Disclosure, which is one of the many steamy films Michael Douglas starred in the early 90‘s, is one of the first films to portray reverse sexual harassment from the reverse perspective.

The plot centers around an incident between Michael Douglas (Tom) and Demi Moore (Meredith) . The two are former lovers who re-connect in a “meeting”- their circumstances have entirely changed- she is now his boss and he now has a family.  After Tom stops a hot and heavy sexual encounter from progressing any further, both of them turn to the courts to find a settlement.

As you might expect, no one believes that Tom would have turned down someone as sexually alluring as Demi Moore.  At this point, I’ll start in with the spoilers- since the movie is 16 years old, I’m sure that I’ll only be jogging your memory instead of ruining an entire film for you. After Meredith has to settle the sexual harassment case due to an incriminating tape, she figures out a way to set up Douglas’ character through corporate sabotage.

Demi Moore’s character Meredith in Disclosure is portrayed as a hard, cold-blooded woman addicted to power, while Michael Douglas’ character Tom seems like a man helpless to his sexual needs. Though the film was made over a decade ago, little seems to have changed in the way that successful women are portrayed in film or in the media- it seems like women have to be all that more cut-throat to get ahead than men and at least in the 90’s  have to use their sexual appeal to get ahead. At the time the movie was first released, sexual harassment was a big issue in the media because of  the Clarence Thomas hearings.

The other women in the film were not portrayed in quite the same manner as Meredith; one top executive was seen as a more sexless, but attractive type, and another woman in the film testified that often Tom would “caress her shoulders” or “pat her on her bottom”, neither of which she found fault with.

One of the more interesting lines in the movie comes from Tom’s  attorney (also a woman) who says that sexual harassment is never truthfully about sex, it is about power. Tom repeated the line to his wife in a somewhat futile attempt to justify/explain why the events transpired. Often, the same line is given as the reason that rape occurs and it’s interesting to consider the relationship between sex and power.

The movie was based on Michael Crichton’s novel, which was also named “Disclosure”. In the early 90’s, there were several movies based on his novels, all of which were on different suspenseful topics.