Sexual harassment – do we need a new taboo?

What if this new taboo sought to make all workplace sexual goings on as sickeningly unthinkable as, say, incestuous behaviour by parents towards their children?

I ask you to take this particular flying leap of the imagination because right now in the Weinstein-horrified US there is some revisiting of a Big Idea belonging to the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead's idea has resonance for us, too, in these sleaze-sensitised times.

This week's offerings of the ever-stimulating online magazine Slate have included Jennifer Onion's Margaret Mead's Left-Field Idea For Solving The Sexual Harassment Problem.

Onion explains that in 1978 the 77-year-old anthropologist Margaret Mead published a piece entitled A Proposal: We Need Taboos On Sex At Work.

The 1970s saw a surge of women into the workplace and Onion notes that Mead's piece emerged at a time of activism on the issue of sexual harassment.

Mead had seen taboos at work in the Pacific societies she had studied. She wrote that "I realise this must sound strange to a generation of young women who have felt the need to break and abandon taboos of many kinds, but the deepest taboos in any society keep the social system in balance.' "

Onion writes that "[Mead] said that the taboo, even more so than a law, spoke to what a society believed in its core: 'Prohibiting certain forms of behaviour...affirms what we hold most precious in our human relationships.' So, for example, a society that believes children should grow up free of the fear of sexual abuse in the home would institute an incest taboo."

The heart of Mead's proposal was that American society, faced with women now entering the workplace in large numbers, should forge a new taboo.

What we need, Mead continued, "are new taboos that are appropriate to [our] new society … taboos that will operate within the work setting as once they operated within the household".

"Neither men nor women should expect that sex can be used either to victimize women who need to keep their jobs or to keep women from advancement or to help men advance their own careers. [So we need] a taboo that says clearly and unequivocally, 'You don't make passes at or sleep with the people you work with.' "

Legal scholar Mary Anne Case took Mead's ideas out into society for debate and in 2008 wrote (Onion's piece gives a link to it) a challenging essay A Few Words in Favour of Cultivating an Incest Taboo in the Workplace. In it Case reported how Mead's ideas had not gone down well with a conference audience she, Case, had run them past.

"My suggestion of an incest taboo in the workplace was not at all well received. Some objectors took the view that eroticism is central to our personalities; that we spend so much time at work that we have few places other than the workplace to express it; that if we aren't allowed to be freely erotic in the workplace we are basically condemned to a life of celibacy and erotic repression."

Case found a scary "vehemence" in her audience. But that was 20 years ago. Perhaps in 2017, and with workplace Weinsteinery now powerfully appalling us, ideas like Mead's and Case's would get a more appreciative hearing.

But perhaps Case's vehement objectors have a point. I have never worked in the public service but can, just, imagine how the reported tedium of it would be unbearable without some opportunities to be "freely erotic" in the office. But what do I know? Public servants are to me an unknown tribe, as different as the remote peoples Margaret Mead studied, marvelling at the social superglue of their taboos.

To digress a little, how difficult youngish Australians must be finding it to understand quite why the fall from grace of Don Burke OAM is such a big deal. We are living in more post-gardening times now. But once upon a time, when ours was a nation of backyards, TV's Burke's Backyard was a towering, ratings-magnet of a show. It ran for 17 years from 1987 to 2004.

The on-screen Burke himself was personable and wildly popular. A gardener myself, I liked him very, very much. I shared his patriotic fondness for gardening with Australia's native flora.

His media aura was God-like. I remember how, with Floriade in its early years and with me raging against it in The Canberra Times, Burke's minions asked me to go on his show to discuss my novel perversion (for Floriade seemed to me then, and seems today, the antithesis of what true gardening should be). When I declined, politely, the minions were bewildered. They couldn't believe their ears. Different Burke minions called me, sure there was some misunderstanding. After all, wasn't an invitation from Don to appear on his show an invitation from God to visit Heaven?

But, shy of this new-fangled TV and worried about what mincemeat Nationally Famous Don might make of a provincial little garden worm like me, I never did say yes but instead burrowed deeper into my safe world of print.