What Michelle Guthrie alleges may be ‘icky’ but it’s not harassment

Former ABC boss Michelle Guthrie discussed her controversial firing on 4 Corners last night. Picture: 4 Corners/ ABC

What does sexual harassment look like? Here’s a few ideas:

Sexual harassment is having a picture of your face superimposed on porn, and passed around the office.

It’s nasty conversations, in which a dynamic up-and-comer is described as being willing to do anything to get ahead.

It’s telling your executive assistant that she’d go further faster, in a tighter skirt.

It’s the owner-chef in a restaurant, sticking his tongue in and out like a lizard when his favourite waitress comes to collect the plates.

Sexual harassment is telling your female colleagues that they won’t need to worry about the restructure, because they’ll be off having babies by then.

It is wolf-whistles, and cat calls, and it’s having your bra strap plucked.

It’s the men in the office trying to get women into poses where they can see down their top, or under their skirts (“Just bend over and get that file from the bottom drawer will you, love?”)

It’s inappropriate, demeaning and sometimes threatening behaviour, which can very quickly become sexual assault (that’s when he actually squeezes your breast, or shoves his hands into your underpants.)

Okay so what about what former managing director of the ABC, Michelle Guthrie, complained about on TV last night?

The allegation, hotly denied, seems to be that the ABC chairman, Justin Milne, rubbed her back while they were out for dinner with other board members at the super-lux Sydney restaurant, Billy Kwong’s.

Ms Guthrie described the behaviour as “inappropriate” and “unprofessional” and “icky.”

Incredibly, a lawyer had to get involved.

And so we are having to ask this question: is it sexual harassment to rub somebody’s back?

The answer should be obvious: depends who’s doing the rubbing and under what circumstances.

In this case?

Of course it’s not.

Ms Guthrie was the managing director of the ABC, on a contract worth almost a million dollars a year.

What she has described isn’t Harvey Weinstein, trying to force himself, physically, upon a woman half his size in a hotel room.

This isn’t a female recruit being wooed into having sex with a fellow soldier she quite likes, only to discover that he has secretly filmed the encounter, and is now sharing the video around.

Ms Guthrie told 4 Corners that she spoke to a lawyer, and “he (the lawyer) said to me, you know, Justin denies it … you have to work it out with him.”

She said: ‘That’s absurd.”

Meaning that somebody else — presumably the board of the national broadcaster, as if they don’t have enough to do? — would have to sort it out.

But why?

Why couldn’t Ms Guthrie simply say: “Don’t touch me”? Or even: “I would prefer it if you didn’t touch me.”

She’s an adult, after all.

Certainly Mr Milne seems to have been a bit of a dinosaur, referring to women in the workplace as “chicks” and “babes.”

But women the world over are engaged in an ongoing battle to have allegations of sexual harassment taken seriously, because such behaviour is tremendously serious, in the way the chairman rubbing the MD’s back at Billy Kwong’s during a dinner board meeting just isn’t.