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Sexual Harassment,
Psychology and Feminism
#MeToo, Victim Politics
and Predators in
Neoliberal Times
Lisa Lazard
Sexual Harassment, Psychology and Feminism
Lisa Lazard
Sexual Harassment,
Psychology
and Feminism
#MeToo, Victim Politics and Predators in
Neoliberal Times
Lisa Lazard
School of Psychology
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-55254-1 ISBN 978-3-030-55255-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55255-8
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Acknowledgments
There are many people that I owe a debt of gratitude to for their incred-
ibly generous support of this project. First and foremost, I would like to
thank Rose Capdevila for her encouragement and friendship over the last
20 years. This book began in a conversation that Rose and I had about
6 years ago. We were discussing the fact that no one really seemed to
talk about sexual harassment anymore and why the issue had lost rele-
vance. The visibility of the issue now still seems extraordinary to me
given that conversation happened in the not so distant past. I am grateful
for Stephanie Taylor’s support during the writing of this book and her
insightful comments on earlier draft chapters. I would also like to thank
Sarah Crafter, Lauren McCallister, Kate Milnes, Brigette Rickett, Martin
Tolley and the Open University’s CuSP research group, for their incisive
comments on chapter drafts. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Wakelin,
Jess Wakelin and Lauren Wright for reading the last draft over so care-
fully. I also would like to thank Calen and Mark Wakelin for allowing this
task to take over their household for a week. It is impossible to express
my love and gratitude for my partner Richard, who has provided me with
immeasurable support in this process. I am also especially grateful to my
family but particularly Cleo and Dexter who tolerated my distraction with
kindness and understanding. This book is dedicated to Cleo, Dexter, Aria,
Vicky and Chay, with love. This book is also dedicated to Marcia Worrell,
a brilliant academic and a wonderful friend.
v
Contents
1 Introduction—#MeToo and Feminisms 1
2 Workplace Harassment, Hollywood’s Casting Couch

and Neoliberalism 17
3 Women, Sexual Harassment and Victim Politics 43
4 The Sexual Harassment of Hollywood Men 69
5 Sexual Harassment and Sexual Predators in Neoliberal

Times 95
6 Conclusion—Sexual Harassment and Speaking Rights 119
Index 127
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction—#MeToo and Feminisms
Abstract In this chapter, Lazard offers a brief history of how sexual

harassment has been understood in feminism scholarship and activism
since the emergence of the term in the 1970s. The chapter explores
how feminist theorisation has drawn attention to how cultural scripts
for heterosexuality has prescribed gendered sexual subjectivities in which
women are positioned as sexually passive and constrained in relation
to men. The chapter explores recent shifts to understanding women as
empowered sexual subjects which have gained prominence with the ascen-
dency of postfeminism and neoliberal feminist ideas in popular culture.
This chapter sets the scene for a broader explanation of how postfemi-
nism and neoliberal feminism has shaped contemporary understandings
of sexual harassment and resistance to it.
Keywords Sexual harassment · Postfeminism · Neoliberal feminism ·

Heterosexuality
If you have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted write me too in reply
to this tweet. Me too…if all the women who have been sexually harassed
or assaulted write ‘me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of
the magnitude of the problem. (@AlyssaMilano, 15 October 2017)
© The Author(s) 2020 1

L. Lazard, Sexual Harassment, Psychology and Feminism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55255-8_1
2 L. LAZARD
This tweet was the springboard for the meteoric rise of the #MeToo
hashtag activism against sexual harassment and violence in 2017. Actress
Alyssa Milano posted the tweet in amidst growing public condemna-
tion of film producer Harvey Weinstein, whose long history of sexual
violence against women was exposed by The New York Times on the 5th
of October 2017 (Kantor & Twohey, 2017). The call to use #MeToo
originated from the Me Too movement founded by Tarana Burke in
2006.1 Within 24 hours of its posting, the #MeToo hashtag had been
used in 12 million Facebook posts and shared nearly a million times on
Twitter (Boyle, 2019). Numerous celebrities came forward to tell their
experiences of sexual harassment in what became a public speak-out.
Many of those named as perpetrators during this speak-out were held
to account in the media. What followed was an unprecedented number
of public apologies by those accused. This is not to say the issue of
speaking out was treated entirely sympathetically. There were concerns
that #MeToo, particularly in relation to the naming of perpetrators, had
gone too far, that it had become a witch hunt (Fileborn & Phillips, 2019).
However, the backlash did not seem to deter the overwhelmingly positive
response towards #MeToo in much public discussion and reporting (e.g.
De Benedictis et al., 2019).
The supportive response to #MeToo could not be further from how
the issue of sexual harassment has been treated in the not so distant
past. Prior to #MeToo, relatively few people disclosed their experiences
either formally or informally (e.g. Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018). Indeed,
women’s reluctance to define their experiences as sexual harassment
and seek amelioration had been extensively documented, particularly
in feminist psychological research in the 1990s (Gutek & Koss, 1996;
Herbert, 1994; Lazard, 2018; Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997). This research
occurred against a backdrop of a wider pattern of routine disbelief and
hostility towards those who had experienced sexual violence (Anderson &
Doherty, 2008; Gregory & Lees, 1999). Characterising this pattern is the
way in which victims have been held to account for their own conduct—
did they precipitate the harassment? Are they making a false accusation?
Are they being oversensitive? (e.g. Hinze, 2004; Lazard, 2017). The
tendency for the significance of sexual harassment to be downplayed
or dismissed has a long history and has often paved the way for the
sympathetic treatment of perpetrators (Mann, 2018).
1 INTRODUCTION—#METOO AND FEMINISMS 3
How have we got from a place where victims are subject to routine
social censure to one which appears more socially supportive of those
harassed? How is sexual harassment made sense of and understood? What
implications do such understandings have for perpetrators and victims?
These questions guide the analysis of sexual harassment presented in this
book. Situated within a feminist psychological framework, my aim is to
explore particular shifts in the cultural landscape which are relevant to
how sexual harassment has become constituted, and how this has shaped
the way in which victims and perpetrators come to be understood. To
set the scene for this book, I will briefly contextualise the more recent
resistance to sexual harassment within the trajectory for activism and theo-
risation around the phenomenon. In doing so, I will explicate the feminist
theoretical influences that shape the arguments in this book. At this point,
I would like to add a caveat—the contexts I attend to refer largely to
the US, from which #MeToo arose, and the UK, the place from which
I write. As such, I make no claims that the shifts I discuss are global,
complete or mark firm breaks from patterns of understanding that have
been dominant. This book aims to articulate predominant understand-
ings around sexual harassment that have been particularly relevant in the
global North.
Workplace Sexual Harassment,

Sexual Violence and Heterosexuality
In this book, the exploration of sexual harassment starts with how it
is primarily understood as something that men do, most commonly to
women and, to a lesser extent, other men. This book is also concerned
with how the context of work has been central in getting the issue on the
public agenda. This is not to say that my analyses presumes that sexual
harassment only occurs in the workplace. Rather, I start from the posi-
tion that the recognition of workplace sexual harassment as a gendered
phenomenon has been a key frame within which developments in femi-
nist theorisation and activism have largely taken place. In this section, I
will discuss key developments in the trajectory of sexual harassment as a
social problem which shape the direction of this book.
#MeToo emerged out of celebrity women’s shared experiences of
being subjected to the Hollywood casting couch—a euphemism for quid
pro quo harassment in which sexual activity is made a condition of
job security, benefits or reasonable treatment (MacKinnon, 1979). This
4 L. LAZARD
context for the emergence of #MeToo shares similarities with how sexual
harassment became a key concern within the history of feminist activism.
While the coining of the term has been attributed to several different
sources, there is consensus that it appears to have entered popular vernac-
ular in the 1970s, arising from the work undertaken by the Working
Women’s United Institute (WWUI). The WWUI formed at Cornell
University, had worked on behalf of Carmita Wood—an administrator
at Cornell who had been subjected to sexual harassment by a faculty
member. The WWUI galvanised a critical response to Wood’s treatment
by supporting her during an appeal. This provided the impetus for the
development of a research and publicity hub around workplace sexual
harassment by the WWUI which eventually became a national support
centre for victims of sexual harassment in New York. It was a WWUI
survey which has been credited with first using the term sexual harass-
ment in 1975 in formal documentation (Benson & Thompson, 1982). In
the same year, the term found its way into mainstream media, with The
New York Times publishing an article entitled ‘Women begin to speak out
against sexual harassment at work’ (Nemy, 1975). The UK lagged behind
the US in the use of the term in popular discourse by several years. Wise
and Stanley (1987) suggested that there was “no mention of any such
animal as ‘sexual harassment’ in the English press, certainly none that we
could find, before the reporting of American sexual harassment cases and
the review of feminist and feminist-influenced books on the subject at the
end of 1979” (p. 30).
Activism around sexual harassment was shaped by the shifting aims
of women’s organised activism across the 1960s and 1970s. In the UK,
the Women’s Liberation Movement had initially focused on economic
and legal equality which included rights around sexual choices. For
example, equal pay, shared childcare and access to contraception were
the primary aims of gender parity agendas at this point (Warner, 2001).
These concerns provided the backdrop for the contextualisation of sexual
harassment as a workplace issue. The phenomenon became constituted as
an economic harm which supported women’s subjugation under patri-
archy. The 1970s also saw an expansion of feminist agendas around
sexual violence, from the politics of rape, to a continuum of sexual
violence that spanned across everyday to exceptional circumstances. In
line with this broadening of focus, definitions of sexual harassment
have included wide-ranging behaviours such as leering, ogling, wolf
whistling, catcalling, touching, sexual bribery, sexism and heterosexism
to name but a few (Fitzgerald et al., 1988; Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997).
These behaviours were referred to by Wise and Stanley (1987) as ‘the

dripping tap’ to denote how sexually harassing practices were often a
continuous and mundane pattern in women’s lives. These practices were
connected to pervasive sexisms that demarcated and set unequal rights
and freedoms of men and women which ultimately constrained women’s
participation in social life, particularly in the workplace.
In theorising the broadening of attention to a range of instantiations
of sexual violence, Kelly’s (1988) groundbreaking research drew attention
to the relationship between normative heterosexuality and sexual violence
through the notion of continuum. The continuum of sexual violence
brought together typical heterosexual practices with sexual offences
including, for example, sexual harassment, child sex abuse, domestic
violence and rape. The purpose of this was to articulate the link between
varied acts of sexual and gendered violence and “more commonplace
interactions between men and women/girls” (Kelly, 1988, p. 51). Kelly’s
argument drew on Rich’s (1980) classic essay Compulsory Heterosexuality
and Lesbian Existence which has undoubtedly influenced much femi-
nist work on connections between normative heterosexuality and sexual
violence. Rich (1980) presented an explanation of heterosexuality as a
political institution akin to, and underpinning, other institutions such as
marriage, motherhood and the nuclear family, which act in the service of
male dominance of women. The presumed and undisputed naturalness of
heterosexuality renders it compulsory which, Rich (1980) argued, consol-
idates male power over women and creates divisions between women
by, for example, othering lesbian women as deviant, pathological and by
making their experiences invisible.
In her essay, Rich drew on MacKinnon’s (1979) highly influential book
the Sexual Harassment of Working Women to highlight how compulsory
heterosexuality intersects with other institutions which, in Mackinnon’s
work, included economics. Mackinnon (1979) pointed to the long history
in which women were reliant on sexual exchange for material survival—
“prostitution and marriage as well as sexual harassment in different ways
institutionalize this arrangement” (p. 175). During the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, many women were excluded from access to
education and training (Shields, 1975) which served to act as a barrier
to many forms of employment and to segregate women into low paid
and socially devalued jobs. According to MacKinnon (1979), middle-
class and upper-class women were excluded from the workplace often
through recourse to the possibility of victimisation by “sexual predators”
6 L. LAZARD
outside the home. Working-class and poor women entered into precarious
employment contexts in which they were often denied job security or the
possibility for advancement enjoyed by their male counterparts. A picture
emerged in which women were dependent on economic subsistence from
men who held higher ranking employment positions (e.g. Baker, 2008;
Lambertz, 1985). For Mackinnon (1979), sexual harassment perpetuates
practices which keep women in sexual service to men. The woman who
resisted unwanted sexual attention on the job also risked other punish-
ments including, as Mackinnon (1979) notes, being subject to pejorative
uses of the term ‘lesbian’. Building on this, Rich argues that requirements
that women sexually market themselves to men required lesbian women
workers not only to hide their sexual identification, but actively align
themselves with social requirements for doing heterosexual femininity “in
terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of
‘real’ women” (Rich, 2003, p. 21). This early scholarship pointed to how
the experience of sexual harassment is not straightforward or monolithic
but is inevitably shaped by intersectional power relations that become
relevant in instances of harassment. Indeed, the notion of compulsory
heterosexuality has been used to draw attention to how sexual harass-
ment does not simply support a gender hierarchy of male dominance and
female subordination but works as a mechanism to police the boundaries
of normative gender. As Butler (1990) argued “the sexual harassment of
gay people may well take place not in the service of shoring up gender
hierarchy, but in promoting gender normativity” (p. xiii).
Critical theoretical engagements with heterosexuality became the focus
of a body of empirical work in feminist psychology which has attended
to how heterosexuality shapes subjectivity and practice. In particular,
Wendy Hollway’s insights in her early work (1984, 1989) on gender rela-
tions and sexuality has been influential in feminist scholarship in these
areas. Hollway argued that three dominant discourses provided a cultural
resource for organising heterosexual relationships: (1) the male sex drive
discourse—that men are naturally compelled to seek sex with women;
(2) the have/hold discourse—that women aim to secure a committed
relationship with a man in which sex becomes exchanged for relational
exclusivity, commitment and security; and, (3) the permissive discourse—
in the wake of women’s activism around sexual liberation, women are
assumed to be equal sexual subjects and have sexual needs like men do. In
her analysis, Hollway explored how the male sex drive discourse and the
have/hold discourse work together in highly gendered ways in which men
are positioned as always ready for sex and women’s bodies activate this
readiness. Women, on the other hand, are set the task of managing men’s
desire for sex. The permissive discourse, with its roots in the 1960s sexual
revolution, would appear to unsettle the male sex drive and have/hold
discourses. However, as Gavey (2018) notes, the permissive discourse did
not appear to destabilise normative patterns of heterosexuality described
in the former two discourses—sexual and gender inequalities continued to
play out behind the traction gained by the turn to sexual permissiveness.
The ways in which such dominant discourses of heterosexuality prescribe
certain gendered sexual subjectivities have been widely influential in work
seeking to understand the cultural conditions enabling sexual violence.
For example, Gavey (2018) argues that the heterosexual dynamic of sexu-
ally passive or constrained women and agentic men authorises sexual
encounters which are not always easily distinguishable from rape. This
creates room for ambiguity around whether an experience was rape or
“just sex”. For Gavey (2018) such normative heterosexual dynamics can
thus function as a support within the “cultural scaffolding” enabling
sexual violence. In this book, I argue that these insights around the rela-
tionship between normative heterosexuality and sexual violence are crucial
for understanding how sexual harassment relational dynamics are consti-
tuted. Throughout this book, I draw attention to how discourses of sexual
harassment are produced in and through frames of normative heterosexu-
ality. I argue that these discourses have and continue to profoundly shape
how we make sense of the victimisation of women and men.
Shifting Landscapes
To say that sexual victimisation arises from the assumed sexual passivity
of women in relation to men is, and never was, the whole story. Women’s
sexual agency has not been completely absent in understandings of sexual
violence. There is, of course, a long history of characterisation of the
sexual agentic woman as deviant (e.g. ‘slag’, ‘slut’), which has worked to
prop up a sexual double standard that has been used to justify the sexual
harassment and assault of women (e.g. Attwood, 2007; Mendes, 2015).
Feminine sexuality has been predominantly constructed as passive and
acquiescent but, at the same time, provocative and dangerous, constrained
only by the social requirements of feminine sexuality (Gavey, 2018).
Within this context, the man who forces sexual activity on women can,
8 L. LAZARD
and has been, understood as a romantic hero—freeing the woman of her

