Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Archives of Sexual Behavior (2020) 49:1437–1441 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01723-w LETTER TO THE EDITOR Bringing More Voices to the Table: Community Responses to Our Sexual Harassment Guest Editorial Sari M. van Anders 1,2,3  · Meredith L. Chivers 1  · Lori A. Brotto 4  · Debby Herbenick 5  · Sofa Jawed‑Wessel 6  · Jayleen Galarza 7 Published online: 13 May 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 When discussions of sexual harassment are on the table, who feels able to pull up a chair? Not everyone feels entitled or able to take up space in academic journals or resist the poten- tial blowback doing so often entails. The list of commentary authors who pulled themselves a chair and the context of their comments on our Guest Editorial (Herbenick et al., 2019) is, on balance, a clear and ironic/unironic representation of major axes of power. On the one hand, feminist theories predict that those experiencing oppression and critically engaging with those experiences will be best positioned to think through that oppression, including who perpetrates it, who maintains it, whom it benefts, what can change it, as well as who resists eforts towards equity. On the other hand, feminist theories also predict that those who beneft from oppression will pro- tect the status quo and resist both challenges to it and attempts towards more equitable distributions of power. So, the pattern of commenters’ social locations is not surprising, nor are their comments. Yet, to presume this pattern is refective of the response to our Guest Editorial would be a grossly partial and incomplete view. Indeed, the response to our Guest Editorial has been broad and far-reaching. We appreciate the support from three positive commentar- ies for the concerns we raised about sexual harassment in sex research (Byers, Mustanski, Semenya, Suschinsky, & Vilain, 2020; Sánchez, 2019; Seto, 2019). This included Byers et al. representing the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR) and, in addition, Sánchez recounting his own expe- rience of racism in academia and Seto calling for empirical research on perpetrators of sexual harassment. These three commentaries in the academic record were not, however, the only supportive feedback our Guest Editorial prompted. The response has been much bigger. The quantifed metrics of the response to our Guest Edito- rial help to demonstrate its reach. Since it went online only about a year ago, Altmetrics shows that there have been over 12,000 downloads and 587 shares. According to Altmetrics, this puts it in the top 5% of all “outputs” of a similar age that it tracks, #31 of all Archives of Sexual Behavior publications (ever), and #1 of all outputs from Archives of Sexual Behavior of a similar age. “Altmetric has tracked 14,288,069 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these, this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it’s in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric” (Altmetric, 2020; boldface material removed). Beyond metrics, we have been heartened and moved by the immense outpouring of support for our Guest Editorial. We have given an invited talk on sexual harassment in sex research, prompted by the Guest Editorial, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Canadian Sex Research Forum (CSRF) in Victoria that itself spurred much positive discussion. We have heard from colleagues in sex research and other disciplines, including at multiple career stages, that our Guest Editorial helped them to consider how to address sexual harassment and even how their own past actions may have been sexual harassment. Col- leagues—ones we know and new ones we have met—have included our Guest Editorial in lab meetings, academic society * Sari M. van Anders sva5@queensu.ca 1 Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, 62 Arch St., Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada 2 Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada 3 Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada 4 Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada 5 School of Public Health, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA 6 School of Health and Kinesiology, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NB, USA 7 Department of Social Work and Gerontology, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, USA