, providing advocacy in the US for issues facing women, and raising funds to support UNIFEM and USNC.

The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) provides financial and technical assistance to innovative programs and strategies to foster women’s empowerment and gender equality. Placing the advancement of women’s human rights at the center of all of its efforts, UNIFEM focuses its activities in four strategic areas: (1) reducing feminized poverty, (2) ending violence against women, (3) reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS among women and girls, and (4) achieving gender equality in democratic governance in times of peace as well as war.

The National Council for Research on Women (NCRW) is a network of 120 leading research, policy, and advocacy centers committed to improving the lives of women and girls. Harnessing the power of more than 2,000 experts in the United States and among its international affiliates, NCRW provides the latest research and information to stimulate fully informed debates, effective policies and inclusive practices. With a Corporate Circle of major companies and a Presidents Circle of leaders in higher education, the Council works in partnership with business, academic, non-profit and philanthropic organizations, to generate transformative change, both nationally and globally.

By DORCHEN LEIDHOLDT and JANE MANNING

NEW YORKERS have heard a stream of grave accusations this week that our governor tried to obstruct a domestic assault case against his aide David Johnson. But one element of this story has received less attention than it deserves: After Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend called 911 and reported that he had ripped off her clothes, thrown her against a dresser and choked her, Mr. Johnson was not even arrested.

In this, Mr. Johnson did not receive preferential treatment; the police response would likely have been the same for any defendant, whether he worked for the governor or not. The police wrote up the incident as “harassment in the second degree,” which is not even a misdemeanor but a violation, a trivial charge comparable to disorderly conduct. Incredibly, in New York, choking by compressing someone’s neck is not considered assault unless there is evidence that the victim suffered physical injury.

Advocates for battered women have been working for years to change this. Cutting off someone’s air supply is an agonizing, terrifying and life-threatening form of abuse, and New York needs a statute that makes it a crime to choke someone whether physical injury is evident or not.

Choking is often more dangerous than punching, shoving and other kinds of abuse. If an attacker applies 11 pounds of pressure for just 10 seconds, the victim can be rendered unconscious. With greater pressure, death can occur within minutes. And even after the attacker lets up, a victim can collapse and die hours or even days later because of underlying damage to the neck, or to the brain due to lack of oxygen. Ten percent of violent deaths in the United States are strangulations.
And yet choking very often leaves few or no visible signs. In a study of 100 cases of strangulation, the San Diego District Attorney’s office found that in 62 of them, police officers reported no visible injuries, and in 22 others, signs like redness or scratch marks on the neck were too minor to photograph. The study also found that when a victim’s injuries were not visible or consisted of faint redness, the police treated the attacks as trivial.

About half the states in the country have laws specifically addressing choking. But in states that have not enacted such laws, including New York, batterers have an incentive to choose choking and suffocation over other forms of attack. They often escape criminal charges and, perhaps emboldened by their impunity, choke their victims again. A 2008 study of 310 homicides in 11 American cities, published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine, found that 43 percent of women who were murdered by intimate partners had experienced at least one episode of choking before their killing.

This tragic statistic, at least, contains a kernel of hope: If we can change our criminal justice system to take choking seriously, we may be able to head off fatal attacks.
On Wednesday, State Senator Eric Schneiderman introduced legislation that would criminalize intentional choking and suffocation in our state. Under this law, choking someone into unconsciousness would be a violent felony. Abusers who terrorize their victims through choking or suffocation without causing unconsciousness or physical injury would face a lower-level felony charge.

New Yorkers looking for some good to come of the latest disgrace in our state capital can find it in Senator Schneiderman’s bill. If enacted, it would ensure that when a victim of choking calls 911, the police can arrest the attacker on serious charges befitting a vicious and dangerous crime.

Dorchen Leidholdt is the director of Sanctuary for Families’ Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services. Jane Manning is the president of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women.