Implicit sexual harassment: what it is and why men don’t see it
I am piloting a technique to deal with abusive, exploitative, and oppressive behaviors in my personal and professional life. This is the first of (hopefully not too) many posts with this in mind. My hope is that these posts help disrupt these harmful patterns with opportunities to educate.
On February 26th, 2023, I was sexually harassed by a man known amongst the international humanist community by the name of Hugo Estrella. This was not the first time he sexually harassed me. The first time was on March 31st, 2020.
Some folks may look at this and think my responses to Hugo are harsh. Many men may look at this and not understand how this is considered sexual harassment.
But before I get into why this is sexual harassment, you first need to understand that I have been dealing with men like this both online and in person since before I was even an adult.
Now let’s talk about implicit sexual harassment.
A lot of men don’t see the tactics of domination leading up to more explicit acts of sexual harassment. But if you look closely, you can see these domination tactics that Hugo used to slip below the radar of “explicit sexual harassment” yet still engage me using sexual undertones:
I do not know Hugo Estrella at all. He added me as a friend on Facebook several years ago, and I accepted because we have over 50 mutual international humanist friends.
He messaged me privately to conceal his attempts to assert dominance. He even admitted outright that he “would never reply publicly.”
This man has never communicated with me about humanism, our mutual work, or anything of the sort. These screenshots are our only communications on any platform.
With no prior contact whatsoever, he used my birthday in 2020, as an entry point to call me “beautiful and sexy” and even threw in a winky face.
I did not respond to his message in 2020, yet Hugo felt emboldened to message me directly again three years after I posted a Facebook status. In this status, I mused why so many of the men on dating apps who make travel a core part of their identity also identify as apolitical.
He gave me unsolicited dating advice. (This is a huge red flag, many men use this as a tactic to hook women into a conversation where they hope there will be a sexual outcome).
“You may get surprised by going the old way.” Mainly because he said this in an unsolicited context, this can be interpreted as a very subtle implication that older men (like himself) will be more interested in me if I let them dominate me.
“I understand why you are lonesome” is a defense mechanism, projecting his own loneliness onto me to save face after being rejected and implying that my not being interested in him is due to a shortcoming or character flaw of mine rather than his own.
“Don’t play the victim” is gaslighting.
“I am nice to everyone, including you,” is gaslighting.
“I did nothing wrong, but trying to be nice” is gaslighting.
It’s not just me who experiences stuff like this. Too many women deal with it on a regular basis. Just because you don’t see or hear it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. People who are constantly harassed – we have to pick our battles. And most of those battles are easier to choose when it’s explicit sexual harassment – it’s easier for other men to understand why it’s wrong.
But stuff like this – the more implicit tactics of domination – are more challenging for men to understand as wrong. When they don’t fall into perfectly boxed, legal definitions of explicit harassment, men seem to have a harder time seeing it. It’s like a man saying, “haha, we should totally have sex! …Just kidding! …unless you want to.” It’s not explicit harassment, but it is definitely harassment.
These implicit harassments are used far more often than explicit ones. It’s easier for predators to assert dominance when flying just below the explicit harassment radar. And this is why I responded the way I did to Hugo. This is my learned response from past mistakes in letting implicit harassment go unchecked, allowing it to build into explicit harassment. When I previously let it go unchecked, I experienced severe emotional abuse because I was dealing with escalating tactics of dominance being used to inch my humanity out of the exchange until I was fully objectified.
I have learned from dealing with dozens upon dozens of men like Hugo throughout my life that it is better to nip this thing in the bud before it escalates. At this point, I know the signs and red flags very well because I know what implicit harassment looks like. I had to learn to protect myself, and it’s much safer for these men to think of me as a bitch, or “bitter” as Hugo called me than it is for me to deal with the continuing abuse that comes with this implicit harassment.
I hope anyone who initially read these messages and didn’t understand why this is considered sexual harassment now has a better understanding.
Can you see how implicit sexual harassment yields similar harms to explicit sexual harassment?