This post, which highlights an academic paper related to #MeToo, is part of a series on #MeToo, sex discrimination, and possible solutions that amount to more than quick fixes.  You can read about other academic papers here and here.

Building on my posts highlighting how #MeToo must focus on systemic solutions, I'm doing a series to highlight some recent academic papers that are related to #MeToo. In addition to Professors Lesley Wexler, Jennifer Robbennolt, and Colleen Murphy’s paper, “#MeToo, Time’s Up, And Theories of Justice,” and Professors Daniel Hemel and Dorothy Lund’s paper, Sexual Harassment and Corporate Law, Professor (and Take Care contributor) Nancy Leong recently shared the introduction of her article, Them Too, which is forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review.  (She is revising the paper, but is happy to share a copy with anyone who reaches out.)

Nancy’s article argues that sexual harassment results in thus far unaccounted for harms to third parties (that is, persons other than the victims of harassment).  She identifies a few third parties who may be harmed by sexual behavior:

• Employees or students who are passed over for favorable treatment because a less qualified person may be “having sex with the boss.”
• Persons who suffer from a “sexualized institutional environments”—students who avoid professors, possible mentors, or potential employers who are known or rumored to be sexual harassers.
• Institutions that suffer because sexual behavior “interferes with worker productivity and morale, or with student learning and intellectual growth.”

There may be even more ways of conceptualizing the broader harms of sexual harassment.  For example, bystanders can be harmed by harassment.  As Rebecca Traister has written (and Dahlia Lithwick elaborated and personalized in a stunning essay about how open harassment makes “us all victims and accomplices”), “the stink got on me anyway. I was implicated.”  Harassment makes bystanders partially complicit in the harassment, which can make it harder for them to do something about harassment in the future.  And at some point, it can be uncomfortable to sit with the knowledge about harassment and your role in it.  Guilt and shame are powerful emotions, as several victims of harassment have written.  (In particular, I’d recommend this piece by Natalia Antonova.)

Nancy’s recognition of some other costs of sexual harassment also responds to one critique of #MeToo. Specifically, Nancy’s article, like Daniel and Dorothy’s, addresses the concern that relieving harassers of their positions of authority is too harsh a sanction.  I gave examples of this rhetoric in my last post, but it’s worth repeating them here.  Rebecca Traister collected a litany of examples where people lament the metaphorical “deaths” that #MeToo has caused.  Some samples:

• On Mark Halperin: “He deserves to have what he did deplored.  But does he deserve to die?  How many times can you kill a guy?”
• On Charlie Rose: “You get accused you’re obliterated.  Charlie Rose ceases to exist.”
• On Matt Damon: He is getting “beaten to death.”
• On Charlie Rose: He was “trampled” in a “toddler’s crusade.”

Traister surmised:

People expending empathy on these guys, none of whom have been killed, or charged, or even stripped of the wealth that they accrued in decades of unchallenged power, is...mind-boggling.  If only we could direct as much mass empathy & identification toward the men & women who ARE charged & imprisoned & killed unjustly by a system run by white men as we do toward the powerful white men who abuse power. Or, obviously, toward the men and women who are abused by them.

Nancy’s article, which expands existing accounts of the costs of harassment, does two things.  First, it provides more reasons to think that sometimes, relieving someone of a position of authority is warranted.  Second, it provides us with a way to connect the costs of harassment with the group of people that we, collectively, are apparently able to empathize with most—white men.

@LeahLitman

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