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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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan
This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
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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This point of view raises the question whether one ought to speak
of language and culture or rather of language as a part of culture. So
far as the process of their transmission is concerned, and the type of
mechanism of their development, it is clear that language and culture
are one. For practical purposes it is generally convenient to keep
them distinct. There is no doubt that two peoples can share in what
is substantially the same culture and yet speak fundamentally
different idioms; for instance, the Finno-Ugric Magyars or
Hungarians among the adjacent Slavs, Germans, and Latins of
central Europe, who are all Indo-Europeans. The other way around,
the northern Hindus and west Europeans are certainly different
culturally, yet their languages go back to a common origin. In fact it
has become a commonplace that the arguing of connection between
the three factors of race, language, and culture (or nationality), the
making of inferences from one to the other, is logically unsound (§
33). One can no more think correctly in terms of Aryan heads or a
Semitic race, for instance, than of blond linguistic types, Catholic
physiques, or inflecting social institutions.
At the same time, speech and culture tend to form something of a
unit as opposed to race. It is possible for a population to substitute a
wholly new language and type of civilization for the old ones, as the
American negro has done, and yet to remain relatively unmodified
racially, or at least to carry on its former physical type unchanged in
a large proportion of its members. On the other hand, a change of
speech without some change of culture seems impossible. Certainly
wherever Greek, Latin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Pali, Chinese have
penetrated, there have been established new phases of civilization.
In a lower degree, the same principle probably holds true of every
gain of one language at the expense of another, even when the
spreading idiom is not associated with a great or active culture.
The linkage of speech and culture is further perceptible in the
degree to which they both contribute, in most cases, to the idea of
nationality. What chiefly marks off the French nation from the Italian,
the Dutch from the German, the Swedish from the Norwegian—their
respective customs and ideals, or the language gap? It would be
difficult to say. The cultural differences tend to crystallize around
language differences, and then in turn are reinforced by language,
so that the two factors interact complexly. Nationality, especially in its
modern developments, includes another factor, that of social or
political segregation, which may in some degree run counter to both
speech and culture. Switzerland with its German, French, and Italian
speaking population, or Belgium, almost equally divided between
Flemings and Walloons, are striking examples. Yet however
successfully Switzerland and Belgium maintain their national unity, it
is clear that this is a composite of subnational elements, each of
which possesses a certain cultural as well as linguistic distinctness.
Thus the Walloon speaks a French dialect, the Fleming a Dutch one;
and the point of view, temperament, historic antecedents, and minor
customs of the two groups are perceptibly different. Similarly, both
the history and the outlook and therefore the culture of the French
and German cantons of Switzerland are definitely distinguishable.
57. Relative Worth of Languages

