All of this reminds me of one of the most useful concepts in history/sociology of social mores.
Norbert Elias was a German Jewish sociologist writing in the 1930s (which is why his work didn't get a lot of attention until republication in the 1960s) who did a survey of manner books from the Middles Ages on.
He had a concept of the "threshold of shame." Essentially, we talk about things that are in the threshold, but not on either side.
There are many examples, but take the example of spitting on the floor at dinner. This is something that is never mentioned in medieval manner books. It starts to get mentioned in the late Middle Ages and is commonly discussed in the Early Modern period with famous intellectuals weighing in. Then it disappears from manner books. Of course, what is happening is that in the early period, it isn't discussed because it is universally accepted. In the later period it isn't discussed because probably none of us have had the experience of inviting a dinner guest to our house who regularly spat on the floor throughout dinner.
But in the transitional period, it gets discussed a lot. And keep in mind, we're talking about long time scales here. With the spitting example, the transitional period is a couple of centuries.
And of course, it works the other way. Until recently we didn't really have discussions regarding the morality of gay marriage. It was simply unthinkable. Most of Christian Europe applied the death penalty to gay sex without reflection or remorse. It wasn't necessary, in fact not even possible, to have a discussion of letting "those people" actually marry. It was outside the conceptual realm for the average European, including homosexuals, 100 years ago.
So when I see these watershed moments when the dam breaks loose and a behavior that was tolerated (to greater and lesser degrees) for centuries suddenly becomes completely unacceptable, we are fully in the middle of the threshold of shame. And by that I mean that the moralists have rendered judgement, but behavior has not caught up.
The strange thing with this one is that most of the behaviors in question would have been seriously punished in 16th century Geneva (uh... I spent about 20 years full-time studying, for lack of a better term, a "morals" court in Geneva for the period 1541 to 1564). The reason, of course, was the control of extramarital sexuality rather than aggression against women.
We crossed the extramarital sex threshold first and are only now crossing the aggression against women threshold and in the intervening long period, women were at greater risk than they were earlier and later.
So we have a situation where men acted in an era when their behavior was clearly deemed wrong, but was permitted because moral prescription did not match moral enforcement and quite often the blame was assigned to the women. But as we pass through the threshold and we leave behind blaming the victim, and looking the other way, and saying "it's locker room talk" on the far side of the threshold, we end up in this moment we're in.
And sadly, because most of my life has been spent on the other side of the threshold, I had no clue that this was so prevalent (as is always the case before the threshold of shame is entered). So many articles are taunting people who are shocked to find out how common this is, but in all honesty, I'm shocked.
As a teaching assistant, we had to go through sexual harassment training and it seemed so ridiculous. I remember everyone laughing when the video showed a "more marginal case" of harassment since everyone in the room thought it was absurdly blatant. I think everyone in the room thought the video makers were just really bad and portraying subtlety. I think back on it now and realize that the "subtle" cases were probably happening daily on our large campus.
