Should we believe men too when they're victimised by women, or is this a one way deal? What if it's a man and a woman accusing each other, or two men or two women. What if the dude is a historically oppressed minority?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600895 and marked it off-topic.
As an exercise, ask a few men and women you know if they've ever been harassed or attacked at work. If they didn't report it, ask them why.
The power dynamics are significantly different though, I don't feel at all in danger, I'm a 6'2 man who lifts weights in his spare time, so it's more of an annoyance than anything truly worrying. I understand that this person may go on to harass the next person who fills my role, but I simply have too much personally riding on the outcome of the present to leverage it in that way.
I'd certainly be pretty worried if someone in a position of power over me was doing anything of the sort. Even if you don't have to worry about the individual literally overpowering you (Which in itself would be a tough thing to prove you were not the aggressor if you are a muscular 6+ footer and had to push off an aggressive advance)
Any feminist will remind you that sexual harassment isn't about sex, it's about power. With more women in positions of power these days expect the number of harassment cases where men are the target to rise.
I hope to God you don't show up for jury duties.
"I believe you" can mean you believe what the person is saying WITHOUT it meaning you take it to be 100% factual.
In this circumstance, it can mean you believe them (as in, trust them) but you're not "convicting" anyone of anything. But you ARE giving them the comfort of "trust."
If they say "X touched me inappropriately" and you say "I believe you" meaning "I trust you", then that means "I trust that you are telling the truth".
(Actually, what I think you're really talking about is a kind of social nicety, what is in reality a white lie. Where people will say "I believe you" as like a kind of gesture of good faith towards a person. Like indicating that you're not going to be biased against them. But it's not actually a statement of belief. In other words, it does not have a meaning in terms of a type of belief).
E.g. in some of these situations you are actually lying to the person (in a mild way) and not actually expressing a belief at all.
An analogy. I might say "I went to the store", but actually I was at a friend's place, and I said this because I wanted to come across a certain way.
It is not that the statement "I went to the store" has these two interpretations. The notion of going to a friend's place isn't a different interpretation of that statement, it is just that I'm not telling the truth.
Of course - and that means you still think (to some degree of conviction) it is true. The original context that spawned this discussion was implying some sort of interpretation that did not involve a belief of some sort in the truth of the statement.
> I can believe your testimony to me in good faith, but understand it may not be accurate.
If someone says "X touched me inappropriately", and you respond "I believe you" then this response means "I believe your statement" not "I believe your testimony was in good faith". (Or it is a kind of white lie, as discussed elsewhere in this thread).
That's true, but this is literally how 99% of human interaction works out.
My dad might say "Hey, can you help me with something on the house in two weeks?" and I don't even know what day yet, so I'll say "Of course, would love to!"
It's... not a 100% completely honest response, but it's the polite one. Rather than saying "I have no idea because I lack information, please tell me the date and I'll get back to you."
In reality, I say sure, I commit, and as more information is acquired we adjust the situation: just as would happen in the original scenario.
White lie or not, it would be inappropriate and needlessly damaging to reply to your colleague in such a way "I have no idea if what you're saying is true, sorry, but I'll look into it."
It would not be healthy for anyone involved to actively show skepticism towards them.
If you do not show some level of skepticism, you default to a state of belief. As in, you believe your colleague at face-value for the complaint brought to you.
We're _not_ talking about convicting someone of a crime. We're not talking about taking immediate action on that belief.
Well, no, you default to a neutral state of receiving information, sans judgment.
Also it is not true that if you do not show skepticism, you default to some specific state. You could hold any number of opinions without showing skepticism -- what you are showing the other party is irrelevant. "Showing" or expressing belief is not the same thing as believing.
>As in, you believe your colleague at face-value
If you are pretending that you believe your colleague while silently reserving judgment or judging disbelief, you do not believe them in any meaningful sense of the word. You are disguising your judgment of what they are saying so as to not cause further conflict -- i.e., acting. That is very different from believing what they say or even 'believing at face value'.
