reasonable woman regarding sexual harassment and the vulnerability of women either provide a citation to support the text in the article or kindly remove the text as this is presumably a matter that has received non trivial attention in the last 2 decades in the US a citation ought not be difficult to find if in fact the information given is correct Preceding unsigned comment added by I back this This concept seems very very controversial and I ve personally never encountered it It needs to either be cited and properly contextualised as outr or removed Preceding unsigned comment added by legal fiction Concerning a legal fiction were I the original author I might choose to open the article with a tone less aggressive and more informative to the layperson Legal fiction is a term of art I don t believe it should be the definitional headline It is however accurate Restatement Second of Torts 283 comment c 1965 The reasonable man is a fictitious person who is never negligent and whose conduct is always up to standard In Vaughan v Menlove 1837 132 ER 490 the legal fiction is implied First when the jury was instructed that the defendant was required to have acted as a prudent man would have acted under those circumstances And then under review the directive was deemed too vague Further it was determined that a defendant acting honstly and bona fide to the best of his own judgement would afford no rule at all and leave open infinitely variable individual judgement Nuance aside the foundation for the legal fiction for the basis of comparison exists The reasonable person is a fact assumed or created by courts To eliminate the citation needed might I suggest Bedder v Director of Public Prosecutions 1954 1 WLR 1119 where reasonable man is deemed a wholly impersonal fiction to which no special characteristic of the accused should be attributed Camplin 1978 A C 705 a reasonable man means an ordinary person of either sex not exceptionally excitable or pugnacious but possessed of such powers of self control as everyone is entitled to expect that his fellow citizens will exercise in society as it is today R v Smith 2000 4 AER 289 citing Champlin and Bedder a preasonable man is a person having the power of self control to be expected of an ordinary person of the sex and age of the accused but in other respects sharing such of the accused s characteristics as they think would affect the gravity of the provocation to him and that the question is not merely whether such a person would in like circumstances be provoked to lose his self control but also whether he would react to the provocation as the accused did That said I maintain that a citation is of modest benefit if not entirely unnecessary From conceptual inception the question has never been is the reasonable person fictional I submit the question has always been Is a reasonable person defined in accordance with a particular normative ethical commitment or in accordance with an empirically observed practice or perception I posit that a reasonable person possessed of minimal education should have little difficulty exploring the nature of legal fiction given the link were they so inclined WP BOLD