social constraints and giving her what she ‘really wants’. Women have
also been bequeathed within dominant sexual violence discourses with the
role of actively setting the limits on sex by gatekeeping it and resisting it
forcefully when necessary (Lazard, 2018).
In more recent times, certainly over the last 30 years, women’s sexual
agency and empowerment has gained extraordinary visibility and has
become increasingly situated within the parameters of social acceptability
around sex. Within this cultural milieu, women are invited to embrace
the promise of unlimited freedoms afforded by contemporary times by
embodying sexiness and doing sex to please themselves (Gill, 2008).
Indeed, a body of work has noted that women’s bodies have become
‘super sexualised’ within mainstream media and society more generally
(Gill, 2008; Whitehead & Kurz, 2009). For example, clothes, images
and activities that had once been regulated to the sex industry became
mainstreamed as Porno Chic (e.g. Harvey & Gill, 2011). Of course,
the sexualisation and objectification of women has long been implicated
in sexual harassment and violence and has been tied to the reduction
of women to bodily passivity. As Segal (1992) has argued, objectifica-
tion produces women as “passive, perpetually desiring bodies—or bits of
bodies—eternally available for servicing men” (p. 2). However, the steady
rise in discourses around women’s sexual empowerment, with women
invited to engage with sexiness on their own terms, appears to move away
from any straightforward notion of women as a passive object of the male
gaze (Gill, 2008).
Alongside the elevation of women’s empowerment, feminism has
become popular, undeniably visible and mediated through celebrity and
commercialisation. While examples are abundant, Rivers (2017) places
Beyoncé as a frontrunner in this trend with her incorporation of the
words of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, ‘We
should all be feminists’, in her 2013 track, ‘***Flawless’. On the face of
it, engagement with feminist politics appears to be a taken-for-granted
feature of contemporary life. The mainstreaming of feminism and the
presumed liberation of women appears to stand in contradiction to
notions of everyday sexual victimisation and the continued inequalities
that underpin it. Indeed, over the last 30 years, we have witnessed periods
of relative quiet on the topics of sexual harassment and sexism which
certainly gave the impression that these issues no longer warranted exten-
sive public attention (e.g. Gill, 2011). This, of course, is not to say that
discussions of sexual violence have been completely absent. However, as
Gill (2016) notes, feminist activism, particularly that related to sexual
victimisation, has received relatively limited coverage in the press.
Such shifts have been connected to wider cultural rationalities which
shape gendered subjectivity. More specifically, and particularly relevant
to this book, are those concerned with postfeminism, neoliberalism and
neoliberal feminism. While postfeminism is a contestable term, Gill’s
hugely influential work refers to it as a cultural sensibility that makes sense
of empirical patterns in the contemporary landscape. These include:
the notion that femininity is increasingly figured as a bodily property;

a shift from objectification to subjectification in the ways that (some)
women are represented; an emphasis on self-surveillance, monitoring and
disciplining; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the domi-
nance of the make-over paradigm; a resurgence of ideas of natural sexual
difference; the marked re-sexualisation of women’s bodies; and an emphasis
upon consumerism and the commodification of difference. (Gill, 2011,
p. 4)
Postfeminism as a sensibility also includes the muting of critical vocab-

ularies for articulating structural inequalities and cultural influence (Gill,
2016). Crucially, postfeminism has been implicated in the undoing or
undermining of feminist politics. More specifically, postfeminist argu-
ments take feminism into account only to cast it out. As McRobbie
(2004) cogently argues:
Post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can

be taken into account, to suggest that equality has been achieved, in order
to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is
no longer needed, it is a spent force. (p. 255)
That feminism is predominant in popular culture has raised questions

about the continued relevance of postfeminism as an analytic. There seems
now to be little reticence in framing social issues as feminist ones which,
as Keller and Ringrose (2015) suggest, complicates the idea that femi-
nism has done its work and is no longer needed. This certainly points to
complexities in the current feminist moment. Banet-Weiser (2018) argues
that while feminist work can and is done through popular media, popular
feminism often remains ambivalent to wider feminist politics. Feminisms
10 L. LAZARD
which become popular are often marked by disengagement with the

structural inequalities that prop up unequitable gendered arrangements
(Gill, 2016). In considering the pervasiveness of popular feminism, Gill
(2016) persuasively argues for the continued relevance of postfeminism
for making sense of the uneven visibility of particular feminist politics.
Many feminisms which become prominent take a highly individualised
approach to gender inequality, encouraging women to work on them-
selves in order to develop the confidence to succeed (e.g. Gill & Orgad,
2016). Other strands of popular feminism are seen to embrace feminism,
but without any burden to take a political position on social issues or
offering challenge to the status quo. These themes across some variants
of popular feminism, Gill (2016) argues, are perfect in keeping up with
postfeminism. Postfeminism as a sensibility can provide a means through
which to make sense of how multiple, complex and contradictory under-
standings of feminist politics coexist as they become embedded within
social issues.
Research has drawn attention to how postfeminism resonates and over-
laps with neoliberal ideas (Brice & Andrews, 2019; Gill, 2008, 2016;
O’Neill, 2018). Neoliberalism is understood as political and economic
rationality that centres on privatising public assets, capitalising corporate
profits and the rolling back of state welfare provision. It has also given
rise to a form of governance in which, individuals are called upon to live
as if their lives were an enterprise. In line with the principles of enter-
prise, people’s lives become shaped by ideas around ambition, success
and calculation (Scharff, 2016). Neoliberalism can thus be understood as
a “mobile, calculated technology for governing subjects as self-managing,
autonomous and enterprising” (Gill & Scharff, 2011, p. 5). As Rose
(1999) points out, within neoliberal cultures, individuals are “obliged
to be free” (p. 153). In making “free” choices, individuals are also
obliged to take full responsibility for the state of their lives. Embedded
within individualism, the freely choosing neoliberal subject bears strong
resemblance to postfeminist ideals of empowerment, self-reinvention and
entrepreneurship.
Scholarship has pointed to the ways in which neoliberalism colonises
feminism (Fraser, 2009), producing what has been referred to more
recently as neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2018, 2019). In contrast
to the postfeminist disavowal of the need for feminist politics, neoliberal
feminism affirms its continued relevance by acknowledging gender dispar-
ities in working cultures. For example, while the gender pay gap, glass
ceilings and sexual harassment are acknowledged to be significant barriers
to women’s success in the workplace, the solutions neoliberal feminism

posits are those in keeping with individualism. Women are invited to solve
such barriers by, for example, working on their own self-confidence and
self-esteem (Gill & Orgad, 2016). Through this self-work, the neoliberal
feminist subject is one who is incited to exercise resilience in the face of
workplace gender-based challenges; she is one who takes responsibility
for her own well-being as well as the degree of success or failure that
she makes of her life. Rottenberg (2018, 2019), in her timely analysis
of neoliberal feminism, draws attention to its operation in contempo-
rary culture. This is exemplified by its presence in bestselling books such
as Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) feminist manifesto Lean In: Women, Work,
and the Will to Lead and, more recently, Ivanka Trump’s (2017) Women
Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success (Rottenberg, 2018, 2019). For
example, in Ivanka Trump’s book, Rottenberg (2019) argues that while
there is an argument made for structural changes to support women to
work, including affordable childcare and paid maternity leave, much of
the advice provided for success revolves around women making invest-
ments in themselves. This includes, for example, the necessity of good
planning to realise goals, developing a personal mission statement as well
as fostering one’s own networking and negotiating skills. Rottenberg
(2018) argues that through self-investment activities:
The self becomes…indistinguishable from a business, where one calcu-

lates one’s assets, one’s losses and what is more or less valuable in order
to decide where more capital investment — in the form of developing
entrepreneurial skills, resources or capacities — is necessary. (p. 1077)
Neoliberal feminism’s call for individual self-improvement effectively

displaces the need to address the structural undergirdings of gender
inequality. In this sense, neoliberal feminism provides a version of femi-
nist politics that is relatively unchallenging to existing gendered power
relationships that continue to frame working lives.
In this book, I examine how neoliberal, feminist and postfeminist
discourses have variously shaped understandings of sexual harassment and
social responses to it. In doing so, I explore how gendered notions of
agency have become constituted in representations of sexual harassment
dynamics. While gender is a key analytic in the arguments presented,
this book is also concerned with how contemporary constructions of
the phenomenon are intersectionally shaped, particularly by race and
class (e.g. Crenshaw, 1991; Phipps, 2020). The theoretical arguments
advanced in this book are supplemented by an exploration of themes and
12 L. LAZARD
discourses running through media reporting related to the 2017 speak-

out against sexual harassment (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Parker, 2005). This
is intended to support my examination of shared cultural patterns around
sexual harassment and how these patterns shape how this phenomenon
becomes recognised as a problem, who gets to speak about it, and who is
heard.
Outline of Chapters
The following five chapters address key themes arising from feminist and
psychological scholarship on sexual harassment. Chapter 2 is concerned
with sexual harassment in the context of work. While the workplace has
been featured in psychological research on this topic, it has not always
been extensively theorised. Drawing on research from psychology, organ-
isational studies and feminism, I explore how new modes and ideals of
work and workers have shaped how sexual harassment is understood and
dealt with. Within these new workplace frames, I examine how neolib-
eral feminism has become relevant to contemporary resistances to sexual
harassment on the job. Chapter 3 moves to a discussion of how post-
feminist, feminist and neoliberal discourses have shaped the trajectory of
victim politics in relation to sexual harassment. Specifically, this chapter
focuses on how notions of agency and passivity become relevant to
understanding victims and victim resistance. While Chapters 2 and 3 are
primarily concerned with the sexual harassment of women, Chapter 4
examines the sexual harassment of men. In Chapter 4, I explore the
circumstances in which men are accorded or denied speaking rights as
victims, in order to articulate the relationship between sexual harassment,
normative heterosexuality and masculinities. I attend to how postfemi-
nist and inclusive discourses mediate understandings of men as victims in
the #MeToo media coverage. Chapter 5, the final substantive chapter of
this book, explores the construction of perpetrators of sexual harassment.
It focuses on the new predominance of the sexual predator discourse
for making sense of sexual harassment and how this discourse supports
both the heterosexualisation of sexual harassment and carceral agendas
of neoliberalism. I conclude, in Chapter 6, by drawing together the key
themes across the book which are particularly relevant for making sense
of resistance to sexual harassment in contemporary culture.
Note
1. Milano’s use of Me Too was subject to criticism for the fact that she did not
initially acknowledge Tarana Burke’s “Me Too” activist work. Burke’s work
was centred around gaining support and recognition for women of colour
who had experienced sexual violence. This issue is explored in Chapter 3.
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CHAPTER 2
Workplace Harassment, Hollywood’s Casting

