Sexual harassment is a good thing: the human race would die out without it.

This was the verdict of a judge in Russia last month, dismissing a case brought by a 22-year-old woman in advertising. She had claimed that her boss had told all his female underlings to "signal with their eyes if they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table". She hadn't realised that he meant this literally and her eyes may have given an inadvertent twitch at some point; when she refused his subsequent and most unwelcome advances, he locked her out of the office. The judge did not dispute the evidence but told the woman that her boss had done nothing remiss: on the contrary, he was simply being gallant.