One respect in which languages differ from cultures is that they
cannot, like the latter, be rated as higher and lower. Of course, even
as regards culture, such rating is often a dubious procedure,
meaning little more than that the person making the comparison
assumes his own culture to be the highest and estimates other
cultures low in proportion as they vary. Although this is a subjective
and uncritical procedure, nevertheless certain objective comparisons
are possible. Some cultures surpass others in their quantitative
content: they possess more different arts, abilities, and items of
knowledge. Also, some culture traits may be considered intrinsically
superior to others: metal tools against stone ones, for instance, since
metal is adopted by all stone culture peoples who can secure it,
whereas the reverse is not true. Further, in most cases a new
addition does not wholly obliterate an older element, this retaining a
subsidiary place, or perhaps serving some more special function
than before. In this way the culture becomes more differentiated. The
old art may even attain a higher degree of perfection than it had
previously; as the finest polish was given to stone implements in
northern Europe after bronze was known. In general, accretion is the
process typical of culture growth. Older elements come to function in
a more limited sphere as new ones are added, but are not extirpated
by them. Oars and sails remain as constituent parts of the stock of
civilization after it has added steam and motor boats. In the senses
then that a culture has a larger content of elements, that these
elements are more differentiated, and that a greater proportion of
these elements are of the kind that inherently tend to supersede
related elements, the culture may be considered superior.
As regards languages, there are also quantitative differences.
Some contain several times as many words as others. But
vocabulary is largely a cultural matter. A people that uses more
materials, manufactures more objects, possesses knowledge of a
larger array of facts, and makes finer discriminations in thought,
must inevitably have more words. Yet even notable increases in size
of speech content appear not to be accompanied by appreciable
changes in form. A larger vocabulary does not mean a different type
of structure. Grammar seems to be little influenced by culture status.
No clear correspondence has yet been traceable between type or
degree of civilization and type of language. Neither the presence nor
the absence of particular features of tense, number, case,
reduplication, or the like seems ever to have been of demonstrable
advantage toward the attainment of higher culture. The speech of
the former and modern nations most active in the propagation of
culture has been of quite diverse type. The languages of the
Egyptians (Hamitic); Sumerians; Babylonians and Arabs (Semitic);
Hindus and Greeks (ancient Indo-European); Anglo-Saxons (modern
Indo-European); Chinese; and Mayas, are about as different as
exist. The Sumerian type of civilization was taken over bodily and
successfully by the Semitic Babylonians. The bulk of Japanese
culture is Chinese; yet Japanese speech is built on wholly different
principles.
Then, it is impossible to rate one speech trait or type as inherently
or objectively superior to another on any basis like that which
justifies the placing of a metal culture above a stone culture. If wealth
of grammatical apparatus is a criterion of superiority, Latin is a higher
language than French, and Anglo-Saxon than English. But if lack of
declensions and conjugations is a virtue, then Chinese surpasses
English almost as much as English surpasses Latin. There is no
reason favoring one of these possible judgments rather than its
opposite. Amabo is no better or worse than I shall love as a means
of expressing the same idea. The one is more compact, the other
more plastic. There are times when compactness is a virtue,
occasions when plasticity has advantages. By the Latin or synthetic
standard, the English expression is loose jointed, lacking in
structure; by the English or analytic standard, the Latin form is over-
condensed, adhering unnecessarily to form. One cannot similarly
balance the merits of a steel and a flint knife, of a medical and a
shamanistic phase of society. The one cuts or cures better than the
other.
So, from the point of view of civilization, language does not matter.
Language will always keep up with whatever pace culture sets it. If a
new object is invented or a new distinction of thought made, a word
is coined or imported or modified in meaning to express the new
concept. If a thousand or ten thousand new words are required, they
are developed. When it desires to express abstractions like futurity
or plurality, any language is capable of doing so, even if it does not
habitually express them. If a language is unprovided with formal
means for the purpose, such as a grammatical suffix, it falls back on
content and uses a word or circumlocution. If the life of a people
changes and comes to be conducted along lines that render it
frequently important to express an idea like futurity to which
previously little attention has been paid, the appropriate
circumlocution soon becomes standardized, conveniently brief, and
unambiguous. In general, every language is capable of indefinite
modification and expansion and thereby is enabled to meet cultural
demands almost at once. This is shown by the fact that virtually
anything spoken or written can be translated into almost every other
language without serious impairment of substance. The æsthetic
charm of the original may be lost in the translation; the new forms
coined in the receiving language are likely at first to seem awkward;
but the meaning, the business of speech, gets expressed.
58. Size of Vocabulary
The tendency is so instinctive in us to presuppose and therefore to
find qualities of inferiority, poverty, or incompleteness in the speech
of populations of more backward culture than our own, that a
widespread, though unfounded, belief has grown up that the
languages of savages and barbarians are extremely limited
quantitatively—in the range of their vocabulary. Similar
misconceptions are current as to the number of words actually used
by single individuals of civilized communities. It is true that no one,
not even the most learned and prolific writer, uses all the words of
the English language as they are found in an unabridged dictionary.
All of us understand many words which we habitually encounter in
reading and may even hear frequently spoken, but of which our
utterance faculties for some reason have not made us master. In
short, a language, being the property and product of a community,
possesses more words than can ever be used by a single individual,
the sum total of whose ideas is necessarily less than that of his
group. Added to this are a certain mental sluggishness, which
restricts most of us to a greater or less degree, and the force of
habit. Having spoken a certain word a number of times, our brain
becomes accustomed to it and we are likely to employ it to the
exclusion of its synonyms or in place of words of related but
distinguishable meaning.
The degree to which all this affects the speech of the normal man
has, however, been greatly exaggerated. Because there are, all told,
including technical terms, a hundred thousand or more words in our
dictionaries, and because Shakespeare in his writings used 24,000
different words, Milton in his poems 17,000, and the English Bible
contains 7,200, it has been concluded that the average man, whose
range of thought and power of expression are so much less, must
use an enormously smaller vocabulary. It has been stated that many
a peasant goes through life without using more than 300 or 400
words, that the vocabulary of Italian grand opera is about 600, and
that he is a person above the average who employs more than 3,000
to 4,000 words. If such were the case it would be natural that the
uncivilized man, whose life is simpler, and whose knowledge more
confined, should be content with an exceedingly small vocabulary.
But it is certain that the figures just cited are erroneous. If any one
who considers himself an average person will take the trouble to
make a list of his speaking vocabulary, he will quickly discover that
he knows, and on occasion uses, the names of at least one to two
thousand different things. That is, his vocabulary contains so many
concrete nouns. To these must be added the abstract nouns, the
verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and the other parts of speech, the short
and familiar words that are indispensable to communication in any
language. It may thus be safely estimated that it is an exceptionally
ignorant and stupid person in a civilized country that has not at his
command a vocabulary of several thousand words.
Test counts based on dictionaries show, for people of bookish
tastes, a knowledge of about 30,000 to 35,000 words. Most of these
would perhaps never be spoken by the individuals tested, would not
be at their actual command, but it seems that at least 10,000 would
be so controlled. The carefully counted vocabulary of a five and a
half year old American boy comprised 1,528 understandingly used
words, besides participles and other inflected forms. Two boys
between two and three years used 642 and 677 different words.
It is therefore likely that statements as to the paucity of the speech
of unlettered peoples are equally exaggerated. He who professes to
declare on the strength of his observation that a native language
consists of only a few hundred terms, displays chiefly his ignorance.
He has either not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary or has
not known how to do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can
usually converse with natives to the satisfaction of his own needs
with two or three hundred words. Even the missionary can do a great
deal with this stock, if it is properly chosen. But it does not follow that
because a civilized person has not learned more of a language, that
there is no more. On this point the testimony of the student is the
evidence to be considered.
Dictionaries compiled by missionaries or philologists of languages
previously unwritten run to surprising figures. Thus, the number of
words recorded in Klamath, the speech of a culturally rude American
Indian tribe, is 7,000; in Navaho, 11,000; in Zulu, 17,000; in Dakota,
19,000; in Maya, 20,000; in Nahuatl, 27,000. It may safely be said
that every existing language, no matter how backward its speakers
are in their general civilization, possesses a vocabulary of at least
5,000 words.
59. Quality of Speech Sounds

