This year has seen an explosion of rage about sexual harassment

Will it lead to lasting change?

Dec 19th 2017

YOU have applied for a job and the interviewer asks you a question that lands like a?bombshell: do you have a boyfriend? Then another: do people find you desirable? And a third: do you think it is important for women to wear bras to work? If you are a woman you probably know what you would do. Perhaps you would refuse to answer, complain or walk out. You would certainly be furious.

This is how 197 female American undergraduates, asked to imagine such an interview, said they would react. But they—and probably you—were wrong. The psychologists who asked them, Marianne LaFrance and Julie Woodzicka,?orchestrated?a real-life version of this?ordeal, by advertising for a research assistant and arranging for male?accomplices?to interview the first 50 women who applied. Half were randomly chosen to be asked those three questions. Not one refused to answer, let alone complained or walked out. When they were asked afterwards (and offered the chance to apply for a real job), they said they had felt not anger, but fear.

bombshell: something that is very surprising or shocking

orchestrate: to organize or plan something that is complicated

ordeal: an experience that is very unpleasant or difficult

accomplice: a person who works with or helps someone who is doing something wrong or illegal

An ethics review board had let the experiment go ahead when it was assured that the interviewers would go no further than off-colour questions. And yet videos of the interviews showed how much this supposedly minor sexual harassment?threw the women off their stride.?They?plastered on fake smiles, ummed and ahhed, paused and trailed off more often than the control group. Ms LaFrance, who studies non-verbal communication, says they “screwed up the interviews”.

In a final twist, the researchers showed clips of the videos to male MBA students. Fake smiles are fairly easy to tell from real ones: they involve fewer facial muscles and do not crinkle the corners of the eyes. But many of the men saw the women as amused, even flirtatious. Men often lack the motivation to read the signs of women’s feelings, says Ms LaFrance. But they can learn if they want to. When she offered course credit to the students who learned to spot the fake smiles, plenty succeeded.

plaster on fake smiles: 臉上堆滿假笑，用的也是真的好

假笑是很容易看出來的，因為它比真笑用比較少部分的臉部肌肉，而且眼角的皺紋不會出來。 雖然很多男人不留意女人的面部表情感受，但如果讓他們注意，他們是能分清的

This experiment was carried out in 2001, long before the events of 2017 blew open the extent of sexual harassment of women at work by powerful men. But it was a?masterful?demonstration of how such abuse works—and of the misconceptions that have enabled it to continue for so long. It revealed the differences between what women think they would do if they were sexually harassed and what they actually do; between the perception of verbal harassment as trivial and the harm it causes to women’s work performance; between women’s and men’s notions of what counts as sexual harassment; and between women’s feelings and men’s perceptions of them.

This year has shown that these differences are still wide. It has seen the long-overdue punishment of some brutish men who had?groped?and?leered?their way round their workplaces.But has there been a permanent shift in what society will tolerate? Or will the moment pass, and a new generation of powerful men slyly take up where a previous one left off?

上面那個實驗是2001年做的，離2017年性騷擾事件的爆發已經過去很久了。女人想象自己在遇到性騷擾時候的反應和真正遇到性騷擾的時候的反應是不同的

提出了本文的問題！！

One place to look for an answer is in the way other social norms have changed. From the abolitionists’ fight against slavery in the 19th century, to campaigns against domestic violence in the 1970s, to demands for same-sex marriage from the 1990s,?progress comes in stops and starts, with many reversals.?Campaigners must defeat?vested?interests, incomprehension and ridicule. Cristina Bicchieri, a philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Norms in the Wild”, a book about social rules, has a warning: “Don’t expect the birth of a new norm to be easy.”

From the top

With hindsight, this year’s flood of allegations had its source in 2016. During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a sound recording revealed him boasting of serial harassment and groping. His election just a month later showed that American politics had become so?polarised?that this did not disqualify him in the eyes of most Republican voters—though Alabamans rejected Roy Moore in a Senate race this month, after he had been accused of harassment and assault by several women, including one who was 14 at the time. And yet among some people MrTrump’s victory inspired a longing for powerful, abusive men to face a reckoning. The Women’s March against his inauguration was the biggest day of protest in America’s history.

這個問題的答案可以從其他社會問題那里得到，從廢除奴隸制度、到反家庭暴力、到爭取同性婚姻，這些一點點的進步都是來之不易的，有很多的反反復復。

polarise: to cause (people, opinions, etc.) to separate into opposing groups

The dam broke in October,?with accusations of harassment and assault against Harvey Weinstein, a film producer. Since then dozens of prominent men in show business, journalism and politics have been accused of sexual harassment, and been sacked or stepped down. The #MeToo hashtag has already been used 4.7m times on Twitter by women(and a few men) whose harassers were not famous enough to make the news.

Both sexes have found the outpouring astonishing.?Many men are amazed to learn that so many women have suffered sexual harassment. For women the surprise is that?perpetrators?are being punished at last.

perpetrate: to do something that is illegal or wrong

perpetrator

perpetration

這是一篇超級長的文章，我把它分作了三部分，這是第一部分。

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Results

Lexile?Measure: 1000L - 1100L

Mean Sentence Length: 16.10

Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.40

Word Count: 837

這篇文章的藍思值是在1000-1100L， 適合英語專業大一大二的水平學習，應該是經濟學人里屬于最簡單的了

使用kindle斷斷續續地讀《經濟學人》三年，發現從一開始磕磕碰碰到現在比較順暢地讀完，進步很大，推薦購買！點擊這里可以去亞馬遜官網購買~