You're describing power within an industry, not our culture. You are for no reason attributing the action of a few to many. Which is sexist.
> and the idea of consent shouldn't be overused and watered down to apply to every difficult situation
I got the impression that's what the article was doing. That was my main issue, it seems to take consent and MeToo and frame it in a very juvenile manner, contextualized with teenagers getting to know their sexuality and first experimenting not sure about what they want, like or how to act. Where consent and MeToo is about preventing serious sexual abuse, not dealing with a breakup or an ackward kiss.
The change is the corruption is visible now that the internet is a thing. The making of the democratic sausage has always been a disgusting process.
The point is that it isn't a few men. If you listen to women most of them have accounts of how they've been harassed in some way. A recent (2018) survey[1] found that 81% of women had experienced verbal sexual harassment, and 27% reported physical sexual assault. That is not "a few" men giving the rest a bad name. Also it is not sexist to point it out.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/21/587671849...
Sorry but this stats does not support your claim...? If the stats phrasing was "81% of men had conducted" it would support your claim, but experienced doesn't in any way means that every woman that experienced harassment experienced it from one unique male each time (which is probably the least likely implication of all).
It is sexist to point it out, just at it is racist to point to incarceration rate (weighted by population) of blacks to call a black person more prone to disobedience. (or male incarceration rate, for that matter) It is a classical classroom example case of misrepresentation of statistic to make discriminatory remark, or shift the blame to a group.
That's not the claim I was making though. What I said was that we don't know if it's a minority of men who are harassing women. The stats don't tell us that. The assertion that it's very few men doesn't really hold water though, simply because women everywhere report the same experiences. Consequently there are men everywhere who are harassing women.
It is a classical classroom example case of misrepresentation of statistic to make discriminatory remark, or shift the blame to a group.
I'm not misrepresenting the statistics. I'm saying that the statistics tell us there's a massive problem with sexual harassment of women and we don't know if that's from a minority or a majority of men. You're not using the statistics when you say it's a minority of men. You're making an unfounded and unproven assumption.
I would hope that it's not a majority of men, but whether it's 1%, or 5%, or 25% of men isn't something I'd like to even guess at. My partner tells me that it's far closer to 25% than 1% though, and I believe her.
The assumption that we've got no evidence and therefore we'll go with your partner's estimate is unlikely to carry the debate. That is why people are calling your comment sexist. [No argument -> could be 25% of men!] is a sexist position. Plus this is a forum flooded of men so that flaw there will be spotted pretty quickly.
We should not confuse perpetrators and victims.
From the several hundreds of men I know as friends, class mates, colleagues, I have never experienced a single one cat calling, groping, grooming or doing worse kinds of sexual harassment. In hundreds of parties and thousands of work situations, I've never seen it. Not even once.
I've seen both men and women circulating sexually charged jokes or telling such jokes in work environments, and I've seen both men and women comment on each others looks or hitting on each other, both when it was wanted and unwanted. But that's it.
Yes, that's just my anecdotes, but it seems far more likely to me that we are talking about a small percentage of men doing it all the time than most men doing it sometimes.
But I remember reading that rapes are similar. One person is doing it multiple times till he get caught.
But I think it is very possible like you said that a few can impact a lot of women by just repeated behavior. Somehow I hope so at least.