#MeToo. Those were the two words that started a revolution.

One year on from the outpouring of profoundly personal stories about sexual harassment and violence, research has found that the movement prompted a major shift in people’s attitude’s towards harassment. 

SEE ALSO: Women over 50 see sexual harassment very differently than millennials

New research by the Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading gender equality organisation, reveals that there’s been a “significant shift in attitudes to sexual harassment.” According to the study, 53 percent of people say that since #MeToo, attitudes about what’s considered “acceptable” are different. 

The research also found that young men are “more likely to challenge sexual harassment” since the #MeToo movement. 58 percent of young men say they’re now “more likely to speak up against sexual harassment.” 

The largest shift in attitudes occurred among people aged between 18 and 24 and over half of them say they’re more likely to challenge harassment post-#MeToo. The findings also showed that 50 percent of young people believe that our standards about “what is acceptable” has also altered.  

Attitudes among older men are lagging behind, however. Per the research, a mere 16 percent of men of the age of 55 have talked to another man about sexual harassment — compared to 54 percent of young men. 

“Older men have to be part of the change because they often hold positions of power. But their attitudes are lagging behind.”

“This survey confirms that we have had a year of disruptive attitudinal and behavioural change and that was long overdue,” Sam Smethers — Fawcett Society chief executive — said in a statement emailed to Mashable. “Other evidence shows we are also still seeing significant numbers of women being sexually harassed at work. Now it is time for tougher legislation and real, lasting culture change.”

Smethers added that older men also need to play a part in the cultural shift because of the power they hold. “Older men have to be part of the change because they often hold positions of power. But their attitudes are lagging behind.  They don’t seem to realise the #MeToo movement is also about them,” Smethers continued. 

Smethers added that section 40 of the Equality Act should be brought back, outlawing harassment from customers and clients. “We also need to go further and place a new duty on large employers to prevent discrimination and harassment. Employers have to take responsibility for their own workplace culture,” she continued. 

Sarah Green, co-director of End Violence Against Women Coalition, said the UK’s justice system needs to catch up with the shift in attitudes. “We are a year on from the truly global explosion of #MeToo, first started by young black women who found people looked the other way when they called out sexual abuse,” she said. 

Now that people’s attitudes are starting to change, it’s time the legal system reflected those changes. 

Finally, here’s some augmented reality that’s somewhat useful.

Last month, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines released a hand bag check to see what you can bring onto the plane — before you lug your stuff to the airport.

Using the KLM app, you can check the dimensions of your baggage to see if it’s the correct size for carry-on or for checking. You open the app, load up the AR bag-checker, and a virtual suitcase appears that you can scan over your actual piece of luggage to see if it fits within the blue KLM suitcase.

Starting Tuesday, the same mixed-reality bag check is also available on the Messenger app, making this maybe the only situation in which you’d want to use Messenger to talk to a brand.

AR tends to get applied to gimmicky marketing experiences, like Air New Zealand’s recent pop-up in downtown Chicago that showed what the business class experience is like through AR to promote its new route, or to push e-commerce (Snapchat is using AR to let users shop on Amazon through the camera app). This one is more aligned with utility. The bag-measuring feature is similar to the Measure app on iOS, which puts a virtual ruler on real-life objects.

SEE ALSO: This AR documentary lets you know how it really feels to interrogate someone at immigration

KLM seems to have added the AR feature as a way to draw attention to its app, which lets you book your flight or store your e-ticket. Now the company’s using the same AR tool through its business Messenger app. Facebook announced that some brands would be able to use AR through the platform back in May. After who-knows-how-many passengers asked about luggage size limits, the company is using the Messenger and in-app AR experience to pretty much make a game out of checking your baggage size. 

The airline has previously dabbled in AR for less-than-useful purposes, like sharing a 360-degree view of its Dreamliner aircraft. (I mean, it veers into cool, but it’s not that handy.)

While the luggage tool is mostly a guide and doesn’t jump you through airport security or anything, it’s still one of the most helpful AR uses we’ve seen.