It's fine for people to say "I think he did it, but the prosecution didn't prove it, and so I found him not guilty."
In this mindset you've setup a guilty until proven innocent framework because in your mind you already believe to be true any accusations leveled at someone.
When someone levels an accusation, the only belief you should hold is that it's a serious accusation that needs further investigation because someone has risked a lot by leveling it.
Believing anything that comes out of someone's mouth to be true when there are massive consequences to their words is unethical.
>It's fine for people to say "I think he did it, but the prosecution didn't prove it, and so I found him not guilty."
You cannot believe someone to have done something and personally believe that the person is not guilty. They may not be guilty under the framework of the law, but you are still treating them as guilty in your mind. If you worked with the accused and you had a strong sense of ethics, you would never treat that person the same way again, even though the accusation may have been proven to be fabricated.
It is unethical to take accusations at face value that will ruin people's lives.
Believing a colleague when they come to you with ANY complaint does not mean you're going to pass judgement, or you even have to. It means listening and doing that in a way that does not discourage future complaints.
Your attitude towards them -- listening etc -- is a completely orthogonal matter to whether you believe in the truth of their claims.
There seems to be this wishy-washy notion of "belief" that's causing confusion in this thread, where "believing" is equated to "not being judgemental".
That's not "belief". Believing X means thinking that X is true. What you're really talking about is taking an agnostic position.
Yes, you can modulate the strength of your belief but they're all beliefs that the statement is true. The great-grandparent comment (the one whose meaning this discussion was about) was implying something other than belief in the truth of the statement.
"I believe what you're saying, so I will follow up."
Or,
"I believe what you're saying, so I will take immediate action on those persons."
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/do-i-have-wrongful-te...
Yes, we can all make factually true, but totally irrelevant arguments that don't change anything.
A person does not have the right to be trusted, but can expect to be taken seriously on a claim of harassment if they have earned trust or if they provide evidence to back up the allegation.
You can be declared guilty by preponderance of evidence, of course, but still you are innocent until proven guilty.
The UK police had to back off from a similar policy that the after high profile investigations that were dropped with no criminal charges being made. They now take complaints seriously and try to keep the confidence of the complainant but don't start off with unconditional belief from the outset whilst still proceeding, at first, on the basis that the allegation is truthful but testing the accuracy of the allegations and the evidence with an open mind.
FFS, dude. Men hold the vast majority of power in our society. No cards are stacked against them. No old fashioned norms are still levied on them everytime a woman speaks to them. They aren't constantly reminded by our culture to be gentlemen or look handsome or bring home the bacon or do anything they don't want to. To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just being a dick.
Power isn't based on gender, it's based on wealth. Do you think abuse of power will suddenly end once the majority of wealthy individuals are women instead of men?
The point is that yes, for these reasons and many others, we should "believe women when they report harassment in the workplace."
Name the other sources of power in the United States in the year 2017. Whatever you can come up with, none of it is as significant as wealth.
>The point is that yes, for these reasons and many others, we should "believe women when they report harassment in the workplace."
You did not answer my question. Do you think abuse of power will suddenly end once the majority of wealthy individuals are women instead of men?
As your question doesn't really have anything to do with our debate, I respectfully decline to answer. It was nice talking.
It's one thing to say women have substantially more cards stacked against them on average. But it's another to say men have no cards stacked against them.
Your position is particularly harmful to feminist aims, because one of the core feminist teachings that we need to get through is this:
Don't assume a woman is a certain way because of stereotypes. Between group differences are smaller than within group differences.
Women can be less sporty than men on average, while still almost half of women are more athletic than the average man.
Similarly, women can have more cards stacked against them on average, while still nearly half of men have more cards stacked against them than the average woman.
The place we need to get to, which I believe intersectional feminism advocates, is to understand each person and situation individually, and consider that there are always many axes of oppression operation simultaneously.
