The  recent ruling by a Russian judge that sexual harrassment at the workplace is not only acceptable, but necesssary “for the survival of the human race”, has, predictably, got an explosion of responses from various blogs.

Recently a 22-year-old advertising professional in russia moved a court compalining that her 47-year-old boss had locked her out of office becasue she refused to have sex with him.  She is the reportedly third woman ever to successfully bring a sexual harassment case in Russia, where sexual harassment is rampant.

The boss  claimed that female workers signalled to him all the time “with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word. I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically,” she said.

The judge said he threw out the case not because of lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally. “If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

Little wonder then that sexual harassment is rampant in Russia; and there are suggestions that female subordiantes forced to have sex with their managers/supervisors is one of the reasons for the high rate of unwanted pregnancies and abortions in the coutnry. According to one report, in 2006, there were as many as 1.6 million abortions in Russia.

Here is an interesting comment on one blog on the high number of abortions: “While getting assaulted by your boss may be the only way to pay the bills, it sure isn’t incentive to give birth to more Russian babies.”