I was completely blown away at how often women around me were harassed. I didn't see a reason for #metoo to be as loud as it was, until these stories started coming out.
My assumptions about most men having respect for women's basic rights was really misplaced.
Are you saying that from most women having been harassed it follows that most men have been harassing women?
Because if most men would do this (and most implies: a majority of them), then even the current deluge of reports would be nothing compared to what you’d expect it to be.
I’ve have asked female colleagues about this and while they did complain about sexism, it was always isolated cases. Not most men.
Of all the respondents, 20% report sexual harassment of some sort. That’s a very high number. There is no reason to doubt its veracity.
But if 50%+ of all men were like that, you’d expect this number to be way higher.
Google is letting me down on that.
This one.
Most men are great people. But, the amount of damage that the minority can cause is what astounded me.
Also noticed that some perfectly normal people, have a couple of very weird ideas about romance, sex and women that cause them to act in a way that to a 3rd person and the woman herself to rightly consider it harassment.
Personally, I feel the rules around acceptable behavior when drunk/high need to be taught in school and a few solid lines need to drawn to let in most cases men and in a few cases women, know what constitutes consent.
It only takes one abusive man to make every woman in an office miserable. If he also happens to be the boss, then what is anyone, man or woman, to do to stop him?
It's just as difficult for a man to stand up and oppose his boss as it is for a woman. More so, in fact, if he only heard about the harassment but never witnessed it. When people's jobs are on the line, it's not hard to see why we have a culture of silence.
Even small stuff like calling BS on the sort of comments that happen when only guys are around (we've all heard them).
The implicit consent of everyone around these kinds of people is what lets this stuff continue (along with everything else of course).
I don't really think so. I think there are better ways to handle this.
The thing is, if somebody gives you inappropriate remarks on your appearance once a year on average it is something completely different, than if this thing happens to you multiple times a week, and sometimes even multiple times a day.
If you get robbed once, bad luck. If you get robbed multiple times a month, you will develop your ways of dealing with it.
I've been sexually harassed as a man, and I'm not even a particularly attractive bloke. Obviously it's different, I didn't have to worry about being followed home and pinned down by someone that's a foot taller and 50 lb heavier than me. If someone's being inappropriate with me, I can tell them to fuck off with little fear of repercussions, I don't have to be polite and worry about them retaliating, meanwhile I have a friend who was punched in the face at a nightclub because she rejected some guy's advances.
Those that are doing the harassing are at fault of course, but something is also wrong if men are acting on potentially career destroying impulses. Is the education system failing at teaching discipline? or philosophy? I've gone through the public education system in the U.S. and neither were taught to me, I had to seek them out myself. Maybe sexual harassment seminars should be less about defining and identifying sexual harassment and more about the type of person you can become when you stop letting pleasure and impulse define your life.
* The harassers genuinely believe they aren't doing something wrong / think their victims want it * The harassers can't control their urges in the moment / over long times * The harassers don't care that they are doing something wrong / think they have the right to do wrong.
I'm not sure which is worse. And again, it is probably a mix of the above where cognitive dissonance nudges the harassers into after the fact justifications.
But for some it is the other way round. They have to dominate in order to get sexually excited. Then, if you are in a position of power, and you feel there is a seemingly consequence-free¹ area in which to abuse it, many of these otherwise mostly rational and educated men give in to the temptation.
It is not that we suddenly have a problem with some men sexualy abusing their positions of power. It is just getting a bit more visible than it was before, now that it has become a topic. This certainly feels like illuminating a dark corner with light, to find it filled with bugs fleeing in all directions.
That is why "lets just switch off the light" is not a rational option here.
¹ in legal- and job-related terms that is. These actions still have real consequences for their co-workers and subordinates
How do we get from having men avoid these urges and situations at work (which is what is sort of the standard sexual harassment education) to having men want to better themselves and create a work space free of sexual context.
A lot of men I know already do this, but not all of them. And for the ones that somehow missed the "don't give in to your sexual urges because it will make you less than what you can be" part of becoming an adult, looking back at my own education there was very little to actually teach that other than life itself.
