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Marcia Hocevar's manager, Timothy Amundsen, brought pornographic material to work and shared it with others at meetings.1 He threatened female employees with violence and constantly called them "bitches," "fucking bitches," and "fat flicking bitches."2 He told dirty jokes, including jokes that were demeaning to women.3
Amundsen also used profanity in the presence of male employees. For instance, he called a new male employee the "fucking new guy."4 He played a sexually inappropriate tape at a meeting where both male and female employees were present.5 The court reasoned that since Amundsen was "boorish and unprofessional" to both male and female employees, his harassment of Ms. Hocevar was not "because of sex."6
INTRODUCTION
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) states that sexual harassment is any 'Verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature . . . [that] explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment."7 Marcia Hocevar said that, as a result of the harassment she faced at work, she suffered "fear, depression, anxiety and self-doubt," and had to be treated with Prozac.8 Yet under the current legal framework, the court found that these conditions did not violate Title VII's prohibition on harassment9 because she was not targeted as an individual "because of sex."10
This Comment examines whether a legally cognizable claim of hostile environment sexual harassment under Title VII can stem solely from indirect environmental conditions, which I call "ambient harassment,"11 and concludes that under the proper analysis, it can. The defining feature of ambient harassment is that it is not clearly targeted at any individual or group of individuals in the workplace. In some instances there is no visible target (for example, pornography displayed in a common area), while in other instances everyone in the workplace is targeted but no one is singled out (for example, by sexually abusive language), which is sometimes referred to as "equal opportunity harassment."
Ambient harassment includes pornographic images in the office (for example, on coworkers' computers, printouts posted in common areas, or printouts in the offices of superiors), abstract discussions of "proper" gender roles, derogatory statements made about one gender, and sexually charged language used with reference to nonemployees.12 These sorts of behaviors...