Essay Series 5.4: Sexual harassment is the background to most women’s lives.

Sexual harassment is unwanted, sex-related behavior. This includes forcing someone to have sex or inflicting sexually related verbal and physical acts on others. Sexual harassment can occur in person and online. Women are between two and seven times more likely to experience such harassment than men.³⁷³ Two social movements—#MeToo and #TimesUp—have fought against sexual harassment that powerful men have inflicted on women.

In-Person Sexual Harassment

Survey results document that sexual harassment is a fact of most women’s lives. For example, in 1976, Redbook magazine published its survey results showing that 90 percent of women reported being sexually harassed at work, and only 25 percent of them believed that men would be asked to stop if the women reported the abuse to their supervisor. A 1991 New York Times/CBS poll reported that 40 percent of women were sexually harassed at work by men who had power over their careers. More than half of the men who responded to this poll said they had done something that women could consider harassment.³⁷⁴

The abuse can be pervasive in young women’s lives. For example, Soma Sara was in her 20s when she started a website in 2020 that invited people to share their experiences with sexual harassment, assault, and rape. The people who post are largely teenagers and young people in their 20s. Her website³⁷⁵ went viral in the United Kingdom.³⁷⁶

Sara’s analysis of her website’s stories shows that girls and women experience harassment in daily life, on the streets, at parties, and at work.³⁷⁷ Public harassment involves commenting on a woman’s appearance, asking for her phone number, calling her names, or following her.

Workplace harassment involves undesired sexualization of a work relationship, which can include unwelcome invitations to socialize, sexual blackmail, misogynistic jokes, or creation of a sexist atmosphere.³⁷⁸

Sara says that the young women and girls who have commented on her site have “learned to laugh off” harassment and abuse. They also have given oral sex to avoid intercourse. Some were worried about their performance during this act and about reprisals if they didn’t give in to boys’ sexual demands. Girls are also experiencing slapping, choking, and anal sex without their consent.³⁷⁹

Online Harassment

The manosphere and the alt-right use trolling techniques to vilify and harass those who oppose them. Trolling can involve criticisms, threats to safety including rape and murder, hacking of online accounts, lying about women, and coordinating troll attacks. One major troll attack focused on Leslie Jones, who appeared as a lead in a remake of the movie Ghostbusters, which features women as the central characters. Milo Yiannopoulos led this attack and was banned from Twitter in 2016. Research indicates that men are more likely to be a “troll” than women.³⁸⁰

Amnesty International commissioned a 2017 survey of 4,000 women aged 18-55 in eight countries about women’s experiences with online harassment. Twenty-three percent of them experienced online harassment, including threats of physical or sexual assault. The figure was 33 percent in the United States. Forty-one percent of respondents felt physically unsafe as a result of the harassment, and 26 percent of them experienced “doxxing,” which involves harassers revealing the women’s personal data online. These women experienced anxiety, stress, and panic attacks as a result of the harassment.³⁸¹

Turning to the 2020s, men’s online sexual abuse of women has taken even more twisted forms in South Korea, France, and the United States. South Korea has had several online sex scandals. In 2018, the first major one was men filming unknowing women in bathrooms and changing rooms and then sharing the videos online. In 2020, the Nth Room scandal broke, which involved men luring women into situations where they were photographed or filmed in sexually compromising ways. The men then blackmailed the women into doing increasingly cruel and dehumanizing things and then shared the resulting videos online.³⁸² The mid-2020s scandal involves primarily middle and high school students creating and sharing deepfake pornographic videos of girls and using them to harass girls.³⁸³

In France, Dominique Pelicot used a web-based chat room to arrange for at least 70 men to rape his drugged wife Gisèle Pelicot during the last decade of their 50-year marriage and filmed these assaults. In 2024, he and 50 other men were convicted of rape or sexual assault crimes in France.³⁸⁴

The core audience in the 2026 scandal comes from the United States. Men are sharing videos of themselves raping and sexually assaulting their drugged wives, partners, or girlfriends. They are also sharing information about how to drug their partners. This information comes from a months-long CNN investigation published in March 2026. The website had over 20,000 videos of men assaulting drugged women with hundreds of thousands of views. The host site had 62 million visits in one month.³⁸⁵

Fighting Sexual Abuse

Two recent movements, #MeToo and #TimesUp, are important milestones related to men’s sexual abuse of women. The first involves women sharing their stories. In 2006, Tarana Burke started the #MeToo movement, where women shared stories of sexual abuse. The movement became an international conversation in 2017 after the allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s rapes hit the news. Prominent women actors talked about the sexual harassment and rape they experienced. Twelve million #MeToo posts occurred on Facebook within 24 hours.³⁸⁶ The #MeToo movement has become an international organization focused on prevention of sexual violence.³⁸⁷

As a result of the surge in #MeToo complaints, about 200 prominent men lost their jobs or projects, and a few men faced criminal charges. Many of these men were able to return quickly to work in other places.³⁸⁸ For example, Louis CK was able to resurrect his career as a comedian. He admitted to masturbating in front of women and lost millions of dollars in contracts and shows as a result. As of the mid-2020s, he is selling out comedy shows and making jokes about his harassment of women.³⁸⁹

The second movement was #TimesUp. It grew out of the #MeToo movement. #TimesUp focused on raising money to help women who had been harassed to pursue legal remedies against their harassers or abusers. The funds also helped survivors with public relations matters. #TimesUp ended in 2023 after fallout related to its key leaders minimizing women’s accusations of sexual harassment against Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York. #TimesUp’s remaining funds went to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which the National Women’s Law Center administers independently.³⁹⁰ The women leaders of #TimesUp discredited other women by defending the governor. Even worse, they weakened the fight against sexual harassment.

Reflections

Sexual harassment has been a feature of my life since puberty, although it did start fading after age 65. Age has given me the gift of invisibility to many harassers. This is certainly welcome. However, the sexual aggression against girls and women that many leaders in the United States tacitly condone has me worried about the girls and younger women in my life.

The two times that I shared my stories of sexual harassment or assault with a man were disappointing. I had one man say that my experiences were a compliment. My answer was that harassment is a form of intimidation and an attempt to exert control. Another man looked at me with pity in his eyes and said little. I don’t want pity. What I want is men to be outraged and stand up to other men who make misogynist comments or joke about sexual assault.

Men need to learn by asking the women in their lives about sexual harassment and assault. Then, if women choose to share their experiences, men need to listen to these stories with compassion. Men need to engage their healthy masculinity and speak up against what amounts to terrorizing women. We also need political leaders, social media giants, and the rest of the power structure to actively fight against the often blatant illegal acts of abuse.

Have you ever had someone share their stories of harassment with you? How did you react?