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The government has also recently emphasized its dedication to women’s employment rights, especially as it urges women to have more children amid a looming demographic crisis.

Pickup artistry — a practice that arrived in China from the United States — commonly refers to the use of manipulative techniques, including gaslighting, to demean women and lure them into having sex. It became a booming industry in China, with thousands of companies and websites promising to teach techniques, and it has been widely condemned by both the government and social media users.

Women have also been increasingly pushed out of the workplace and into traditional gender roles since China’s leader, Xi Jinping, assumed power. Some fear that the campaign to encourage childbirth could turn coercive.

The gesture, at least, is extensive. As revised, the law would offer the most comprehensive legal definition yet of sexual harassment, to include behaviors such as sending unwanted sexually explicit images or pressuring someone into a relationship in exchange for benefits. It also instructs schools and employers to introduce anti-harassment training and channels for complaints.

The law would also codify women’s right to ask for compensation for housework during divorce proceedings — following the first-of-its-kind decision by a Chinese divorce court last year to award a woman more than $7,700 for her labor during her marriage.

When Peng Shuai, a star tennis player, recently said on social media that a top Chinese leader had pressured her into sex, she was censored within minutes, and many worry that she is under surveillance.

“The priority should be on bottom-up enforcement, where you empower individuals who have been harassed to use the law to protect their rights,” he said.

It is rare for victims of harassment to go to court. An analysis by Mr. Longarino and others found that 93 percent of sexual harassment cases decided in China between 2018 and 2020 were brought not by the alleged victim but by the alleged harasser, claiming defamation or wrongful termination. Women who have made public harassment claims have been forced to pay those they accused.

Nonlegal complaints can bring heavy consequences, too. In December, Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, fired a woman who had accused a superior of raping her. The company said that she had “spread falsehoods,” even though it had earlier fired the man she accused.

Even when women do sue their harassers, they face steep hurdles. Perhaps the most high-profile #MeToo case to go to court was brought by Zhou Xiaoxuan, a former intern at China’s state broadcaster, who asserted that Zhu Jun, a star anchor, had forcibly kissed and groped her. But the case faced years of delays. In September, a court dismissed the claim and said she had not provided enough evidence, though Ms. Zhou said the judges had rejected her efforts to introduce more.

several male bloggers with large followings on the social media platform Weibo denounced the provisions against degrading or harassing women online, saying they would give “radical” feminists too much power to silence their critics.

A woman in southern Guangdong Province who asked to use only her last name, Han, out of fears for her safety, said that she had endured years of physical and emotional abuse by her ex-husband. Even though she managed to secure a divorce last year, he continues to stalk and threaten her, she said. She obtained a restraining order, viewed by The New York Times, that cited chat logs and recordings.

If the law is revised, she continued, the police will be forced to recognize that she has a right to seek their help.

Although Ms Luo's post was widely read and sparked a discussion about sexual harassment, observers say the #MeToo campaign has not been as prominent on Chinese social media, compared to many other countries.Feminist activists have cited a lack of proper mechanisms to deal with sexual harassment, fears of victim-blaming, internet censorship and the detention of five prominent feminists in 2015 as potential reasons for this.

This #TimesUp/#MeToo moment is no different; it is a revolt for which we have been preparing for decades, or perhaps it’s the point at which a long, slow, mostly quiet process suddenly became fast and loud. Part of the work was done over the past five years, more of it over the past 50. We have had a tremendous upheaval over the past few years – at the end of 2014, I wrote in these pages: “I have been waiting all my life for what this year has brought.” What this wave brought is recognition that each act of gender violence is part of an epidemic. It’s brought a (partial) end to treating these acts as isolated incidents, as the victim’s fault, as the result of mental illness or other aberrations. It’s meant a more widespread willingness to recognise that such violence is extraordinarily common and has an enormous impact, and arises from values, privileges and attitudes built into the culture.

But even the “we” has changed and I believe that that is central to why so much else has changed. Who determines what stories get told, who gets believed, whose words have weight, who’s in charge has changed. (Black Lives Matter was another movement to shift what is visible, whose version is heard, who matters.) We have not lost the proponents of the old worldview, in which men’s lives matter more and their words have more credibility, but we have gained people who don’t operate by those rules. Feminists have slowly, steadily gained power – and by feminists I mean everyone of whatever gender who thinks first that women deserve full equality and second that systematic misogyny remains a grave problem.

We are going to return to a phase in which change happens slowly and subtly enough that it is invisible to most people, though not to the people who take the long view and those who drive the change or who benefit from one small change in their home or workplace or relationship. And then the slow changes will reach a point at which there will be another rupture.

Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.