Leslie Knope has many talents, but one of her best is the ability to give the perfect gift.

There’s an innate goodness embedded into the DNA of Parks and Recreation. Maybe that’s why it’s still so hard to let go of our beloved Pawnee, Indiana squad almost four years after the series said goodbye.

Now, with the holiday season officially here, many of us are taking a page from Leslie’s playbook as we ponder how we’ll surprise and delight our loved ones with thoughtful gifts in the coming months. For the Parks and Rec superfan in your life, here’s an idea: Stay on brand.

SEE ALSO: Here are the perfect gifts for any ‘Fortnite’ fanatic

If you have a loved one who still watches Leslie Knope’s adventures on a regular basis, make their holidays special with one of these Parks and Rec-adjacent gifts.

1. Literally any other Michael Schur series on DVD/Blu-ray

OK fine, this one’s kind of obvious. Michael Schur is the co-creator of Parks and Rec, but he’s got a lot of other major credits connected to his name, including The Office (U.S. version), Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place.

There’s no wrong choice here. All of these shows are better than most of the other things on TV.

Price: Under $20 per season on Amazon

2. Parks and Rec swag

My Parks and Rec-loving wife absolutely adores her City of Pawnee Parks Department tote bag and coffee mug.

The series may have ended years ago, but NBC still sells an impressively large catalog of Parks and Rec merchandise on its website. Hoodies, t-shirts, mugs, glasses, beach towels, smartphone cases… you name it. Not seeing anything on NBC’s website? Try Etsy or Redbubble for fan-created merch.

It may be a little on the nose as a gift, but what fan doesn’t like repping their fandom?

Price: Varies by item in the NBC store

3. Offerman Woodshop products

You might not know this, but Ron Swanson’s love for wood and woodworking isn’t just a fictional hobby. It’s also a real-life interest for the actor who plays him, Nick Offerman.

Offerman Woodshop offers a range of products for different levels of interest and price points. There are books and branded souvenir-type items, as well as much more expensive works of wooden art. You can even purchase slabs of different types of wood, to fuel your gift recipient’s burgeoning interest in woodworking.

Price: Varies by item in the Offerman Workshop

4. A bottle of Lagavulin Whisky

While we’re on the subject of Ron Swanson, let’s talk about whiskey. Ron’s a big fan of the stuff. And Lagavulin, a single malt scotch brewed on the island of Islay in Scotland, is his brand of choice.

It’s potent stuff, and definitely not for everyone. Even if you’re getting the gift for an over-21 recipient, make sure they like scotch before picking up a bottle. You can spend hundreds, even thousands, on a good bottle of Lagavulin. But even on the low end (which is still plenty good), you should expect to spend no less than $60.

Price: Varies by vintage on MasterOfMalt.com

5. A good waffle maker

Leslie Knope’s love for waffles is legendary. And while we don’t have access to J.J.’s Diner, we can brighten a Parks and Rec fan’s day with a strategically gifted waffle maker.

That’s exactly what Ben and Anne did in a Season 5 episode when they both decided it was time to out-gift Leslie. Follow their example. There are plenty of options to choose from.

Price: Varies on Amazon

6. The Settlers of Catan

Ben Wyatt’s fictional Cones of Dunshire never made the leap into real life, but there are other ways to celebrate the beloved Ice Clown’s nerdy appreciation for tabletop games. Did you know, for example, that Ben is a nationally ranked Settlers of Catan pro?

The game of settling a new land and building up a stockpile of resources isn’t difficult to find, nor is it hard to learn. But anyone hoping to achieve Ben Wyatt levels of Catan mastery needs to have a copy of the game for themselves.

Price: $44.99 on Amazon

7. America the Beautiful annual pass

Leslie Knope loves her parks. She’s the most devoted to Anne, Ben, and Pawnee (in that order), but her job running Pawnee’s parks department is much more than just a 9-to-5. She cares about creating happy public spaces for the people in her community.

You can help your Parks and Rec-loving friends and family celebrate that love with an America the Beautiful annual pass. The $80 pass gives its owner and up to three guests (16 or older) free access to more than 2,000 federally operated recreation sites (details here), located all across the country.

