Sandi Toksvig Quotes

I first came to Delhi with my parents when I was 15 years old. We went to see the Red Fort, and I was walking behind my parents, and some guy who was walking along touched me inappropriately. I screamed, but he was acting so cool about it. I did not create any further scene and left.

We still have people out there who tolerate sexual harassment and sexual assault….This [Rape in the Army] is my most important priority. I am not kidding. I am not kidding.

It is the harassers and assaulters who make us 'look bad,' not the women who have every right to expose crimes against them.

I've never experienced sexual harassment at work, but I 100% believe and support everyone that has come forward, because I'm very lucky that it has never happened to me.

Whether it's Hollywood or Bollywood, sexual harassment is a reality. I've experienced it first-hand, and I know many of my counterparts have as well.

I have been shocked at some senior actors who made lewd comments on my body. They think it is normal, and in fact, I thought it was normal. But, much later, I failed to see how that is a normal thing.

If a boy pings a girl's bra it may be unpleasant and annoying, but is it really assault?

An ever-widening definition of abuse can incite a culture of fear and complaint: encouraging teachers and girls to name and shame could mean labelling sexually awkward teenage boys as sex pests.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

I have grown up in Delhi in a way, and I keep coming here often. But, and I am sorry to say, I'll always be nervous when in Delhi. In my college days, I have had my bum pinched around so many times. So yes, in Mumbai, I can just walk around and do what I want to do, but in Delhi I'll always be scared.

Rape is not illegal. It is regulated.

I love this new world, I no longer have to be politically correct .... It was too trivial to be considered anything of significance. To call it a sexual assault is not based in reality.

This is why it’s so hard for women to publicly accuse men of predatory actions. The victims are perceived as dramatizing and self-important. They risk not being believed. Or getting blamed. Or having crimes investigated improperly. Or being called selfish, mendacious. Women suffer automatic credibility deficits when leveling such accusations, while men enjoy “himpathy,” -- the “excessive sympathy sometimes shown toward male perpetrators of sexual violence.

Women should not be forced to accept sexual harassment as the price of admission to a life and career in the political world. They should not have to endure unwanted touching, innuendo, and propositioning from men in positions of power.

The supposedly petty sexual harassment that so many women have to endure, from Hollywood studios to the factory floor at Ford, is a national outrage that needs to end. Period.

Women need to be able to speak out if they are uncomfortable or something happened in the past that they were not comfortable with.

I worked on the Harvey Weinstein-produced 'The Great Raid,' where I warned a young co-star not to take Harvey up on his invitations to drinks unless the whole group was there.

Sometimes when women come forward about sexual harassment, they're seen as a troublemaker.

I haven't faced harassment in terms of work, but I think every girl in India has gone through some or the other awkward moment in public where she was eve-teased or touched inappropriately.

I was 24 when I was embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit. This was 2014, long before, en masse and on social media, we said #MeToo and #TimesUp. At the time, I felt completely alone. Visceral, hateful online harassment from strangers left me paranoid and anxious for years afterward.

The evasion of justice within academia is all the more infuriating because the course of sexual harassment is so predictable. Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes.

It is difficult to have the guts to speak up about any kind of sexual assault.

Most women who go public with #MeToo stories are fearful for obvious reasons. There is the pain of reliving traumatic experiences. There is the rage of not being believed.

I've heard many women say that they were afraid to come out or they were too ashamed to talk about it because they thought it was something they had done to promote the man to sexually harass them - and that is not the case.

My experiences have also convinced me that sexual harassment is very rarely publicly punished after it is reported, and then only after a pattern of relatively egregious offenses.