“He was called a Don Juan for years,” said Hélène Devynck, 55, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of raping her at his home when she worked as one of his assistants in the early 1990s.

“His ego is destroying him,” said Cécile Delarue, 43, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of engaging in sexual harassment when she worked with him two decades ago.

Mr. Poivre d’Arvor declined an interview request through Mr. Naepels, who said that at least one more woman could be included in the defamation suit.

According to the French news media, Mr. Poivre d’Arvor has been married for 50 years to the same woman, who has not commented publicly on the accusations.

On air, he appealed especially to a target audience of women under 50, Mr. Lévrier said.

He regularly invited young women to watch his live broadcasts before leading them to his private office, where several of the women say he assaulted them. He also pressed young female employees for sex, or sexually harassed them, according to former employees, including Ms. Devynck, the former assistant.

“I knew that, at the time, if I complained, he was the seducer and so I was the whore — I couldn’t say anything because of his power and the support he had,” said Ms. Devynck, who went on to a successful career at other channels.

“I’m of a generation that was raised with the idea that women and men were equal, and that it was through work that I would gain freedom — my mother told me often,” Ms. Delarue said. “But this man just saw me as a fresh piece of meat.”

A famous letter written by Catherine Deneuve and other prominent Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo as “puritanism” and defended “the freedom to importune” as part of French “gallantry.” Traditional French feminism — and its fierce rejection of #MeToo as an American aberration — was a “trap” that led women to believe that they could be free without worrying about sexual violence, Ms. Devynck said.

“His image was so powerful that people kept saying it’s not possible, he’s such a seducer, she should have been flattered,” Ms. de Blasi, 33, recalled. “I kept reading, ‘French charm, gallantry and seduction,’ when it wasn’t about that at all.”

“Little jokes about not wearing a décolleté, makeup or a skirt,” she recalled.

The great seducer is “such a part of our collective imagination,” she said. “And the problem is that part of French society still believes in it, or at least believed in it.”

A bill in California could make medication abortion available at colleges, a move that would be tremendous for the pro-choice movement and for students in desperate need of increased access.

somehow we’ve reached a point where any behavior short of violent predation – let’s call it the “not as bad as Weinstein” standard – is characterized as misunderstood seduction.

There’s a reason so many people are conflating bad and sometimes criminal behavior with romance: traditional ideas about seduction rely on tropes of women witholding sex and men working hard to get it. It’s a narrow notion of heterosexuality – one that does a good job excusing abusive behavior.

When will we have more concern for the women hurt by abuse than the men accused of it? One of Roy Moore’s accusers had her house burnt to the ground – arson is suspected. Harper’s magazine was on the brink of publishing the name of a woman who created the Shitty Media Men list before a feminist Twitter campaign stopped it. Some women won’t see justice for years, some ever. This moment isn’t about romance, it’s about abuse. Perhaps the fact that so many people can’t tell the difference is part of the problem.

I recently interviewed Sofia Ventura, a professor of political science at the University of Bologna, about Silvio Berlusconi, and whether the image of women had improved in Italy since he had left power, after shaping a culture of trashy television. “The image of women hasn’t really improved in Italy. It’s still rare to find women who have authoritative roles in the media and political system. On the contrary, things have gone backwards,” she told me. “The evening talk shows are frightening,” she continued. “When they discuss politics and call on an authoritative voice, women are never called on.”

The #MeToo movement barely caught on in Italy, except coverage of developments in the States. Women were afraid to come forward in Italy for fear of being humiliated, excoriated, or sued for defamation. In the States, the #MeToo movement took off “because there was already a culture that allowed these people to be heard with respect,” the novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano told me. “Here, we’re so far behind that we still need to build that.”

In every country where populists have won, including the United States, it’s been followed by soul-searching about the role of the press in a democracy. Maybe it’s time for Italy to have the same debate.

The charge of double standards points to a steep learning curve for a party that has struggled to keep pace with shifting public attitudes towards gender roles, power dynamics and sexual boundaries.

That same year, Gillibrand became the first Democratic senator to call for her Minnesota colleague Al Franken to quit over allegations of sexual misconduct. She was joined by others including Kamala Harris, who tweeted: “Sexual harassment and misconduct should not be allowed by anyone and should not occur anywhere. I believe the best thing for Senator Franken to do is step down.”Franken did just that, but some critics now believe that he was the victim of a rush to judgment and should have been allowed to wait for the results of an investigation.

This time, although Gillibrand said Cuomo’s alleged conduct was “completely unacceptable”, she stopped short of demanding he resign before the investigation is done

“The vice-president’s view is that she believes all women should be treated with respect. Their voices should be heard. They should tell their story. There’s an independent investigation that is happening now, being overseen by the New York attorney general, and she certainly supports that.”