Price: $80 on the USGS website

8. Muncie, Indiana getaway

This is more of a DIY gift. Jerry Gergich’s love for the small, real-life city of Muncie, Indiana is well known on the show. As he mentions on more than one occasion, it’s his family’s preferred vacation destination.

Since you can’t gift anyone a trip to Pawnee — the city only exists in our hearts, sadly — do the next best thing and gift a trip to Muncie instead. There’s a whole website devoted to Muncie tourism, in fact, with suggestions on where to stay, what to eat, and how to fill your time there.

Price: Varies depending on how you spend your trip

9. Gift card for Michael’s or another local crafts store

Leslie Knope is an expert quilter and a god-tier scrapbooker. 

Those are skills that can’t be gifted. But you can give your loved one a hearty push in the right direction by funding their shopping spree at any local crafts store. They don’t even have to buy yarn/knitting needles or scrapbooking supplies (though Leslie would probably feel betrayed by that decision). 

Price: Pick your own price via Michael’s

10. Miniature horse

Lil’ Sebastian is adorable and all, but this is no impulse gift. The up front cost of buying a miniature horse is multiple thousands of dollars on the low end. Then, it’s hundreds more each month — for 20 to 30 years, most likely — to keep the animal stabled, fed, and trained. (Start looking here.)

On the flip side, all that money does pay for a miniature horse. Which is like a normal-ass large horse, but tiny. That said, you’ll still probably want to confer with your friend or loved one — spoil the surprise, as it were — before you consider such an expensive and commitment-heavy gift.

Price: A lot

Tile has more or less defined the “personal object tracking” category with its range of Bluetooth trackers that you clip or attach to various things (like house keys) to keep from misplacing them. By connecting these beacons with an iOS or Android device, you can easily find your things by “ringing” them. However, its Achilles’ heel of the devices is that they eventually stop working because their batteries aren’t replaceable.

Now Tile can say goodbye to that weakness. The Tile Mate and Tile Pro, announced this morning, have user-replaceable batteries. (Tile is keeping its $25 and $35 price points, respectively, and will kick off orders today.)

SEE ALSO: Lost keys could be a thing of the past thanks to this nifty tracker

The upgrade fixes the main issue that users won’t have to buy a new Tile each time one dies. A watch battery (CR1632 or CR2032) now powers the Tile, and those are widely available. This is also better for the environment since every Tile won’t be thrown out when the battery dies. 

I met with Simon Fleming-Wood, the chief experience officer at Tile, and he told me that the implementation of a battery took several tries. Eventually, the team decided to incorporate a sliding door in way so you won’t need a tool to open it, and the battery won’t fall out by accident. The battery in the box is guaranteed to last for one year.

Sound and Bluetooth connectivity range has also been improved. Both models have a louder speaker, and you can also customize the volume within the app. The Mate has a 150-foot connection, and the Pro now has a range of 300 feet. Despite these three new features, the price stays the same, and the devices aren’t any bigger.

Along with the new hardware, Tile is introducing a subscription service. Tile Premium is meant to provide peace of mind, dedicated support, and better alerts. The service is $2.99 a month or $29.99 for a full year. Subscribers will get an automatic replacement battery to arrive before the current battery dies, with the battery and shipping cost covered. They’ll also get an 30-day  location history for each Tile device (including third-party products). In addition to traditional email or chat support, they’ll get a number to text as well.

Smart Alerts, along with the battery replacements, are probably the most significant benefit. You can now switch on alerts to be notified if you leave your home without a specific Tile. It still uses the same Bluetooth technology to track a Tile, but in this case, you set up a geofence around your home. With it set up, if you leave without your keys that have a Tile Mate on them, it can ping you. Luckily you can turn this on for select Tiles since you might not want to bring everything with you. The geofence is a beta feature for all premium users. 

We’ll be doing a deep dive into Tile Premium, as well as the new Mate and Pro, in a full review arriving soon.

