Not an isolated phenomenon, [sexual harassment] belongs on a continuum of mutually reinforcing behaviors and messages that permeate women’s lives…
Sexual harassment will abate when women forbid its trivialization and minimization as “misconduct,” or “inappropriate workplace behavior” and when women refuse to tolerate the impunity afforded Clarence Thomas, A Supreme Court Justice(!) and President Donald Trump.
Sexual harassment happens within and because of its context: a society whose psycho-sociological, cultural, political, and economic structures function to subordinate women and simultaneously to connect male power with sexual domination, and system-wide domination based on sex.
Written by rena Grasso Reader Supported News Writing for Godot
November 16, 2017
By ignoring history and rational analysis, media coverage of sexual harassment obscures its sources and obstructs change. Without removing its causes, sexual harassment will continue to victimize women. Its pervasiveness is not new. Feminists exposed this decades ago. The present “epidemic” is an outbreak of visibility, rather than of occurrence, a symptom of chronic malignant sexism that periodically comes to light.
‘Sexual harassment’, the phrase and its exposure, was born in the radicalizing crucibles of second wave consciousness-raising groups. In women-only spaces: living rooms, meeting halls, classrooms, they identified personal experiences, discovered that other women shared them, and realized that “the personal is the political.” Such was Cornell’s Women and Work class, formatted to elicit students’ real work experiences, facilitated by sociologist Lyn Farley in the 1970s.
Numerous stories emerged of being touched, harangued for sexual favors, bargained with and coerced by men. Like today, this exposure was explosive. Unlike today, women’s gatherings were erupting across the country, lifting into the light of consciousness a ubiquitous, wide range of violating and violent behavior inflicted on women: rape, wife battering and murder, sexual harassment, childhood molestation, and emotional abuse.
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Connecting the dots, feminists developed the intellectual framework for understanding sexual harassment. Not an isolated phenomenon, it belongs on a continuum of mutually reinforcing behaviors and messages that permeate women’s lives from street cat calls, to calling women “girls”, to a steady diet of objectifying advertisement, to sexist jokes and pornography, to daily reports of rape (often belittled and denied), to domestic violence and murder.
Sexual harassment happens within and because of its context: a society whose psycho-sociological, cultural, political, and economic structures function to subordinate women and simultaneously to connect male power with sexual domination, and system-wide domination based on sex.
For example, the present cast of high profile perpetrators, i.e. rich and powerful men, underscores how economics and politics keep women in dependent, low status roles that render them vulnerable to male power. Of course it’s the wealthy men, the ones with the rank, the ones in positions to influence salary, grades, and promotion. But that’s the problem. Men dominate every institution: education, the arts, the media, government, business and corporations, the military, and, of course, Hollywood,
The problem of male power isn’t confined to the top echelons. Male wealth and power cut across class stratifications and racial divides. Not all men are top dogs. But women are at the bottom of all respective race and class divisions that they share with their male entitled peers. Hence, the diversity of sexual harassers and workplaces, from the double-breasted silk-suited dapper charmers to sleazy bullies, from media studios to factories.
Examining hitherto invisible female experiences, feminists identified the politics of the 3500 years old system, Patriarchy, the social organization that weaves female subordination throughout its structures. Hence, the majority of women experience double whammy oppression, class and sexism, racism and sexism in an air tight system that promotes divisiveness amongst women, and male bonding. “ Me subject, her object,” “me superior, her inferior” is the compensatory consciousness/ privilege that adjusts men to systematic inequality, and provides a (female) scapegoat for whatever resentments and frustrations the system breeds in egos conditioned to entitlement.

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Non top-dog men are oppressed by class and race elaborations of the sexist domination/subjugation paradigm. However, filtering out for class and race, that spectrum of sexist violence functions exclusively to diminish women: by intimidation and fear that restrict female experience, by the denial of females’ humanness, by the propagation of denigrating images and messages, and by the creation of subjugating dynamics that ensnare women in abusive relationships.
The damage to women is incalculable. The numbers, so large, they numb. In this country, daily, 26 women are murdered by intimate partners; one of four women has experienced rape and sexual assault; every woman has been subjected to some form of sexual harassment on the long highway between the street and the citadels of power.

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