- Never take no for an answer
- Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness
- Break the law as long as you get away with it
- The bottom line is about the benefits I can extract from any given situation
A quick search will surface evidence that corporations as a whole are psychopathic and that CEOs skew heavily psychopathic (1 out of 5, similar to prison populations, according to a study - though I can't find the original paper).
I think the lesson here is that empirically, it's not potentially career destroying - in fact, it's highly likely to have pretty much no consequence.
I'm pretty confident once these actions do become at least plausibly career destroying, that men as a whole will find ways of being able to rein it in. "Consent", as an example, is a straightforward concept.
I have nothing to back this up, but I think it's one of two things.
1.) It's the culture of their day. This is applicable to older CEOs where it was the norm. They never grew out of it, because they never needed to grow out of it.
2.) They're powerful enough that it doesn't matter. Of course, if tens or hundreds of women come forward accusing a CEO of sexual misconduct, then it's going to be a problem. But in the day-to-day, it's only going to be a problem if the culture in the company allows it to be a problem.
Either of those cases has nothing to do with the inability to control urges. The problem is that those men are being overly aggressive with their sexual misconduct because they can.
I think there might be (at least) two kinds of discipline: the discipline of doing and the discipline of not-doing. Does getting up early and putting in long hours running a business really use the same mental skills as not throwing your trash on the sidewalk or coming to a complete stop on the white line next to the red octagon? We might call these initiative discipline and reactive discipline: in one case, you go out and find the situation where you're supposed to do something, but in the second, the mountain comes to Muhammad, so to speak.
There are obviously a hundred shades of gray between rape and an unwanted compliment. So if rape is the most extreme, and the most risky, and you have a 70% chance of literally nothing happening and the chance of seeing actual jail time is statistically zero... this whole category of behaviors is definitely not “high risk”.
1. Statistics compiled by the RAINN institute which uses the US Justice Department’s reporting for its main data sources. More info here: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system
I will suggest that a lot of powerful men are only just now in recent years beginning to see women "in their league." It's highly problematic for them to respond to that with propositioning these women, but it's possibly not entirely fair to say they simply haven't learned to control themselves.
In some cases, they may control themselves just fine most of the time. Then they meet some very happening lady who blows them away under circumstances where they aren't used to seeing women at all and they find themselves in new territory they aren't entirely prepared for.
FWIW, I happen to be a woman. No, this is not an "apologist" position. This is my framing for how to navigate the social/business landscape without stuff blowing up in my face.
I'm sorry - I don't approve of sexual harassment, but with all the hysteria, I am still not sure how often women simply consider sexual interest to be harassment. It seems to me sexual interest is a normal aspect of human life. And being attractive also has advantages, that the #metoo crowd never mentions. We don't really know how many women actually benefited from being attractive. Weinstein claimed many women took him up on his offer, after all.
I support laws against catcalling, or enforcing existing harassment laws to include catcalling. But you really lose me when you try to put saying anything--no matter how offensive or even illegal--in the same bucket as doing physical violence to another person.
I think this is where the #metoo movement and other groups that promote women's safety and well-being lose a lot of support from people who would otherwise be in agreement with them. I can go really far supporting laws to protect women from all kinds of awful things. But I can't really stretch reality far enough to say that saying something is the same as raping someone.
No one is suggesting catcalling is the same as rape; people are suggesting they're both in the same category. To use an analogy, a Ford Fiesta and a Ferrari FXX aren't going to compete in a race together but they're both cars.
To use an analogy, public urination and murder aren't doing to result in the same penalties but they're both crimes.
There is an unsavory political/propaganda purpose to putting catcalling and rape in the same category. The eliding of crimes of vastly differing degrees of severity is another warping of law enforcement and the judiciary which totalitarian states have used to oppress individuals. To do the constant work against this, we need to be careful about distinctions.
What would happen if your tools were used against you?
I certainly don't presume you and I would see eye to eye on the society I'd build.
Do you imagine your faction would be in charge? It certainly sounds like you do. "Revolutions are often initiated by idealists, carried out by fanatics and hijacked by scoundrels." -- Thomas Carlylse
Unless one views combatting unwanted sexual conduct to which people are subjected without consent as an unsavory purposes, no, there isn't.
> The eliding of crimes of vastly differing degrees of severity is another warping of law enforcement and the judiciary which totalitarian states have used to oppress individuals.
