 First edition | |
| Author | Helen DeWitt |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | New Directions |
Publication date | October 2011 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 288 pp |
| ISBN | 978-0811220347 |
| OCLC | 828418632 |
Lightning Rods is a 2011 novel by Helen DeWitt. It was DeWitt's second novel, following The Last Samurai. Though written immediately after The Last Samurai, it remained unpublished for more than a decade before it was published by New Directions. [1]
Joe is a struggling encyclopedia salesman who moved from Eureka, Missouri to Florida in order to sell vacuum cleaners, only to find that another salesman had already saturated the market in the aftermath of a hurricane. One day while driving along the shore he stops and parks his car on a whim, and while looking at the shorebirds, he has a revelation. He realizes that companies could avoid sexual harassment in the workplace and the consequent expensive lawsuits if they provided some kind of outlet for their male employees' sexual urges. Combining this insight with one of his own recurring sexual fantasies, he hits on the idea of hiring women to have sex with selected male employees, with the anonymity of both the men and women protected by a wall that would separate them and only expose the woman's lower half. The women, referred to as "lightning rods", would otherwise work as regular office employees, and no one in the office would know who they were.
In the first phase of Joe's project, he convinces a small office to implement a voluntary "spin the bottle"-like program in which two employees are randomly selected once a day to kiss each other in front of the rest of the office. The program turns out to be popular, and, emboldened by its success, Joe decides to look for a company to pitch his full idea. Most of the executives he talks to reject him out of hand, but he is able to find one who is willing to try it. Joe has an elaborate mechanism installed in the disabled stalls of the men's and women's bathrooms, which share a common wall. It is kept secret to everyone except Joe, the CEO, the group of high-performing male employees selected to participate, and the lightning rods themselves.
The program is immediately successful. Some of his lightning rods use the extra earnings to further their careers; two of them in particular, Lucille and Renée, are able to save up to go to Harvard Law School, and later in life Lucille becomes a wealthy corporate lawyer and Renée becomes a Supreme Court justice. Many of the other lightning rods find the work psychologically difficult, however. As the program becomes well-established, Joe makes refinements and starts expanding to other companies.
At some point, the idea takes off in the wider world. A couple of competitors crop up offering a cheaper version that is closer to outright prostitution. Joe is contacted by the FBI and agrees to an expansion into the public sector on condition that the FBI can access the participants' identities. Joe also branches out into tangentially related products: inspired by seeing a man with dwarfism in Kansas City, he invents a height-adjustable toilet.
At the end of the novel, lightning rods have become a widespread, though still controversial, industry.
Jennifer Szalai, writing in The New York Times , wrote "DeWitt points to problems that are recognizable and real — how men’s desires can differ from women’s, how harassment can upend a workplace — and offers up a modest proposal using the familiar rhetoric of our time." [2] This article praises DeWitt's blunt but good work, "To find fault in DeWitt’s broad strokes, in the novel’s brusque disregard for any depth of feeling, would be like denouncing Mel Brooks for having made 'The Producers' instead of 'The Pawnbroker.'" [2]
The Guardian described it as a "tightly disciplined and extremely funny satire on office politics, sexual politics, American politics, and the art of positive thinking, culminating with a sad, dry attack on the very basis of constitutional democracy." [3]
Garth Risk Hallberg (author of City on Fire ), reviewing the book in The Millions , wrote, "DeWitt’s idiosyncratic intellect has always gravitated toward the gap between messy reality and the logical Ideal, it’s no surprise to find her choosing the narrower path, and succeeding brilliantly." [4]
A review in Slate called it a "demented comic masterpiece." [5]
Anita Faye Hill is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university's Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure in 1991 when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment is a type of harassment involving the use of explicit or implicit sexual overtones, including the unwelcome and inappropriate promises of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. Sexual harassment can be physical and/or a demand or request for sexual favors, making sexually colored remarks, showing pornography, and any other unwelcome physical, verbal, or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature. Sexual harassment includes a range of actions from verbal transgressions to sexual abuse or assault. Harassment can occur in many different social settings such as the workplace, the home, school, or religious institutions. Harassers or victims can be of any gender.
An office lady, often abbreviated OL, is a female office worker in Japan who performs generally pink-collar tasks such as secretarial or clerical work. Office ladies are usually full-time permanent staff, although the jobs they perform usually have relatively little opportunity for promotion, and there is usually the tacit expectation that they leave their jobs once they get married.
The Last Samurai (2000) is the first novel by American writer Helen DeWitt. It follows a single mother and her young son, a child prodigy, who embarks on a quest to find his father. Despite selling well and garnering critical acclaim on publication, it was out of print for almost a decade; when reissued in 2016, it received renewed praise and accolades.
Helen DeWitt is an American novelist. She is the author of the novels The Last Samurai (2000) and Lightning Rods (2011) and the short story collection Some Trick (2018) and, in collaboration with the Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff, has written Your Name Here. She lives in Berlin.
