The article imposes a social science framework on a law-based theory of sexual harassment forwarded by Katherine Franke (1997), which sought to address shortcomings of extant theory and to account for atypical forms of sexual harassment, notably male same-sex sexual harassment (SSSH). Sex-role spillover theory, sexual harassment climate theory, and Person × Situation theory are discussed with regard to their ability to account for SSSH. Preliminary postulates of this framework are tested with data from the 1995 Department of Defense sexual harassment survey of the U.S. military (J. E. Edwards, T. W. Elig, D. L. Edwards, & R. A. Riemer (1997). The results suggest that SSSH occurs because targeted men do not fit their offenders' gender-role stereotype of heterosexual hypermasculinity. Legal and workplace implications are discussed in an effort to expand existing theories and policies regarding sexual harassment to this more encompassing view.

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In two decades of research on sexual harassment, one finding that appears repeatedly is that gender of the rater influences judgments about sexual harassment such that women are more likely than men to label behavior as sexual harassment. Yet, sexual harassment judgments are complex, particularly in situations that culminate in legal proceedings. And, this one variable, gender, may have been overemphasized to the exclusion of other situational and rater characteristic variables. Moreover, why do gender differences appear? As work by Wiener and his colleagues have done

Few victims of sexual harassment acknowledge that their experience constitutes sexual harassment. In this study, we examined five general models gleaned from the literature on observers' or laypersons' perceptions of sexual harassment to examine their efficacy in explaining victims' acknowledgment processes: type-of-harassing experience; personal characteristics of the target/observer; and affective consequences of the event@), attributions, and power (status) of the offender. Data were collected in a campus-wide survey of students, faculty, and staff at a large midwestern university (N = 1,147), which measured incidence rates of eight forms of sexual harassment and the situational characteristics of, responses to, and consequences of the most dramatic experience. Results from single-model and multiple-model hierarchical logistic regression analyses partially support each of the models. The following general model emerged: Individuals who experience unwanted sexual attention are more likely than others to acknowledge being sexually harassed if (a) they perceived their experience as part of a larger problem in their environment, (b) they had a strong emotional reaction to it, (c) the perpetrator was a superior, (d) they were sensitive to the issue of sexual harassment (e.g., they were women instead of men). However, differences in this pattern emerged across various subsamples. This research warrants further theoretical development on victimization acknowledgment processes.Survey research on sexual harassment indicates that the prevalence of sexually offensive or uncivil behavior is much greater than that of formal complaints or even of personal acknowledgment of having been sexually Requests for reprints should be sent to Margaret S. Stockdale,