Navigating our social world can sometimes be like stumbling through fog: intuiting the impact of our actions on other people often involves a confusing haze of speculative guesses about what they are thinking and feeling. However, some actions are clear as daylight in their intent and impact. Sexual harassment falls into this latter category.

Sometimes it is suggested that definitions of harassment have become so blurred that people are wary of ever complimenting anyone, lest it be interpreted as an unwanted advance. David Foster recently argued here that Laura Bates's Everyday Sexism project risks compounding this situation by conflating "offensive and clumsy sexual remarks with respectful, courteous sexual advances" and thus "promulgating a view that any direct sexual advance is tantamount to harassment".

Bates has made it clear that this is not the intention of the project and, as she argues most men are capable of differentiating between a genuine act of friendliness or flirtation (an act that intends a positive social outcome), and a hostile act of sexual aggression (oblivious to the impact on its recipient, or even actively calculated to cause distress). So, if there is a grey area between the two, it is very small, and inhabited by few people.

However, given this, a troubling thought then occurs. Many men who engage in verbal or physical harassment are probably aware that it will render their victim distressed, or at least uncomfortable. And yet they do it anyway. The question then is why?

Social sciences are bedevilled by such a bewildering array of competing perspectives that one cannot hope to offer the reason for a given phenomenon. Nevertheless, at the risk of oversimplifying the issue, one explanation for harassment relates to societal power: the perpetrator feeling either a sense of power, or paradoxically, a lack of it. The first type – surfeit – is easier to comprehend. Some men allow the clamour of their libido to drown out the faltering voices of their conscience, and their social position means they can express these desires without concern for the feelings of the recipient, or fear of reprisal. For instance, Lord Rennard allegedly bestowed his advances on people whose relative powerlessness meant their complaints were hushed up or ignored.

The power deficit explanation is more counter intuitive. Some gender theorists argue that ostentatious displays of aggression are not because men feel powerful, but precisely the opposite – because they lack societal recognition or power. This has a parallel with antisocial behaviour more generally, which in its most visible form is perpetrated by those who feel disenfranchised from society, as in the UK riots. (People with power engage in more insidious forms of antisocial behaviour, like rigging the stock market.) Men with conventional power are assured of their status "as men" and don't need to explicitly demonstrate it; conversely, those without such power compensate by aggressively asserting it in cruder ways. On this reading, harassment constitutes the acts of men who feel marginalised and ignored by society and are lashing out in a destructive bid for recognition and status.

However, recognising that harassment is related to power still doesn't explain why some men assert their power, or lack thereof, through intimidating expressions of sexuality. For some sociobiologists, lecherous behaviour is simply the natural expression of men's testosterone-fuelled primeval imperative to be sexually aggressive, shaped by millions of years of evolutionary selection. Conversely, social constructionists blame misguided societal values that coerce males into being tough through the message that boys don't cry, neutering their emotions and diminishing their capacity for empathy.

However, most men – including those who are powerful or marginalised – generally manage to behave like civilised human beings, which gives us hope: sexual aggression is not an inevitable biological expression of maleness, nor an immutable societal prescription. As such, the predatory behaviour of a minority of men is not a given, and can be addressed. Perhaps this involves correcting structural imbalances so that more women are in positions of power. Maybe it is a question of helping disenfranchised young men feel more valued and socially engaged, as some youth intervention programs endeavour to do. Whatever the solution – and there won't be only one – we cannot collectively be described as civilised until we find it.

• This article was amended on 26 June 2014 to more fully explain the arguments set out by David Foster in his article of 9 April 2014.