Couch and Neoliberalism
Abstract This chapter explores sexual harassment as a workplace problem

in both psychological and feminist research. It examines how the new
normal of working lives, and shifts in ideals of the “good” worker, have
shaped how sexual harassment is understood. Of particular importance is
how neoliberal feminism, which primarily addresses professional and priv-
ileged women, dovetailed with initial traction of #MeToo. This chapter
explores the complexities of intersectional power relations that are rele-
vant for understanding less privileged women’s experiences of challenging
sexual harassment. It focuses on how intersectional power relations can
be minimised and obscured by recourse to women’s self-empowerment
in postfeminist and neoliberal feminist discourse.
Keywords Workplace sexual harassment · New normal of working lives ·

Intersectionality · Postfeminism · Neoliberal feminism
I told him [Harvey Weinstein] something like, “When I win an Academy

Award in one of your movies.” He said, “No, when you get nominated.” I
said, “No, no, when I win an Academy Award.” That was a small moment
of power when I was able to contradict him and hold to my reality. And then
I got out of there. And by the way, I’ve never been offered a movie by that
studio. Ever. (Setoodeh, 2015, para. 5)
© The Author(s) 2020 17

L. Lazard, Sexual Harassment, Psychology and Feminism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55255-8_2
18 L. LAZARD
In 2015, two years prior to The New York Times exposé of Harvey
Weinstein, actress Ashley Judd publicly shared her experience of sexual
harassment by the Hollywood producer in an ‘edited and condensed’
interview with Variety Magazine (Setoodeh, 2015). This interview has
been marked as an early attempt at unmasking Weinstein’s long history
of sexual harassment and violence against women in the entertainment
industry. Indeed, it was Judd’s personal testimony in the Variety Maga-
zine article that served as the powerful opener for the New York Times
exposé of Weinstein in 2017. The above extract from Judd’s 2015 inter-
view describes an interaction between Judd and Weinstein sometime after
he had subjected her to sexual harassment. What this draws attention
to is the ongoing impact of his greater professional power over her in
the years that followed. This observation is, of course, not new. As I
have argued in the preceding chapter, women’s activism against sexual
harassment has been embedded in a critique of women’s subjugation
within paid work since the emergence of the term in the 1970s. The
workplace has, however, undergone substantial shifts since this early grass-
roots activism. In this chapter, I explore the connection between sexual
harassment and the workplace. I begin by tracing a path through how
this connection has been treated within the psychological literature. I
then examine the contextualisation of sexual harassment within changing
patterns of work. In doing so, I develop an argument that points to how
aspects of the #MeToo voicing has been shaped by neoliberal feminism
and contemporary notions of the ideal worker.
Psychology and Workplace Sexual Harassment

Grassroots women’s activism and feminist scholarship in the 1970s was
central to calling public attention to sexual harassment as a significant
social issue. Much of this political activity focused on workplace sexual
harassment as a mechanism for women’s sexual and economic subju-
gation under patriarchy (see Chapter 1). The gendered social order of
paid work was characterised by the sexual division of labour which was
premised on the ideal of a male breadwinner and female homemaker (e.g.
Pateman, 1988). This ideal was undergirded by the presumed naturalness
of sex-differentiated social roles in which women’s position in the social
order was understood in terms of their natural suitability to homemaking
and childcare (Shields, 1975; Weisstein, 1993). In practice, many women
worked because they were not in a heterosexual partnership, or because
2 WORKPLACE HARASSMENT, HOLLYWOOD’S CASTING COUCH … 19
jobs typically done by the working classes generally did not pay enough
for families to rely on one pay packet (Holloway, 2007). Nevertheless,
the breadwinner ideal enabled the workplace to be treated primarily as
a masculine preserve which created the conditions for women’s lower
status to men on the job. These social orders around paid work created
a relationship in which women were economically dependent on men
(e.g. Connell, 2005; Hearn, 2015; MacKinnon, 1979; Walby & Bagguley,
1990). It was these economic gender inequalities that were treated as
central for making sexual harassment possible, permissible and routine
(Tangri et al., 1982).1
To challenge such gendered power disparities, much feminist schol-
arship in the 1970s and 1980s contested the presumed naturalness of
the sex-differentiated roles. This included the theorisation of gender as
a cultural construct (e.g. Fausto-Sterling, 1985; Oakley, 1972; Unger,
1979) and heterosexuality as a central site of women’s oppression (Fine
& Gordon, 1989; Rich, 1980). Such analyses thus questioned the ‘natu-
ral’ role of women in supporting men to work and reproducing children
as the future generation of labour (Pateman, 1988). These feminist chal-
lenges contributed to the political problematisation of sexual harassment
as a form of sex discrimination at work (MacKinnon, 1979; Samuels,
2003). Sexual harassment thus became an issue of public governance
in the 1980s, with institutions and formal bodies developing codes of
practice and grievance processes for dealing with it. It was during this
time that sexual harassment was formally defined as an employment
equality issue and as a matter for trade unions (Thomas & Kitzinger,
1997). Important to this were the amendments made to civil law in
both the US and UK which allowed workplace sexual harassment to be
actionable as workplace sex discrimination. Against this backdrop, and
in response to public calls to address sexual harassment as a pressing
social concern, sexual harassment appeared as a field of research in main-
stream psychology (Fitzgerald et al., 1995). This dovetailed with the
growth in both attribution research (the study of factors that influence
judgements about the behaviour of self and others) and sexual violence
proclivity research (the measurement of individual proclivity for sexual
violence) in psychology. These research areas undoubtedly shaped the
direction of much psychological research on sexual harassment. Attribu-
tion and proclivity research moved away from the wider feminist critiques
of gender and the workplace. This was done in order to position sexual
20 L. LAZARD
harassment within the frames of mainstream psychology and examine

individual processes that were relevant to it.
Attribution studies, for example, have been primarily interested in how
people make sense of victims and perpetrators of sexual harassment. Using
vignette methodology, studies have typically manipulated the character-
istics and behaviour of fictional victims or “targets”, and perpetrators
or “actors”, in order to investigate what information is important in
making judgements about the cause of sexual harassment. While vignettes
typically use the workplace as the context for sexual harassment, it has
remained an untheorised backdrop in this field of research. For example,
Pryor and Day’s (1988) study used vignettes describing the sexual harass-
ment of a female student by her male professor. However, the focus of the
study was not on the professional relationship but on the student’s appear-
ance and behaviour. More specifically, participants rated the professor’s
behaviour as less harassing for physically “unattractive” women compared
to “attractive” or “average looking women” (p. 407). This study also
suggested that unwanted sexual attention was rated less harassing for
a woman dressed in a “sexually provocative” manner (p. 407). Other
studies have found that participants are more likely to see the target as
provoking sexual harassment if they were “attractive” (Castellow et al.,
1990; Gutek et al., 1983). Questions about the social and structural bases
of sexual harassment at work were effectively displaced by a focus on the
behaviour of individual women.
While early attribution research attempted to identify the factors
relevant to defining an event as sexual harassment, it did not problema-
tise normative assumptions about heterosexuality that framed everyday
definitions and judgements. As discussed in Chapter 1, within norma-
tive heterosexuality, women have been positioned as sexually passive
or constrained in relation to sexually agentic men. The male sex drive
discourse has been particularly dominant and positions men as keen and
ready for sex with women (Hollway, 1984, 1989). Women, on the other
hand, have been positioned as sexual gatekeepers and tasked with the job
of managing men’s sexual interest in them (e.g. Farvid & Braun, 2018;
Jackson & Cram, 2003). Attribution studies, often uncritically, drew on
notions of women’s bodies as a site of trouble by how they elicit sexual
interest from men. That women are socially required under normative
heterosexuality to both conform to social expectations around feminine
beauty (Blood, 2005), and manage the potential dangers in doing so,
was not considered (Hall, 2004). Across early attribution research, there
appears to be a reasonably consistent theme around the idea that victims

could or should manage the potential risk of sexual harassment (e.g.
Valentine-French & Radtke, 1989). While the emphasis on victim respon-
sibility in attribution studies has been justified as a means to understand
the pervasive phenomenon of victim blame (e.g. Whatley, 1996), the
design of studies arguably reproduces victim blame as a reasonable and
legitimate thing to do when making sense of sexual harassment and
violence (e.g. Anderson & Doherty, 2008). That victim responsibility
featured heavily in sexual harassment attribution research is perhaps not
surprising given that the growth of this research area coincided with a rise
of neoliberalism as a cultural ideal in the UK and the US. Neoliberal ideals
encourage all individuals to take personal responsibility for every aspect
of their lives, including exposure to the risk of sexual violence (Anderson
& Doherty, 2008).
Alongside attribution studies, proclivity studies on sexual harassment
burgeoned in the 1980s. These studies centred on the measurement
of men’s proclivity for sexual harassment. This field of research was
pioneered by the work of Pryor (1987) who developed the Likelihood
to Sexually Harass Scale (LSH) which remains the most influential and
widely used measure of sexual harassment proclivities. The LSH consists
of 10 hypothetical scenarios, each accompanied by a Likert scale, which
invite respondents to consider the likelihood that they would sexually
harass someone if there were no consequences for doing so. All 10
scenarios describe quid pro quo harassment which refers to how sexual
activity is made a condition of job security, benefits or reasonable treat-
ment (Mackinnon, 1979). Pryor’s decision to use this definition, however,
was not specifically rooted in concerns about theorising the link between
sexual harassment and work. Rather, because quid pro quo behaviour has
been more consistently socially defined as sexual harassment, its use in
the LSH contributed to the validity of the scale and its reputation as a
psychometrically sound measurement tool (Pina et al., 2009).
That the LSH scale focuses on only one form of sexual harassment has
been the basis for its critique. Bingham and Burleson (1996) attempted to
address this shortcoming by developing the Sexual Harassment Proclivity
Index (SHPI). Bingham and Burleson (1996) devised a vignette with a
series of Likert scale items, that were intended to reflect a broader range
of sexually harassing behaviour. These items describe different communi-
cation strategies for indicating sexual interest because, for Bingham and
Burleson (1996), men’s proclivity for sexual harassment may be rooted
22 L. LAZARD
in a communication skills deficit which manifests as “poor dating skills”

(p. 311). The vignette employed in the SHPI requires participants to
imagine how they could attempt to realise a potential sexual relationship
with a colleague. More specifically, participants are invited to take the
perspective of the manager when reading the following scenario:
Suppose that during the first few weeks Donna worked for you, you invited
her out to dinner several times. She turned you down each time. This was
really disappointing to you because you think Donna is very pretty and you
would like to get to know her better. Listed below are various strategies
that men have said they might use in this situation. If you were in this
situation, how likely would you be to use each of the strategies listed?
(p. 311)
In Bingham and Burleson’s (1996) study, 26 strategies were listed,

all of which could comprise sexual harassment, by the Equal Employ-
ment Opportunities Commission (1980) guidelines. These strategies were
intended to reflect less extreme forms of sexual harassment (e.g. “Com-
ment on how pretty Donna is”; “Try to convince Donna that she would
enjoy having dinner with you”; “Try to be especially sexy when Donna is
around”) to more extreme displays (e.g. “Offer Donna a raise or promo-
tion if she will start seeing you socially”; “Tell Donna you will fire her if
she doesn’t start seeing you socially”; “Let Donna go, and hire someone
else who is equally qualified for the job”) (p. 312). Participants indicated
the likelihood of them using each strategy using a five-point Likert scale
(1 = highly unlikely to use, 5 = highly likely to use).
Like attribution studies, normative assumptions about heterosexuality
appear to shape the design of the research. For example, the vignette
describes events that happened before “Donna” is subjected to sexual
harassment. This includes Donna’s repeated refusal to date the manager
which could constitute the phenomenon. The SHPI therefore requires
the participant to start from the imaginary position that they are already
engaging in problematic sexual behaviour. However, these “pre harass-
ment” behaviours are not problematised in the study. This lack of
problematisation suggests that these behaviours are seen to reflect normal
interactions between men and women. Interestingly, participants cannot
easily claim a position that is not sexually harassing in the response format
supplied. While it is true that participants could answer by selecting the
“highly unlikely to use” response category, the phrasing “unlikely” retains
the possibility, however small, that sexual harassment could be a useable