True, but irrelevant, for several reasons: first, this isn't a law enforcement issue; second, while the category of discussion overlaps with criminal conduct, it is not a discussion of crime as such, but of a category united by shared features not incliding criminality; third, no one is suggesting equivalency or arguing for ignoring the distinctions between acts within the category while discussing the broad category.
But if one views the efforts towards combating unwanted sexual conduct as a pretext used by certain people who want power as an end, then it becomes an especially unsavory purpose, no?
True, but irrelevant, for several reasons: first, this isn't a law enforcement issue
The classic strategy of non-governmental authoritarians, since they do not have a monopoly on violence, is to do what they can with the same effect. If you don't have the state monopoly on violence, then dress in uniformed hoods and do violence and vandalism under the cover of anonymous crowds. If you don't have the state function of the judiciary, then use kangaroo courts, "trial in the media," and extralegal means to make accusations with the presumption of guilt. All of the above is very relevant today.
third, no one is suggesting equivalency or arguing for ignoring the distinctions between acts within the category while discussing the broad category.
False. Exactly that is happening in order to turn the tables on current power structures, and to let one group intimidate another.
There are lots of ways to address this, but I'll limit myself to probably the biggest issue involved: Power dynamics. If your boss expresses sexual interest in you, it puts you in a very difficult situation if the interest is not mutual. See result #4 in the article, and read through some of the comments here for examples.
Catcalling is an inappropriate way to show sexual interest, especially in the workplace. Sexual harassment is a legally defined term in most places, and is not just showing an interest, it is harassment. I hope we can agree that sexual demands for career advancement is not just sexual interest, and neither is rape.
A person's sexual interest is theirs. When they chose to share that interest with another person in the workplace they better carefully gauge their position of power, and the appropriateness of the context. They should also respond in a mature and appropriate way if the interest is not appreciated or reciprocated.
You should also be careful how you throw around the term "hysteria" https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-quackery/history-h... as it is a loaded phrase
You might want to look at the etymology of the word "hysteria", and think about it in this context.
in general, it makes me very uncomfortable to be touched by someone without giving explicit consent, and over the years this has happened quite a few times (ranging from touching my hair at a bar to forcibly trying to restrain me from leaving after i decline sex). but if someone who i already consider attractive grabs me and starts talking to me, i don't necessarily mind and i might even like it. a whole range of behavior goes from uncomfortable to enjoyable in proportion to how much i am attracted to the person. on the flip side, knowing how uncomfortable it makes me, i will basically never touch anyone (other than to shake hands), unless they have explicitly told me it's okay. i think people perceive me as being kind of cold because of this.
my point isn't that the ambiguity condones bad behavior in any way, but rather that you shouldn't make such sweeping statements to shut people down who might be trying to have a good faith discussion. this stuff is complicated and we need to talk about it.
That said, I don't think there's much reason to think that a person who created a throwaway account to undermine the legitimacy of #metoo is really trying to have a good-faith discussion.
The point about my comment on men not understanding consent and boundaries is that it is very often a convenient lack of understanding. The claim that women are just too darned mysterious is used to justify violation of consent and boundaries. However, if those same straight men are hit on by other men, they suddenly develop a very clear idea of boundaries and consent.
This suggests to me that the lack of understanding is not just convenient but willful. As Upton Sinclair says, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" The same goes, I think, for horny dudes. Especially horny dudes living in a patriarchal culture where women used to be effectively property of one man or another, and where that patriarchy is still being slowly unwound.
In this setting it's at a minimum incredibly unprofessional, especially between people who don't know each other well and are potentially customer/client or investor/investee.
Imagine doing this stuff in a sales meeting.
Yes, they are in the same category of “unwanted sexual conduct”.
Now, sure, there are narrower categories each could also be put in which exclude some others.
> I am still not sure how often women simply consider sexual interest to be harassment.
Interest is an internal state; women may not want you to have interest, but short of some outward act they are unlikely to have anything to consider harassment.
If you are expressing unwanted interest in the workplace, or particularly in a context where you exercise economic power over the subject of that interest, they aren't wrong to view it as harassment.