There is no medicine on earth that has the power to heal me in the way romantic comedies do. OK, well that statement is probably completely medically inaccurate, but I just completely and utterly adore this wildly underrated genre. 

For many years, I was somewhat coy about my adoration of this genre. In my early twenties, I wouldn’t admit to friends that I’d watched Notting Hill for the umpteenth time, but would instead gush about some arthouse film that I’d barely understood, let alone enjoyed. At university, I’d hide my DVD copies of My Best Friend’s Wedding, When Harry Met Sally, Bridget Jones’ Diary. Looking back now, I wish I hadn’t done that. But I also know that I did that because of a palpable cultural snobbery surrounding the genre of film I love the most. Whenever I did talk about the genre, it was always met with disparaging comments that it was a lesser art form, that it wasn’t high-brow. Ugh.

SEE ALSO: ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ stars try (and fail) to identify classic romcoms from iconic quotes

This year, with the release of Crazy Rich Asians and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, I decided it was high time we reclaimed this wonderful genre. But, in order to do so, we need to fully understand the reasons behind the reluctance to recognise the cultural value of the romantic comedy. 

“If you think about women located as consumers within the 20th century, using the supermarket is concatenated with women’s reading.”

According to academics, the romantic comedy has been a genre associated with women since its inception — and it’s because of this association that it’s considered inferior. Dr Stacy Gillis, lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at Newcastle University, says that the romantic comedy has been a “staple of Hollywood since the 1930s” but it’s always had a “very specifically gendered marketplace” that it’s been aimed at. 

Gillis says this gendering coincides with the rise of “romance fiction as we know it today” from the 1930s. “At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, romance was a term often used to refer to adventure romance, scientific romance, it meant popular storytelling,” says Gillis. 

Some of the most commercially successful books from the ’20s and ’30s were actually romance fiction written by women, but they weren’t considered the best of the best. “Any university syllabus of the 1920s will say, James Joyce one of the most seminal authors of the 20th century, but actually one of the bestselling novels in 1926 is Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades,” says Gillis. “This is what people are reading, they’re not reading Joyce.” In the 1930s, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca “sold very well,” says Gillis, but “wasn’t seen as the pinnacle of a certain kind of fiction. This is because “mechanisms” like university syllabi and book prizes “valorise a certain kind of reading,” according to Gillis.”What often happens is writing by women and about women — and I’d extend that notion to the romantic comedy — gets pushed to the peripheries,” she says.

The product placement of romantic fiction also plays a role in how we culturally view romance as a genre. When publisher Mills & Boon began investing in romance fiction in the 1930s, that’s when romantic fiction became “synonymous with formulaic plots.” “They had a distribution cycle that often saw them placed in supermarkets, so this goes hand in the hand with the dismissal of a certain kind of literature that you’re reading quickly and not reading critically, that has the same kind of plot,” says Gillis. “If you think about women located as consumers within the 20th century, using the supermarket is concatenated with women’s reading.”

Another genre that follows a kind of formula — and could be labeled “formulaic” is the Western. But, rather than being dismissed as low-brow, it’s revered as the acme of cinema. Double standard?

“Because we live in a patriarchy, [romance] is dismissed as being inconsequential or ephemeral whereas something like science-fiction or the Western are not,” says Gillis. “Actually, the Western in Hollywood cinema had a very long and well-respected history whereas the romantic comedy is just seen as froth.”

This use of the term “formulaic” to dismiss romantic films as “froth” is actually a completely invalid argument. As Dr Faye Woods — a lecturer in film, theatre and television at the University of Reading — points out: ” romantic comedy is often described as ‘formulaic’ or ‘unrealistic’, but genre is a formula.” 

“Horror, westerns, war films, and sports movies don’t get described as formulaic, but romcoms and musicals are.”

“Horror, westerns, war films, and sports movies don’t get described as formulaic, but romcoms and musicals are,” says Woods. “These are genres built around pleasure and require great skill in creating. A well-built genre follows a formula and that’s why they are emotionally satisfying.”

