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Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
Sexual harassment oftentimes is the result of the direct sexual objectification of a woman in order to establish a power imbalance between the harasser and person harassed. Sexual harassment is seen as an issue that affects women as a whole, but the intersection of race and gender is not often associated with sexual harassment cases. This essentially makes the event unique since both dimensions (gender and race) are utilized to make the discrimination more severe. People have multiple identities that can be discriminated against. In terms of race, women of color are commonly discriminated against on a daily basis. But in most laws, this intersection does not completely define this form of discrimination and little action is made to do so, seeing as protection of persons cases usually utilize a single characteristic as a basis for discrimination (either gender or race, not both. If a person is not punished for the full extent of their crime, this openly allows for the person who harasses to essentially get away with half of the crime. Ultimately, they will receive only half of the punishment the person harassed thinks they deserve in terms of the law. This is if the people harassed decide to report their harassment, seeing as many of all sexual harassment cases are not reported due to the women harassed believing there is little to no benefit for reporting. Of these people who report, they are mainly White, middle-class women that report and receive attention to the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. Women of higher income tend to face less harsh backlash from their compared to those with a higher socioeconomic status. In fact, two-thirds of people that do report harassment end up being retaliated against or losing their job after reporting. Black women tend to experience more retaliation than to lose their job. Although there are protections in place for workers, the limits to the law are more in favor of the workplace than it is the workers.

The Faragher/Ellerth defense is commonly used in order to minimize the amount of claims workers have for a hostile work environment. This limits the amount of liability an employer has due to the responsibility of reporting being the core aspect of what makes or breaks the defense. For women, this defense makes it harder to report because so long as the company has policies put in place and there is no "tangible" evidence to prove an employer is trying to cover up a sexual harassment, the company is not found liable. In connection with liability, recently many companies have purchased liability insurance in order to settle cases at a lower cost to than to take the claims to court every time. From the actions of the Faragher/Ellerth defense and the actions of the companies in previous years, we can see that female workers are not being protected in their environments. We no longer hold perpetrators accountable for their actions and instead are trying to minimize the problem of sexual harassment. Due to the claims only being limited to sexual harassment on a gender basis, the essential parts of race and gender in a claim are lessened in effect. Because we do not hold accountability for such claims, the perpetuation of certain stereotypes go by without repercussions. This lessens the boundary women of color have between the stereotypes that have been placed on other women with a similar background as them. The objectification of these women makes the behavior seem more as a "less harmful" gesture from men because they expect to illicit a stereotype based response from the harassed woman. This is similar to the argument of using clothing as a suggestion for asking for harassment to occur. Although culture usually is something we can use to humanize others, the culture is used as method to sexually objectify women. We can see examples of this for women of all colors and backgrounds. Although the event of sexual harassment is important to discuss as a whole, in terms of the effect it has on women in general, we must understand that sexual harassment and other forms of sexual assault are an issue of power. Of these issues, race is one of the most prevalent ways we have to compare areas of disadvantage in the ability to report sexual harassment.

Differences in the Exotic Dance Industry
Throughout the years, the feminist movement has worked to make sex work less oppressive and maintain more agency within the worker's rights. The sex industry inherently sexualizes the women that take part of it as a source of income, but women of color tend to face unequal conditions and fall prey to stereotypes placed on them. Sexual objectification and power imbalances are more likely to occur due to the transaction between the client and sex worker because of the dependency of the worker on the money holder. In environments such as these, it is still important to maintain respect for individuals whether the service provider or client. Though, race discrimination does happen within the workplace. Just as well, so does sexual harassment since these two events are not exclusive to one another and intersects. In the sex industry as a whole, we can see that the view of sex work people tend to have reflect on their way they believe women should be treated, especially their racial attitudes and biases. But completely banning people from working in these industries does not resolve the need for change and respect upheld for both White exotic dancers and exotic dancers of color. Though, these women are still subjected to certain stereotypes that are glorified in the sex industry.

There is still a large gap in the stratification of gender and race and how that affects the oppressive environments some workers deal with everyday. For exotic dancers, differences are weighed by the violence they experience in their environments, general treatment, and the wage gap based off skin color. Clients oftentimes associate a sense of refinement and class to people who advertise themselves as a mix of White and drop their racial background of Black. In terms of hiring differences, women who work at certain clubs are reflective of the crowds they are catering to. White women are usually used in order to attract middle-class business men, while women of color, specifically women of darker skin tones, are hired to attract working class customers. This essentially labels women as a certain product to be sold and creates a rank order who will earn more. The exotic dancers of the clubs highly reflect the Women of darker skin tones also have less body restrictions, focusing more on their "voluptuous" curvature, and have to be more creative with how they present themselves to their audience just to earn a little extra. For instance, some women of color earn a large difference of $100 to $300 in tips compared to White women. This alludes to a certain sense of quality placed on the dancers, seeing as White women are offered more. Women of color tend to have to go through more extreme lengths in order to accommodate the lower amounts of money they are tipped. Many dancers of color are willing to perform sex acts in order to make a higher profit from their work.

