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 feminist and feminist-influenced books on the subject at the end of 1979” (p. 30).
Activism around sexual harassment was shaped by the shifting aims of women’s organised activism across the 1960s and 1970s. In the UK, the Women’s Liberation Movement had initially focused on economic and legal equality which included rights around sexual choices. For example, equal pay, shared childcare and access to contraception were the primary aims of gender parity agendas at this point (Warner, 2001). These concerns provided the backdrop for the contextualisation of sexual harassment as a workplace issue. The phenomenon became constituted as an economic harm which supported women’s subjugation under patriarchy. The 1970s also saw an expansion of feminist agendas around sexual violence, from the politics of rape, to a continuum of sexual violence that spanned across everyday to exceptional circumstances. In line with this broadening of focus, definitions of sexual harassment have included wide-ranging behaviours such as leering, ogling, wolf whistling, catcalling, touching, sexual bribery, sexism and heterosexism to name but a few (Fitzgerald et al., 1988; Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997). These behaviours were referred to by Wise and Stanley (1987) as ‘the dripping tap’ to denote how sexually harassing practices were often a continuous and mundane pattern in women’s lives. These practices were connected to pervasive sexisms that demarcated and set unequal rights and freedoms of men and women which ultimately constrained women’s participation in social life, particularly in the workplace.
In theorising the broadening of attention to a range of instantiations of sexual violence, Kelly’s (1988) groundbreaking research drew attention to the relationship between normative heterosexuality and sexual violence through the notion of continuum. The continuum of sexual violence brought together typical heterosexual practices with sexual offences including, for example, sexual harassment, child sex abuse, domestic violence and rape. The purpose of this was to articulate the link between varied acts of sexual and gendered violence and “more commonplace interactions between men and women/girls” (Kelly, 1988, p. 51). Kelly’s argument drew on Rich’s (1980) classic essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence which has undoubtedly influenced much feminist work on connections between normative heterosexuality and sexual violence. Rich (1980) presented an explanation of heterosexuality as a political institution akin to, and underpinning, other institutions such as marriage, motherhood and the nuclear family, which act in the service of male dominance of women. The presumed and undisputed naturalness of heterosexuality renders it compulsory which, Rich (1980) argued, consolidates male power over women and creates divisions between women by, for example, othering lesbian women as deviant, pathological and by making their experiences invisible.
In her essay, Rich drew on MacKinnon’s (1979) highly influential book the Sexual Harassment of Working Women to highlight how compulsory heterosexuality intersects with other institutions which, in Mackinnon’s work, included economics. Mackinnon (1979) pointed to the long history in which women were reliant on sexual exchange for material survival—“prostitution and marriage as well as sexual harassment in different ways institutionalize this arrangement” (p. 175). During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many women were excluded from access to education and training (Shields, 1975) which served to act as a barrier to many forms of employment and to segregate women into low paid and socially devalued jobs. According to MacKinnon (1979), middle-class and upper-class women were excluded from the workplace often through recourse to the possibility of victimisation by “sexual predators” outside the home. Working-class and poor women entered into precarious employment contexts in which they were often denied job security or the possibility for advancement enjoyed by their male counterparts. A picture emerged in which women were dependent on economic subsistence from men who held higher ranking employment positions (e.g. Baker, 2008; Lambertz, 1985). For Mackinnon (1979), sexual harassment perpetuates practices which keep women in sexual service to men. The woman who resisted unwanted sexual attention on the job also risked other punishments including, as Mackinnon (1979) notes, being subject to pejorative uses of the term ‘lesbian’. Building on this, Rich argues that requirements that women sexually market themselves to men required lesbian women workers not only to hide their sexual identification, but actively align themselves with social requirements for doing heterosexual femininity “in terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of ‘real’ women” (Rich, 2003, p. 21). This early scholarship pointed to how the experience of sexual harassment is not straightforward or monolithic but is inevitably shaped by intersectional power relations that become relevant in instances of harassment. Indeed, the notion of compulsory heterosexuality has been used to draw attention to how sexual harassment does not simply support a gender hierarchy of male dominance and female subordination but works as a mechanism to police the boundaries of normative gender. As Butler (1990) argued “the sexual harassment of gay people may well take place not in the service of shoring up gender hierarchy, but in promoting gender normativity” (p. xiii).
