But according to Dianna Taylor, the director of John Carroll University’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program and author of “Sexual Violence and Humiliation,” women who experience sexual violation are not socially conditioned to fight back against threats, given normative gender constructions.
Rather, she said, they are primed to be polite or to engage in self-protective internal dialogue, like, “This can’t be happening to me.”
“In the moment when a sexual violation occurs, most victims freeze,” said Taylor, who introduced the Watson scenario into spring semester lectures that addressed the denial of sexual autonomy and bodily integrity.
“Compound this ambivalence with the power imbalance between the person who has hired services and the person providing them, and the fact that Watson is a sports celebrity, it seems pretty clear that expecting someone in the position of the massage therapists to just stop Watson is at best unrealistic and at worst victim-blaming.”