This brings into question the overall safety of the dancers in lower income places whose only option is to appeal to more working class people just because that is their only audience. Customers tend to hypersexualize women of color and as a result of that direct objectification tend to spend less money for their services. This is how customers lure exotic dancers into desperately needing more money to make their wages, making them perform illegal and unsafe sex acts in return. From these illegal services, we can see that many strippers of color or strippers in general begin to sell their bodies for money which is illegal. Though this is not the only unsafe aspect of selling their body. Some women are asked to insert foreign objects into their body, to do amusing dances, or other acts that continuously humiliate the dancer. From this, we can see that the client keeps a certain power over the dancer. They not only hold monetary promises over the dancer, they also separate themselves from simple pleasure into more humiliation based acts. This might be the separation between "I do not like darker-skinned women" in a physical sexual sense, and lets the client who does not particularly like dark-skinned women to receive some sort of pleasure in the end. Though the dissonance is there, they get a power high.

Annotated bib

Brooks, S. (2010). Hypersexualization and the dark body: Race and inequality among black and latina women in the exotic dance industry. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 7(2), 70-80. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13178-010-0010-5

This is a work that analyzes the role of racial stereotypes and sex work. Throughout this study, the argument of sex work is described in two ways as being either harmful to women with low socioeconomic status or as a way to empower those same women. This is done by looking at the treatment of dancers, their pay differences, and the safety of the clubs that these women work in. The application of sexual stereotypes of women is important to look at because sex work is a very controversial topic and inherently sexualized. Sex work makes this topic unique to the other ones as it targets a large but important genre of women. A lot of women participate not only in stripping, but they also sell nude photos and perform other sorts of sex acts in order to receive money. I think this would have to be its own paragraph and might even lands itself somewhere else in the Sexualization article as a whole to contribute to information on women of color’s sexualization.

Johnson, Connie M. 2015. "How Women of Color are Portrayed on the Cover of Magazines: A Content Analysis of the Images Black/African, Latina, Asian and Native American (BALANA)." Minnesota State University, Mankato, Ann Arbor ( https://manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1703013085?accountid=7084 ).

The following study was done on magazine articles in order to see what women are being told in terms of women of color. Previous studies have been done and mainly focus on appearance of white women in magazines. This analysis looks at how the image portrayal of women of color set a standard for them in the real world. The way others portray them in images molds what their social identities are and how race is a crucial role in their experiences. The key ideas here are the effects and sexualization of women in the media and how those effects end up creating identities and biases. The importance here is the list of concepts applied and the effort that only analyzes one form of media. In terms of the other articles, a lot of them have a heavy use of opinion behind them. While that is not necessarily bad, I do like to see the viewpoints of the people that create these attitudes. This would be important in creating a direct link between cause and effect between social media and how people portray these women.

Leung, Katherine E. 2017. "Microaggressions and Sexual Harassment: How the Severe Or Pervasive Standard Fails Women of Color." Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights 23(1):79-102 ( https://manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/2036209839?accountid=7084 ).

Women of color also are notably harassed because of stereotypes that have formed from older racial biases. This article analyzes the history of some of those attitudes and how it affects current day media. Such as, pornography ad its role in perpetuating the role of Black men and women in slavery. Other forms of harassment are covered in order to see real world application of how women of color experience the world on a simple social level. The key ideas are sexual harassment, perpetuation of stereotypes, microaggressions, and the implicit bias of the general public. The focus on sexual harassment is very important to sexualization since it is sexual objectification in practice. I would most likely put this right after the intro paragraph to the women of color section and talk about how sexualization contributes to harassment.

Rose, Grace. 2018. "Hypersexualizing Women of Colour in Media Builds Harmful Expectations." University Wire, Feb 05, ( https://manowar.tamucc.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1994199262?accountid=7084 ).

The sexualization of women as a whole is not something, they chose for themselves, but hey are expected to maintain a certain image of sexuality. Fir the most part, women of color suffer more from this sexualization due to the connection to their oppressors and history of being oppressed as a racial or ethic group. The implicit bias of others is due to stereotypes about what kind of sexual offerings each ethnic group holds and how multiracial children are a way of explaining that such racist attitudes do not exist anymore. Through certain characterizations, whether women of color confirm or deny stereotypes is purely up to them and does not make them an object of sexual gratification. The key ideas relevant in this speech are the different stereotypes of women of color and especially multiracial women. In the other works I have cited, most of the time people keep categories away from each in order to not mix them. I would probably try to make a new subsection for multiracial women, but I would like to also include some of the words about objectification in the general first paragraph.