Damek.

What does it take for the world to move forward? Some days it just seems utterly pointless.

A woman seeking to become only the third woman ever to successfully bring a sexual harassment case in Russia was dealt a shocking rebuke when the judge threw out her case, ruling that sexual harassment is actually necessary for the survival of the human race.

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

So. Many. Things. Wrong.

First, this obviously comes from the cultural assumption that “women don’t want or like sex,” which many people have here in America, too. Like, obviously the man has to trick and cajole women into sex, or else it would never happen. Or, alternately, that men & women don’t like sex in general, and shouldn’t, and it should only be for children, and gallant efforts to procreate are good, or something.

In any case, such baloney. Hello? News flash: women like sex as much as men — and yes, there are women who don’t, for either biological or psychological or cultural reasons, but there are men who don’t as well, and the idea that “women don’t and need to be cajoled into sex” is more of a self-fulfilling belief than anything.

Second, my goodness, I realize I was wrong, but for some reason I had the idea that Russia was on its way to being a first world country. Clearly, in the cultural attitudes of gender relations & sex, this is far from the truth. I count myself eternally lucky to live in a country where, while there are still a plethora of crazy repressed attitudes to sex, for the most part it does seem at least on the road to the realization that, hey, sex is fun, mostly harmless, and everyone tends to enjoy it to similar degrees.

Too bad the only way the rest of the world will ever get there, in this as in other cultural matters, is to hoist themselves by their own petards (with influence, perhaps, but … as usual, we can’t just bomb them into submission … though I do wish I could fly over and kick some people in the nuts.)