I'm genuinely curious what your wife's take is - she may see it a little differently from you.
> Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.
Even if I am misreading this, I would rather call it "sexist harassment" to make clear that is not itself of a sexual nature.
"Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general."
This is what the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission considers "sexual harassment". You may not like these definitions, but this is the government's definition of "sexual harassment".
The paragraph you quoted says "harassment doesn't have to be of sexual nature" and you are using it to support the claim that "sexual harassment doesn't have to be of sexual nature".
You are overinterpreting this thing.
About the only type of harassment that do not qualify under sexual harassment is those that insult intelligence, ability to perform a task, and racism.
This seems like a confusion between using swear/curse words and things being sexual. People swearing often say words that are also used to describe sexual acts by the use is akin to using homophones.
"You wanker!" isn't sexual, for example, unless there's particular context to make it that way.
① I once saw someone trying to establish the term and spelling “Ghey” as a non-sexually associated disparaging word.
Its probably different when words that used to be disparaging become less so (wanker, gay). Because there remain a generation that are still offended by them, we should probably lighten up on them especially in mixed company.
You’re missing the point. That is not the reason. The reason why one shouldn’t use the term “Gay”, even if one doesn’t mean anything actually homophobic by it, is that by using the term, one encourages actual homophobes and reinforces their belief that their hatred and/or fear of homosexuals is normal. You might think that everyone who hears you knows you don’t mean “Gay” as a homophobic slur, but I can assure you — you would be wrong.
I've done some reading on this and it is never quite clear. It seems like if the asshole is an asshole to everyone it is fine. Only if they pick a protected class to be an asshole to does it become a problem.
I would wish that bullying that is illegal when directed at your wife is illegal when directed at you (modulo gender specific forms). In practice I'm sure it depends on how manly you are compared with her.
So, I just had lunch with my wife, and she pretty much agrees with my take. She views her main problem as the act of a single, albeit misogynist, individual, and not a symptom of a systemic problem. Moreover, she expressed surprise (like myself) at the suggestion that astronomy is full of sexual harassment. She can't imagine my colleagues or former colleagues being like that. That is not to say that problems we can't see don't exist, of course.
It seems to matter quite a lot to people whether harassment is characterized as gender-based or not, and we don't have any apparent evidence that it is.
Though I've never really been sure why being a jerk to someone because they're a woman should be any different than being a jerk in exactly the same way for some entirely different (yet no doubt equally stupid) reason.