So, what exactly is it about romcoms that makes people slap on the “formulaic” label? Well, the answer is, in part, rooted in misogyny. 

“Romantic comedy, as with much culture created for women, is not creatively and culturally valued,” says Woods. Does society have a problem with the way it views films about women’s lives and emotions? “We might think about how, socially, the lower status genres are female focused. The way that soap or melodrama is used as a descriptive term in a negative way, when they are genres that value complex emotion-focused storytelling,” Woods adds. 

But, this devaluing of art about and for women stems from the way we view women’s pleasure and emotions. “As a culture we look down on and devalue emotions that are seen as feminine, in the same way that we devalue and mock female pleasure (Magic Mike XXL, Book Club, 50 Shades),” says Woods. “How pleasure is framed as ‘guilty’, and what kinds of genres and forms fall into this — romance, pop, weepies.”

In the same way that our emotions and desires are dismissed, so too are our feelings pertaining to the books and films we like. Gillis says that the “narratives in which women’s desires” — not just the sexual and emotional ones — are dismissed, also dismiss our “reading desires” and movie ones as “worthless.” 

For this reason, it’s extremely important we show pride in the books, movies, and TV shows we love, Gillis says. “I think it’s really important that we stand up for these movies, novels that we really believe in,” she says. 

That’s why it’s important to celebrate the films we’re actually watching on repeat — not the ones our culture tells us are smarter or superior in some way. “How many times have people seen Sleepless In Seattle versus insert-name-of-arthouse cinema?” asks Gillis. 

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell film Overboard,” she says. “I think it’s one of the funniest movies ever made but it’s never gonna win any awards for high-brow filmmaking.”

I too can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched Julia Roberts tell Hugh Grant that she’s “just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her.” But, I can tell you that I am ready for each and every one of us to start celebrating the movies we can’t stop ourselves from watching. The ones we’re ashamed to admit we like. 

Welcome to Fat Bear Week at Mashable! Each fall, Katmai National Park holds a competition as Alaska’s brown bears finish fattening up for their long winter hibernation. This year, Mashable is getting in on the salmon-munching action. Check back with us all week as we follow the fat bear face-offs each day, and remember to get your votes in for each round. Happy fishing!

By the fall of each year, the brown bears of Katmai National Park grow exceptionally fat. The largest males, in fact, can tip the scales at more than 1,000 pounds.

This year, 13 plump omnivores have made it into the official Fat Bear Week contest, after park rangers selected the bulkiest contenders. 

Over the next month, the bears will begin hibernating, slowly burn through their ample fat stores while slumbering through the harsh Alaskan winter. 

Before their hibernation can begin, however, we — their adoring public — must pick our champion: the fattest fat bear of them all.

Katmai has released its bracket of fattest bears, and voting begins on Wednesday. But first, it’s time to get to know the bears of 2018’s competition.

The bracket is populated with some globally popular characters — such as Holly, Otis, and 747 — bears who have earned their fame while fishing on the explore.org live webcams.

Typically, there are 12 bears for the 12 playoff spots. But 2018 isn’t your average fat bear bracket. 

SEE ALSO: Fat Bear Week is here: Your complete guide to nature’s most exciting competition

The twelfth spot is shared by two sibling cubs who just spent their second year in the wild, munching salmon along Katmai National Park’s Brooks River.

To help you cast informed votes, each day both Mashable and Katmai National Park will post “dueling” comparison images of each bear — from their early summer state to their present, rotund forms — so you can judge just how fat they’ve gotten this summer while devouring the skin, brains, and vivid red flesh of sockeye salmon. 

The voting is ultimately done through Katmai’s Facebook page, but before you cast your ballot, it’s time to do a little research:

Your 2018 Fat Bear Week Competitors  

In 2014, Holly adopted an orphaned cub that had been abandoned in Katmai. 

This year, she returns with two yearling cubs — cubs that already survived their first year in the wild and are back for a second summer and have their own shared spot on the bracket. 

Holly’s adopted cub, Bear 503, is now a young adult that’s facing off in this year’s Fat Bear Week competition.