In 2004, when a television producer told me, “Sexual harassment is still going on,” I believed her even though by then the chorus of public opinion, not known for its track record, had pronounced harassment all but gone. Bald eagles were ‘all but gone’ but they’re still here.  I’m glad about the eagles. 

Is harassment gone or not? I began researching. On a call to the Screen Actors Guild, imagine my surprise when I heard on the telephone menu, "If this is an emergency regarding personal on-the-set safety or sexual harassment, press one."

Bingo. I began to interview people working in film and television. Is sexual harassment still here? Is it different? What can women and men do about it? I learned a lot.

For a long time sexual harassment was a stifled, private mayhem, never seen, never mentioned. Now everyone at work is aware of the need, legally, to watch out for it. That’s a big change, and there are others, too. The first section of this article is about harassment today, what’s different, what’s the same. The second part takes a swing at what those changes may reveal: a current of behavior for which we don’t yet have a name, like a new disease. Maybe it’s an old one that needs a new name. 

Putting a name to an act or an attitude focuses our reaction to it. Women have been fending off sexual harassment, and detesting it, for centuries but the “stress of furtive molestations” didn’t have a name until the summer of 1975 when a remarkable group of women, including Susan Brownmiller and Catherine MacKinnon, met at Cornell University. They realized that “to a person, every one of us . . . had had an experience like this . . . And none of us had ever told anyone before.” To break the silence, they needed a name for it.  “We wanted something that embraced a whole range of subtle and unsubtle persistent behaviors. Someone came up with ‘harassment.’ Sexual harassment!”[ii]

A crucial move. 

Your basic sexual harassment

According to Webster’s dictionary, to harass means “ . . . to raid, harry, worry, impede by repeated attacks . . . to vex, trouble or annoy continually or chronically: plague, bedevil, badger."

That describes it quite well. Producer Judith James (Quiz Show, Mr. Holland’s Opus) enlarges on the theme:

“It’s the entitled humiliating the un-entitled, the women. We’ve all had sexual harassment in our lives and by people who startle us because in the moment before it happens, you think you’re a respected, whole human being. Sexual harassment is not so much sexual and/or harassment—it’s so demeaning, so bad for your ego, you’re nothing in those situations. It is definitely part of the power structure. Men are brutalized or harassed in other ways, treated abominably at times in studios or agencies, but maybe what happens with women is that guys feel they can go one step further to make us feel like shit.”

How much of it is still with us? Irma Herrera, the Executive Director of Equal Rights Advocates, the nonprofit women’s law firm in San Francisco, says: “About forty percent of our calls are about sexual harassment. Law students answer that hotline and they really learn the amount of pain it causes women.”

Margaret Heidenry, a screenwriter (Something Borrowed), started as a grip/electrician. She says it still happens “because it can. There are tons of illegal things that people still do. It's about power, their power, and it's about their sexuality."

“Men have to adjust. Get a grip,” says Sachs, a chief lighting technician with many film and television credits (Nowhere to Run, White Sands). “Work is not sitting in a bar with friends.”

Historian Rosalind Miles has written many fiction and nonfiction books (Danger! Men at Work; Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women’s History of the World).  She told me:

"To stop sexual harassment in Hollywood you'd have to rebuild the business, but the dog-eat-dog industry practices, of which sexual harassment is only a part, are not reflected in the films they make. No one is routinely depicted behaving in this way and getting away with it. Sexual harassment is often tolerated in 'creative' or 'artistic' men who are not expected to conform to a nine-to-five morality. The right to have access to beautiful and exceptional women and to use them for ‘rest and recreation’ is regarded as a legitimate perk of the life, even though no one owns up to it. Women, too, think of it overtly as a way to climb the greasy pole, and that perpetuates and even institutionalizes it.”[iii]