Another mistaken assumption that is frequently made is that the
speech of non-literary peoples is harsh, its pronunciation more
difficult than ours. This belief is purely subjective. When one has
heard and uttered a language all his life, its sounds come to one’s
mouth with a minimum of effort; but unfamiliar vowels and
consonants are formed awkwardly and inaccurately. No adult reared
in an Anglo-Saxon community finds th difficult. Nor does a French or
German child, whose speech habits are still plastic, find long
difficulty in mastering the particular tongue control necessary to the
production of the th sound. But the adult Frenchman or German,
whose muscular habits have settled in other lines, tries and tries and
falls back on s or t. A Spaniard, however, would agree with the
Anglo-Saxon as to the ease and “naturalness” of th. Conversely, the
“rough” ch flows spontaneously out of the mouth of a German or
Scotchman, whereas English, French, and Italians have to struggle
long to master it, and are tempted to substitute k. German ö and
French u trouble us, our “short” u is equally resistant to Continental
tongues.
Even a novel position can make a familiar sound strange and
forbidding. Most Anglo-Saxons fail on the first try to say ngis; many
give up and declare it beyond their capacity to learn. Yet it is only
sing pronounced backward. English uses ng finally and medially in
words, not initially. Any English speaker can quickly acquire its use in
the new position if, to keep from being disconcerted, he follows some
such sequence as sing, singing, stinging, ringing, inging, nging, ngis.
So with surd l—Welsh ll—which is ordinary l minus the
accompaniment of vocal cord vibrations. A little practice makes
possible the throwing on or off of these vibrations, the “voicing” of
speech, for any sound, with as much ease as one would turn a
faucet on or off. Surd l thereupon flows with the same readiness as
sonant l. As a matter of fact we often pronounce it unconsciously at
the end of words like little. When it comes at the beginning, however,
as in the tribal name usually written Tlingit, Americans tend to
substitute something more habitual, such as kl, which is familiar from
clip, clean, clear, close, clam, and many other words. The simple
surd l has even been repeatedly described quite inappropriately as a
“click”; which is about as far from picturing it with correctness as
calling it a thump or a sigh; all because it comes in an unaccustomed
position.
Combinations of sounds, especially of consonants, are indeed of
variable difficulty for anatomical reasons. Some, like nd and ts and
pf, have their components telescope or join naturally through being
formed in the same part of the mouth. Others, like kw (qu), have the
two elements articulated widely apart, but for that reason the
elements can easily be formed simultaneously. Still others, like kt
and ths, are intrinsically difficult, because the elements differ in place
of production but are alike in method, and therefore come under the
operation of the generic rule that similar sounds require more effort
to join and yet discriminate than dissimilar ones; for much the same
reason that it is on the whole easier to acquire the pronunciation of a
wholly new type of sound than of one which differs subtly from one
already known. Yet in these matters too, habit rather than anatomical
functioning determines the reaction. German pf comes hard to adult
Anglo-Saxons, English kw and ths to Germans. So far as degree of
accumulation of consonants is concerned, English is one of the
extremest of all languages. Monosyllables like tract, stripped (stripd),
sixths (siksths), must seem irremediably hard to most speakers of
other idioms.
Children’s speech in all languages shows that certain sounds are,
as a rule, learned earlier than others, and are therefore presumably
somewhat easier physiologically. Sounds like p and t which are
formed with the mobile lips and front of the tongue normally precede
back tongue sounds like k. B, d, g, which are voiced like vowels,
tend to precede voiceless p, t, k. Stops or momentary sounds, such
as b, d, g, p, t, k, generally come earlier than the fricative continuants
f, v, th, s, z, which require a delicate adjustment of lip or tongue—
close proximity without firm contact—whereas the stops involve only
a making and breaking of jerky contact. But so slight are the
differences of effort or skill in all these cases, that as a rule only a
few months separate the learning of the easier from that of the more
difficult sounds; and adults no longer feel the differences. The only
sound or class of sounds seriously harder than others seems to be
that denoted by the letter r. Not only do children usually acquire r
late, but among all races there appears to be a certain percentage of
individuals who never learn to form the sound right, but substitute
one approaching g or w or j or l. The reason is that r stands alone
among speech sounds. It is the only one produced by blowing the
tongue into a few gross vibrations; which means that this organ must
be held in a special condition of laxness and yet elevated so that the
flow of breath may bear on it. However, even this inherent difficulty
has been insufficient to prevent many languages from changing
easier sounds into r.
60. Diffusion and Parallelism in Language and