“strategy” for men to secure a sexual relationship with a woman. This
methodological critique is not limited to the SHPI. The LSH scale also
builds in similar assumptions into its vignette design. As an example,
Pryor (1987) outlines the following scenario which is one of the ten
vignettes used in the LSH scale:
Imagine you are the news director for a local television station. Due to
some personnel changes you have to replace the anchor woman for the
evening news. Your policy has always been to promote from within your
organisation when an anchor woman vacancy occurs. There are several
female reporters from which to choose. All are young, attractive and appar-
ently qualified for the job. One reporter, Loretta. W., is someone who you
personally find very sexy. You initially hire her, giving her a first break
in TV. How likely are you to do the following things in this situation?
Assuming that you fear no reprisal, would you offer Loretta the job in
exchange for sexual favours? (p. 273)
In this vignette, the sexual attractiveness of the candidates is described

as relevant to the news director’s decisions before quid pro quo harass-
ment has taken place. This is because all the candidates are “apparently”
qualified but what distinguishes Loretta, W., is the fact that the news
director finds her “sexy”. The employment decision is thus already based
on the sexualisation of Loretta. Much like how women’s provocation of
men was an assumed and unproblematised reality in attribution studies,
what is taken for granted in the design of such proclivity research is
that women’s bodies, are a site of trouble. For example, Loretta invites
trouble by her alignment with Eurocentric feminine beauty standards,
that is, being “young”, “attractive”, “pretty” and “sexy”. This in turn
provokes the male character into persistently and aggressively pursuing
her, mirroring long-standing cultural heterosexual imperatives for men to
seek sex and for women to resist it (Gavey, 2018). The “pre harassment”
context in this vignette draws on the male sex drive discourse in which
men’s desire for sex is something which suffuses with men’s day to day
activities, and in this case, drives employment decisions. The problema-
tisation of normative heterosexuality and its link to workplace practices,
however, went largely unexamined in this body of research.
As research on sexual harassment expanded, studies sought to explic-
itly articulate the interplay between the individual and organisational life
in the dynamics of sexual harassment. This was largely understood in
24 L. LAZARD
terms of how the hierarchical organisation of employees within organ-

isations afforded some individuals more power over others. Proclivity
research suggested that those with a predisposition for sexual harassment,
and who were relatively high up in the workplace hierarchy, were likely
to harness their greater organisational power in order to sexually exploit
women (e.g. Bargh et al., 1995; Pryor et al., 1993). The focus of this
research remained on identifying the exact problem with the deviant few
and developing individual interventions to solve the problem of work-
place sexual harassment. For example, Lee et al. (2003) suggested that
organisations could use psychological measures to screen male employees
in order to identify potential sexual harassers. The idea is that men who
scored highly on screening measures could be moved to job positions
which would be less triggering of their sexual harassment proclivities.
There seemed to be a general scepticism in this body of work about the
pervasiveness of sexual harassment and the wider cultural patterns shaping
sexual harassment dynamics. As Bargh et al. (1995) argued:
Feminist theorists have argued that sexual harassment and coercion are
used by men to maintain their power advantage over women in society…-
Sociologists have stressed the general tendency for those in a superior
position of organizational power (i.e., men) to exploit subordinates.
However, only a minority of men who have power over women sexually
harass them …the majority do not. (p. 278)
The tendency to rarefy sexual harassment appears to have arisen, at least

in part, because research in the field focused on quid pro quo harass-
ment. However, as Thomas (1997) argued, a focus on extreme “quid pro
quo” instances is unhelpful in developing explanations of less dramatic,
everyday manifestations of the phenomenon. In addition, the largely
unexamined and undertheorised contextualisation of the workplace in
both proclivity and attribution research served to confine it there (e.g.
Fairchild & Rudman, 2008; Lazard, 2009).
This is not to say that consideration of workplace gendered power rela-
tions was entirely absent in psychological research. Gutek and colleagues,
for example, developed Sex Role Spillover theory to explain why women
disproportionately experience sexual harassment and subordination at
work (e.g. Gutek, 1982; Gutek et al., 1983). This social psychological
theory suggests that because gender norms and sex-role expectations are
well-entrenched in society, they “spillover” into work roles. For Gutek
(1985), sex-role spillover can be defined as “the carryover into the work-
place of gender-based expectations that are irrelevant or inappropriate to
work” (p. 17). When spillover occurs, people respond to women in their
sex role rather than in their work role. As Gutek and Morasch (1982)
argue:
when women are propositioned by men at work, touched sexually or

made the object of sexual comments or gestures, that is an indication
of a spillover of sex-role expectations and behaviour into the work-role.
(pp. 58–59)
Gutek and Morash (1982) suggest that sex-role spillover is likely to

happen when the ratios of women to men are skewed. In male-dominated
jobs, sex-role spillover occurs because women’s sex is visibly salient which
can strengthen traditional sex-role expectations. Sex-role spillover can also
occur when women are working in traditionally feminine occupations
(e.g. nurse, receptionist) because the job itself is inextricably entwined
with sex-role expectations. For spillover to occur, men will also need
to step out of their work role which underscores the ways in which
masculinity, unconstrained by certain standards of professional conduct,
has been predominantly socially defined by the pursuit of sexual contact
with women.
Sex-role spillover theory has amassed support from a body of experi-
mental studies (e.g. Burgess & Borgida, 1997; Gutek & Cohen, 1987;
Ragins & Scandura, 1995). However, a central issue with this theory
is that the problem is located in the “spillover” rather than in sex-role
expectations per se. As such this theory does not explicitly critique tradi-
tional assumptions about men and women outside of work. For Mott
and Condor (1997), this is highlighted in the definition Gutek uses of
spillover as “irrelevant or inappropriate to work”. This definition “implies
that stereotypes of femininity and heterosexuality may be legitimate (‘rel-
evant’ or ‘appropriate’ in other (non-work) contexts” (Mott & Condor,
1997, p. 52). Crucially, the theory also appears to produce the workplace
as a public sphere in which behaviour and interaction should be defined
and shaped only by formal processes. The notion of spillover suggests
that gender, personal relationships and affectivity do not belong in this
public sphere and need to be contained within private life. The idea that
it is possible or desirable to maintain a distinction between the public
sphere of work and the private realm can distract from “the multiple and
26 L. LAZARD
often subtle ways in which the workplace may be routinely and profoundly
personalised, gendered and sexualised” (Mott & Condor, 1997, p. 52).
Indeed, the construction of women’s harassment by men as a private or
personal dispute has been used to separate sexual harassment from work
and deny women legal recourse in the workplace (Baker, 2007). Thus, the
historical separation of public and private spheres could militate against
the formal challenging of workplace sexual harassment.
The gendering of organisations has been a focus in sociology, critical
management and organisational studies, masculinity research and feminist
psychology. Research in these areas have not only attempted to make the
operation of gender and sexuality in the workplace explicit, but have also
investigated how men have come to dominate particular organisational
cultures in particular ways (e.g. Brewis & Linstead, 2000; Collinson &
Hearn, 2005; Hearn & Collinson, 2017; Nicolson, 1996). Such work has
pointed to how organisational discourse reinscribes notions of heterosex-
uality in which “proper” masculine sexuality is positioned as dominant
and active and “proper” feminine sexuality is positioned as subordinate
and passive. The sexual harassment of women by men can function as a
means to perform heterosexual masculinity as well as serving to distance
the masculine harasser from the subordinate feminine (Thomas, 1997).
The uneven distribution of gendered and sexual power in the work-
place has meant that women workers have been tasked with the job of
navigating masculine ideals and privilege as they do paid labour. The
emergence of the term sexual harassment has been treated as a political
tool for women to draw attention to how sexual harassment instantiates
masculine dominance and to formally challenge it (Thomas & Kitzinger,
1997). However, it became increasingly clear that using the term in prac-
tice was far from straightforward. The recognition of sexual harassment
as a harm repositioned what had been considered relatively ordinary,
everyday behaviours within the political language of victimisation (see
Chapter 3 for a full discussion). To be sexually harassed was also to
be a victim which has long been associated with powerlessness, vulner-
ability and passivity (Lazard, 2009; Stringer, 2014). These associations
looped around to reflect and reinforce heteronormative ideals of femi-
ninity which, as I have argued, have also centred on passivity in relation
to men. Therefore, to be positioned as both a woman and a victim could
work against claiming a professional identity at work because of the ways
in which victim identity can reinforce women’s position as the femininised
other (Nicolson, 1997).
Scholarship in the 1990s, particularly in feminist psychology, began

to draw attention to the uneasy fit between calling out sexual harass-
ment and predominant characterisations of professional life (Monson,
1997; Nicolson, 1996; Thomas & Kitzinger, 1997). Particularly rele-
vant to this were studies investigating women’s reluctance to define
or label their experiences as sexual harassment. By rejecting the label
‘sexual harassment’, women could dismiss or downplay their experiences
as harmless office banter (e.g. Marshall, 2017; Mott & Condor, 1997).
By constructing incidents as a joke, women could attempt to situate
themselves as an equal colleague and within workplace ideals of the
team player (e.g. Mott and Condor, 1997). Studies also suggested that
women were concerned that they would be negatively characterised if
they called out sexual harassment. For example, research indicated that
women medical professionals refused to label their experiences as sexual
harassment because they did not want to be seen as oversensitive. Being
oversensitive and emotional have long been associated with heteronor-
mative femininity and are in opposition to characterisations of medical
professionals as controlled, rational and objective (e.g. Hinze, 2004;
Nicolson, 1997). Women’s reluctance to call out sexual harassment in
many instances appeared to be connected to women’s everyday attempts
to legitimatise their presence in the masculinised public sphere of work
(e.g. Marshall, 2017; Nicolson, 1997).
The New Normal of Working

Lives and Sexual Harassment
The separation of the public sphere of work and private life has become
increasingly difficult to maintain with relatively recent changes in working
lives. The ideal of the male breadwinner and the family wage was been
significantly weakened in recent years with increased moves towards a
dual earner or adult worker model in which all people who can do paid
work are duty bound to do so (Adkins, 2016; Daiger Von Gleichen
& Seeleib Kaiser, 2018). This shift co-occurred with the geographical
expansion of neoliberalism as a political and economic rationality centred
on privatisation, individualisation and the rolling back of welfare provi-
sion. Alongside its global expansion, neoliberalism has expanded across
all spheres of life as a form of governance which constitutes subjects as
“self-managing, autonomous and enterprising” (Gill & Scharff, 2011,
p. 5). Within this context, what has emerged has been referred to as
28 L. LAZARD
the new normal of working lives, which is typified by flexible hours,

contract work and labour mobility and requires workers to be adapt-
able, accommodating and self-responsible (Taylor & Luckman, 2018). As
valued aspects of subjectivity, these ways of being have become central to
new ideals for the contemporary worker. These include, for example, the
aspirational figures of the entrepreneur and the independent contractor.
These ideal workers invest in their own human capital and seek oppor-
tunities to secure work for themselves but take on the risks and costs of
these endeavours (Adkins, 2016). Importantly, investments that people
are encouraged to make extend to all aspects of their lives. This can be
seen, for example, in how many contemporary work practices effectively
blur working and private identities and, increasingly, monetise non-work
identities in the service of professional self-promotion and self-marketing
(e.g. Abidin, 2016; Khamis et al., 2017).
Central to conceptualisations of the contemporary adult worker in
social policy and discourse is the idea that men and women can freely
choose to participate in the labour market and take control over the direc-
tion of their working lives (Daly, 2011). Located within gender-neutral
frames, this worker ideal can obscure the persistence of gendered arrange-
ments, expectations and inequalities underpinning patterns of work. Daly
(2011) argues that this can be seen in the reduced attention given to
structural gendered patterns in social policy reforms in the 2000s. This
included, for example, less focus on the unpaid divisions of labour in
households, which prop up paid employment. Along with new presump-
tions of gender neutrality, the ideal adult worker is constituted through
the lens of privilege (e.g. middle class, white, able-bodied to name but a
few) which denies the material conditions which constrain people’s ability
to live up to these ideals. As Scharff (2016) notes “the neoliberal incite-
ment to manage one’s self as enterprise …cuts across gendered, racialized
and classed power dynamics… neoliberal subjects disavow vulnerability
and instead manifest an intensified individualism” (p. 109). This provides
the conditions under which the relevance of intersecting discriminations
can be downplayed in contemporary working life.
These changes in worker ideals coincided with the predominance of
postfeminist understandings of gender equality as something that has
been achieved—women are now empowered subjects unencumbered by
the constraints of sexism (Gill et al., 2017). Notions of empowerment and
choice have been conflated with a postfeminist sexy aesthetic within which
women are positioned as agentic and independent enough to express
themselves as confident and desiring subjects. Postfeminist notions of