To address your assertion directly: that a male victim of sexual harassment has no cards against him, consider this:
The flip side of "boys will be boys", a meme used to let rapists go unpunished, is "boys must be boys", a meme that men always want sex and therefore if he had a drunken hookup he must have wanted it. This goes far beyond the less accepted (though still frighteningly effective) meme of "she was drunk so she must have wanted it". Women are not presumed to want sex all the time.
I consider that a card stacked against men. We have precious little shared framework for thinking and talking about the times we don't want sex. It's not equivalent to the deck of cards that is patriarchy, but it's a card.
I think feminism will profit greatly from taking a stance on how people should be treated better, rather your stance, which is a stance on which people should be treated better (women).
I still believe WATM is usually a derailing technique used to distract from discussions of women's rights, I just don't believe that in the current climate it benefits the feminist movement to respond to them as such. It doesn't take much effort to say "sure, men too" and doing so reinforces other key feminist rhetoric.
Anyway, yeah, of course everyone has different circumstances. I didn't mean literally no men, just as the grandparent comment didn't mean literally believe all women. I was speaking generally in order to be comprehendible to a guy speaking generally and hypothetically.
Happy to hear any difficult and unrealistic social pressures you think we regularly face today.
I just wanted to say that it seems to me like you are speaking about broad generalizations and that is not the same thing as speaking about real people or individuals. Also, that your generalized idea of men is based on the premise that that general man is a wealthy and powerful person, but this is not the case for most men.
If you "believe women who report sexual harassment", and more specifically, if you believe women who report sexual harassment in "less clear cut" scenarios than Susan Fowlers, then you are deliberately stacking the deck against the specific men who are accused of sexual harassment, some of whom will invariably be innocent. How much comfort the fact that other people with the same genetalia tend to fill the boardrooms provides to the accused, I will leave to your imagination.
> They aren't constantly reminded by our culture to be gentlemen or look handsome or bring home the bacon or do anything they don't want to.
Men aren't reminded constantly by their culture to do things they don't want to do? Where do you live, because it sounds like paradise to me.
> To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just being a dick.
It's neither. It was an attempt to puncture what I saw as misguided rhetoric. A good old WhatAboutTheMen is an efficient approach because the commenter's default reasoning for not "just believing" men would likely mirror mine for not "just believing" women. And so I don't have to spell it out for them.
We can imagine utopia and then imagine how we would treat people in that setting. That seems to be what you're doing. But if we're not actually in utopia, then we really are tipping the scales in some way. And that does suck, and sometimes that means that one group is going to be treated unfairly, but often it's about the lesser of evils.
I'll do you the honor of not questioning your sincerity without even making an effort to address any specific thing you said. Seems like an almost...pusillanimous...thing to do.
> We can imagine utopia and then imagine how we would treat people in that setting.
I am not suggesting a solution to the existence of injustice, which is what a utopia would entail. I am merely pointing out that simplistic rhetoric about believing accusors will not solve the problem.
> But if we're not actually in utopia, then we really are tipping the scales in some way. And that does suck, and sometimes that means that one group is going to be treated unfairly, but often it's about the lesser of evils.
And there we part ways. Adding up all the bad stuff that happens to one group, comparing it to all the bad stuff that happens to another group, and saying "if this makes the bad stuff in the big pile smaller, then having more bad stuff in the small pile is acceptable collateral damage" is not a good approach. Applied in the large it would quite likely lead to two much bigger piles. I know you probably don't recognise that as what you're doing, but your reasoning is far too simplistic given the complexities of the problem.
edit: fine, apparently people get downvoted if they're not pedantic.
"and saying "if this makes the bad stuff in the big pile smaller, then having more bad stuff in the small pile is acceptable collateral damage" is not a good approach. Applied in the large it would quite likely lead to two much bigger piles."
Show your work. Why is that "likely" to lead to two bigger piles?
There's a word for that, you know.
> Show your work. Why is that "likely" to lead to two bigger piles?
