More on Sexual Harassment

In the news these days it seems there are an endless number of women coming forward talking about sexual harassment or abuse by those in power over them.  I think it has happened to many more than we actually know, it is pervasive, part of the culture that we have never examined.

Many men, even my own husband participated in sexual harassment in high school or junior high school. Later, people like Steve realized how abusive this behavior was and they stopped.  Many were drawn into at that age out of peer pressure. What is staggering is the number of men who still engage in this behavior as adults.  The list of powerful men who have been named is mind numbing because for every one that is named how many are unnamed?  Hundreds? Thousands?

It is curious to hear how some of these men justify their behavior.  Some are completely unapologetic, some are calling their accusers liars.  Most interesting to me are the men who admit to the acts stating that they apologize.  They honestly saw these incidents differently than women do.  There is a difference of opinion.  They thought they were being funny.  They thought is was consensual.  They didn't know it was offensive.

In part, it makes sense at least in some cases that they didn't understand how devastating their behavior was for us. Their culture taught them that it was OK to behave that way.  It is pervasive in our culture this idea that it is OK to treat someone like an object, the punch line of a bawdy joke.  Even now devoted Christian men I know in their 70's talk about the girl with the big chest in school and how she was an object of fascination and ridicule.  What they still fail to recognize is that girl was a person with feelings, that she was humiliated.  If she chose to retaliate in some way there was a good reason for it.

I am reading a book by Ta Neishi Coates entitled "Between the World and Me", about his experience as a black man in the United States, in this culture where black people were enslaved at one time.  He talks about the body and how his body and the bodies of other blacks have been used, chained, enslaved, and how in different ways this still goes on.  He talks about protecting his body and the body of his son.  While I am not black, I understand some of what he is talking about because female bodies have been used, enslaved, and desecrated and it still happens.