successful women, particularly if women’s achievement is in traditionally
masculine domains, are moderated by a sexy, hyperfeminine self-styling
that has heterosexual appeal (Jackson et al., 2012). While the postfeminist
subject appears to break with long-standing notions of feminine passivity
through the emphasis on empowerment and choice, many scholars have
argued that the postfeminist ideal represents and valorises aspects of
traditional femininity (Brown-Bowers et al., 2015).
The predominance of postfeminist ideals coupled with those associ-
ated with shifts in working patterns, I would argue, presented particular
complexities for making sense of and negotiating sexual harassment,
particularly in the 2000s. At this point, it is important to note that there
has been limited sustained study of sexual harassment in the context of
the new normal of working lives and, until quite recently, postfeminism.
The exception to this is research by Brunner and Dever (2014) who
studied women’s experience of sexual harassment in service industries
and so, for this reason, I attend to their work in some detail. In their
study, Brunner and Dever (2014) show how women workers are subject
to contradictory discourses centred on feminine desirability and profes-
sionalism. In the service and hospitality sectors examined, the required
femininity is one that is “sexy” and desirable to men. Within these
contexts, women become tasked with managing a professional appearance
that both plays up to the sexualised requirements of the job and disinvites
men’s sexual advances. I would argue that while women have long been
positioned as sexual gatekeepers, contemporary worker ideals appear to
intensify this expectation by treating sexual harassment as the responsi-
bility of women to manage as competent and autonomous workers. While
Brunner and Dever (2014) do not explicitly link these pressures to post-
feminism, I would argue that the broader visibility of constructions of
the emancipated sexy postfeminist subject could serve to legitimise these
expectations of women workers.
Brunner and Dever’s study suggests that managing sexual harass-
ment becomes increasingly difficult within flexible working regimes that
blur the boundaries between leisure time and work time. This study
highlighted how work-related social events, including company parties,
casual lunches and “after work” drinks, were instances which compli-
cated neat divisions between work and personal time. While participation
in work-social events was ostensibly voluntary, they were also seen by
30 L. LAZARD
the women participants as professionally necessary and advantageous

for career progression. The blurred boundaries of work-social events
presented difficulties for identifying and dealing with sexual harassment.
It was unclear to women workers whether unwanted sexual attention by
colleagues in a non-work context would count as workplace discrimina-
tion. As Brunner and Dever (2014) note, the increased blurring of work
and non-work introduces:
clear elements of uncertainty as to legal protection evidently attach to

these newly identified ‘social’/‘voluntary’ settings, settings that never-
theless comprise an integral part of workplace identity formation and
maintenance. Further… the growing imperative for workers to self-manage
may similarly erode their ability and/or willingness to read sexual harass-
ment as a legitimate workplace concern, returning it instead to the realm
of individual failure and individual responsibility. (p. 469)
Similar issues have more recently been noted with informal networking
practices in creative industries. The informality of these work practices
creates uncertainty as to whether unwanted sexual attention can count as
sexual harassment (Hennekam & Bennett, 2017). The difficulties in chal-
lenging sexual harassment have been amplified by increased employment
precarity that typifies much contemporary work. Particularly since the last
recession in 2008 in the UK and US, there has been a push towards
freelance work, a rise in zero-hour contracts and threat of redundancy
in austerity politics (Gill & Pratt, 2008). Within these contemporary
working conditions, the ability to unionise or use workplace legislation
had become limited with the real possibilities of work endangerment
in the form of non-renewal of contracts (e.g. Jones & Pringle, 2015;
Hennekam & Bennett, 2017). Thus, the risks of challenging sexual
harassment by those who had experienced it appeared to have become
increasingly intensified in the years leading up to #MeToo.
#MeToo and the Workplace

Given the continued relevance of women’s sexual capital, the precarity
of contemporary work, and expectations that competent workers can
manage sexual harassment themselves, it is in many ways surprising that
#MeToo gained significant traction. However, the more recent public
concern with sexual harassment appears connected to its association with
paid work. As I have argued, the problematisation of workplace sexual

harassment is embedded within feminist activism that has drawn attention
to women’s exclusion from and subordination in paid work. However,
a more recent context relevant to the rise of #MeToo is the need for
women to participate in the labour market. According to Repro (2017),
demographic research in the 1990s and 2000s had voiced concerns about
the declining reproduction rates post the baby boomer generation and
an economically inactive ageing population. These factors converged
to produce a shrinking working population. Repro (2017) argues that
women’s activism in the 1960s and 70s on women’s labour rights, equal
pay and reproductive choices (Chapter 1) had been linked by demog-
raphers to declining reproduction rates. In short, paid labour appeared
to a disincentive for having children, or at least, multiple children. Fewer
births translated into the possibility of having a too-small labouring popu-
lation for economic growth. According to Repro (2017), these concerns
around future economic growth served as the impetus for governmental
turns to gender equality policies to fill the labour gap with women.
For example, the European Union and its member states in the mid-
1990s developed gender equality policies which highlighted the untapped
productive capacities of women or more specifically:
the domesticated middle-class women of nuclear families [who] were seen

as flexible and creative individuals whose productive capabilities should
not be squandered… and instead harnessed to the drive for growth
and competitiveness in the EU. Gender equality policy was the means
by which women could be mobilised to boost the capitalist economy
through their self-transformation into productive and enterprising subjects
as entrepreneurs and job seekers. (Repro, 2017, p. 137–138)
Middle-class women workers are the primary focus of neoliberal femi-

nism which gained ascendency around 2012 (Rottenberg, 2018) amidst
the mainstreaming of feminism in popular culture (e.g. Gill, 2016; Rivers,
2017). Neoliberal feminism centres on the professionalisation of women,
espousing values around supporting women’s success in the workplace by
drawing on the individualistic, entrepreneurial and profoundly middle-
classed ideology of neoliberalism. Aligning with gender equality policies
which promote work–life balance to increase women’s reproductive and
economic capacities, neoliberal feminism similarly encourages middle-
class mothers to find equilibrium to enable them to maximise their
32 L. LAZARD
capital value at work and at home. The focus of neoliberal femi-

nism is not only on women who are already mothers. A key message
for all women is the primary importance of investing in their profes-
sional development (Rottenberg, 2018). Importantly, neoliberal feminism
acknowledges gender inequalities which compromise women’s ability to
‘achieve’ at work. This includes, for example, unpaid divisions of labour
and costs of childcare. Rottenberg (2018, 2019a) argues that neoliberal
feminist solutions to these social and structural inequalities are, however,
profoundly individualistic. Solutions tend to centre on and prioritise self-
improvement—it is up to individual women to actively strive towards
work–life balance by putting in the effort. Indeed, women, according to
this self-help genre, can overcome a host of broader gendered inequali-
ties by self-empowerment and self-improvement in organisational cultures
(Gill, 2016; Rottenberg, 2019b).
Alongside its presence in work-related initiatives and self-help
resources, neoliberal feminism has also appeared in the more recent prob-
lematisation of workplace sexual harassment. Indeed, there were several
ways in which the rise of #MeToo, and the challenges to sexual harass-
ment that immediately preceded it, overlapped with neoliberal feminist
concerns. The emergence of #MeToo arose as a response to the exposé
of Weinstein’s use of the Hollywood casting couch to exploit aspirational
actresses. The casting couch is, of course, a euphemism for quid pro
quo harassment in the entertainment industry. Sexual harassment thus
emerged as form of sexual violence that constrained women professionals
in their ability to work. As we have seen, women have been encouraged
to not only participate in paid labour but to maximise their capital value.
Sexual harassment can thus be seen as not only interfering with women’s
participation in the labour market but also as a constraint to human
capital enhancement. This is touched upon in the quote from Ashley
Judd’s Variety Magazine interview in 2015 that opened this chapter. As
described in this quote, Judd offers a challenge to Weinstein in her asser-
tion that she would “win an Academy Award” in a Weinstein produced
movie (Setoodeh, 2015, para. 5). The challenge offered by Judd is an
unmooring of her own professional advancement with Weinstein’s greater
economic power and influence. This is achieved by her confidence in her
own capital as she says: “when I win an academy award” (Setoodeh,
2015, para. 5). Judd thus becomes interpellated as an entrepreneurial
and capital-enhancing subject. Within this context, Weinstein operates as
a constraint to capital enhancement which sits uncomfortably with both
neoliberal imperatives around entrepreneurship, as well as popular femi-

nist exhortations of women’s agency and empowerment. The idea that
sexual harassment is a constraint on the capital value of women under
neoliberalism is one that is reliant on feminist politics. According to
Rottenberg (2018), neoliberal rationality is based on the idea of people
as ungendered human capital. Rottenberg (2018) goes on to argue that
there is no lexicon in neoliberal discourse for how unequal gendered prac-
tices become relevant to sustaining or undermining economic and labour
systems. In light of this, neoliberalism needs feminism to resolve absences
and tensions in its own logic (Rottenberg 2018).
The recognition that it was overwhelmingly privileged professional
women that remained most visible in #MeToo, despite how the hashtag’s
travel cut across intersectional fault lines, has been problematised in both
popular and academic arenas (e.g. Boyle, 2019; Gill & Orgad, 2018).
This is not to say that engagement with inequalities between women
have been completely absent in the challenges offered in and around
#MeToo. For example, the launch of Times Up by Hollywood women,
which grew from #MeToo activism, raised funds for less privileged women
to legally challenge workplace sexual harassment. There was also a move
towards zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies to protect all individ-
uals, rather than the privileged few, in the wake of #MeToo (Gill &
Orgad, 2018). The sheer numbers of individuals joining the chorus of
#MeToo seemed to unsettle neoliberal discourses of individual responsi-
bility for dealing with sexual harassment within frames of the competent
worker, as mentioned earlier. As Banet-Weiser (2018) notes, the exten-
sive travel of #MeToo has forced people to think of sexual harassment
as a collective problem. Media representations of the #MeToo collective
have included people located across diverse social locations and positions.
However, at the same time, the specificities of these social locations and
positions in shaping experiences of sexual harassment and speaking out
about it have, I would argue, been largely represented through assimila-
tionist modes of incorporation and “inclusivity”. As Butler (2013) notes,
assimilationist modes can position privilege as the place from which other
experiences are seen and heard. This, for example, can be seen in Time
magazine’s article on the #MeToo “silence breakers” (Zacharek et al.,
2017). The following extract included in the article is a quote by Dana
Lewis, who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the Hotel Plaza with
five other women:
34 L. LAZARD
‘I am a single mother. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and she’s depending

on me,’ says Lewis, who still works at the hotel to make ends meet. ‘My entire
life revolves around her. I wasn’t really left with the option of leaving. I’m
not left with the option of giving up. I want to show her that it’s O.K. to
stand up for yourself. If you keep fighting, eventually you’ll see the sun on the
other side.’ (Zacharek et al. 2017, para. 29)
Here, specific classed hardships are noted in that Lewis needs to work
to survive and “make ends meet”. Lewis’s raced positioning as a woman
of colour is also referenced by the inclusion of her photo in the article.
However, constraints and difficulties related to these social positionings
are not treated as a barrier to dealing with sexual harassment. Instead,
the solution to inequality is located in women’s self-empowerment to
fight for justice. In this sense, power around class and race are taken into
account, only to be undone through neoliberal feminist notions of self-
empowerment in the workplace (see also Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 for
further discussion). Similarly, Rottenberg (2018) argues that neoliberal
feminist politics:
can and does acknowledge the gendered wage gap and sexual harassment
as signs of continued inequality. Yet the solutions it posits – precisely like
encouraging individual women to speak out against sexual harassment and
abuse - ultimately elide the structural and economic undergirding of these
phenomena, and in so doing help make poor and immigrant women, as
well as women of colour, even more precarious and invisible than they
already are. In this way, neoliberal feminism helps to reify white and class
privilege as well as heteronormativity. (p. 42)
That current challenges to sexual harassment have been broadly tied

to state-protected and regulated work deepen the range of inequalities
described by Rottenberg (2018). Even in formal work, intersectional
power relations shape whether sexual harassment can be challenged and,
indeed, the degree of success such challenges may have. As Zarkov and
Davis (2018) note in their consideration of #MeToo:
I am reminded of Nafissatou Diallo, the New York hotel maid who accused
Strauss-Khan of sexual assault in 2011. She stood no chance, precisely
because their social locations were so hugely, un-comparably different: she
was a black immigrant hotel maid, he was a white national of a powerful
European state and the director of one of the most powerful financial
agencies in the world. (p. 5)
Outside state-regulated work, it is questionable as to whether #MeToo is

even relevant to women working in the informal economy. Kagal et al.
(2019), for example, highlights how minoritised women in the informal
sector face a range of barriers which limit the possibilities for saying
Me Too. This includes, for example, a non-regulated relationship of
economic dependency of employees on employers which becomes ever
more complex in contexts of broader discriminations that minoritised
women are located in. The struggle is in both being able to say Me Too
and in negotiating the response to this voicing which may be strongly
shaped by racist and sexist cultures of disbelief, dismissal and intimidation.
Considering the informal economy makes explicit how the association
between legitimised forms of work and sexual harassment can act as an
exclusionary mechanism against participation in #MeToo. Moreover, the
question of what counts as legitimate and valued work is central, I would
argue, for understanding the visibility of professional women who can
more easily be positioned as capital-enhancing feminist subjects under
neoliberalism.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the contextualisation of sexual harassment
as a workplace problem. It has explored how the dominance of the
breadwinner ideal acted as an exclusionary mechanism for women’s
participation in the workplace, and created conditions which enabled the
possibility of sexual harassment. This chapter has examined more recent
shifts to an adult worker ideal which encourages all adults into the labour
market. New worker ideals of the autonomous, competent and enter-
prising worker have introduced new complexities for understanding the
sexual harassment of women at work. In contemporary work, women
are confronted with a set of tensions in which they may be expected to
deal with sexual harassment as a competent worker and as a neoliberal
subject who is required to effectively manage the risk of sexual violence.
I have argued that the traction of #MeToo was supported by neolib-
eral feminist discourses in which sexual harassment becomes constituted
as a constraint to neoliberal capital enhancement. I have also argued
that because the ideal neoliberal feminist worker is marked by privilege,
intersecting inequalities that become relevant to less privileged women’s
experiences of challenging sexual harassment can be obscured through
dominant discourses of self-empowerment. In the next chapter, I explore
the notion of victimhood as a tool of resistance against sexual harassment
within neoliberal and postfeminist frames.
36 L. LAZARD
Note
1. This is not to say that sexual harassment was only conceptualised as an
outcome of the misuse of organisational power. Sexual harassment, as a
form of sexual violence, had also been theorised as a key mechanism for
sustaining the patriarchal social order. For example, it has been argued that
patriarchal relations are reinforced by the abuse of some women because
this keeps all others in a state of fear (e.g. Brownmiller, 1975). Thus, in
some feminist research, sexual harassment was seen as a systematic abuse
of power that enabled the social control of women and girls (e.g. Herbert,
1994).
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[20] Édit. A. Barbier, in-8, t. I, p. 363.
Le même acteur, tout brave qu’il fût de sa personne, eut à souffrir

et à dévorer en silence maint affront plus cruel encore. Un jour, entre
autres, qu’il jouait lui-même dans son Opéra de village (1691), le
marquis de Sablé s’en vint, à peu près ivre, prendre place sur une
des banquettes de la scène. Comme il s’asseyait, il entendit
chanter :
En parterre il boutra nos blés,