If we both agree that we want fewer incidents of harass ment, a higher fraction of harassers punished, fewer false allegations, and fewer incidents of innocent people being punished... then that's a pretty complicated problem, right? Now multiply that by the number of potential harassers and harassees in the world. My "work" is simply the observation that a complicated problem isn't solvable by simplistic rhetoric. Of course, given the climate, that spiraled, as it does.
Saying "just believing" isn't the best phrase the OP could have picked but neither was your rhetoric. It just contributes to the divide between men and women.
blackrose is exclusively thinking of rich and powerful men when framing his argument.
[edit: removed paragraph]
This is a lot of aggression, and it makes me think that you are just as closed to alternative viewpoints as those with whom you are discussing this topic. I think you should completely re-evaluate your approach to debating this in the future.
I'll take the downvotes for this, but I think certain stances people are spouting on this thread are aggressively perpetuating the poor societal values I've been arguing against. They're aggressively playing down the consequences of their sexist mentality and normalizations. And because I'm a not-impoverished white dude who doesn't worry about being persecuted for my opinions, I expressed them.
(Also, the "selfish dick" part isn't meant to be taken personally. Many people are selfish, and own up to it, and wear the badge proudly. That's great. But to argue for sexism under some pretense of a noble cause is bullshit.)
You need to understand that the way you engage others on the internet is harmful to your viewpoints. You honestly come off as hostile and even childish. You're fabricating complete strawmen and attacking them. I honestly have to question whether or not you have some sort of personality disorder, given how upset you get over things that the people you are attacking have not said or even implied. You also seem to be extremely self-loathing, and you want to project that onto others.
> You also seem to be extremely self-loathing, and you want to project that onto others.
These are funny sequences of statements.
Anyway I wasn't attacking you; I was arguing against the ideas presented, that we should "think about the men!" first when we're discussing women reporting sexual assault. The paragraph I deleted implied that anyone who holds this worldview either hasn't ever listened to a woman or is self-centered. I could've put it better, but frankly I was tired of arguing.
And I was fixing the record because you said "blackrose is exclusively thinking of rich and powerful men when framing his argument." Which is false, and I believe I offered good evidence for in my simple example.
This is really a stretch in logic, and the oxymoronic "some of whom will invariably be innocent" gives away your motives on this topic.
Parent comment was saying we should give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment in the workplace. It's a pretty good idea that would make everyone's lives better (even ours, the men!). But if your reaction to that mild suggestion is hostility and misleading arguments, you're contributing to the problem and encouraging more "manly" behavior that necessitates women's blog posts and company culture course-correction.
It's not even a tiny weeny little stretch of logic. It is self-evident to anybody who is thinking clearly about the matter.
> Parent comment was saying we should give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment in the workplace.
No. Wrong. Parent comment said "believe women who...", not "give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment". Do you understand how those two statements are different? Your one doesn't even make sense. Crediblity is "the quality of being believable or worthy of trust". Credence is probably the word you were thinking of. I don't think I'm smarter than you, but these sorts of mistakes do go to show that you are not thinking clearly.
> It's a pretty good idea that would make everyone's lives better
Not the falsely accused. They are men too, right?
> But if your reaction to that mild suggestion is hostility and misleading arguments, you're contributing to the problem and encouraging more "manly" behavior that necessitates women's blog posts and company culture course-correction.
The suggestion is not mild. My reaction was not hostile. My arguments were not misleading. I'm not contributing to the problem of some men being sexual harassers, except perhaps at some absurdly theoretically removed degree, which would leave me damned for pretty much any I comment I could make. I'm not encouraging manly, or even "manly" behaviour. My comments don't necessitate women's blog posts, if by that you are referring to Fowlers call-out. The latter is in fact an absurd charge against me on a personal level, as I'm sure you would recognize after mature reflection. That I necessitate company culture course-correction is likewise absurd, though flattering.
Luckily we have the power of inference and ability to understand what statements mean even when people use different words -- unless, of course, we have an axe to grind, which is what I'm seeing here in your comments.
Your counter arguments haven't convinced me. But it was nice discussing this. Hopefully others will see this thread and make their own decisions.