But this puts Democratic leaders out of step with groups such as Women’s March, which was born out of the January 2017 protests against Donald Trump, who faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment

“We share the view that there should be an independent investigation but Cuomo himself has not even denied many of the harassment allegations and, for us, it’s about behaviour that is disqualifying. It could be illegal, but it also could not be illegal.”

Just as the instant deification then instant demonisation of Cuomo has left many crying out for nuance and complexity, so it can be said that no two cases of sexual harassment in politics are quite the same.

In 2018 Eric Schneiderman, an attorney general of New York lauded as a liberal advocate of women’s rights, resigned after being accused of physically abusing four women. Cuomo was among those who were quick to call for him to step down.

Trump’s nominee to the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, was nearly derailed by allegations from Dr Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her

In 2019 several women accused Biden of making unwanted physical contact.

Last year Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. He vehemently denied the claim, which remained unsubstantiated and faded from the election race. Biden picked a woman – Harris – as his running mate and often highlighted his work as lead sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act.

Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “In hindsight, a number of the Democrats in the Senate who had pushed him to step down later expressed regret. They realised they moved too quickly, they didn’t know enough and the punishment didn’t really fit what they later learnt to be the misbehaviour.”

sexual

“I don’t think the Republican party is in any position to be lecturing anyone about how to handle sexual harassment. They seem to have actually gotten real expertise on how to evade it.”

“Just because we fire Andrew Cuomo and Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, that doesn’t alone solve the problem. The bigger problem is still there, which is that harassment is seen as an acceptable part of our culture. That’s why so many of these people in power are doing it. So yes, we need to respond and uproot harassment wherever it lies but we also need to keep our eye on the ball.”

“How does it feel,” Tchiya Amet wrote to Tyson, and she was addressing not just what she claimed he had taken from her, but also what she claimed he had taken from the world: her gifts, her skills, her potential for a particular kind of contribution.

the term sexual harassment has become too unwieldy, too imprecise, too commercialized. As the writer Rebecca Traister put it, “We must regularly remind everyone paying attention that sexual harassment is a crime not simply on the grounds that it is a sexual violation, but because it is a form of discrimination.”

what gets lost in the easy binaries? What of the lives and careers and ambitions of the people doing the accusing—people who, in coming forward with their allegations, will have their names permanently entangled with the man they say did them harm? The stories of those who have lived in Tyson’s orbit have served as reminders that, here on Earth, we remain biased toward the stars

Paige Patterson is the 75-year-old president of Fort Worth’s Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which claims to be one of the largest schools of its kind in the world. He is lionized among Baptists for his role in the “conservative resurgence,” which is what some call the movement to oust theological liberals beginning in the 1970s. But this week, his past legacy and present credibility were called into question when a 2000 audio recording surfaced in which Patterson said he has counseled physically abused women to avoid divorce and to focus instead on praying for their violent husbands, and to “be submissive in every way that you can.”

It’s not difficult to denounce domestic violence, and it shouldn’t be controversial. And yet, America’s largest Protestant denomination now seems to be ethically schizophrenic when it comes to the topic.

In a #MeToo moment, it’s astounding that Patterson is still standing. But Southern Baptists are a loyal bunch.

Fairly or not, HR is seen as the division of the company that slows things down, generates endless memos, meddles in employees’ personal business, holds compulsory “trainings,” and ruins any fun and spirit-lifting thing employees come up with

the real reason many workers don’t love human resources is that while the department often presents itself as functioning like a union—the open door for worker complaints, the updates on valuable new benefits—it is not a union

should the economy change, or should management decide to go in another direction, HR can just as quickly become assassin as friend

Most of the time, if the man is truly important to the company, the case is quickly whisked out of HR’s hands, the investigation delivered to lawyers and the final decision rendered by executives. These executives are under no legal imperative to terminate an alleged offender or even to enforce a particular sanction, only to ensure that the woman who made the report is safe in the future.

The task force had been charged with determining how much progress the country had made since that historic decision. Its finding: very little. “Much of the training done over the last 30 years has not worked as a prevention tool,” the task force found. That’s an incredible statement—three decades of failure.

It reveals that sexual harassment is “widespread” and “persistent,” and that 85 percent of workers who are harassed never report it. It found that employees are much more likely to come up with their own solution—such as avoiding the harasser, downplaying the harassment, or simply enduring it—than to seek help from HR. They are far more likely to ask a family member or co-worker for advice than to file a complaint, because they fear that they will face repercussions if they do.

This is why all of that training—the videos and online courses and worksheets—seems so useless: because it’s designed to serve as a defense against an employment lawsuit. The task force cited a study that found “no evidence that the training affected the frequency of sexual harassment experienced by the women in the workplace.” The task force also said that HR trainings and procedures are “too focused on protecting the employer from liability,” and not focused enough on ending the problem.

