SOURCE: Coote, Anna. “Would You Mind?” New Statesman 98, no. 2543 (14 December 1979): 946-47.

In the following excerpt, Coote asserts that in Sexual Harassment of Working Women, “MacKinnon's legal analysis gives us some unexpected insights into the complexities of sex discrimination; and her study of sexual harassment provides a useful discipline for examining the law.”

It isn't easy to get people to take sexual harassment seriously as a problem that besets women at work. (‘Do you get harassed?’ ‘I should be so lucky!’) After all, what is wrong with a bit of horseplay in the office? A girl looks attractive, her boss makes a pass. He's only doing what comes naturally and it must be more fun than typing invoices …

A few years ago, feminists began to explode popular myths about rape. Two of the most persistent were that ‘women ask for it’ and ‘men can't help themselves’. Perhaps these have...