I just took a mandatory course on sexual harassment in the workplace, (the company requires all of us to take courses like this on line once a year) and one thing that struck me was this exchange between Bright and Jillian:



So if Jillian was sending Bright sexually explicit emails too, then I don’t think that her case truly represented sexual harassment or sexual misconduct on Bright’s part, and it just seemed like Jillian was fine with those emails until Bright went out with her, had sex with her, and then didn’t call her again, so she went to HR accusing him of sexual misconduct, so although Bright was wrong to do what he did, he didn’t deserve to be fired. Another point is that Human Resources didn’t fire Bright, they were just going to transfer him to another department, which leads me to believe that they realized that Jillian played a part in everything. Rose was the one who fired Bright because she didn’t like how he was treating women in general and because of what he said to her about Jillian’s “Bitch Mood,” but in all honesty I feel that Bright really got the short end of the stick here. Granted, I didn’t like Bright’s cavalier attitude toward women and I think it’s wrong for any man to treat women like that, but there were two sides to this story, and Bright, due in large part to his arrogance in that meeting, didn’t get to present his side of the story.

The course I just took defined sexual harassment as unwanted sexual advances toward someone else, with the key word being unwanted. It seemed to me that Jillian was fine with Bright’s behavior until he had sex with her and he didn’t call her again. Granted Bright was wrong to treat her and other women like, as Rose said, interchangeable objects, but I honestly don’t think that what he did constituted sexual misconduct. One thing I did learn in this course is that you have to be really careful in the workplace, and sometimes even saying something like “you look nice” to someone can get you in trouble if they take it the wrong way, so I’m glad that I’m pretty introverted and I hardly talk to anyone at work!