Workplace violence, violence in the workplace, or occupational violence refers to violence, usually in the form of physical abuse or threat, that creates a risk to the health and safety of an employee or multiple employees. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health defines worker on worker, personal relationship, customer/client, and criminal intent all as categories of violence in the workplace. These four categories are further broken down into three levels: Level one displays early warning signs of violence, Level two is slightly more violent, and level three is significantly violent. Many workplaces have initiated programs and protocols to protect their workers as the Occupational Health Act of 1970 states that employers must provide an environment in which employees are free of harm or harmful conditions.
A workplace is a location where someone works, for their employer or themselves, a place of employment. Such a place can range from a home office to a large office building or factory. For industrialized societies, the workplace is one of the most important social spaces other than the home, constituting "a central concept for several entities: the worker and [their] family, the employing organization, the customers of the organization, and the society as a whole". The development of new communication technologies has led to the development of the virtual workplace and remote work.
Christina M. "Tina" Tchen is an American lawyer and a former official in the President Barack Obama Administration. She was CEO of Time's Up from 2019 to 2021, when she resigned following allegations that she provided legal aid to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo when sexual harassment allegations were made public. Her work centers on issues related to gender inequity, sexual harassment, and lack of diversity in the workplace.
Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and moral reasonableness. In the legal sense, these are behaviors that appear to be disturbing, upsetting or threatening. Traditional forms evolve from discriminatory grounds, and have an effect of nullifying a person's rights or impairing a person from benefiting from their rights. When these behaviors become repetitive, it is defined as bullying. The continuity or repetitiveness and the aspect of distressing, alarming or threatening may distinguish it from insult.
Occupational stress is psychological stress related to one's job. Occupational stress refers to a chronic condition. Occupational stress can be managed by understanding what the stressful conditions at work are and taking steps to remediate those conditions. Occupational stress can occur when workers do not feel supported by supervisors or coworkers, feel as if they have little control over the work they perform, or find that their efforts on the job are incommensurate with the job's rewards. Occupational stress is a concern for both employees and employers because stressful job conditions are related to employees' emotional well-being, physical health, and job performance. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization conducted a study. The results showed that exposure to long working hours, operates through increased psycho-social occupational stress. It is the occupational risk factor with the largest attributable burden of disease, according to these official estimates causing an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke events in 2016.
Workplace harassment is the belittling or threatening behavior directed at an individual worker or a group of workers.
The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013 is a legislative act in India that seeks to protect women from sexual harassment at their place of work. It was passed by the Lok Sabha on 3 September 2012. It was passed by the Rajya Sabha on 26 February 2013. The Bill got the assent of the President on 23 April 2013. The Act came into force from 9 December 2013. This statute superseded the Vishaka Guidelines for Prevention Of Sexual Harassment (POSH) introduced by the Supreme Court (SC) of India. It was reported by the International Labour Organization that very few Indian employers were compliant to this statute. Most Indian employers have not implemented the law despite the legal requirement that any workplace with more than 10 employees need to implement it. According to a FICCI-EY November 2015 report, 36% of Indian companies and 25% among MNCs are not compliant with the Sexual Harassment Act, 2013. The government has threatened to take stern action against employers who fail to comply with this law.
Lin Farley is an American author, journalist and feminist. She was a leader in calling attention to the problems faced by women in the workforce, in particular sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment in the workplace in US labor law has been considered a form of discrimination on the basis of sex in the United States since the mid-1970s. There are two forms of sexual harassment recognized by United States law: quid pro quo sexual harassment and behavior that creates a hostile work environment. It has been noted that a number of the early sexual harassment cases were brought by African American women and girls.
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#MeToo is a social movement and awareness campaign against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture, in which people publicize their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment. The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in 2006, on Myspace, by sexual assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke. The hashtag #MeToo was used starting in 2017 as a way to draw attention to the magnitude of the problem. "Me Too" empowers those who have been sexually assaulted through empathy, solidarity, and strength in numbers, by visibly demonstrating how many have experienced sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.
Time's Up is a non-profit organization that raises money to support victims of sexual harassment. The organization was founded on January 1, 2018, by Hollywood celebrities in response to the Weinstein effect and the Me Too movement. As of January 2020, the organization had raised $24 million in donations.
Purl is a 2018 American animated short film directed and written by Kristen Lester with the story written by Michael Daley, Bradley Furnish, Lester, and James Robertson, produced by Pixar Animation Studios, and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It is the first short released as part of Pixar's SparkShorts program and focuses on a ball of yarn named Purl, who gets employed in a male-dominant company, which causes her to be ignored by her fellow employees. The short was previewed at SIGGRAPH on August 14, 2018, premiered at the El Capitan Theatre on January 18, 2019, and released on YouTube on February 4, 2019, and on Disney+ on November 12, 2019, to acclaim from critics, particularly for its themes.
In Malaysia, sexual harassment, as defined by the Employment Act 1955Archived 11 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine, is “any unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, whether verbal, non-verbal, visual, gestural or physical, directed at a person which is offensive, humiliating or a threat to their well-being”. The Act does not distinguish between male and female or employer and employee. As such, sexual harassment can be committed by a female against a male, or an employee against an employer.
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