I suppose we owe a debt of gratitude to Herman Cain, in some strange way. The seriousness of sexual harassment has come once more into the forefront, and that means that conversations are happening.
Important ones.
I realize that sometimes the line gets blurred, that people take things the wrong way, and so on … but the fact remains that sexual harassment is a problem. A big one.
Serious ones.
And the truth of the matter is, virtually all of these areas of concern are made …
It kind of goes without saying that, whenever a politician starts to gain celebrity status, the skeletons start rattling out of the closets. Sometimes it makes a difference, other times it doesn’t seem to matter much at all (Bill Clinton pops up in my mind here).
Allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of a Republican presidential candidate, particularly given the current political climate, are problematic, though.
Okay, I get really pissed off on a personal level when accusations of sexual hanky panky running the gamut from verbal harassment to rape are ignored. That being said, though, I realize that there are some truly horrible women that play that card for all it’s worth (which, in my opinion, makes them almost as bad as sexual predators since they’ve in large part caused the automatic assumption of lies on the part of actual victims).
But back to Herman Cain, who’s the latest to fall under the almost par-for-the-course accusations of sexually inappropriate behavior …
I love Naomi Wolf. There, I said it. Many feminists, especially young ones, will hate me for that, but I’ll never fully be able to dismiss her ever since reading The Beauty Myth. I felt, and still feel, as though she targeted an issue that hadn’t been acknowledged actively; how much societal obsession with appearance has prevented female progress. I would never argue that she is the best or most structured writer, but as someone whose thesis was largely …
“What’s the difference between segregation and safety?” That’s what some are asking now that Malaysia has decided to combat their sexual harassment issues by introducing Rapid Lady Buses and Trains, a new form of women-only transit. Blatant harassment of women is common in many different cultures, but the issue has proven difficult to legislate, as it requires changing deeply-rooted gender relations on a much larger cultural scale. But to some, a move to separate the sexes to prevent this problem seems to be an archaic switch back to times when women and men weren’t even allowed to be around each other (and to cultures in which that is still the case).
Malaysia isn’t the first to implement such a system; in 2008, Mexico …
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