This study investigated whether attitudinal variables, such as benevolent and hostile sexism toward men and women, female rape myth acceptance, and tolerance of sexual harassment are related to women labeling their sexual assault experiences as rape. In a sample of 276 female college students, 71 (25.7%) reported at least one experience that met the operational definition of rape, although only...

This articlecompares two extended interactions that took place recently on the Internet, one from a recreational Internet Relay Chat (IRC)channel, and the other froman academic listservdiscussion group. The two interactions exhibit similar gender dynamics, which can be characterized as harassment of female by male participants. This harassment takes different forms, in keeping with the possibil...

Galaxy harassment has been proposed as a physical process that morphologically transforms low surface density disc galaxies into dwarf elliptical galaxies in clusters. It has been used to link the observed very different morphology of distant cluster galaxies (relatively more blue galaxies with ’disturbed’ morphologies) with the relatively large numbers of dwarf elliptical galaxies found in nea...

Sexual harassment is one of the most insidious, yet pervasive, forms of violence that affects all girls, not merely those traditionally thought to be vulnerable or at risk. Although harassment in the workplace has been the focus of considerable attention during the last decade, there is a growing recognition that girls experience varied forms of sexual harassment, and that this behavior begins ...

Two laboratory studies examined the impact of person and situation factors in the prediction of gender harassment. Male undergraduates from a mid-sized Midwestern university in the U.S. were recruited based on an assessment of sexist attitudes. It was predicted that, across two studies, characteristics of one’s personality (sexist attitudes) and situational characteristics (sexual priming and m...

The purpose of this study was to develop a laboratory analogue for the study of peer sexual harassment, and to examine person and situational factors associated with male on female peer sexual harassment. One hundred twenty-two male participants were given the opportunity to tell jokes to a female confederate from a joke list that included sexually offensive jokes, as well as other types of jok...

If male workers categorize different groups of women coworkers and, subsequently, treat them differently, the experiences of women from one of these groups would not be indicative of the experiences of women from another group. When this different treatment involves hostile environment sexual harassment of one group, but not the other, then the law must recognize the possibility of "selective s...

Three studies examined when and why an actor's prior good deeds make observers more willing to excuse--or license--his or her subsequent, morally dubious behavior. In a pilot study, actors' good deeds made participants more forgiving of the actors' subsequent transgressions. In Study 1, participants only licensed blatant transgressions that were in a different domain than actors' good deeds; bl...

For mate-searching species, the learnedmate recognition (LMR) hypothesis assumes that sexual harassment favours signal variation among females, which exploits the receiver ability of males. Themodel predicts that coevolving males have responded to the female sexual foil by learning to recognize female variants as potential mates. I translate the LMR hypothesis into the language of signal detect...