Wieke’s Reviews > The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century > Status Update

“A friends of mine, an exceptionally brilliant woman academic, once explained to a male colleague that, had any of her male mentors, in college or grad school, ever so much as put a hand on her knee, it would have ‘destroyed’ her. The colleague was taken aback. He recognized that such an action would have been creepy, wrong, an instance of sexual harassment - but how could such a small gesture destroy anyone? What he didn’t know, she explained to him, was what it is like to have one’s sense of intellectual worth rest so precariously on the approbation of men.” (Srinivasan)