In an episode of ‘Mad Men’ (“Nixon vs. Kennedy” from the first season), there is a portrayal at an office party of an incident of ‘scuttling’: a man chases down a female co-worker, tackles her and pulls up her dress to see what color panties she’s wearing. Other men in the office call out guesses of the color as the two grapple. Afterward, the woman is amicable toward her scuttler and the few people who seem not to approve keep it to themselves.
I first heard of scuttling during the Clarence Thomas confimation hearings circa 1990. Thomas’ former colleague Anita Hill had accused Thomas of lewd language. This got a huge amount of publicity, which opened up unprecedented dialogue on the subject of sexual harrassment. Men and women seemed to have much more divergent views on what was and wasn’t acceptable in a professional environment than had been apparent before this dialogue.
Amid all this, publisher and feminist icon Helen Gurley Brown wrote an opinion piece stating that women were becoming too sensitive, and cited scuttling as an example of a harmless, charming practice that no one minded back in her day. IIRC, her description differed slightly from the ‘Mad Men’ portrayal: I believe she said the woman was undressed until she was only wearing her underwear, at which point she feigned fainting and the activity ceased.
Brown’s words created almost as big a stir as Anita Hill’s accusations, much of which was disbelief that they were accurate. My late mother was born in 1917 and worked as a secretary in the 1930s-1950s. When I asked her about Brown’s claim, she didn’t remember any such practice, and considered the descriptions outrageous. Columnist Roger Simon wrote a piece expressing similar shock. He seemed to assume that Brown’s memories were accurate and that he simply hadn’t heard of the practice before. He opined that scuttling as Brown described it wasn’t sexual harrassment - it was sexual assault.
Seeing the ‘Mad Men’ portrayal has made me curious once again as to whether scuttling - semi-consensual undressing of a woman by a male colleague in a social setting in a workplace environment - ever actually existed, on a substantial scale (I don’t doubt there were a few offices where the rule was ‘anything goes’; there are some of those today). And I don’t question that, then and now, office parties can get out of hand when the liquor starts flowing. That’s not the same thing as widespread acceptance of same.
In the audio commentary, the producers of ‘Mad Men’ refer to Brown’s article as a source on the existence of scuttling. I wonder whether an incorrect memory has acquired the status of documentation?
My GQ: is there any evidence that back in the day, scuttling was widespread and accepted?
I don’t know how you define “back in the day,” but I’m 52 years old and your post is the first time I’ve ever heard of this.
When I first moved into management in the early 80s in Silicon Valley, this would have led to the immediate firing of the person doing the scuttling, and strong reprimands to the ones doing the betting. Since then, it’s obviously gotten much more serious.
Keep in mind that while they were still in the office it was a party after hours and off the clock; it’s not as if Mad-Men was portraying it as normal everyday workplace behavior. And the participants were also intoxicated. Managment wasn’t even present (though I suspect they’d be more upset with Joan raiding the liquor supply cabinet than the scuttling, boys will be boys after all).
:eek: to the whole thing, but especially the bolded phrase. Yeah, no man has ever taken (further) advantage of an unconscious woman. Was HGB suffering from senile dementia when she said this?
IIRC, since the fainting was feigned, it was really just a signal to end the scuttling. The scuttle-ee would immediately ‘awaken’.
But I second your :eek: at HGB’s whole missive. She responded to criticism by saying something like, “I believe in love, and I believe in babies”. Since we all know that with sexual assault banned, people can’t fall in love and have babies :rolleyes:
I always felt that HGB was either lying or remembering incorrectly, but her story was of a nature to take on a life of its own by a combination of its outrageousness, and the inability to disprove it conclusively.
Well, with all due veneration for your advanced years (:)), the 1980s wasn’t that long ago, and the culture of gender relations in the American workplace, while not perfect, had advanced considerably beyond what was acceptable in the 1930s and '40s and '50s.
The 1980s came after second-wave feminism, at the tail-end of the main fight for the ERA, and during a period when agencies like the EEOC were investigating and prosecuting cases of gender discrimination in the workplace (EEOC v. Sears is probably the best-known case). Discrimination based on sex was only outlawed by the 1964 Civil rights Act, and “sexual harassment” only really entered public discourse as a commonly-used term in the 1970s. The landscape was pretty different before all this happened.
Or, maybe, something like this this happened once, and Ms Brown heard about it and somehow assumed it was common practice; or perhaps it did, for a while, become common practice amongst one close-knit group in one office somewhere, and this just happened to be the office where Ms Brown (or a friend, or a friend of a friend) worked, and, again she extrapolated wildly. In a big, big world, people will sometimes do very weird things, and some very weird customs and practices can arise in localized settings. Usually they do not spread very far, or last very long.
That said, certainly sexual attitudes were very different in the '50s, and many things that would today be considered outrageously sexist were considered quite normal, and, at worst, a minor annoyance by most of the female victims. All the same, this “scuttling” as a more or less institutionalized practice seems way out there, even for that era.
Yes, your first paragraph sounds very plausible. Question about the second, though. Now, I was born in 1970, so I never knew the '50s, but I’ve had plenty of time to read about them, and watch movies and TV shows, and ask people who were there then. The impression I get, and I fully admit I could be wrong, is that people back then really seemed to relish creating sexual tension, and creating mystery. Like only filming Elvis from the waist up on Ed Sullivan. Make people wonder how outrageous his act was, instead of letting them see for themselves.
