Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Work Environment in Carpentry

Massachusetts legislators heard testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn at a hearing on March 16, 1992. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.420-421).

Submission of Mary Ann Cloherty, March 12, 1992, Boston, Massachusetts

Working as a woman in a non-traditional job (union carpentry) I have encountered many covert and overt aggressions. Pornography on a job site is one of the more blatant ways a woman is told that “this is a male domain;” “Go Away.”

Sometimes I am sent to a job and (gratefully!) the men have been advised beforehand to remove the porno shots from the elevator or the tool shack or whatever common areas we may share. Sometimes not.

When I was working on the Mass. Avenue Bridge (the only female on the bridge) I was in an environment which was exceptionally hostile. All the crew shared a common table saw which was placed in a central location. Periodically one or more of the carpenters would use the saw and then return to the area on the bridge where they were working. When I approached the table saw one day the whole crew became quiet and watched me. Nailed to the table directly in front of the saw was a playing card. The “playing card” was an explicit close up of female genitalia with a large 16 penny nail (this is basically a SPIKE) nailed into the vagina. When I saw it some of my coworkers started snickering and laughing.

After viewing this, I found myself feeling depressed. Did I set myself up for this humiliation? Why was I working in this field?, etc. Questions which provoked a sense of personal responsibility for their hostility.

Ultimately, I seized the porno card and ripped it into pieces and dropped it into the river. What would tomorrow be like, I wondered.

The hostile environment is real, damaging and effective in repelling women.

See also:

Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn and a Hostile Work Environment
I got to the point where I couldn’t put up with it any more. And being one of the only two women on the job, and being rather new at it and not knowing that I had any alternatives, I got pissed off one day and ripped all the pictures off the wall. Well, it turned out to be a real unpopular move to do. I came back in at lunch time and half the pictures were back up again. They pulled them out of boxes and stuck them on the wall and proceeded to call me names, and just basically call me names or otherwise ignore me.

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Learning Environment at M.I.T.

One example is in the dorms, where despite requests by women students
that pornographic films not be shown in common living rooms, some male
students insisted on their right to show the films. In two cases, a
male student insisted on showing Deep Throat, a film which presents
Linda “Lovelace” Marchiano, who we talked about earlier today, despite
women students in the dorm telling this particular man that it was
offensive to show Deep Throat since it has been documented in her
books–Ordeal and Out of Bondage–that she was tortured
and terrorized into [making it]. Secondly, they told him that at least
one of the students who was a resident of that dormitory had been
throat-raped in that particular way, and she felt particularly
traumatized by the showing of that film. Despite her efforts and other
women’s trying to talk to him about showing the film, he showed it
anyway to a whole group of students from the dorm. As a result, she and
other students lost sleep, she lost a lot of school time. The one
student was a doctoral student, and felt extremely harassed. She tried
to address this through the M.I.T. administration and go nowhere
because they refuse to take an active stance around pornography. And
then she was further harassed in that dormintory through threatening
notes, etc., for trying to stop the showing of that film…

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