Culture
A phenomenon which language shows more conspicuously than
culture, or which is more readily demonstrated in it, is parallel or
convergent development, the repeated, independent growth of a trait
(§ 89, 100).
Thus sex gender is an old part of Indo-European structure. In
English, by the way, it has wholly disappeared, so far as formal
expression goes, from noun, adjective, and demonstrative and
interrogative pronoun. It lingers only in the personal pronoun of the
third person singular—he, she, it. A grammar of living English that
was genuinely practical and unbound by tradition would never
mention gender except in discussing these three little words. That
our grammars specify man as a masculine and woman as a feminine
noun is due merely to the fact that in Latin the corresponding words
vir and femina possess endings which are recognized as generally
masculine and feminine, and that an associated adjective ends
respectively in masculine -us or feminine -a. These are distinctions
of form of which English possesses no equivalents. The survival of
distinction between he, she, and it, while this and the and which
have become alike irrespective of the sex of the person or thing they
denote, is therefore historically significant. It points back to the past
and to surviving Indo-European languages.
Besides, Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic express sex by
grammatical forms, although like French and Spanish and Italian,
they know only two genders, the neuter being unrepresented. These
three are the only large language stocks in which sex gender finds
expression. Ural-Altaic, Chinese, Japanese, Dravidian, Malayo-
Polynesian, Bantu, and in general the language families of Asia,
Africa, and America do without, although a number of languages
make other gender classifications, as of animate and inanimate,
personal and impersonal, superior and inferior, intelligent and
unintelligent. Sex gender however reappears in Hottentot of South
Africa, and in the Chinook and Coast Salish and Pomo languages of
the Pacific coast of North America.
How is this distribution to be accounted for? Indo-European,
Semitic, and Hamitic occupy contiguous territory, in fact surround the
Mediterranean over a tract approximately co-extensive with the
Caucasian area. Could they in the remote past have influenced one
another? That is, could grammatical sex gender have been invented,
so to speak, by one of them, and borrowed by the others, as we
know that cultural inventions are constantly diffused? Few
philologists would grant this as likely: there are too few authenticated
cases of formal elements or concepts having been disseminated
between unrelated languages. Is it then possible that our three
stocks are at bottom related? Sex gender in that case would be part
of their common inheritance. For Semitic and Hamitic a number of
specialists have accepted a common origin on other grounds. But for
Semitic and Indo-European, philologists, who are professionally
exacting, are in the main quite dubious. Positive evidence seems yet
to be lacking. Still, the territorial continuity of the three speech
groups showing the trait is difficult to accept as mere coincidence. In
a parallel case in the realm of culture history, a common source
would be accepted as highly probable. Even Hottentot has been
considered a remote Semitic-Hamitic offshoot, largely, it is true,
because of the very fact that it expresses gender. Philologists,
accordingly, may consider the case still open; but it is at least
conceivable that the phenomenon goes back to a single origin in
these four Old World stocks.
Yet no stretch will account for sex gender in the three American
languages as due to contact influence or diffusion, nor relate these
tongues to the Old World ones. Clearly here is a case of
independent origin or parallel “invention.” Chinook and Coast Salish,
indeed, are in contiguity, and one may therefore have taken up the
trait in imitation of the other. But Pomo lies well to the south and its
affiliations run still farther south. Here sex gender is obviously an
independent, secondary, and rather recent growth in the grammar.
In short, it remains doubtful whether sex gender originated three or
four or five or six times among these seven language stocks; but it
evidently originated repeatedly.
Other traits crop out the world over in much the same manner. A
dual, for instance, is found in Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian,
Eskimo, and a number of other American languages. The distinction
between inclusive and exclusive we—you and I as opposed to he
and I—is made in Malayo-Polynesian, Hottentot, Iroquois, Uto-
Aztecan.
A true nominative case-ending, such as Latin and the other
varieties of Indo-European evince, is an exceedingly specialized
formation; yet is found in the Maidu language of California. Articles,
in regard to which Indo-European varies, Latin for instance being
without, while its Romance daughter tongues have developed them,
recur in Semitic, in Polynesian, and in several groups of American
languages, such as Siouan and Hokan. The growth in Romance is
significant because of its historicity, and because it was surely not
due to imitation of an unrelated language. That is, French developed
its articles independently and secondarily; a fact that makes it
probable that many languages in other parts of the world, whose
history we do not know, developed theirs in a parallel manner, as a
product of wholly internal causes—“invented” them, in short,
although wholly unconsciously.
A trait found in a large proportion of the American languages is the
so-called incorporation of the object pronoun (§ 51). The objective