Choux et poireaux seront sablés.
Il crut qu’on l’insultait, et, se levant avec la gravité d’un ivrogne qui
veut faire une action d’éclat, il marcha droit à l’auteur et le souffleta
en plein théâtre.
Juste retour des choses d’ici-bas ! la même année, Dancourt
avait tiré parti, dans une de ses pièces [21] , du malheur arrivé
récemment au frère cadet de M. Delosme de Monchesnay, un des
fournisseurs du Théâtre-Italien. Ce frère, procureur au Parlement,
avait été confondu mal à propos avec son aîné, par un brutal
personnage qui, croyant avoir à se plaindre des malignes allusions
de celui-ci, s’en était vengé sur les épaules de celui-là, tant il est
dangereux d’avoir des écrivains satiriques dans sa famille ! Mais
hâtons-nous de dire que la réparation de l’outrage fut
rigoureusement poursuivie, et que le plaignant obtint satisfaction
entière.
[21] La Gazette, sc. 18.
Cette méprise, assez peu plaisante, qui avait fourni une scène de
comédie à notre auteur, toujours à la piste des petits scandales du
jour, paraît avoir eu alors quelque retentissement, et chacun s’en
égaya à l’envi. Gacon, l’auteur méprisable et méprisé du Poëte sans
fard, qui attaquait tout le monde, les petits aussi bien que les grands,
est revenu plusieurs fois à cet obscur personnage : ici, dans une
épigramme, il badine sur les coups de gaule que lui attira sa
comédie du Phœnix ; là, dans une satire, il le nomme encore, en se
prédisant le même sort à lui-même :
Un soir, comme à Delosme, on viendra sur mon dos

Payer tout à la fois le prix de vos bons mots.
Je me retire tard, et souvent sans escorte ;
En vain l’on crie au guet pour demander main-forte :
On est roué de coups quand les gens sont venus.
Ce sinistre présage obscurcit souvent l’enjouement de sa verve :

Heureux, s’écrie-t-il un peu plus loin,
Heureux si pour mon dos j’étais en sûreté !
Gacon était bon prophète en s’exprimant ainsi ; heureux encore

eût-il pu se dire, s’il n’avait été battu que par procuration, comme
Delosme, et sur le dos d’un autre !
Le poëte sans fard ne cache pas le respect salutaire qu’il a pour
cet argument particulier à l’adresse des poëtes satiriques : il en parle
toujours avec la considération séante, même quand il veut faire le
brave. Un partisan de son ennemi La Motte avait lancé cette
épigramme contre lui :
Jadis un âne, au lieu de braire,

Parla sous les coups de bâton,
Mais un bâton te fera taire
Ou parler sur un autre ton.
Gacon reconnaît la valeur de cette apostrophe, et il répond avec

une soumission plaisante :
Eh bien, vous le voulez, je vais changer de ton :

L’opéra de La Motte est une pièce exquise.
J’aime mieux dire une sottise
Que d’avoir des coups de bâton.
Comment, après tout cela, serait-on disposé à trouver par trop
bizarre cette singulière pièce d’un recueil non moins singulier : le
Missodrie (de μισος et de δρυς, dans les Jeux de l’inconnu), où nous
lisons l’instructive histoire d’un poëte satirique et mauvaise langue,
tellement battu, tellement roué de coups, qu’il en est venu à haïr
toute image du bâton et à fuir, jusque dans sa maison et dans ses
meubles, ce qui pourrait lui rappeler, de près ou de loin, ce bois
odieux dont il a été si souvent la victime ?
Les artistes non plus, et entre tous les artistes les musiciens,
n’eurent pas grand’chose à envier aux littérateurs. Il est vrai que
c’étaient, pour la plupart, d’étranges personnages, qui n’avaient
point une idée fort élevée de l’art, et dont le genre de vie, à défaut de
la profession, était peu propre à leur concilier le respect. Maugars,
l’excellent joueur de viole, et le chanteur Lambert, qu’on se disputait
partout, qui promettait à tout le monde et ne tenait parole à
personne, eurent maintes fois des démêlés avec le tricot : les
Historiettes de Tallemant nous en apprennent quelque chose. Il est
très-probable, bien que le fait ne soit établi par aucun document
positif, à ma connaissance, qu’il en fut de même pour Lully, dont le
cynisme égalait, ou plutôt dépassait de beaucoup le talent.
IV
Mais, comme si les coups de canne des gentilshommes, les

coups de hallebarde des suisses, les coups de bâton des valets, ne
leur eussent pas suffi, les gens de lettres se traitaient souvent entre
eux de la même façon. On eût dit qu’ils voulaient autoriser et
perpétuer cet usage infamant, en donnant eux-mêmes un exemple
dont ils n’avaient plus le droit de se plaindre qu’on abusât contre
eux. Les discussions littéraires se vidaient presque toujours d’une
façon plus ou moins analogue à celle que Boileau nous a dépeinte à
la fin de sa deuxième satire sur un repas ridicule. Les faits que je
pourrais citer ici ne sont guère moins nombreux que ceux du
précédent chapitre, et la plupart offrent également une leçon de
dignité littéraire, en montrant ces excès, d’une part presque toujours
provoqués par des fautes dont ils sont le châtiment, d’autre part
presque toujours punis eux-mêmes sur leurs auteurs par cette
grande loi morale du talion, qui n’est que l’application pratique des
paroles de l’Écriture : « Quiconque se sert de l’épée périra par
l’épée. »
Nous trouvons, dans une ode burlesque réimprimée quelquefois
à la suite des œuvres de Régnier, le récit d’un combat acharné qui
eut lieu entre ce poëte et Berthelot, l’un des honteux ouvriers de
l’égoût littéraire nommé le Cabinet satirique. Ce fragment d’épopée
ne s’explique pas bien nettement sur les causes de la lutte ; mais sur
la lutte elle-même, il est très-explicite. Régnier rencontre Berthelot
dans le quartier des Quinze-Vingts :
Vers lui desdaigneux il s’avance

Ainsi qu’un paon vers un oyson,
Avant beaucoup plus de fiance
En sa valeur qu’en sa raison,
Et d’abord luy dit plus d’injures
Qu’un greffier ne fait d’escritures.
Berthelot, avecq’ patience

Souffre ce discours effronté,
Soit qu’il le fist par confiance,
Ou qu’il craignist d’être frotté ;
Mais à la fin Regnier se joue
D’approcher sa main de sa joue.
Aussitost, de colère blesme,

Berthelot le charge en ce lieu,
D’aussi bon cœur que, le caresme,
Sortant du service de Dieu,
Un petit cordelier se rue
Sur une pièce de morue.
Berthelot, de qui la carcasse

Pèse moins qu’un pied de poullet,
Prend soudain Régnier en la face,
Et, se jetant sur son collet,
Dessus ce grand corps il s’accroche,
Ainsi qu’une anguille sur roche.
De fureur son âme bouillonne,

Ses yeux sont de feu tout ardens ;
A chaque gourmade qu’il donne,
De despit il grince les dents,
Comme un magot à qui l’on jette
Un charbon pour une noisette.
Il poursuit tousjours et le presse,
Luy donnant du poing sur le nez,
Et ceux qui voyent la faiblesse
De ce géant sont estonnez,
Pensant voir, en ceste défaite,
Un corbeau souz une alouette.
Phœbus, dont les grâces infuses

Honorent ces divins cerveaux,
Comment permets-tu que les muses
Gourmandent ainsi leurs museaux,
Et qu’un peuple ignorant se raille
De voir tes enfants en bataille ?
Régnier, pour toute sa deffense,

Mordit Berthelot en la main,
Et l’eust mangé, comme l’on pense,
Si le bedeau de Saint-Germain,
Qui revenait des Tuilleries,
N’eût mis fin à leurs batteries.
Régnier porta de tant de façons la peine de cette algarade, que

nous n’essayerons même pas de les énumérer. Quant à son
adversaire, qui s’était si cruellement défendu, ce fut Malherbe, un
des plus rudes et des plus cyniques héros de notre histoire littéraire,
le chef de cette réforme poétique dont Berthelot était l’ennemi
déterminé, qui se chargea de son expiation. Piqué au vif par la
parodie que celui-ci avait faite de l’une de ses pièces, Malherbe s’en
fut chercher un gentilhomme de Caen, du nom de La Boulardière, lui
mit un cotret noueux dans les mains, et le chargea de sa réponse,
dont l’ami s’acquitta en courrier fidèle et zélé.
C’est encore avec le bâton que le même rappelait au sentiment
des convenances les confrères assez osés pour effleurer de leurs
épigrammes la vicomtesse d’Auchy, sa favorite, qu’il voulait se
réserver le privilége de tracasser et de battre à lui seul.
Et tout ceci ne l’empêchait pas, bien entendu, de se plaindre
amèrement dans une de ses lettres à Peiresc (4 octobre 1627), des
misérables qui l’avaient assassiné lui-même, c’est-à-dire moulu de
coups, dans une circonstance sur laquelle il ne s’est pas expliqué
clairement : on peut conjecturer, sans jugement téméraire, que
c’était en retour de quelqu’une de ces méchantes boutades dont il
était coutumier.
En parlant plus haut de Balzac, le prince des écrivains français,
nous l’avons montré battu à plusieurs reprises, ou peu s’en faut.
C’est qu’il avait battu lui-même. Rencontrant un jour par les rues
d’Angoulême un avocat qui avait plaidé contre lui, il lui donna un
coup de houssine, qu’il eût payé cher si les grands seigneurs de la
ville n’eussent pris son parti.
On connaît sa querelle avec dom Goulu, général des Feuillants :
la république des lettres se partagea en deux à cette occasion, et
prit parti pour ou contre chacun des adversaires. Ce fut une véritable
bataille rangée. Un jeune avocat provincial, du nom de Javersac,
voulut profiter de la circonstance pour entrer lui-même en lice, et se
faire connaître par un coup d’éclat : en conséquence, il se transporta
à Paris avec un livre où il attaquait à la fois les deux ennemis,
frappant à droite et à gauche avec plus de décision que de talent. Il
s’était flatté de gagner la renommée par ce vaillant début, mais il y
gagna tout autre chose qu’il n’attendait pas. Le 11 août 1628, à neuf
heures du matin, il dormait encore dans le lit de sa chambre
d’auberge, quand il se sentit réveillé en sursaut : c’étaient trois
hommes qui le bâtonnaient à tour de bras.
Si l’on en croit Javersac, qui publia une relation de l’événement,
et Charles Sorel, dans sa Bibliothèque françoise [22] , l’écrivain
outragé s’élança de son lit, l’épée en main, et poursuivit ses
agresseurs jusque dans la rue, où cinquante personnes, ayant vu
son arme ployer jusqu’aux gardes, à un grand coup qu’il donna dans
la poitrine d’un de ces coquins, connurent qu’ils étaient revêtus de
cottes de mailles. Mais Tallemant des Réaux, que nous trouvons
toujours sur notre chemin pour ces aventures scandaleuses, ne
raconte pas les faits d’une manière si honorable pour le jeune
écrivain. Rien n’est plus contradictoire que les nombreux écrits
suscités par cette affaire, et dont la plupart ont aujourd’hui disparu.
[22] Des Lettres de M. de Balzac, p. 133.
Dès le lendemain, on criait sur le pont Neuf, la Défaite du paladin

