Sexual Harassment:

5 Pages 1317 Words

Sexual Harassment:
Not Just For Women Anymore

Feminists have researched women’s experiences of sexual harassment for over 20 years, yet men’s experiences of sexual harassment still remain rarely acknowledged and even less frequently studied. Therefore, this is to stimulate feminist interest in men’s experiences of sexual harassment. This is to offer an analysis of the dynamics of heterosexual men’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment perpetrated by heterosexual men or women. As such, my argument is that men’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment are under minded by a restrictive discourse of “acceptable” masculinity, which constructs certain individuals as less than the ideal of masculinity when they do not behave in particular ways. When men are labeled in this fashion, they are in fact being perceived as “women”. The workplace sexual harassment of men in the form of verbal sexual allegations feminizes those men who perceive such allegations distressing.
Although sexual harassment, which is widely understood as “unwanted conduct of a sexual nature or conduct based on sex which is offensive to the recipient” (Rubenstein) , has been a subject of feminist enquiry since the late 1970s, heterosexual men’s experiences of sexual harassment perpetrated by men or women have never previously been scrutinized by feminists. This is because most feminists conceptualize sexual harassment as male oppression of women. For example, in her analysis of men’s resistance to equal opportunities measures, Cockburn states that male power and male sexuality are linked. Wise and Stanley, in an exploration of sexual harassment in everyday life, deny that men may encounter sexual harassment when they perceive sexual harassment as “male behavior forced on women”. Herbert, discussing sexual harassment in schools, argues that men cannot be sexually harassed because harassment can take place only if the harass...