What HR is actually responsible for—one of the central ways the department “adds value” to a company—is serving as the first line of defense against a sexual-harassment lawsuit

there is only one way to eradicate harassment from a workplace: by creating a climate and culture that starts at the very top of the company and establishes that harassment is not tolerated and will be punished severely. Middle managers can’t change the culture of a company;

To some, it might sound harmless, even amusing. But it made me deeply uneasy. Although the #MeToo movement has helped to raise awareness of the lack of diversity in publishing, biography is a genre in which the voices of women and people of color are still starkly underrepresented. According to a study done by Slate in 2015, 71.7 percent of the biographies the magazine surveyed that year were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors. The study did not consider race, but in the last 20 years, only two books with a person of color as both author and subject have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

The question of access — to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject — has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene’s authorized biographer, argued that a comma in his agreement with Greene allowed him sole access to Greene’s papers for more than a decade while he labored over his three-volume biography, delaying other researchers’ work in the process.

As critics pointed out even before the allegations surfaced, the biography’s accounts of some of Mr. Roth’s relationships contain biases and sexist characterizations that appear to parrot Mr. Roth’s opinions, including an uncomplimentary description of one woman’s genitalia. (Nearly five years ago, Mr. Bailey wrote a review of my own biography of Shirley Jackson that was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist.)

Critics like to speak of biographies as “definitive,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn. An anecdote whose importance I might overlook could be seized on by someone else as a revealing detail.

Publishers should explicitly encourage a diversity of perspectives on a person worthy of biography, and biographers who care about improving representation would do well to rethink their own roles in the system. They might begin by pledging to keep the papers of subjects where they belong: in public archives, open to any scholar prepared to devote the time and energy to working with them.

The result would bring an infusion of new perspectives on literary giants, giving renewed relevance to an often conservative industry. It would also help to generate a more inclusive roster of authors considered worthy of chronicling, remaking and expanding the American literary canon.

Biden told ABC he believed Hill did not get a fair hearing and was not treated well, and said he took responsibility.

Hill also addressed the allegation of sexual and physical assault against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and said officials "didn't go far enough" in handling the matter.

Hill called on the media to ask presidential candidates how they will respond to and address the #MeToo movement, and said she is not satisfied with "the way the media has treated this issue."

“A lot of people are arguing that these kinds of zoonotic pandemics [originating in other species] are expressive of biodiversity ecosystems coming under uncontrollable stress. “And so the question is whether in 100 years, people will look back and see this as being the first of a number of epidemics [caused by] humanity crashing into ecosystems that previously humans were not part of. “I suspect that they will, and I feel quite pessimistic about that.

Holland – who has written widely about the ancient world, Rome and the influence of Christianity – believes social movements in the west such as BLM are part of a cultural and moral upheaval that began in the 1960s, and which he sees as being as significant as the Protestant Reformation.

Describing herself as “a global historian who thinks in big waves”, Damodaran says what we are living through is “clearly a period of heightened uncertainty where the old ideologies no longer work” – naming liberalism, colonialism and the free market economy.

In specific local contexts around the world, she says, small- and large-scale tipping points are being reached, all of which add up to a global sense of crisis, the impact of which, particularly on the environment, is being felt even by those in more prosperous and comfortable societies.

“There is a price we are paying for intensive farming practices. Covid has not just suddenly sprung upon us. You just have to be a historian to understand this moment.”

But the problem is not new, she says: “There’s this hubris which comes out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, that humans in some senses can dominate nature” – and we should not claim to be surprised.

“Everything that is going on at the moment, it seems to me, all links together.”

History has seen great civilisations in China, India and across Eurasia, “but they’ve not caused these crises that we are living through now, and nor has the African world. “You know what happened? Roughly 500 years ago, these small, aggressive maritime powers on the shores of Europe went across the world with their technology and created their empires by sea.

Other societies may now be enthusiastic participants, but it was not they who created western industrial capitalism, he argues.

His most recent book is about China, and he argues that for all that country’s environmental problems, the scale of the climate crisis is well understood in Beijing given the risks to its society from food and water insecurity. “Everything comes back to the climate crisis, because everything is affected by it – the political order, social order, food, water, the migration of people. So we are in a very, very dangerous epoch.”

In that sense, is not history – and the significance or otherwise of this time – in our own hands? “It is totally in our hands,” says Wood

“And if you were going to be really hopeful, you’d say this is the moment when we are going to wake up and realise that our true interests on the planet are served by cooperating.

“These are things that are self-evident, there’s no denying them. What we will do about it is the imponderable.”