pronoun, or an element representing it, is prefixed or suffixed to the
verb, made a part of it. The process is familiar enough to us from
Indo-European so far as the subject is concerned: in Latin ama-s,
ama-t, ama-nt, the suffixes express “you, he, they” and pronouns
comparable to the English ones—independent words—are usually
omitted. The -s in he love-s is the sole survival of the process in
modern English. None of the older Indo-European tongues however
showed an inclination to affix similar elements for the objects,
although there are some approaches in a few recent languages of
the family: Spanish diga-me, “tell me,” and mata-le, “kill him,” for
instance. Semitic on the other hand, and Basque, do “incorporate”
objective elements, whereas most Asiatic and some American
languages do not. Many other instances of parallel or convergent
traits could be cited.
This greater frequency of parallel developments in language than
in culture is perhaps in part due to easier demonstrability in the field
of speech. But in the main the higher frequency seems real. Two
reasons for the difference suggest themselves.
First, the number of possibilities is small in language, so far as
structure is concerned. The categories or concepts used for
classifying and for the indication of relations are rigorously limited,
and so are the means of expression. The distinctions expressed by
gender, for instance, may refer to sex, animateness, personality,
worth, shape, position, or possibly one or two other qualities; but
there they end. If a language recognizes gender at all, it must have
gender of one of these few types. Consequently there is some
probability of several unconnected languages sooner or later
happening upon the same type of gender. Similarly, for the kinds of
number, and of case, and so on, that are denotable. These larger
categories, like gender and number and case, are not numerous.
Then, the means of expressing such relational and classificatory
concepts are limited. There is position or relative order of words;
compounding of them; accretions of elements to stems, namely
prefixes, infixes, and suffixes; reduplication, the repetition of part or
the whole of words; internal changes by shift of vowel or accent
within words; and therewith the types of grammatical means are
about exhausted. The number of possible choices is so small that
the law of accidental probability must cause many languages to hit
upon the same devices.
A second reason for the greater frequency of parallelism in
language is that structural traits appear to resist diffusion by imitation
to a considerable degree. Words are borrowed, sometimes freely,
almost always to some degree, between contiguous languages;
sounds considerably less; grammar least of all. That is, linguistic
content lends itself to diffusion readily, linguistic form with difficulty.
At bottom, the same holds of culture. Specific elements of culture
or groups of such elements diffuse very widely at times and may be
said to be always tending to diffuse: the wheel, for instance, smelting
of metals, the crown as a symbol of royalty, the swastika, Buddhism.
The relations of elements among themselves, on the other hand,
change by internal growth rather than external imitation. Of this sort
are the relations of the classes and members of societies, the fervor
with which religion is felt, the esteem accorded to learning or wealth
or tradition, the inclination toward this or that avenue of subsistence
or economic development. By conquest or peaceful pressure or
penetration one people may shatter the political structure or social
fabric of another, may undermine its conservatism, may swerve its
economic habits. But it is difficult to find cases of one people
adopting such tendencies or schemes of cultural organization in
mere imitation of the example of another, as it will adopt specific
culture content—the wheel or crown or Buddhism, for instance—
from outside, often readily. The result is that culture relations or
forms develop spontaneously or from within rather than as a result of
direct taking over. Also, the types of culture forms being limited in
number, the same type is frequently evolved independently. Thus
monarchical and democratic societies, feudal or caste-divided ones,
priest-ridden and relatively irreligious ones, expansive and
mercantile or self-sufficient and agricultural nations, evolve over and
over again. On the whole, comparative culture history more often
deals with the specific contents of civilization, perhaps because
events like the spread of an invention can be traced more definitely
and exactly than the rather complex evolutions of say two feudal
systems can be compared. The result is that diffusions seem to
outweigh parallels; as is set forth in several of the chapters that
follow this one (§ 105, 111, 127).
In comparative linguistics, on the other hand, interest inclines to
the side of form rather than content; hence the parallelisms or
convergences are conspicuous. If as much attention were generally
given to words as to grammar, and if they could be traced in their
prehistoric or unrecorded wanderings as reliably as many culture
traits have been, it is probable that diffusion would loom larger as a
principle shaping human speech. There are words that have traveled
almost as far as the objects they denote: tobacco and maize, for
example. And the absorption of words of Latin origin into English
was as extensive as the absorption for over a thousand years of
Latin, Christian, and Mediterranean culture by the English people—
went on as its accompaniment and result.
61. Convergent Languages