Stop assuming this is hysteria, it's not. It's a collective, we're just tired of this. And let me also offer some quick and dirty math to support that it's not a majority of men. Let's assume 1% of men don't know how to be polite and in fact enjoy being abusive. They do this on average 1/week to a randomly chosen woman. Within a relatively short time every woman will have had at least one unpleasant experience.
For the most part these individuals pick on people they presume to be easy targets, so some women get treated much worse than others, just as men who are perceived to be easy targets equally have problems - probably with the same guys. That's also why the power dynamics play into it, the definition of easy target depends on that. And at some point, everybody just gives up, deals with their situation as best they can, and tries to never go upstairs ever again in Yale frat houses.
If someone suggests you're misperceiving something and your only reply is "I'm not because I know I'm not," you have an obvious epistemological problem.
Do you actually believe that many women are oversensitive to harassment?
Besides, I believe that women are often the target of sexual interest. I just don't believe that it is such a horrible thing as some of them proclaim. At the very least, many don't really have the comparison to what it is like to be unattractive, which is not very pleasant, either.
Many people expend a lot of money and time to become more physical attractive. Few people expend effort to become less attractive.
What's more, if you complain about being "sexually harassed", at the same time you signal "social proof" of you being attractive. So telling such stories is a double whammy: you can show proof that you are attractive, and get some pity points and protection, too.
I'm more surprised than I probably should be about how much this misses the mark. You don't actually believe only "attractive" women are sexually harassed do you?
Harassment isn't the same as interest.
Heck, expressions of interest aren't the same as interest.
You are insulting men by equating male sexual interest with harassment.
> What's more, if you complain about being "sexually harassed", at the same time you signal "social proof" of you being attractive.
No, you don't.
Because the people who actually take accusations of sexual harassment seriously don't associate it with attractiveness (people who habitually defend harassers or who are serial harassers themselves like to associate them, at least rhetorically, as part of a defense against harassment claims by arguing that the accuser isn't attractive enough to harass, but that's about as far as the association goes.)
Imagine I say, “Why are you misperceiving my actions as harassment? You seem to have an epistemological problem.”
What’s your response?
That would be the ultimate goal of the power game feminism is playing. Political correctness is another tool for that, censoring my thoughts.
If you want to convince me, show me things I can perceive and factor into my estimate of the situation. Don't ask me to simply believe stuff. That would be mind control and power games, and I am not playing.
What? You're just saying in a roundabout way that the truth is whatever you think it is. That doesn't make any sense.
What would it take for you to accept the conclusion of the posted study at face value?
Usually when I encounter someone claiming a great feminist agenda, their minds were made up beforehand and they never even tried to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong. Maybe you're the exception, but that would be counter to my perceptions.
Waiting "until people stop talking crazy" just means no action, ever.
This has nothing to do with being attractive. Ask a bunch of your female friends how many of them started getting catcalls at age 12. You might be surprised.
I brought this up to my daughter, who is 24. She said "Yeah, I was warned not to be alone with him when I was 10".
And I, as a devoted father who has a very close relationship with his daughter (she's one of my closest friends, honestly) had no idea about this. This should give all men pause. What else do you not know about, that happens to your spouses, your sisters, your daughters, your mothers, your friends?
Here's the thing. It's so common for women that they don't detail every little incident in their lives to every man in their lives, because it's too much to track. Do you remember every driver who cut you off in traffic? That's kind of the level of the low-grade sexual harassment women deal with. It's just about every day.
So no, I'm not told everything. And hopefully, most of the time, it's not that the women in my life are afraid to speak up to me about it. It's not that my then ten year old daughter was afraid or ashamed to talk to me about being warned about a lecherous, creepy man in a position of power. It's that even then, she knew it was part of life as a woman.
By age 10, I had already asked a few female friends to be her "bad aunties". Their job was to be adult women she could talk to who weren't in her chain of command - not parents, or teachers, or officials of any sort. They were there to listen and advise when she needed it. And they were specifically asked to keep her confidence no matter what - even from me, and her mother. And she knew this. She knew she had adult women her life she could turn to when she didn't have anyone else she felt safe with, knowing that her parents trusted them with her.
I recommend this to every father.
Here's the thing, business interactions are not the appropriate venue for expressing sexual interest. If someone is giving a pitch to VC's to secure funding for their company, it should be about business, not about someone trying to satisfy their sexual desires.
