The Supreme Court, in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, is mulling over the case of oil-rig worker Joseph Oncale, who alleges that his supervisor, John Lyons, committed numerous offenses against Oncale as a sort of hazing ritual, including placing his unwelcome penis on him. Defense attorneys argued, and an appeals court agreed, that the definition of sexual harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act doesn't include men harassing each other. Oncale may have been harassed because he seemed weak and vulnerable, or because his supervisor may have been secretly gay, or because his supervisor simply didn't like him, but he was not singled out for special indignity because he was a man.

But a brief filed on behalf of the National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization by feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon addresses this thorny issue: "Often it is men perceived not to conform to stereotyped gender roles who are the targets of male sexual aggression." Oncale's supervisors, MacKinnon argues, "were asserting male dominance through imposing sex on a man with less power. Men who are sexually assaulted are thereby stripped of their social status as men. They are feminized: made to serve the function and play the role customarily assigned to women as men's social inferiors."

Oncale's lawyers vow to bring forth testimony from other victims of Mr. Lyons, including an oil worker named Kent Brumfield, who says Lyons held him down and "sucked a hickey on his neck." The court may yet have to grapple with the issue of what motivated Lyons.

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