The Atlantic: One of the principal pleasures of Mad Men, on rich display beginning with the pilot episode, was looking at all of the crazy things people used to be able to do in offices: smoke, drink, and—if they were male—grope and corner and sexually humiliate the women, who could either put up with it or quit.
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The most jarring part of this article is the quote from Woody Allen that says, "You … don’t want it to lead to a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself. That’s not right either". This quote speaks to what I think so many people are missing in all of this protesting that has gone on around sexual assault and harassment in the past few months. The point of the women coming forward and speaking out against their assaulters and oppressors is not to make a huge social media-focused and trending point, but it is to start the movement towards no men ever wanting or committing sexual assault or harassment. The lawyers are not the issue. The male fear is not the issue. The fact that a man would ever feel the want or need to creepily wink is the issue. This is a systematic issue that we need to start killing from its very root.
This article brings up an interesting point when contrasting today's American workplace with the popular TV show Mad Men, stating how behaviors like drinking, smoking, and harassing the office women were socially acceptable then and today, these are absolutely not tolerated-- yet, sexual harassment in the workplace still runs rampant in this era and is very much alive. This article also put words to a concept I had continuously been thinking about when reading the numerous other articles about sexual assault in the workplace and especially the entertainment industry, which is the idea of "scale". Woody Allen's quote about the witch hunt phenomenon was particularly dangerous, because the sentiment of a "sex panic" both equates "winking at a female coworker" with more serious aggressions and assumes the idea that, as the article states, women's bodies are not completely under their control.
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