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In other words, your argument attempts to ignore simple historical facts which you can verify easily on Wikipedia.
Historical oppression doesn't justify questionable behavior. I've seen many instances where women have "dated up" to help their careers. I even saw one instance where a female director dated the CTO and later the CFO to have someone to support her coke habit. Just calling out the men will never truly fix the problem. We need to be giving a consistent message to both sexes. These types of relationships (and expectations of relationships) are not acceptable under any circumstances. Because if it's wrong for men to pressure women but it's okay for women to pursue those men, then there can always be the hope in the back of the man's mind that maybe it's possible.
Do you also do this in discussions of any other topic whatsoever? Whenever someone posts something about HTTP, do you make sure to post comments about Gopher and present it as being just as important?
In the same way, if those advances were never successful, these men would quickly get the message and stop playing. But that doesn't seem to be the case since it's still happening way too frequently. If we want to stop this problem, we need to figure out how to get the message through that even in the cases where the advances were welcomed, they still did something wrong. And that requires more than just laying into those unfortunate few that are unlucky enough to do this kind of thing to women brave enough to come forward. It will require calling out those instances where the advances were welcomed.
In particular, the last paragraph you could have done without. These discussions already get heated enough, IMO.
Those pathetic douchebags were not "primed" by any experiences with women "dating up". They were primed, trained, protected and covered up by the shitty patriarchal society we live in. And it's worth tackling that problem without attempting to dilute it in "maybe she wanted it" sauce.
Thinking back at the show Grey's Anatomy, ABC's highest-rated drama show, got a female lead, and was among the top 10 shows in the US. A recent joke the character made was that all of them married their bosses. While fictional, culture impacts perception regarding behavior and in turns causes behavior.
I see a lot of the vilification in these threads, but very little effort towards trying to understand. Chalking it up to "patriarchal society" may be fine from the standpoint of PC talking points, but it is intellectually lazy and just makes the situation more adversarial rather than one where we can come together and figure out the best ways to avoid this happening in the future. We want to make sure that the men who are in a position to abuse women like this learn why the behavior is wrong and not the steps to avoid (sms/fb/etc messages) getting caught.
This is why both pathologies are relevant. I'm not trying to blame the women who try to use their sexuality to their advantage or even those that engage in consensual relationships with men in a position of power. But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men. It's an exploration of the thought process that led them to act in this way. Perhaps it's not what these men were thinking...it's just my projection, but no one has presented any argument or any other substantive possibility. They've just, like you, overreacted and sought to distort what I was trying to say because it didn't match the outrage and need for vengeance that they feel.
Yup, that one.
> or do we want to minimize the occurrence of this behavior going forward?
False equivalence. I would imagine if VCs and investors get the message that if they hit on women they'll be fired, they'll stop doing it.
> I'm not trying to blame the women who try to use their sexuality to their advantage or even those that engage in consensual relationships with men in a position of power. But because those instances exist and these men have likely witnessed them personally, even if they're rare, they create the possibility in the minds of these men.
Okay, so to combat this "pathology", we'll say, "If you engage sexually with someone who approached you in a professional context, consensually or otherwise, you're fired". Seems easy enough, and that takes care of the problem.
You imagine wrong. Instead, they'll learn how to do it without getting caught. Lesson one comes from these incidents. Don't leave an electronic or paper trail. It's much less likely these women would have come forward if they hadn't had electronic records of chat sessions to back up their assertions.
If you only treat the symptoms of the problem, it will keep returning in different forms. You need to address the root of the problem and your over-simplified view of the issue will never allow you to do that.
The far more practical approach is to catch the bad guys over and over again, make examples of them and mete out punishment. That's how criminal deterrence works in every other field. No reason to make an exception here.
So you're advocating for zero tolerence.
There was never any suggestion that any of the men in the article observed some woman "dating up" and as a consequence of that felt justified to grope or send inappropriate messages to the women in the article.
The men in the article themselves did not even try to portray their alleged actions as justifiable, or excuseable by association with any other past behaviour. They either admitted their behaviour was wrong or denied they ever behaved in this manner.
And yet, here you are relating a story about a woman you once saw "dating up" to try and explain those men's behaviour as something else than a simple mistake that should not be repeated.
How is this useful, exactly? In what way does it contribute, besides changing the subject and trying to shift the blame on the people who, in the article, were reportedly subjected to undeniably inappropriate behaviour?
This should tell you to stop and think about what you’re really saying.
It's not even that people are disagreeing, it's that they see a trigger word and stop reading, then launch into a straw man attack. I see that frequently in these "social justice" threads.
Btw, this does not compute. Those instances are "rare" but those men have "likely" witnessed them? When something is rare, most are unlikely to witness it.
These guys see hundreds of pitches. There's hundreds of VCs in the valley. Something can be rare--less than one in a hundred and still be likely. Rare for a single instance can be likely and expected across a large number of instances.
Accordingly, the "law of large numbers" as you report it, means that either only a handful of those hundreds of VCs in SV have witnessed inappropriate pitch behaviour, or this inappropriate pitch behaviour is not rare.
Regardless of the exact quantities, it remains true that an event is either unlikely to be witnessed, or it is not rare. That an event will be witnessed even though it is rare doesn't mean that it will be witnessed often.
The law of large numbers doesn't say that rare things happen often, is what I'm saying. Because that would be an oxymoron, not a paradox (which that "law" is meant to illustrate).
Actually I'd say that dismissing a reasonable point about interactions between individual people using a narrow interpretation of history to establish a non-standard epistemology is the greater intellectual mistake.
In other words, that women couldn't vote 100 years ago says absolutely nothing about whether a venture capitalist abused his relationship with a client or whether a potential client tried to use sexuality for a competitive advantage.
But I am also pragmatic : when I wear a nice costume, it is too show off. When going outside, I know I will be surrounded by people who will watch me.
If I wear a flamboyant shirt, I cannot be upset that people are watching me. I find this normal. I will not find normal someone complaining or even getting in contact with me because of that (though, why not?) but watching, even intensely, is OK. If I do not want to be seen I wear jeans and a blue t-shirt.
This is why I do not agree (including with my wife and mother) that women who wear nice, revealing things do this "for themselves". They do not. Le any other animal, we show how good we are. But we are evolved animals and this do not mean "take me", something people (mostly men) forget.
In short : watching someone who decided to exhibit is absolutely fine. Anything else is crossing the line.