Sex Spoken Here:  Sexual Harassment, #metoo and the impact on current society from flirting to parenting
 
 
Welcome to my virtual therapy room!  I am Dr Lori Beth Bisbey and this is Sex Spoken Here. Remember that this podcast deals with adult themes so if you don’t have privacy you might wish to put on your headphones. 
 
When the headlines broke about Harvey Weinstein, my first response was an internal sigh that in the 21st century men still feel free to oppress women.   As more and more women stood up to say #metoo, I found myself filling with rage as it became clear that this was the status quo rather than an anomaly. 
Then as the allegations spread to other prominent men in Hollywood, in politics my rage turned to despair at how pervasive the harassment and intimidation is.
 
Initially, this played out over gender lines.  Prominent men sexually harassed women.  The focus was on entertainment and the arts and then it moved to politics.    Everyone agreed that this happened in companies and corporations too.    Then the allegations from men began.  Thus far these allegations have been against other men.  However, I have worked with many men who have been sexually harassed and assaulted by women over the years and women as well. 
 
This is because sexual harassment is not about sex.  It is about power.  Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton’s best known remark was ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men’.    Is this so or does power just tend to bring out a person’s pre-existing ethical standards?   Research suggests that power allows the true self to emerge.   Other research highlights the paradox of power which is that the personality traits that allow the person to gain power seem to disappear as soon as control is gained.  To gain power, you have to court the favour of the people who can put you in power.  However, people in power have more choices.  They are less likely to consider the position or situation of others as they did when they were trying to gain power.  This is, in part, because they are not expected to consider others.      When someone gains power, other people are often seen in terms of what they can do for the one in power and if the battle for power was a harsh one, they can be seen as the spoils of war. 
 
Why else does power corrupt?  It inflates the ego and encourages us to act from unconscious or subconscious desire.  It grants license to act decisively seemingly without a concern about the consequences because people in power can feel they are insulated from responsibility.   People become hypocrites.  They may know the right thing to do but power allows them the ability to more easily rationalise unethical behaviour. 
 
French philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault addressed the relationship between power and knowledge by looking at power dynamics and how they are used as a form of social control.  He emphasised that power changes our thinking drastically and that this in turn changes our behaviour.   If we are to address the pattern of sexual harassment in our society, we must address the changes in thinking that power creates.  In order to make any substantive changes, we have to deconstruct our long term ways of thinking about men and women, about the benefits of power, the permissions that power grants in any industry.  We need to look at the perceived rewards of reaching a place of power.  
 
We also need to look at our definitions of personal boundaries.  These are the limits and rules that people create to identify acceptable and safe ways for others to interact with them and behave towards them and how they will react when other people violate those boundaries.  Boundaries are made up from our beliefs, attitudes, past experiences and societal norms.  Jacques Lacan saw these boundaries as layered in hierarchies from the societal boundaries, to smaller cultural subgroup boundaries to family boundaries...