Harassment is perhaps easiest to identify when it occurs in the workplace. If men are worried that they are constantly on the verge of unwittingly violating someone in the post-#MeToo era-which, good, they should be-it’s because, in a society that rarely takes claims of clear-cut sexual assault seriously, there’s usually little room for open discussion about the more nuanced social norms that define the boundaries of sexual harassment. They’re the bad guys, yes, and they’re a fair number of “good guys,” too. Sexual harassment has moved from the realm of cheesy office training videos to the real world, where harassers are not only Donald Trumps and anonymous subway masturbators, but also our friends, lovers, fathers, and work buddies. One male director of a design firm told the New York Times that companies should “cancel the holiday party” until, as the Times paraphrased, “it has been figured out how men and women should interact.”īut the rules of interaction haven’t changed-it’s just that, for the first time, women are publicly calling foul en masse. The baked-in subjectivity of this definition, combined with the large-scale recalibration of this moment, has allowed space for some people to wonder whether cracking down on sexual harassment will put an end to all friendly flirtation. … Part of it is the decades we’ve spent being pressured to underreact.”īy legal definition, sexual harassment is unwelcome or unwanted if it’s welcome or wanted, it’s not harassment. As Rebecca Traister wrote in New York magazine last week, “the rage that many of us are feeling doesn’t necessarily correspond with the severity of the trespass: Lots of us are on some level as incensed about the guy who looked down our shirt at a company retreat as we are about Weinstein. Both the #MeToo hashtag and the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet place accounts of one-off verbal come-ons next to dire accusations of sustained sexual abuse, which made some feminist critics (including, when the spreadsheet first circulated, me) queasy. The definition will grow more capacious as we retrain our antennae to categorize certain male behavior as threatening that we’d previously been conditioned to dismiss or ignore. It’s not just that our collective understanding of the prevalence of harassment has changed it’s that our understanding of the very definition of harassment has been called into question.
This is why the current moment has both women and men reassessing interactions from their past, wondering if they were on either end of a troubling encounter. Though the lines between acceptable behavior and harassment feel in some ways clearer today than ever, there still isn’t anything close to broad agreement about where all these lines should be drawn. Of course, not every uncomfortable experience is harassment, and not every woman is redefining these experiences as abuse. Jesse Jackson grabbed her thigh during a photo-op. “What happened to me was something that was so casual, I almost didn’t even consider it sexual harassment, even though it was beyond my desire,” wrote the Root’s Danielle Young in a recent piece about the moment the Rev.
Actions that once seemed playful or relatively harmless now seem sinister, invisible grease for the wheels of an orchestrated system of humiliation designed to instill self-doubt and fear into women who might have otherwise posed a threat to male control. Now, we must contend with the knowledge that the everyday woman, by virtue of existing in the public sphere, has endured untold violations. Before, we were everyday women dealing with everyday creeps. To people who’ve experienced harassment and abuse, it’s also an alternate history of our own lives. To anyone bearing witness, #MeToo is writing an alternate history of the workplace, the classroom, the corner store, the dance club, the sidewalk, the friend’s party, and the intimate confines of the romantic relationship.