WILLIAMS AND LEBSOCK
that Clarence Thomas, then a nominee to the Supreme Court, had
sexually harassed her. Senators subjected her to a humiliating inqui-
sition, watched by a rapt national television audience. Another for-
mer employee was waiting in the wings to describe how Thomas
had sexually harassed her, too. But she was never called to testify.
Instead, Hill withstood the all- male committee’s bullying alone.
After the hearings, opposition to Hill made her life at the Univer-
sity of Oklahoma so diffi cult that she left her tenured position— an
object lesson on the risks facing anyone who dared to raise a charge
of sexual harassment.
A recent poll by NPR dramatizes the sudden shift: 66% of
Americans think that women who reported sexual harassment
were generally ignored fi ve years ago. Only 26% think that women
are ignored today. When did we begin believing the women? What
changed? And what are the implications for men?
We can trace the disbelief of— or at best, disregard for— women to
the old stereotype we mentioned earlier, the one that holds women to
be fundamentally irrational, vengeful, deceitful, and rampantly sexual.
An ancient version of this stereotype appears in Genesis, in
which Eve commits the fi rst sin and then drags Adam and the rest
of humanity down with her for all time. Through the ages in Judeo-
Christian tradition, authors expounded upon feminine evil. Among
the most vivid prose stylists were two German friars, who in 1486
produced the classic book of witch lore The Malleus Malefi carum (or
The Hammer of Witches ). “What else is woman but a foe to friendship,
an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation,
a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an
evil of nature, painted with fair colours!” they wrote. More to the
point for us, perhaps, is their claim that a woman “is a liar by nature.”
Although by the 19th century more- positive images of women
arose, the stereotype of the Vengeful Lying Slut was too useful to
die. It was imposed on entire classes of women, notably African-
American women, as scholars have amply documented, and on
working- class women pressured into sex by bosses. It was used to
ostracize and humiliate high schoolers who found themselves sud-
denly disparaged as “easy.” Whenever men, and sometimes boys,