99-2710 Frazier v. Delco Electronics Corporation

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“[T]here is no evidence that Spears had a sexual or romantic interest in Frazier, though that is possible. But many cases of sexual harassment involve hostility to female coworkers because they are female. Sometimes it is because the men feel that their macho workplace has been ‘invaded’ by women, whose presence damages the self-esteem that the men derive from thinking they are doing work that only men can do. Carr v. Allison Gas Turbine Division, 32 F.3d 1007 (7th Cir. 1994), was such a case. This is not. But what does seem to be involved here, or so at least a reasonable jury might find, was a sense on Spears’s part that as a man he was owed gratitude and deference by a woman whom he had assisted (by driving her to work until she got a new car), and that the denial of this obligation was an affront to his manhood. We find it difficult to imagine a man treating another man the way Spears treated Frazier – men do not normally respond with such intensity to a spurned offer of friendship, call each other sluts and whores, make faces at each other, and stalk each other. Those are characteristic forms of male aggression against women. See, e.g., McDonnell v. Cisneros, 84 F.3d 256, 259-60 (7th Cir. 1996); Williams v. General Motors Corp., 187 F.3d 563, 565-66 (6th Cir. 1999); Hillary S. Axam and Deborah Zalesne, ‘Simulated Sodomy and Other Forms of Heterosexual Horseplay: Same Sex Sexual Harassment, Workplace Gender Hierarchies, and the Myth of the Gender Monolith Before and After Oncale,’ 11 Yale J.L. & Feminism 155, 161-73 (1999).”

Affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Stadtmueller, J., Posner, J.