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Comment by gduncan12 | Hacker News Reader

Raping someone is fucked up. I don't see how that sentence is fucked up. If someone said that to me, I would take it as a compliment. To me it says not only are you smart enough to be hired, you're also attractive. Is it better to split it up into two separate sentences? Obviously the guy is hitting on her, if she's not interested then that's fine. I really don't see the problem, could someone please explain?

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Seriously, I think "Always Sunny" explains it best (i.e., because of "the implication")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE

Yeah, I immediately thought of that video when I was considering the massive power imbalance at play here.

You can re-word most of Dennis' dialogue to fit the situation, too. "The implication that [she won't get an investment] if she refuses to sleep with me."

The last part of that clip is especially applicable. The other commenter sees this as a compliment. "She's attractive; of course she'd get hit on!" But it's a "compliment" with an asterisk attached to it, and the subtext is a massive power imbalance.

Is it really productive to compare this situation to an implication of life-threatening violence?

If you happen to work in California, you should study the law better before you consider a supervisory position. This style of advance is black-letter sexual harassment in California, if done by a supervisor to an employee in their organization. (This wasn't the precise case here, but it was very close, and your wording seems to take in cases beyond this particular scenario.) If these advances continued, it is easy grounds for a lawsuit.

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