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Sexual harassment is about power and how it’s used or abused, more than it is about sex or even gender. And because men generally have better access to power in our culture, more men are tempted to, and have had the opportunity to, abuse power, and tend to use sexuality as a channel with which to enact that abuse in relation to women. In the wake of a tsunami of sexual harassment allegations against influential men which is surely going to increase in size in the coming weeks, now more than ever there’s the need for the rest of us to speak out.
The truth is that sexually harassing a woman at any level, like all bullying, is a clear confession of weakness and inadequacy which needs to be clearly recognized and described as such, so that any man who wants to retain, or at least give the impression of retaining his self-respect will reject any such behaviour in themselves and others, and distance themselves from it.
But shaming the men who feel the need to bully women may initially cause them to become defensive and aggressive, resistant to change, and full of self-righteous anger in an attempt to validate themselves in their own and others’ eyes. This is understandable and to be expected. Such men need a combination of compassion and boundaries, rather than just condemnation; help in understanding and changing why they behave that way combined with a clear statement from other men and from the wider society that it will no longer be tolerated—if they are to grow and change. Only if we know what kinds of need sexual harassing meets, and what rewards it provides, for perpetrators, can we identify how to change and prevent it.
Judging from their behaviour, a significant number of men seem to hate women at some level. Maybe in response to the buried memory of having been completely dependent on a woman in the first years life which we all have, they retain a deeply hidden fear of not being ‘man enough’, at the same time as at never quite forgiving their mothers —the first and most formative love of all men’s lives — for rejecting them when weaning time came.
Their fear, and the anger it fuels, is probably also linked to that hard-wired sense of danger in the natural world which all men learned at an early stage in our evolution, and which we’ve unconsciously transferred to how we feel about women because of their close links with nature in our minds – their feminine power to be the source of life and love.
This buried fear seems to express itself in an instinctive need to have power over women, especially by men who for whatever reason feel inadequate, no matter how much external success they have achieved. In order to dilute their sense of weakness and fear of rejection, such men are drawn to demean women by ‘harassing’ them to give themselves a feeling of safety. Tragically their fear prevents these men from fully giving or receiving love in a mutually respectful relationship and this sense of isolation perpetuates of their abusive and self-negating ways of relating to women.
The good news is that only a part of most men is fearful of the fe-male – another part of us respects and adores it. If we can look into the core of the buried fears which are at the root of sexually abusive behaviour —and often it’s a woman we are close to who can best help us with this— we can begin to admit them to ourselves and to each other and begin to reduce their power in our lives, transforming the emotional energy that they’ve been trapping into feelings and behaviour which is life-enhancing —both for ourselves and for the women in our lives. By recognising, and learning to change why any of us would ever feel the need to treat women with anything less than caring and resect, we can earn the right to receive the same in return, in the process contributing to a safer and happier world for everyone. The alternative possibility of continuing and growing mutual fear and suspicion between the genders is surely one we’d all like to avoid. Speaking out about it will help.
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