Even before Harvey Weinstein, the casting couch was a thing, as was the moniker "mattress actress." The combination of sexual and transactional in Hollywood was legendary. I think that the pattern that got "Times Up" & "MeToo" going was this. A young hopeful sees a part on a big movie so valuable that a frolic in the producer's office seems a reasonable concession. Twenty years later, when roles for her are rare, and her fame and cash still quite large, this venerated dame of the theater looks back at this event as a stain on her dignity. She's a famous and respected professional - how dare he have taken advantage of her -- forgetting, of course, that she was part of a group that was a dime a dozen back then, not venerable not powerful. She wouldn't have gotten the fame, respect and chance to knock boots with real movie stars but for that producer.

I don't doubt there are parallels in academia. I also don't doubt that fraught as it would have been at the time to have accepted her offer to trade nonacademic effort for an A, these days it's much worse. Today a young woman making such an offer, whether accepted or not, can at any point later can claim that she didn't make but accepted the offer out of fear of the professor's terrifying male toxicity. If he rejects it, she can claim he's punishing her by withholding her deserved A because she refused his brutish offer. And considering the fact that the infractions that Prof. Marcy was accused of seem to have occurred in public, even the Pence rule is no protection. At this point, it appears that a man could spend all time outside of his house in a man-sized gerbil ball, and suddenly women would be talking about how they've spent distraught years unable to recover from having been seen by a man's eyes.

I sometimes think the only thing that can save humanity is for the damages feminists claim to have suffered become so epic:

"I spent 7 years in traction because, in my desperate need to escape his glance, the speed with which I swivelled my neck caused the tendons that hold up my head to be irreparably torn",

in response to events that (even had they happened) would be so trivial

"I could see the eyes of a man in a giant creepy gerbil ball turned in my direction for an entire nanosecond!"

that the entire world simultaneously breaks out in laughter over the ridiculousness of it all.

In any case, this nonsense must stop.