And that leads me to another point. I read an interview with Elvis from right before or after his first Sullivan appearance. Paraphrased from memory: “But did you see the show last week? This Debra Paget was on. She wore a tight thing with feathers on the behind where they wiggle most. Sex, man, she bumped and pushed out all over the place. Yet who do they say is obscene? Me! Man, I’m like Little Boy Blue compared to that.” There did seem to be a lot of buxom starlets wearing fringe or feathers or anything that would enhance jiggle action, giggling in pretend confusion while men made suggestive remarks. And then the bleeping of words on TV, with that Harpo’s-horn noise. Couldn’t just not say the words; they had to be lampshaded.
So it just seems to me that sexual attitudes were different in those days, but not just in terms of female empowerment/lack thereof. It also seems that since everyone was in such a continual state of sexual frustration, that a man or group of men wouldn’t be able to undress a woman down to her underwear (even bearing in mind that that probably included a girdle). They’d either stop at raising the skirt, for fear of losing control, or they would lose control and it would become a gang rape. It took so little (“I keep my undies in the ice box!” while she’s completely hidden by a planter) to arouse men in those days, I don’t think they’d take part in a melee unless they planned to follow through. Again, I could be wrong.
That’s a terrible example. Sullvan’s crew filmed Elvis from the waist up because during rehearsal, he kept putting a bottle in his crotch as a joke, even when told not to. They didn’t risk him doing it live on the air. Note that Elvis had been dancing in a full shot on national TV before.
Further, even those who believe in the myth, the point was that Elvis was to sexy for TV, not that hiding him made him sexier.
That’s Elvis playing into the myth. It may even been the reason why he did that with the bottle – to inculcate the idea that his dancing was too sexy to be seen on TV (even though it had already been put on TV)
Bleeping of words came much, much later. It wasn’t even technically possible for a live show: when I worked in TV in the early 70s, we were faced with the problem on a live call-in show. Radio had the seven-second delay, but nothing of the kind existed for TV. As for taped shows, there was no need to bleep – things were simply edited out. The type of humor that would have required bleeping never made it onto TV.
Well, since you start with false premises, you cannot reach a true conclusion: basic logic. In any case, you are projection 21st century attitutes on people in 1960. People were not in any “continual state of sexual arousal” then (any more than the are now – hell, even a horny teen takes a break every once in awhile) and the sexual humor were jokes, not turn ons.
You might as well argue that whenever Milton Berle dropped his shorts he was arousing millions of women.
BTW, don’t mistake Mad Men as accurately portraying anything. The writers don’t care about the facts of the period; they just care about the stereotypes.
Actually, according to basic logic, you can, even by a formally valid argument, reach a true conclusion from false premises (although it is not guaranteed that you will). It is quite common and often easy to do so, in fact.</pedantry>
Scuttling, eh? I don’t remember this coming up in the Clarence Thomas hearings at all, and have never even heard of it before this moment. Certainly workplace behavior could be much different in 1960, and white-collar men could and sometimes did behave much more outrageously towards women back then, but this still seems pretty out-there. Hooray for Hollywood!
I can’t speak to scuttling but in this clip from the movie American Graffitti (about 2:36) shows the male character Terry the Toad getting pantsed in the parking lot of Mel’s Drive-In. That was during the same period that *Mad Men *took place (and the movie was made back in the early '70s), so I’d guess having one’s underwear revealed in public was a source of juvenile humor for both sexes.
AFAIK, no one’s said the subject of scuttling came up in the hearings.
Helen Gurley Brown’s commentary on the subject of sexual harrassment (which DID come up in the Thomas hearings) contained her (apparently increasingly solitary) memory of the practice.
Hollywood (‘Mad Men’) seems to have maybe based material on that commentary.
When you start with a false premise, you can reach any conclusion. Any means true or false or nonsensical or meaningless. Any. That’s how you can see those fake math pieces showing that 1 = 2. You can make that answer anything, not just 1 = 1 or 1 = 1,000,000, but 1 = blue submachine freedom. That’s the problem with having a false premise. Once you start there, nothing about the conclusion can be said to have meaning or consequence. You can come out with a conclusion that you can independently show to be correct, but that’s either deliberate manipulation or an accident, not the truth.
Pantsing was (and I assume still is) simple bullying. The term and the behavior were common. I can’t see how it has any connection or relation to what scuttling is being described as.
I never heard the term or the concept of scuttling before this thread, either, and I’ve read an awful lot of cultural history. Office parties, OTOH, have a huge history as scenes in which men and women get together in every conceivable way, especially under the influence of alcohol. Looking at a woman’s panties is not in the top 100. It’s not at all hard to imagine some kind of similar game. It’s just that I’ve never come across anything specifically referencing it.
Sure, any argument with any false premises is unsound, but the conclusion might still be true (and the argument itself might be valid, which is a quite separate issue). “Sound/unsound” applies to arguments not to conclusions.
I don’t want to hijack this thread into a tutorial on elementary logic (I was just being a bit facetious originally), but that is not right. I think you are confusing false premises with contradictory premises (from which you can, indeed, validly derive anything). Merely false, but consistent, premises restrict what you can validly infer from them just as much as true ones do:
All angels are mortal. - F
Socrates was an angel. - F