Parallel development in speech form is not restricted to traits like
sex gender and object incorporation. It may affect whole languages.
Chinese a long time ago became an extremely analytical or
“isolating” language. That is, it lost all affixes and internal change.
Each word became an unalterable unit. Sentences are built up by
putting together these atoms. Grammatical relations are expressed
by the order of words: the subject precedes the predicate, for
instance. Other ideas that in many languages are treated formally,
such as the plural or person, are expressed by content elements,
that is, by other words: many for the plural, separate pronouns
instead of affixes for person, and so on. The uniformly monosyllabic
words of Chinese accentuate this isolating character, which however
does not depend intrinsically upon the monosyllabism. In the Indo-
European family, as already mentioned, there has been a drift in the
same direction during the last two thousand years. This drift toward
loss of formal mechanisms and toward the expression of grammar
by material elements or their position only, has been evident in all
branches of Indo-European, but has been most marked in English.
The chief remnants of the older inflectional processes in spoken
English of to-day are four verb endings, -s, -ed, -ing, -en; three noun
endings, the possessive -’s and the plurals -s and -en, the latter rare;
the case ending -m in whom, them; a few vowel changes for plurals,
as in man—men, and goose—geese; and perhaps two hundred
vowel changes in verbs, like sing, sang, sung. Compared with Latin,
Sanskrit, or even primitive Germanic, this brief list represents a
survival of possibly a tenth of the original synthetic inflectional
apparatus. That is, English has gone approximately nine tenths of
the way towards attaining a grammar of the Chinese type. A third
language of independent origin, Polynesian, has traveled about the
same distance in the same direction. Superficially it is less like
Chinese in that it remains prevailingly polysyllabic, but more like it in
having undergone heavy phonetic attrition. This then is a clear case
of entire languages converging toward a similar type.
Another instance is found in the remarkable resemblances in plan
of structure of Indo-European, especially in its older forms, and of
the Penutian group of languages in native California. Common to
these two families are an apparatus of similar cases, including
accusative, genitive, locative, ablative, instrumental; plural by suffix;
vowel changes in the verb according to tense and mode; a passive
and several participles and modal forms expressed by suffixes;
pronouns either separate or expressed by endings fused with the
tense-modal suffixes. Thus, the processes which make English sing,
sang, sung, song, or bind, bound, band, bond, are substantially
identical with those which have produced in Penutian Yokuts such
forms as shokud, pierce, shukid-ji, pierced, shokod, perforation or
hole, shikid, piercer or arrow. In short, most of the traits generally
cited as constituting the Indo-European languages typically
inflectional, reappear in Penutian, and of course independently as
regards their origin and history.
These would appear to be phenomena comparable to the growth
of feudalism in China more than a thousand years earlier than in
Europe, or the appearance of a great centrally governed empire in
Peru similar to the ancient monarchies of the Orient.
62. Unconscious Factors in Language and