> It seems to me sexual interest is a normal aspect of human life.
Lots of things are a normal part of the human experience, but are not appropriate in a professional setting.
> And being attractive also has advantages, that the #metoo crowd never mentions. We don't really know how many women actually benefited from being attractive.
No, no, no, this is wildly misguided. Full stop, #metoo is about sexual misconduct and the culture that allows it. Even if some women are given preferential treatment due to their looks, it in no way justifies sexual abuse/misconduct. It does not justify abusing power to suit sexual whims, even if some women acquiesce to it.
That's true, but I've given this a lot of thought, and I've come to the conclusion that it's simply impractical and inhumane to forbid romantic/sexual interest in a professional setting. Let's face it, most new people you meet in your adult life, you meet through your job, and many people start relationships and even marriages with their coworkers.
I think we should encourage emotional maturity and sensible behaviour instead. Although this too is difficult, because most people can't achieve the former, and the latter is extremely elusive especially in the current climate.
Romance in the workplace shouldn't be forbidden under any and all circumstances but there should be a number of definite parameters:
I don't think there is anything wrong with politely inviting someone to hang out after work to see if the interest is mutual. If the answer is no, that's it, you don't ask again.
Expressing 'sexual interest' at work to me means communicating that you want to have sex with someone, which I don't think is appropriate at work. That would be along the lines of inviting someone to spend the night, sexual innuendos, or other forms of flirting. All of that is problematic in the workplace.
Some people will argue, "What if the interest is mutual?" Sure, but many people don't/won't perceive when it is not, and work is not for finding sexual partners.
'Romantic interest' is more along the lines of communicating you'd want to date someone. Even that is not something that should be going on at work. If two coworkers establish a connection and pursue that outside of work, ok.
Even then, a superior should never date subordinates. And in a sales or investment situation, it should be off limits to proposition someone seeking the sale/investment. Someone pitching their startup shouldn't feel pressure to reciprocate someone else's advances in order to preserve a chance for funding.
> I think we should encourage emotional maturity and sensible behaviour instead. Although this too is difficult, because most people can't achieve the former, and the latter is extremely elusive especially in the current climate.
I would agree, but what does 'sensible' mean? I think many times the offender didn't think they were doing anything wrong. I think people need to speak directly to what is ok and what is not ok so that there's a shared understanding.
Ah, yeah, that's exactly what I meant. The "rules" need to be clarified and spelled out as much as possible. It's just that I'm not smart enough to decide on what they should be (in part also because I'm very adaptable and extremely tolerant to behaviour others consider inappropriate).
That is bullshit feminist invented to support their victim narrative. It used to be 30% or more of couples met at work. It is normal to fall in love or get interested in people you are surrounded with.
This "professional environment" feminists love to talk about doesn't exist, because people are not robots. People have relations with each other. Even among men, there will be colleagues that bother you, or some that you like and become friends.
There are maybe some rare cases of companies aiming for that "professional appearance", but it is all fake. If that is your thing, go seek out such companies. But don't ask other people to change their work environment.
For an investor, their main professional task is to determine if someone is a good risk for investment (possibly with other people's money, who are trusting this person to make good decisions). If their criteria is a quid pro quo for sexual favors rather than whether or not someone's startup is a good place to invest, they're not doing their job. They're doing the opposite of their job.
Likewise, a manager who promises advancement in exchange for sexual favors is advancing someone based on their willingness to sleep with them rather than whether or not the person is a good candidate for advancement. Again, not only is that manager doing a shitty job at being a manager, they're almost doing the worst possible job at being a manager. It's akin to promoting someone based on their personal loyalty to the manager rather than their ability to do the job. It happens all the time but that doesn't make it any better.
TL;DR, even ignoring whether or not someone is a victim in this situation, and not caring about any of the moral or ethical aspects, the harasser has still shown themselves to not be worthy of their job. The most selfish, amoral interpretation of the situation still demands getting rid of the harasser, even if all you care about is business success and are willing to overlook everything else.
Nah, it's way worse. Promoting based on trust can be good, trust is a very important commodity (and hard to come by). In contrast to sexual availability or whatever.