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Comment by underpand | Hacker News Reader

Women that come forward with iron proof are still branded problematic or difficult to work with, ending their careers and launching direct personal targeted harassment of the sort you clearly have never experienced. The idea that women have nothing to lose by making allegations is entirely at odds with what happens in reality.

I’m familiar with Susan Fowler, and I’m sure she represents many other such victims; however, I’ve also read a number of stories like TFA, and presumably they equally represent a contingency of victims. Moreover, I don’t understand why these things need to be pitted against each other as though we have to choose one horrendous injustice or another. Victimizing innocent men doesn’t help victimized women, and contrary arguments are abhorrently sexist.

Our best data on the subject suggests that very few innocent men are being victimized, to use your falsely equivalent language. An overwhelming preponderance of evidence makes clear that a non trivial fraction of men in power are serial abusers who get away with these behaviors habitually. Your argument boils down to "people pointing out the sexism are the REAL sexists" which as you might expect, is not convincing to the rest of us.

Then point is that punishing powerless innocent people doesn't solve the problem of guilty powerful people.

What are “our best data”? The #metoo era only began in the last couple of years, and I’m unaware of a rigorous academic effort to investigate its victims to the degree that we have investigated female sexual victimization over the last several decades. And this makes sense given the portrait of fear on university campuses—no one wants to look like they’re not “part of the team” lest they be subject to their own Ordeal. We do have a number of very convincing cases of excesses which certainly persuade me about the need for further investigation.

> Your argument boils down to "people pointing out the sexism are the REAL sexists" which as you might expect, is not convincing to the rest of us.

Innocent men by definition aren’t sexists, and my point was that arguments to treat them as such (based on the idea that innocent men are responsible for the violations of guilty men by virtue of their common gender) is patently sexism. Maybe that’s not the point you were making; I just wanted to head that off in advance because frankly I’m sick of these disgusting lines of argumentation.

That you are unaware of data does not mean data does not exist. It merely means you've not cared enough about this topic to learn it.

Does this mean that you have the data, and might be willing to share?

> Our best data on the subject suggests that very few innocent men are being victimized, to use your falsely equivalent language.

"It's only happening to a few people so that's ok"? You sure that's the argument you want to make?

That certainly was true, but #metoo overturned that.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be incendiary, but there's exactly zero supporting evidence to back your assertion beyond wishful thinking. And there's innumerable counterexamples where women have had their careers ruined by men who have had an unfair power dynamic over them, after making claims of sexual harassment or unprofessional behavior, and more. The suggestion that only HIS career is vulnerable ignores the actual claims of tens of thousands of women coming forward in the last few years as part of the #metoo movement.

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