Javersac ; et le titre ajoutait, pour donner le change sur le véritable
auteur de l’attentat : par les alliés et confédérés du Prince des
Feuilles [23] . Personne ne s’y trompa, et Javersac moins que
personne, s’il est vrai surtout, comme il le rapporte, qu’un des
satellites lui eût dit en le frappant : « On vous avait défendu d’écrire
contre M. de Balzac. » On nomme même le gentilhomme (Moulin-
Robert) que celui-ci chargea du soin de sa vengeance. Le lecteur
voit que les écrivains, comme les grands seigneurs, avaient leurs
séides pour ces opérations délicates.
[23] Dom Goulu, général des Feuillants, que Javersac
avait attaqué, dans son livre, sous le nom de Phyllarque.
Cette facétie satirique, dont le récit concorde avec celui de

l’auteur des Historiettes, se termine en disant que les amis de
Phyllarque, « joints en ceci avec ceux du parti contraire, ont juré
d’exterminer autant de Javersacs qu’il s’en présentera, et de faire
voir aux mauvais poëtes qu’outre le siècle d’or, le siècle d’airain et
celui de fer, qui sont si célèbres dans les fables, il y a encore à venir
un siècle de bois, dont l’ancienne poésie n’a point parlé, et aux
misères et calamités duquel ils auront beaucoup plus de part que les
autres hommes. »
Le ton du libelle, le rôle qu’il faisait jouer à Javersac dans la
querelle, le soin qu’il prenait de faire retomber l’exécution de l’acte
sur le parti de dom Goulu, tout, jusqu’à cet empressement
extraordinaire de publier la mésaventure de ce petit auteur inconnu,
en a fait attribuer la composition à Balzac lui-même, quoiqu’il s’en
soit toujours défendu. Il paraît à peu près certain que l’ouvrage est
de lui. Ce serait là une vengeance après coup, encore plus cruelle
que la première, et de ces deux actes de mauvais goût, l’un ne ferait
certes pas plus honneur que l’autre à sa mémoire. Je l’aime mieux
lorsque, sur son lit de mort, il fait prier M. de Javersac, par un de ses
amis, de venir le voir, et scelle de ses embrassements et de ses
larmes sa réconciliation avec lui [24] .
[24] Moriscet, Relat. de la mort de Balzac, à la suite
de ses œuvres.
A quelques années de là, nous rencontrons Ménage en démêlé

avec Bussy-Rabutin, démêlé non d’homme de lettres à grand
seigneur, mais d’écrivain à écrivain. Celui-ci, dans son Histoire
amoureuse des Gaules, avait plaisanté sur la passion platonique du
savant homme pour madame de Sévigné. Ménage, piqué au vif,
tailla sa meilleure plume, la trempa dans sa meilleure encre, et, par
une réminiscence de ces agréables discussions du seizième siècle
où les érudits échangeaient, dans la langue de Cicéron, de si
agréables injures, se mit à composer et à polir, ab irato, une
épigramme latine qui, faisant allusion au livre de Bussy et à son
emprisonnement, concluait par ce foudroyant distique :
Sic nebulo, gladiis quos formidabat Iberis ;

Quos meruit, Francis fustibus eripitur.
« Ainsi ce drôle est enlevé aux coups d’épée espagnols, qu’il

craignait ; aux coups de bâton français, qu’il a mérités. »
Un homme capable de faire sonner de la sorte le bâton dans ses
vers ne devait pas reculer devant la réalité. Aussi voulut-il un jour
user lui-même de cette arme sur le dos d’un intendant : il est vrai
que celui-ci lui avait donné un soufflet ; mais, si c’était une raison
suffisante pour autoriser le bâton, en était-ce une pour se vanter de
pouvoir le faire assassiner, en payant un spadassin cent pistoles ?
Tallemant nous a raconté cette bravade, mais nous aimons à croire,
ou que Tallemant a exagéré, ou que Ménage, qui n’avait pas eu le
temps de digérer sa colère en l’exprimant en latin, se repentit bien
vite de cette boutade inconsidérée ; ou enfin que le mot assassiner
avait, dans la bouche du docte personnage, la signification
particulière que nous lui avons déjà vue tout à l’heure dans une lettre
de Malherbe, ce qui serait encore fort joli. Pourtant, il n’est guère
possible d’admettre ici cette dernière explication, car il avait
commencé par supplier le cardinal de Retz de lui permettre, en un
billet signé de sa main, de donner cent coups de bâton à son
intendant, et ce ne fut qu’au refus du maître que, dans sa fureur, il
s’emporta jusqu’à l’autre menace.
Ménage s’était borné aux paroles, sans mettre réellement, que
nous sachions, la main à l’œuvre : il obtint en retour mesure pour
mesure. Lorsque, dans sa Requête des Dictionnaires (1649), qui lui
ferma les portes de l’Académie, il eut médit de Boisrobert,
Cet admirable Patelin

Aimant le genre masculin,
un des neveux de l’abbé, dépêché peut-être par son oncle, s’en fut
l’attendre un jour, pendant trois heures, avec une gaule choisie
parmi les plus solides, à un endroit où il devait passer. Ménage eut
la chance de sortir par une autre porte. Il n’avait point frappé, il ne fut
point frappé lui-même, mais il s’en fallut d’assez peu pour le rendre
plus sage à l’avenir.
Quant à M. de Boisrobert, qui donnait de semblables
procurations à ses neveux, nous avons déjà vu, par avance, qu’il fut
payé de la même monnaie, et nous n’avons pas à y revenir ici.
Encore s’il s’en fût tenu au bâton, on eût pu, jusqu’à un certain point,
y trouver une excuse, en se rejetant sur la force de l’habitude. Mais
croira-t-on que, dans une discussion littéraire, il alla jusqu’à menacer
d’un régiment des gardes Baudeau de Somaize, le futur auteur du
Dictionnaire des précieuses, qui, sans se laisser intimider par cette
formidable argumentation, lui répondit avec une dignité hautaine ?
Il semble, du reste, que ce dernier genre de discussion, tout
étrange qu’il puisse paraître au premier abord, eût alors quelque
tendance à se mettre à la mode parmi les auteurs ; car, à la même
époque, nous en trouvons un autre exemple, encore plus
caractérisé, dans la petite guerre de gros in-quarto qui s’engagea
entre Costar et Girac, vers 1655, sur la tombe de Voiture. Les deux
tenants commencèrent par s’accabler d’injures réciproques : c’était
la règle ; mais bientôt Costar, non content d’avoir employé tout son
crédit pour obtenir des magistrats que la parole fût interdite à son
adversaire, n’hésita pas à invoquer, sous une forme transparente,
l’intervention de la force armée, en le menaçant de lui faire expier
ses attaques contre Voiture par les mains des officiers qui
passeraient dans l’Angoumois, où résidait le vaillant champion de
Balzac. Ce passage, où l’on appelait, en quelque sorte, les
dragonnades à l’appui d’une thèse littéraire, mérite d’être transcrit in
extenso.
« Sans mentir, dit Costar en parlant de son antagoniste, un
homme de cette humeur est bien sujet à se faire battre : j’entends à
coups de langue et à coups de plume, car nous ne vivons pas en un
siècle si licencieux que l’étoit celui de ces jeunes Romains de
condition, qui se promenoient par les rues tout le long du jour,
cachant sous leurs robes de longs fouets pour châtier l’insolence de
ceux qui n’approuvoient pas le poëte Lucilius, s’ils étoient si
malheureux que de se rencontrer en leur chemin. »
Costar a beau prendre, par pudeur, quelques précautions
oratoires, on voit bien, et on le verra encore mieux tout à l’heure,
que, tout en battant Girac à coups de plume, il trouverait quelque
satisfaction à le battre d’une façon plus solide. Il a peine à dissimuler
l’admiration qu’il éprouve pour ces jeunes Romains de condition, et
l’envie qu’il aurait de les imiter, en châtiant l’insolence d’un homme
qui osait ne pas approuver entièrement le dieu Voiture, ni M. de
Costar, son prophète :
« Néanmoins, poursuit-il en enflant sa voix, M. de Girac pourroit
bien s’attirer quelque logement de gendarmes, s’il passoit des
troupes par l’Angoumois ; et je m’étonne que lui, qui ne néglige pas
trop ses intérêts, et qui songe à ses affaires, ne se souvienne plus
du capitaine qui lui dit, il y a deux ou trois ans : « En considération
de M. le marquis de Montausier, j’empêcherai ma compagnie d’aller
chez vous, mais c’est à la charge qu’à l’avenir il ne vous arrivera
plus d’écrire contre M. de Voiture. »
Que dites-vous de ce capitaine bel-esprit, qui menace d’un
logement de soldats ceux qui n’admireront point M. de Voiture, et de
Costar qui triomphe en rappelant ce beau fait ? Ce n’est donc point
d’aujourd’hui, quoi qu’on en ait prétendu, que certains écrivains
appellent les gendarmes à l’aide pour vider leurs discussions
littéraires. Qu’on veuille bien en croire ces quelques pages, et qu’on
ne nous offre plus trop légèrement pour modèle la bienséance et la
dignité des polémiques du grand siècle. On se souvient de ce valet
qui dit à Javersac, en le battant dans son lit : « C’est pour vous
apprendre à écrire contre M. de Balzac. » Aujourd’hui voilà la même
phrase retournée contre un partisan de Balzac. Toujours, on le voit,
la loi du talion, et la justification du proverbe de l’Évangile !
« J’ai de la peine, continue encore ce rude jouteur, à deviner ce
qui a pu rassurer si fort M. de Girac contre ces menaces, si ce n’est
qu’il se soit imaginé qu’en devenant un auteur célèbre il n’auroit plus
que faire de recommandation étrangère, et que son livre tout seul lui
tiendroit lieu de sauvegarde inviolable aux gens de guerre… Si M.
de Girac était mon ami, je lui conseillerais de prendre d’autres
sûretés contre le capitaine partisan et vengeur des beaux
esprits [25] . »
[25] Suite de la défense, p. 40-41.
D’autres écrivains se gourmaient entre eux et vidaient leurs

différends à la force du poignet, comme ce sieur de Haute-Fontaine
qui, dans un accès de colère et de dépit, pour se venger d’avoir été
vaincu par le ministre Du Moulin dans leurs communes prétentions à
une chaire de philosophie, lui écorcha à coups de poing tout le
visage, si bien que ce dernier fut obligé de se faire mettre de la
peinture couleur de chair sur les endroits lésés. Ce Haute-Fontaine
était un rude gaillard, et Tallemant nous raconte encore qu’il donna
un soufflet à un capitaine anglais qui médisait du roi de France, et
que, dans une hôtellerie, il battit cinq ou six recors qui voulaient
emmener quelqu’un en prison.
Les querelles entre gens de lettres avaient donc aussi leurs côtés
dangereux, et ce n’est pas sans quelques réserves qu’on peut
accepter ce mot du premier président, qui disait à Gilles Boileau, en
l’excitant contre l’auteur de Christine, Ægidius Ménage : « Il y auroit
du péril entre gens d’épée ; mais les auteurs ne versent que de
l’encre. » S’il voulait dire simplement qu’une affaire d’honneur n’était
point à craindre, cela était parfaitement vrai, et les écrivains les plus
susceptibles d’alors semblent n’avoir pas soupçonné, au moins dans
leurs disputes littéraires, ce mode de satisfaction pourtant si
répandu : ils se bornaient à des vengeances plus humiliantes pour
eux comme pour leurs adversaires. Le mot du premier président ne
donne pas une haute idée de la grandeur d’âme et de la dignité de
celui qui pouvait avoir besoin d’un tel encouragement.
En passant de la vie privée des auteurs à leurs livres, non pour y
découvrir des renseignements particuliers sur tel ou tel fait, mais
pour y chercher, dans le ton général et le caractère habituel de la
polémique, la trace des mœurs, des usages, des tendances du
temps, nous y retrouverons encore l’influence et la souveraineté du
bâton. La même conclusion ressort avec la même évidence des faits
et des écrits : les uns et les autres suivent une ligne parallèle ; ils se
reflètent, pour ainsi dire, en se complétant, et ceux-ci sont comme le
commentaire justificatif et l’appendice naturel de ceux-là. Le bâton
se dessine à chaque page, dans toutes les attitudes : c’est le
vengeur qui apparaît toujours aux moments solennels ; c’est le nec
plus ultrà de l’argumentation dans les querelles entre écrivains. Les
gladiateurs de plume, ainsi que les appelait Balzac, n’y allaient pas
de main morte dans ces duels journaliers où l’on ne s’arrêtait point
au premier sang ; et vraiment, à lire les aménités dont, à l’instar des
Scaliger et des Scioppius, des Vadius et des Trissotins, le père
Garasse et dom Goulu, Girac et Costar, voire Furetière et Scarron,
etc., remplissent leurs ouvrages, à l’adresse de leurs adversaires, on
se prend à trouver anodines et douceâtres les plus grandes
violences de nos escarmouches littéraires ou politiques
d’aujourd’hui. Scudéry, Cyrano de Bergerac et le romancier Vital
d’Audiguier se vantaient d’écrire avec leurs épées : on dirait que
leurs confrères écrivent avec un bâton taillé en guise de plume.
Le bâton était chose tellement dans les mœurs, qu’on l’employait
comme un des ressorts de l’action, non-seulement dans les tragi-
comédies, mais quelquefois même dans les tragédies de la première
moitié du siècle. C’est ainsi que, dans la Rodomontade de
Méliglosse (1605), le vieil Aymon, irrité, menace d’appuyer ses
représentations de la même manière que le comte de Sault avait
appuyé les siennes, et de frotter d’importance ses contradicteurs.
J’aurais trop beau jeu de recueillir le même air partout où il se
présente, dans les épigrammes, les romans, et surtout les comédies,
où les coups de bâton forment, pour ainsi dire, la base même de
l’intrigue : c’est là un des cachets de la littérature du temps, comme
plus tard le seront tour à tour les tirades sur la tolérance, les
descriptions de souterrains et de fantômes, les bonnes lames de
Tolède, et les dames aux camellias. Je veux seulement rapporter
quelques exemples, qui suffiront pour indiquer le ton général.
Voici d’abord le d’Artagnan littéraire, le matamore périgourdin :
Cyrano, qui a l’épiderme très-irritable et qui ne peut souffrir la
contradiction, ne rêve que d’assommer ceux qui lui déplaisent. C’est
lui qui disait au comédien Montfleury, son ennemi intime : « Penses-
tu donc, à cause qu’un homme ne te sauroit battre tout entier en
vingt-quatre heures, et qu’il ne sauroit en un jour échigner qu’une de
tes omoplates, que je me veuille reposer de ta mort sur le
bourreau ? » Les coups de bâton pleuvent comme grêle dans ses
Lettres, au point même que cet éternel refrain, qui ne manquait pas
d’abord d’un certain agrément, finit par devenir des plus monotones,
— comme je crains qu’il ne le devienne dans ce livre, sans qu’il y ait
de ma faute. L’exemple suivant est assez caractéristique pour me
dispenser de tous les autres : « On vous coupe du bois… car je vous
proteste que, si les coups de bâton pouvoient s’envoyer par écrit,
vous liriez ma lettre des épaules, et que vous y verriez un homme
armé d’un tricot sortir visiblement de la place où j’ai accoutumé de
mettre, monsieur, votre très-humble serviteur. » (A un comte de bas
aloi.) [26] .
[26] Voir encore Lettr. satiriq., II, 19, etc. ; édit. P.
Lacroix, chez Delahays.
Saint-Amant réserve une correction semblable à l’imprimeur qui a
donné une édition subreptice et fautive de ses œuvres :
Pour moi, je lui promets tant de coups de bâton,