Culture
The unceasing processes of change in language are mainly
unconscious. The results of the change may rise to the recognition of
the speakers; the act of change, and especially its causes, happen
without awareness of those through whose minds and mouths they
take place. This holds of all departments of language: the phonetics,
the structural form, largely even the meaning of words. When a
change has begun to creep in, it may be observed and be
consciously resisted on the ground of being incorrect or vulgar or
foreign. But the underlying motives of the objectors are apparently as
unknown to themselves as the impulses of the innovators.
If this view seem extreme, it can easily be shown that the great
bulk of any language as it is, apart from any question of change, is
employed unconsciously. An illiterate person will use such forms as
child, child’s, children, children’s with the same “correctness” as a
philologist, yet without being able to give an explanation of the
grammatical ideas of singularity and plurality, absoluteness and
possession, or to lay down rules as to the manner of expression of
these ideas in English. Grammar, in short, exists before
grammarians, whose legitimate business is to uncover such rules as
are already there. It is an obviously hasty thought that because
grammar happens to be taught in schools, speech can be
grammatical only through such formal teaching. The Sanskrit and
Greek and Latin languages had their declensions and conjugations
before Hindu and Greek and Roman scholars first analyzed and
described them. The languages of primitive peoples frequently
abound with complicated forms and mechanisms which are used
consistently and applied without suspicion of their existence. It is
much as the blood went round in our bodies quite healthily before
Harvey’s discovery of its circulation.
The quality of unconsciousness seems not to be a trait specifically
limited to linguistic causes and processes, but to hold in principle of
culture generally. It is only that the unconsciousness pervades
speech farther. A custom, a belief, an art, however deep down its
springs, sooner or later rises into social consciousness. It then
seems deliberate, planned, willed, and is construed as arising from
conscious motives and developing through conscious channels. But
many social phenomena can be led back only to non-rational and
obscure motives: the wearing of silk hats, for instance. The whole
class of changes in dress styles spring from unconscious causes.
Sleeves and skirts lengthen or shorten, trousers flare or tighten, and
who can say why? It is perhaps possible to trace a new fashion to
Paris or London, and to a particular stratum of society there. But
what is it that in the winter of a particular year makes every woman—
or man—of a certain social group wear, let us say, a high collared
coat, or a shoe that does not come above the ankle, and the next
year, or the tenth after, the reverse? It is insufficient to say that this is
imitation of a leader of fashion, of a professional creator of style.
Why does the group follow him and think the innovation attractive
and correct? A year earlier the same innovation would have
appeared senseless or extravagant to the same group. A year after,
it appeals as belated and ridiculous, and every one wonders that
style was so tasteless so short a time ago.
Evidently the æsthetic emotions evoked by fashions are largely
beyond the control of both individuals and groups. It is difficult to say
where the creative and imitative impulses of fashion come from;
which, inasmuch as the impulses obviously reside somewhere in
human minds, means that they spring from the unconscious portions
of the mind. Evidently then our justification of the dress styles we
happen at any time to be following, our pronouncing them artistic or
comfortable or sensible or what not, is secondary. A low shoe may
be more convenient than a high one, a brown one more practical
than a black one. That that is not the reason which determines the
wearing of low brown shoes when they are customarily worn, is
shown by the fact that at other times high black ones are put on by
every one. The reasons that can be and are given are so
changeable and inconsistent that they evidently are not the real
reasons, but the false secondary reasons that are best distinguished
as rationalizations. Excuses, we should call them with reference to
individual conduct.
What applies to fashion holds also of manners, of morals, and of
many religious observances. Why we defer to women by rising in
their presence and passing through a door behind them; why we
refrain from eating fish with a knife or drinking soup out of a two
handled cup, though drinking it from a single handled one is
legitimate; why we do not marry close kin; why we remove our hats
in the presence of the deity or his emblems but would feel it impious
to pull off our shoes; all the thousands of prescriptions and taboos of
which these are examples, possess an unconscious motivation.
Such cases are also illustrations of what is known as the relativity
of morals. The Jew sets his hat on to worship, the Oriental
punctiliously slips out of his shoes. Some people forbid the marriage
of the most remote relatives, others encourage that of first cousins,
still others permit the union of uncle and niece. It would seem that all
social phenomena which can be brought under this principle of
relativity of standard are unconsciously grounded. This in turn
implies the unconscious causation of the mores, those products of
the social environment in which one is reared and which one accepts
as the ultimate authority of conduct. As mores are those folkways or
customs to which an emotional coloring has become attached, so
that adherence to the custom or departure from it arouses a feeling
