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Spencer Darling

Page Number

73

Abstract

If your job requires you to passionately embrace your coworker after surviving the seat-riveting climax action of the third act, does that complicate your workplace’s sexual harassment prevention strategy? Most jobs do not require workers to make intentional intimate contact with their coworkers. Yet, in the entertainment industry, some jobs require not just intimate contact with coworkers but selling that contact as authentic. This staged intimacy, like staged violence, carries a risk that simulated conduct can result in real harm. When produced without precaution, staged intimacy can create working conditions that constitute sexual harassment in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This same law gives employers a preventive duty that requires them to take affirmative steps to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace. Unfortunately, traditional preventive measures found in most workplaces are ill-equipped to prevent the kinds of harassment that can arise from staged intimacy. Recently, however, a new field of professionals composed of intimacy coordinators and intimacy directors have emerged with a stated goal of making staged intimacy safer and more comfortable for performers. Their methodology, abstracted to apply as a harassment prevention tool, may hold legal significance. This article asks whether an employer's Title VII duty to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace can be interpreted to support employer adoption of new safeguards for the production of intimate scenes. Such an interpretation could be an important step in reforming the workplaces of an industry that has become synonymous with sexual abuse.

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