If you have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted write me too in reply to this tweet. Me too…if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. (@AlyssaMilano, 15 October 2017)
This tweet was the springboard for the meteoric rise of the #MeToo hashtag activism against sexual harassment and violence in 2017. Actress Alyssa Milano posted the tweet in amidst growing public condemnation of film producer Harvey Weinstein, whose long history of sexual violence against women was exposed by The New York Times on the 5th of October 2017 (Kantor & Twohey, 2017). The call to use #MeToo originated from the Me Too movement founded by Tarana Burke in 2006.1 Within 24 hours of its posting, the #MeToo hashtag had been used in 12 million Facebook posts and shared nearly a million times on Twitter (Boyle, 2019). Numerous celebrities came forward to tell their experiences of sexual harassment in what became a public speak-out. Many of those named as perpetrators during this speak-out were held to account in the media. What followed was an unprecedented number of public apologies by those accused. This is not to say the issue of speaking out was treated entirely sympathetically. There were concerns that #MeToo, particularly in relation to the naming of perpetrators, had gone too far, that it had become a witch hunt (Fileborn & Phillips, 2019). However, the backlash did not seem to deter the overwhelmingly positive response towards #MeToo in much public discussion and reporting (e.g. De Benedictis et al., 2019).
The supportive response to #MeToo could not be further from how the issue of sexual harassment has been treated in the not so distant past. Prior to #MeToo, relatively few people disclosed their experiences either formally or informally (e.g. Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018). Indeed, women’s reluctance to define their experiences as sexual harassment and seek amelioration had been extensively documented, particularly in feminist psychological research in the 1990s (Gutek & Koss, 1996; Herbert, 1994; Lazard, 2018; Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997). This research occurred against a backdrop of a wider pattern of routine disbelief and hostility towards those who had experienced sexual violence (Anderson & Doherty, 2008; Gregory & Lees, 1999). Characterising this pattern is the way in which victims have been held to account for their own conduct—did they precipitate the harassment? Are they making a false accusation? Are they being oversensitive? (e.g. Hinze, 2004; Lazard, 2017). The tendency for the significance of sexual harassment to be downplayed or dismissed has a long history and has often paved the way for the sympathetic treatment of perpetrators (Mann, 2018).
How have we got from a place where victims are subject to routine social censure to one which appears more socially supportive of those harassed? How is sexual harassment made sense of and understood? What implications do such understandings have for perpetrators and victims? These questions guide the analysis of sexual harassment presented in this book. Situated within a feminist psychological framework, my aim is to explore particular shifts in the cultural landscape which are relevant to how sexual harassment has become constituted, and how this has shaped the way in which victims and perpetrators come to be understood. To set the scene for this book, I will briefly contextualise the more recent resistance to sexual harassment within the trajectory for activism and theorisation around the phenomenon. In doing so, I will explicate the feminist theoretical influences that shape the arguments in this book. At this point, I would like to add a caveat—the contexts I attend to refer largely to the US, from which #MeToo arose, and the UK, the place from which I write. As such, I make no claims that the shifts I discuss are global, complete or mark firm breaks from patterns of understanding that have been dominant. This book aims to articulate predominant understandings around sexual harassment that have been particularly relevant in the global North.
Workplace Sexual Harassment, Sexual Violence and Heterosexuality
In this book, the exploration of sexual harassment starts with how it is primarily understood as something that men do, most commonly to women and, to a lesser extent, other men. This book is also concerned with how the context of work has been central in getting the issue on the public agenda. This is not to say that my analyses presumes that sexual harassment only occurs in the workplace. Rather, I start from the position that the recognition of workplace sexual harassment as a gendered phenomenon has been a key frame within which developments in feminist theorisation and activism have largely taken place. In this section, I will discuss key developments in the trajectory of sexual harassment as a social problem which shape the direction of this book.
#MeToo emerged out of celebrity women’s shared experiences of being subjected to the Hollywood casting couch—a euphemism for quid pro quo harassment in which sexual activity is made a condition of job security, benefits or reasonable treatment (MacKinnon, 1979). This context for the emergence of #MeToo shares similarities with how sexual harassment became a key concern within the history of feminist activism. While the coining of the term has been attributed to several different sources, there is consensus that it appears to have entered popular vernacular in the 1970s, arising from the work undertaken by the Working Women’s United Institute (WWUI). The WWUI formed at Cornell University, had worked on behalf of Carmita Wood—an administrator at Cornell who had been subjected to sexual harassment by a faculty member. The WWUI galvanised a critical response to Wood’s treatment by supporting her during an appeal. This provided the impetus for the development of a research and publicity hub around workplace sexual harassment by the WWUI which eventually became a national support centre for victims of sexual harassment in New York. It was a WWUI survey which has been credited with first using the term sexual harassment in 1975 in formal documentation (Benson & Thompson, 1982). In the same year, the term found its way into mainstream media, with The New York Times publishing an article entitled ‘Women begin to speak out against sexual harassment at work’ (Nemy, 1975). The UK lagged behind the US in the use of the term in popular discourse by several years. Wise and Stanley (1987) suggested that there was “no mention of any such animal as ‘sexual harassment’ in the English press, certainly none that we could find, before the reporting of American sexual harassment cases and the review of feminis...