A History of Sexual Harassment

You have to be living on Mars not to know that the last several months have given us a great deal to think about concerning sexual abuse and harassment. The Twitter #MeToo hashtag (see also here on Wikipedia) has swelled to epic proportions via the tweets of women who report having been harassed and coerced into sex — or, sometimes, who refused to be coerced — and then (until recently) felt unwilling to publicly accuse the harasser.

I admit I've been torn as to whether to take #MeToo as seriously as aggrieved women might wish me to. For one thing, I've had a blind spot as to whether I ought to believe most of the women's allegations.

The reasons for which I've had a blind spot have to do in part, I think, with the facts of my age (70) and my gender (male). Plus, I seem to personally nurture a psychological predisposition toward innocence. I want to believe that I myself am innocent of all except minor transgressions, and I want to believe that most other people — including most men — are equally innocent.

My predisposition toward innocence has wrongly led me to believe that the spate of harassment and abuse accusations against men — when they are not false accusations — are the fault of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. At that time, old sexual taboos pretty much evaporated. My (incorrect) belief has been that the relaxing of sexual taboos has had as a side effect the engendering of widespread sexual harassing and abuse. Thus if we were to look back to before the Sexual Revolution, we would find little if any sexual harassment.

Wrong!

Yesterday I googled "history of sexual harassment" and found "A Short History of Sexual Harassment" by Reva B. Siegel. Siegel shows that sexual harassment and coercion have been endemic in American life ever since there was American life in the first place. Siegel: "The practice of sexual harassment is centuries old — at least, if we define sexual harassment as unwanted sexual relations imposed by superiors on subordinates at work."

First example: the treatment of black female African slaves by their white male masters. Siegel: " ...  sexual coercion was an entrenched feature of chattel slavery endured by African-American women without protection of law."

After the slaves' emancipation in the mid-1860s, the focus shifted to how women who were not chattel slaves ("property" rather than human beings) but instead "wage-slaves" have been treated. Any woman in the work force might be subjected to harassment and sexual coercion by her male employers or superiors, and have no legal recourse. The law as then practiced thought of every woman, slave or free, as being in effect the possession of some man:

At common law, sexual assault gave rise to an action for damages insofar as it inflicted an injury on a man's property interest in the woman who was assaulted; thus, a master might have a claim in trespass against a man who raped his slave, or a father might bring a seduction action against an employer who impregnated or otherwise defiled his daughter.

As for rape per se, yes, it was clearly against the law. Usually, though, no woman could prove in court that she had been raped unless she could show that she had put up the "utmost resistance" to the act that had been forced upon her. The legal standards that were then in effect cocerning "utmost resistance" were impossible to prove. Any woman who tried would typically just lose her job and/or her good reputation, and the main reason for that catch-22 was that men believed women in general were by nature "promiscuous." If a man had sex with her, the default assumption was that it was at her behest.

What Siegel says in her essay convinces me that sexual harassment and coercion have been rampant not just for decades but for centuries. Wherever and whenever there has been a situation in which a man is in a position of power and a woman is subordinate to him, there has been a substantial likelihood of sexual abuse.

*****

Hands off!

Sexual abuse is thus not just about sex. It's about power. It's about control. And it's very often about class distinctions, inasmuch as the harassing/abusing male is often of a higher socioeconomic class than the woman being abused — the reason being that the higher-ups in an organization are apt to possess more of the attributes of high socioeconomic class than the lower-downs.

And, given the reasons why these class distinctions arise in the first place, it's accordingly often about race and ethnicity, since the abused women are often people of color, whereas the abusing men are often white.

Yet class distinctions and race/ethnicity distinctions are not always present. What is generally present is a difference in the relative levels of power. If the potential abuser can convey to the potentially abused that her (or his, when the abuser is a woman or a gay man) job is at stake unless she complies, and then if she does not keep her mouth shut about the abuse later on, the ground is fertile for abuse.