Si jamais sur son dos je puis prendre le ton,
Qu’il croira que du ciel, qu’à sa perte j’oblige,
Il pleuvra des cotrets par un nouveau prodige [27] .
[27] Élégie au duc de Retz.
Ne dirait-on pas, sauf les rimes, que ces vers sont sortis du
même moule que la prose de Cyrano ?
Dans son Poëte crotté, où il a eu Maillet spécialement en vue,
Saint-Amant a tracé aussi, avec son entrain habituel, un tableau un
peu chargé peut-être, mais très-vrai au fond, de la condition
ordinaire de certains écrivains en sous-ordre, et de l’aimable façon
dont ils étaient traités, même par les valets de leurs protecteurs :
A la fin, saoul de chiquenaudes,

De taloches, de gringuenaudes,
D’ardentes mouches sur l’orteil,
De camouflets dans le sommeil,
De pets en coque à la moustache,
De papiers qu’au dos on attache,
D’enfler même pour les laquais,
De bernements, de sobriquets,
De coups d’épingle dans les fesses,
Et de plusieurs autres caresses
Que dans le Louvre on lui faisoit
Quand son diable l’y conduisoit,
Il lui prit, quoique tard, envie
D’aller ailleurs passer sa vie.
Plus loin, le poëte crotté prend la parole :

L’aventure du paladin [28]
Me fait tressaillir de l’épaule :
Je redoute en diable la gaule,
Et m’est avis que sur mon dos
Je ne sens déjà que fagots.
[28] Javersac.
Écoutez cet agréable vaudeville, qui donne la note des

plaisanteries du temps :
Saint-Ruth, Calais, Larry, Boufflers,

Ce ne sont point des ducs et pairs
Et ne prétendent point de l’être
Par plus d’une bonne raison ;
Car ils servent si bien leur maître,
Qu’ils mériteraient le bâton, etc.
Puis, c’est une autre muse anonyme qui chante à son tour, sur
l’air connu :
Quoi ! Nogaret se mêle

De faire des chansons ?
Ne craint-il point la grêle
De cent coups de bâtons ?
Ici, c’est Scudéry, dont on parodie la superbe épigraphe en deux

vers burlesquement menaçants :
Et, poëte et Gascon,

Il aura du bâton.
Là, c’est l’abbé de Pure, qui, dans son roman de la Précieuse,

s’adresse en ces termes, par l’intermédiaire d’un de ses
personnages, à un méchant poëte provincial :
Tes vers sont tout ton bien, terre, prés et garenne ;
Mais encor que peux-tu, d’une semblable graine,
Ni semer, ni cueillir que des coups de bâton ?
Enfin, puisqu’il faut se borner dans cette revue, que je pourrais

prolonger à l’infini, Scarron, le moins cruel des hommes pourtant, a
joint sa voix à ce concert, en maint et maint endroit de ses œuvres.
Écoutez-le, dans sa chanson contre Gilles Boileau, s’écrier sur le
mode lyrique :
Taisez-vous, Boileau le critique :

On fait, pour votre hiver, grand amas de fagots ;
On veut qu’un bras fort vous applique
Cent coups de bâton sur le dos.
Ailleurs, dans ses burlesques Imprécations contre celui qui lui a

pris son Juvénal, il souhaite de voir le voleur fustigé à tour de bras,
et de l’entendre crier sous les étrivières. Il termine sa satire contre
ceux qui font passer leurs libelles diffamatoires sous le nom d’autrui,
en leur disant : « Vous savez
… Qu’outre les fléaux, famine, guerre, peste,

Il en est encore un, fatal aux rimailleurs,
Fort connu de tout temps, en France comme ailleurs :
C’est un mal qui se prend d’ordinaire aux épaules,
Causé par des bâtons, quelquefois par des gaules.
Mais, loin de lui en vouloir de ces intempérances de langage, il faut

plutôt lui savoir gré de n’avoir pas été plus loin, quand on songe que,
dans sa Baronade, il va jusqu’à souhaiter que Baron soit pendu, et
que, dans sa Mazarinade (si toutefois cette pièce est bien de lui), il
dit, en parlant du cardinal, qu’il espère voir le jour où
Sa carcasse désentraillée,
Par la canaille tiraillée,
Ensanglantera le pavé.
Voilà qui est peu plaisant pour un poëte burlesque. Restons-en
sur ce beau trait : tout ce que nous pourrions découvrir encore serait
pâle à côté d’une période aussi haute en couleurs.
Il nous semble que ces citations ont bien leur éloquence, et que
nous ne pouvions mieux achever de démontrer à quel point les
coups de bâton étaient passés dans la langue, dans les mœurs et
dans les actions du temps.
V
On ne s’arrêtait même pas toujours au bâton dans la réalité, non

plus que dans les écrits : nous l’avons déjà vu pour l’Arétin, que le
cynisme de son impudence devait, il est vrai, placer en dehors de la
loi commune. Archiloque avait péri par le poignard. Quand l’abbé
Cotin disait des poëtes satiriques qu’ils ont pour destin de mourir le
cou cassé, il exagérait de bien peu, à supposer qu’il exagérât. A la
manière dont on en usait souvent, le bâton eût pu suffire à lui seul
pour justifier le vers de l’abbé Cotin et l’avertissement de Pradon à
Boileau, tant il savait coucher son homme jusqu’au lendemain sur la
place en lui rompant les membres, si bien que le mot d’assassinat,
même dans son sens moderne, n’était guère trop fort pour des
exécutions semblables. Mais, tout meurtrier qu’il fût, il ne le
paraissait pas toujours assez à la colère vengeresse des grands
seigneurs, qui avaient parfois recours à des armes plus sanglantes
encore.
En 1651, le marquis de Vardes fit trancher le nez au
pamphlétaire Matthieu Dubos, qui l’avait maltraité dans un de ses
manifestes. Les laquais du marquis le saisirent, et, dit le facétieux
Loret,
Coupèrent à coups de cizeau

Son très-infortuné nazeau,
Ce qui fait qu’après cet outrage
On peut dire de son ouvrage :
« Ce sont des discours mal tournez
D’un auteur qui n’a point de nez [29] . »
[29] Muse histor., l. II, lett. 29, 23 juillet 1651.
C’est par erreur que les mémoires du cardinal de Retz [30] , en

racontant cette catastrophe, vingt ans plus tard, l’appliquent à un
autre libelliste du même temps, Dubosc-Montandré, celui qui,
suivant la légende, aurait rudement expié, par la main du prince de
Condé ou de ses lieutenants, les attaques qu’il avait dirigées contre
lui, avant de lui avoir vendu sa plume.
[30] Livre III.
Sarrasin était le protégé et le domestique du prince de Conti :

celui-ci, dans un moment de colère, le frappa, dit-on, à la tempe, et
si malheureusement, qu’il en résulta une fièvre violente dont le poëte
mourut. Il est vrai que Tallemant conteste l’anecdote, mais son
opinion n’a pas prévalu. Il prétend que le prince ne le maltraita qu’en
paroles, et raconte que souvent, après avoir menacé de le jeter par
les fenêtres, il se laissait apaiser par ses bouffonneries.
Louis Racine donne à entendre, dans ses Mémoires sur son
père, que le fameux voyageur Bernier serait mort par suite d’une
plaisanterie que lui fit à sa table le président de Harlai. J’ignore
quelle peut être cette plaisanterie délicate ; mais l’histoire de
Santeuil éclairera le lecteur, et lui fera voir qu’il n’y a rien
d’impossible ni même d’invraisemblable dans une assertion qui
paraît d’abord singulière.
Santeuil, malgré son titre et son habit, qui eussent dû le faire
respecter, n’en était pas moins traité par ses Mécènes en poëte,
c’est-à-dire de la plus cavalière façon du monde. La duchesse de
Bourbon ne se faisait nul scrupule de le souffleter, puis, sur ses
réclamations, de l’inonder d’un verre d’eau en plein visage, pour le
punir de ne l’avoir pas encore célébrée dans ses vers. Jusque-là,
rien à dire : c’était l’ordinaire de tout auteur protégé. Mais voici qui
dépasse les bornes. Un soir, à dîner, la société du duc de Bourbon,

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Sexual Harassment, Psychology and

Feminism Lisa Lazard

ISBN 978-3-030-55254-1 ISBN 978-3-030-55255-8 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

1 Introduction—#MeToo and Feminisms 1

2 Workplace Harassment, Hollywood’s Casting Couch

3 Women, Sexual Harassment and Victim Politics 43

4 The Sexual Harassment of Hollywood Men 69

5 Sexual Harassment and Sexual Predators in Neoliberal

6 Conclusion—Sexual Harassment and Speaking Rights 119

Introduction—#MeToo and Feminisms

Abstract In this chapter, Lazard offers a brief history of how sexual

Keywords Sexual harassment · Postfeminism · Neoliberal feminism ·

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Workplace Sexual Harassment,

These behaviours were referred to by Wise and Stanley (1987) as ‘the

and has been, understood as a romantic hero—freeing the woman of her

the notion that femininity is increasingly figured as a bodily property;

Postfeminism as a sensibility also includes the muting of critical vocab-

Post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can

That feminism is predominant in popular culture has raised questions

which become popular are often marked by disengagement with the

to women’s success in the workplace, the solutions neoliberal feminism

The self becomes…indistinguishable from a business, where one calcu-

Neoliberal feminism’s call for individual self-improvement effectively

discourses running through media reporting related to the 2017 speak-

Hollway, W. (1984). Gender difference and the production of subjectivity. In

Rich, A. C. (2003). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence (1980).

Workplace Harassment, Hollywood’s Casting

Abstract This chapter explores sexual harassment as a workplace problem

Keywords Workplace sexual harassment · New normal of working lives ·

I told him [Harvey Weinstein] something like, “When I win an Academy

© The Author(s) 2020 17

Psychology and Workplace Sexual Harassment

harassment within the frames of mainstream psychology and examine

appears to be a reasonably consistent theme around the idea that victims

in a communication skills deficit which manifests as “poor dating skills”

In Bingham and Burleson’s (1996) study, 26 strategies were listed,

the possibility, however small, that sexual harassment could be a useable

In this vignette, the sexual attractiveness of the candidates is described

terms of how the hierarchical organisation of employees within organ-

The tendency to rarefy sexual harassment appears to have arisen, at least

when women are propositioned by men at work, touched sexually or

Gutek and Morash (1982) suggest that sex-role spillover is likely to

Scholarship in the 1990s, particularly in feminist psychology, began

The New Normal of Working

the new normal of working lives, which is typified by flexible hours,

themselves as confident and desiring subjects. Postfeminist notions of

the women participants as professionally necessary and advantageous

clear elements of uncertainty as to legal protection evidently attach to

#MeToo and the Workplace

paid work. As I have argued, the problematisation of workplace sexual

the domesticated middle-class women of nuclear families [who] were seen

Middle-class women workers are the primary focus of neoliberal femi-

capital value at work and at home. The focus of neoliberal femi-

neoliberal imperatives around entrepreneurship, as well as popular femi-

‘I am a single mother. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and she’s depending

That current challenges to sexual harassment have been broadly tied