Critical theoretical engagements with heterosexuality became the focus of a body of empirical work in feminist psychology which has attended to how heterosexuality shapes subjectivity and practice. In particular, Wendy Hollway’s insights in her early work (1984, 1989) on gender relations and sexuality has been influential in feminist scholarship in these areas. Hollway argued that three dominant discourses provided a cultural resource for organising heterosexual relationships: (1) the male sex drive discourse—that men are naturally compelled to seek sex with women; (2) the have/hold discourse—that women aim to secure a committed relationship with a man in which sex becomes exchanged for relational exclusivity, commitment and security; and, (3) the permissive discourse—in the wake of women’s activism around sexual liberation, women are assumed to be equal sexual subjects and have sexual needs like men do. In her analysis, Hollway explored how the male sex drive discourse and the have/hold discourse work together in highly gendered ways in which men are positioned as always ready for sex and women’s bodies activate this readiness. Women, on the other hand, are set the task of managing men’s desire for sex. The permissive discourse, with its roots in the 1960s sexual revolution, would appear to unsettle the male sex drive and have/hold discourses. However, as Gavey (2018) notes, the permissive discourse did not appear to destabilise normative patterns of heterosexuality described in the former two discourses—sexual and gender inequalities continued to play out behind the traction gained by the turn to sexual permissiveness. The ways in which such dominant discourses of heterosexuality prescribe certain gendered sexual subjectivities have been widely influential in work seeking to understand the cultural conditions enabling sexual violence. For example, Gavey (2018) argues that the heterosexual dynamic of sexually passive or constrained women and agentic men authorises sexual encounters which are not always easily distinguishable from rape. This creates room for ambiguity around whether an experience was rape or “just sex”. For Gavey (2018) such normative heterosexual dynamics can thus function as a support within the “cultural scaffolding” enabling sexual violence. In this book, I argue that these insights around the relationship between normative heterosexuality and sexual violence are crucial for understanding how sexual harassment relational dynamics are constituted. Throughout this book, I draw attention to how discourses of sexual harassment are produced in and through frames of normative heterosexuality. I argue that these discourses have and continue to profoundly shape how we make sense of the victimisation of women and men.
Shifting Landscapes
To say that sexual victimisation arises from the assumed sexual passivity of women in relation to men is, and never was, the whole story. Women’s sexual agency has not been completely absent in understandings of sexual violence. There is, of course, a long history of characterisation of the sexual agentic woman as deviant (e.g. ‘slag’, ‘slut’), which has worked to prop up a sexual double standard that has been used to justify the sexual harassment and assault of women (e.g. Attwood, 2007; Mendes, 2015). Feminine sexuality has been predominantly constructed as passive and acquiescent but, at the same time, provocative and dangerous, constrained only by the social requirements of feminine sexuality (Gavey, 2018). Within this context, the man who forces sexual activity on women can, and has been, understood as a romantic hero—freeing the woman of her social constraints and giving her what she ‘really wants’. Women have also been bequeathed within dominant sexual violence discourses with the role of actively setting the limits on sex by gatekeeping it and resisting it forcefully when necessary (Lazard, 2018).
In more recent times, certainly over the last 30 years, women’s sexual agency and empowerment has gained extraordinary visibility and has become increasingly situated within the parameters of social acceptability around sex. Within this cultural milieu, women are invited to embrace the promise of unlimited freedoms afforded by contemporary times by embodying sexiness and doing sex to please themselves (Gill, 2008). Indeed, a body of work has noted that women’s bodies have become ‘super sexualised’ within mainstream media and society more generally (Gill, 2008; Whitehead & Kurz, 2009). For example, clothes, images and activities that had once been regulated to the sex industry became mainstreamed as Porno Chic (e.g. Harvey & Gill, 2011). Of course, the sexualisation and objectification of women has long been implicated in sexual harassment and violence and has been tied to the reduction of women to bodily passivity. As Segal (1992) has argued, objectification produces women as “passive, perpetually desiring bodies—or bits of bodies—eternally available for servicing men” (p. 2). However, the steady rise in discourses around women’s sexual empowerment, with women invited to engage with sexiness on their own terms, appears to move away from any straightforward notion of women as a passive object of the male gaze (Gill, 2008).
Alongside the elevation of women’s empowerment, feminism has become popular, undeniably visible and mediated through celebrity and commercialisation. While examples are abundant, Rivers (2017) places Beyoncé as a frontrunner in this trend with her incorporation of the words of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, ‘We should all be feminists’, in her 2013 track, ‘***Flawless’. On the face of it, engagement with feminist politics appears to be a taken-for-granted feature of contemporary life. The mainstreaming of feminism and the presumed liberation of women appears to stand in contradiction to notions of everyday sexual victimisation and the continued inequalities that underpin it. Indeed, over the last 30 years, we have witnessed periods of relative quiet on the topics of sexual harassment and sexism which certainly gave the impression that these issues no longer warranted extensive public attention (e.g. Gill, 2011). This, of course, is not to say that discussions of sexual violence have been completely absent. However, as Gill (2016) notes, feminist activism, particularly that related to sexual victimisation, has received relatively limited coverage in the press.
