Contemporary Research Analysis Journal

This study examines verbal sexual harassment on social media specifically in TikTok comments, particularly comments directed toward female Sales Promotion Girls (SPGs) appearing in promotional content. The study addresses the occurrence of sexualized and gender-based language in social media comments and aims to identify and classify the forms of verbal sexual harassment found in the selected comments based on Fitzgerald et al.’s (1995) framework. A qualitative descriptive approach was employed to analyze 40 TikTok comments identified as containing verbal sexual harassment. The data were collected from publicly available comments on the @goodponsel TikTok account and analyzed based on three dimensions of sexual harassment proposed by Fitzgerald et al. (1995): gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. The findings show that all three dimensions were identified in the analyzed data. Unwanted sexual attention was the most frequently identified category, comprising 20 data (50.00%), followed by gender harassment with 18 data (45.00%) and sexual coercion with 2 data (5.00%). The findings indicate that verbal sexual harassment in the analyzed comments was expressed through appearancebased evaluations, gender-based labeling, degrading expressions, and transactional or suggestive language. Overall, the study concludes that Fitzgerald et al.’s (1995) framework can be applied to identify different forms of verbal sexual harassment in TikTok comments. The study also demonstrates that such harassment is not limited to explicit sexual propositions but may occur through various forms of gendered and sexualized language in digital communication. 

Verbal Sexual Harassment; TikTok Comments; Gender Harassment; Unwanted Sexual Attention; Sexual Coercion.

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