Although sexual harassment, which is widely understood as “unwanted conduct of a sexual nature or conduct based on sex which is offensive to the recipient” (Rubenstein) , has been a subject of feminist enquiry since the late 1970s, het

“Disclosure” (Crichton, 1994), a fictional account of a male worker’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment perpetrated by a woman line manager, has attracted much feminist criticism. Brant and Too, for example, in the introduction to a collection of articles rethinking sexual harassment, say that while this plot might be defended as a liberal desire to be fair in acknowledging that individuals of either sex may harass, Disclosure “pretends that men and women operate on a terrain which is neutral rather than one contoured by inequalities” (Brant & Too, 14). There is indeed a clear scope for an admission that men may be sexually harassed to be deployed to wrongly reconceptualise sexual harassment as a gender-neutral problem spawned by sexual interest rather than male power over women. This was a characteristic of 1980s press coverage of workplace sexual harassment. Wise and Stanley report that after the press identified the “office Romeo” (the over-sexed man engaging in normal male responses to a sexual situation) they also unearthed the “office Juliet” (a mature woman, experienced in sexual goings-on and with an eye for shy, nervous and sexually inexperienced males).

Epstein’s research does not address whether or not heterosexual men or heterosexual women may sexually harass heterosexual men. Morgan briefly reflects upon his own personal experiences of harassment perpetrated by men (e.g. while Morgan was cutting grass in an open space, a man approached with his arm around a woman, deliberately organizing his walk in order to force Morgan to stop work; Morgan was reading at a bus stop, when a “stereotypical rugby player” swaggered past and gave a loud barking noise, causing Morgan to jump). Morgan observes that such incidents are consistent with the argument that patriarchy is the dominance of men by men as well as the dominance of women by men. He concludes that, “While the harassment of women by men p

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