the notion that femininity is increasingly figured as a bodily property; a shift from objectification to subjectification in the ways that (some) women are represented; an emphasis on self-surveillance, monitoring and disciplining; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of the make-over paradigm; a resurgence of ideas of natural sexual difference; the marked re-sexualisation of women’s bodies; and an emphasis upon consumerism and the commodification of difference. (Gill, 2011, p. 4)
Post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality has been achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force. (p. 255)
That feminism is predominant in popular culture has raised questions about the continued relevance of postfeminism as an analytic. There seems now to be little reticence in framing social issues as feminist ones which, as Keller and Ringrose (2015) suggest, complicates the idea that feminism has done its work and is no longer needed. This certainly points to complexities in the current feminist moment. Banet-Weiser (2018) argues that while feminist work can and is done through popular media, popular feminism often remains ambivalent to wider feminist politics. Feminisms which become popular are often marked by disengagement with the structural inequalities that prop up unequitable gendered arrangements (Gill, 2016). In considering the pervasiveness of popular feminism, Gill (2016) persuasively argues for the continued relevance of postfeminism for making sense of the uneven visibility of particular feminist politics. Many feminisms which become prominent take a highly individualised approach to gender inequality, encouraging women to work on themselves in order to develop the confidence to succeed (e.g. Gill & Orgad, 2016). Other strands of popular feminism are seen to embrace feminism, but without any burden to take a political position on social issues or offering challenge to the status quo. These themes across some variants of popular feminism, Gill (2016) argues, are perfect in keeping up with postfeminism. Postfeminism as a sensibility can provide a means through which to make sense of how multiple, complex and contradictory understandings of feminist politics coexist as they become embedded within social issues.
Research has drawn attention to how postfeminism resonates and overlaps with neoliberal ideas (Brice & Andrews, 2019; Gill, 2008, 2016; O’Neill, 2018). Neoliberalism is understood as political and economic rationality that centres on privatising public assets, capitalising corporate profits and the rolling back of state welfare provision. It has also given rise to a form of governance in which, individuals are called upon to live as if their lives were an enterprise. In line with the principles of enterprise, people’s lives become shaped by ideas around ambition, success and calculation (Scharff, 2016). Neoliberalism can thus be understood as a “mobile, calculated technology for governing subjects as self-managing, autonomous and enterprising” (Gill & Scharff, 2011, p. 5). As Rose (1999) points out, within neoliberal cultures, individuals are “obliged to be free” (p. 153). In making “free” choices, individuals are also obliged to take full responsibility for the state of their lives. Embedded within individualism, the freely choosing neoliberal subject bears strong resemblance to postfeminist ideals of empowerment, self-reinvention and entrepreneurship.
The self becomes…indistinguishable from a business, where one calculates one’s assets, one’s losses and what is more or less valuable in order to decide where more capital investment — in the form of developing entrepreneurial skills, resources or capacities — is necessary. (p. 1077)
Neoliberal feminism’s call for individual self-improvement effectively displaces the need to address the structural undergirdings of gender inequality. In this sense, neoliberal feminism provides a version of feminist politics that is relatively unchallenging to existing gendered power relationships that continue to frame working lives.
In this book, I examine how neoliberal, feminist and postfeminist discourses have variously shaped understandings of sexual harassment and social responses to it. In doing so, I explore how gendered notions of agency have become constituted in representations of sexual harassment dynamics. While gender is a key analytic in the arguments presented, this book is also concerned with how contemporary constructions of the phenomenon are intersectionally shaped, particularly by race and class (e.g. Crenshaw, 1991; Phipps, 2020). The theoretical arguments advanced in this book are supplemented by an exploration of themes and discourses running through media reporting related to the 2017 speak-out against sexual harassment (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Parker, 2005). This is intended to support my examination of shared cultural patterns around sexual harassment and how these patterns shape how this phenomenon becomes recognised as a problem, who gets to speak about it, and who is heard.
Outline of Chapters
The following five chapters address key themes arising from feminist and psychological scholarship on sexual harassment. Chapter 2 is concerned with sexual harassment in the context of work. While the workplace has been featured in psychological research on this topic, it has not always been extensively theorised. Drawing on research from psychology, organisational studies and feminism, I explore how new modes and ideals of work and workers have shaped how sexual harassment is understood and dealt with. Within these new workplace frames, I examine how neoliberal feminism has become relevant to contemporary resistances to sexual harassment on the job. Chapter 3 moves to a discussion of how postfeminist, feminist and neoliberal discourses have shaped the trajectory of victim politics in relation to sexual harassment. Specifically, this chapter focuses on how notions of agency and passivity become relevant to understanding victims and victim resistance. While Chapters 2 and 3 are primarily concerned with the sexual harassment of women, Chapter 4 examines the sexual harassment of men. In Chapter 4, I explore the circumstances in which men are accorded or denied speaking rights as victims, in order to articulate the relationship between sexual harassment, normative heterosexuality and masculinities. I attend to how postfeminist and inclusive discourses mediate understandings of men as victims in the #MeToo media coverage. Chapter 5, the final substantive chapter of this book, explores the construction of perpetrators of sexual harassment. It focuses on the new predominance of the sexual predator discourse for making sense of sexual harassment and how this discourse supports both the heterosexualisation of sexual harassment and carceral agendas of neoliberalism. I conclude, in Chapter 6, by drawing together the key themes across the book which are particularly relevant for making sense of resistance to sexual harassment in contemporary culture.
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Milano’s use of Me Too was subject to criticism for the fact that she did not initially acknowledge Tarana Burke’s “Me Too” activist work. Burke’s work was centred around gaining support and recognition for women of colour who had experienced sexual violence. This issue is explored in Chapter 3.