MAUREEN MULLARKEY: Why Criminalizing Sexual Harassment Fosters Witch Hunts.

What we do know is that something called sexual harassment is an imprecise but stubborn old nuisance sharpened into a crime by Catherine MacKinnon in the late ‘70s and codified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). As first introduced, the term referred to a loose chain of workplace irritants never to be confused with sexual battery, rape, or attempted rape. By now it has expanded into an all-purpose indictment, a universal solvent for turning radical feminist choler into a blunt object.

Like that shapeless thing in the old sci-fi movie, “The Blob,” the concept of sexual harassment swallows everything it meets. It digests a degenerate thug like Harvey Weinstein together with a college student who makes an awkward pass at a girl, an office worker who tells a risqué joke, or a well-intentioned boss who compliments a woman on her dress. MacKinnon’s devouring blob is covered throughout the country by a mélange of federal, state, and city laws as a form of discrimination under human rights laws.

Delirium over harassment plays out like the courtroom scene in “Alice in Wonderland.” You remember it: The Queen of Hearts had made some tarts and someone took them quite away. Who did it? Theft is pinned on the Knave of Hearts, but evidence is a shambles, scanty at best. Accusations fly; denials tumble over each other. The king calls the jury to consider its verdict. His wife interrupts: “‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’”

That is where we find ourselves now in the flood of unverifiable allegations hemorrhaging from college campuses and corporate offices to the Capitol. Huff and wrath arriving years, even decades, beyond their sell-by date ought to make us look closer at this inquisition.

Inquisitions are launched for the benefit of the inquisitors, not of the inquisited.