purplerein said:

Not so much threatened, more shocked that a married woman would be this bold, not at the club, not at the bar, but in the staff lounge for lunch!

JustErin said:

Not in my business. There's a written dress code. There's incompetent bosses.
I wouldn't say anything but I would do something for the sake of the "clients" If you work at Hot Topics, anything goes. If you're working with the elderly, some things are scarey. Multiple facial piercings, tattoos...etc.. The right to express yourself does not supercede the job. If you want to stay in a low paying job, express yourself all you want. With the exception of the art field, music industry, etc. with the rest of society, there's a limit.

If I may be allowed to comment....

The major component in the military with sexual harassment is simply "perception"...how the person takes your comments, not how you intended them....it is an extremely slippery slope, because it is not immune to someone with an ax to grind falsely accusing you....and the accused is very often guilty until proven innocent...

I used to be an equal opportunity representative in my last unit in Germany, and I recall looking into several incidents where, in my personal opinion, nothing serious occured...but when the letter of the regulation was applied, it was easily sexual harassment. Since we walk around in uniform all day, the dress code thing doesn't apply as much, so we tend to focus more on inappropriate jokes and anything that would cause a "hostile" work environment, such as suggestive calendars and pinups. Some of you pointed out that it should be up to a boss to tell a worker about suggestive or inappropriate dress, and I would add that if the boss did so that they should be as gender neutral and PC as possible because even in that case (again from a military perspective) the boss doing that could be percieved as being a form of harassment.

I honestly believe that as usual, a good idea to make things equal spiralled out of control into something that reduces the work place to dull, anticeptic place to spend the majority of your day.....
[Edited 11/26/06 8:56am]

I've work in Corporate America for several of the top giants in oil and banking the sexual harassment issue is a major "this will get you fired" thing ever since the water cooler talk of the Seinfeld episode back in what the early 1990's I think...(I say that because it IS one of the points of reference whenever the subject is brought up by anyone in HR) no one male or female can make ANY kind of comment, reference, hint or indication to the other in ANYway that may be taken or perceived as ANYthing sexual. You can not say someone looks nice, their perfume or cologne smells nice NOTHING AT ALL least of all make a comment about how someone is dressing, even if you report it to someone you can be looked upon with a raised eyebrow because the question becomes what were you doing looking at the persons whatever. This happened to someone I work with last year, he’s gay and reported to the VP of our department that one of the student ads wasn’t dressing appropriately in office attire (which she wasn’t…see through clingy outfits with thong panties) but they questioned him for looking even though anyone who saw her couldn’t help but to look but that didn’t matter to them.

Also, my brother was let go from a company back in the late ‘90s because he was one of many people who forwarded a sex joke (it was 25 people in total who was fired. The last person who received the joke had been sexually harassing a woman who reported him to HR and as I've said all 25 people how received and forwarded the email got canned.

I tell the men I work with to compliment me if I look or smell nice or if they have a funny off colored joke or email they want to share with me, I can tell and know the difference between a compliment or joke and sexual harassment.