respectively of approval or disapproval, it is evident that the origin of
folkways generally is also unconscious, since there seems no reason
why the emotions or ethical affect enveloping a customary action
should incline more than the custom itself to spring up
unconsciously.
It has become recognized that the average man’s convictions on
social matters remote from him are not developed through
examination of evidence and exercise of reason, but are taken over,
by means of what is sometimes denominated the “herd instinct,”
from the society or period in which he happens to have been born
and nurtured. His belief in democracy, in monotheism, in his right to
charge profit and his freedom to change residence or occupation,
have such origin. In many instances it is easy to render striking proof
of the proposition: as in the problems of high tariff, or the Athanasian
creed, or compulsory vaccination, which are so technical or intricate
as to be impossible of independent solution by evidence and
argument by the majority of men. Time alone would forbid: we should
starve while making the necessary research. And the difference
between the average man’s attitude on such difficult points and the
highly gifted individual’s attitude toward them or even toward simpler
problems, would seem to be one of degree only.
Even on the material sides of culture, unconscious motivation
plays a part. In the propulsion of ships, oars and sails fluctuated as
the prevalent means down almost to the period of steam vessels. It
would be impossible to say that one method was logically superior to
the other, that it was recognized as such and then rationally adhered
to. The history of warfare shows similar changes between throwing
and thrusting spears, stabbing and hewing swords, light and heavy
armor. The Greeks and Macedonians in the days of their military
superiority lengthened their lances and held them. It no doubt
seemed for a time that a definite superiority had been proved for this
type of weapon over the shorter, hurled javelin. Then the Romans,
as part of their legionary tactics, reverted to the javelin and broke the
Macedonian phalanx with their pilum. But the Middle Ages again fell
back on the thrusting lance. The Greeks successfully developed
heavy armor, until Athenian light armed troops overcame Spartan
hoplites. The Macedonians reintroduced heavy armament, which
held sway in Europe until after the prevalence of firearms. But the
last few years have brought the rebirth of the helmet.
These fashions in tools and practical appliances do not alter as
fast as modern dress styles, and part of their causes can often be
recognized. Yet there seems no essential difference, as regards
consciousness, between the fluctuation of fashions in weapons—or
navigation or cooking or travel or house building—and, let us say,
the fluctuation of mode between soft and stiff hats or high and low
shoes. It may be admitted to have been the open array of the legion
that led to the pilum; the bullet that induced the abandonment of the
breast plate, shrapnel that caused the reintroduction of the helmet.
But these initiating factors were not deliberate as regards the effects
that came in their train; and in their turn they were the effects of
more remote causes. The whole chain of development in such cases
is devious, unforeseen, mainly unforeseeable. At most there is
recognition of what is happening; in general the recognition seems to
become full only after the change in tool or weapon or industrial
process has become completed and is perhaps already being
undermined once more.
Of course purely stylistic alterations—and linguistic innovations—
also possess their causes. When the derby hat or the pronoun thou
becomes obsolete, there is a reason, whether or not we know it or
do not see it clearly.
The common causal element in all these changes may be called a
shift in social values. Perhaps practical chemical experience has
grown, and gunpowder explodes more satisfactorily; or an economic
readjustment has made it possible to equip more soldiers with guns.
The first result is a greater frequency of bullet penetrations in battle;
the next, the abandonment of the breast plate. Increasing wealth or
schooling or city residence makes indiscriminate familiarity of
manners seem less desirable than at an earlier period: brusque thou
begins to yield to indirect plural you. Or again, new verbs, all of
regular conjugation like love, loved, are formed in English or
imported from French until their number outweighs that of the
ancient irregular ones like sing, sang. A standardizing tendency is
thereby set going—“analogizing” is the technical term of the
philologist—which begins to turn irregular verbs into regular ones:
dived replaces dove, just as lenger becomes longer, and toon
becomes toes. There is the same sort of causality in one of these
phenomena as in another. The individual or community that leaves
off the breast plate or stiff hat is more likely to be aware that it is
performing the act than the one that leaves off saying toon or thou.
But it does not seem that there is an essential difference of process.
Linguistic and æsthetic changes are most fully unconscious, social

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Sexual Harassment, Psychology and

Feminism Lisa Lazard

Sexual Harassment in the UK Parliament: Lessons from

Sexual Violence in Australia, 1970s–1980s : Rape and

Eating Disorders and Child Sexual Abuse 1st Edition

Sex, Teens, and Everything in Between: The New and

The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism Catherine Rottenberg

Sexual Crime and Trauma 1st ed. Edition Helen Swaby

Sexual Crime and Prevention 1st ed. Edition Rebecca

Feminism and Intersectionality in Academia 1st ed.

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