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Comment by samd | Hacker News Reader

Implicit in your comments is the idea that you can't work with women without the risk of lawsuits. This is classic victim-blaming.

The problem is not the lawsuits. The problem is harassment, and further, the men who are so incapable of not harassing women that they segregate their workplaces.

We should recognize that the number of lawsuits pales in comparison to the incidence of actual harassment. We should be blaming the perpetrators of this harassment, and the men who would avoid working with women rather than change their behavior. We should not be blaming the women who raise these suits, or decrying their nature, as there is a very real and serious problem of sexual harassment in our industry.

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Allegations of victim blaming tend to be used to shut down conversastion rather then contribute to it. There are times when mentioning victim blaming is appropriate, but you have to be extra careful with this concept.

If anything, this case is system-blaming. More importantly, it is looking at how the system works, and what unintended effects are attempts to improve have. Specifically, observing that the increase is lawsuits leads to the creating of single gender environments, harming other metrics of gender equality. There is no concept of blame in this observation. It is merely a conjecture about cause and effect which can be used to make more informed choices.

Having recognized this we may decide that sexual harrasment lawsuits are not worth it, in which case I may leave the country. Or we could look for ways to conduct these lawsuits in a way that is less damaging. Or we may decide to use/develop other responses to sexual harrasment before going to a lawsuit.

This is a discussion that needs to be had, and your response preculudes it.

Nothing of that nature was implied; rather, you read misogyny into the comment due to your own biases.

The original post was very careful not to put either sex in either role. It even went so far as to not exclude homosexual relations by suggesting that you'd want three people in the room despite a segregated workplace.

Your post, in contrast, insists that harassment suits are always filed by woman against men. It goes so far as to suggest these hypothetical employers must be men and that their motivation is an inability to control themselves.

The implication was simply that as sexual harassment cases become more costly, it may be pragmatic to take more drastic measures to prevent them. I'm very disgusted by your post.

Allegations of "Victim blaming" are a classic tactic to shut down discussion by implying that anyone who steps out of the appropriate mental box will be deemed an accomplice.

Discussion about what, exactly? That women are not trusted enough to not bring false allegations, therefore men should always have witnesses to make sure that men are not victims of even false allegations?

Seriously, if you are the victim of a false allegation that is later proven to be false, then your reputation is not destroyed. If you are the victim of one instance of a false allegation that later reveals a pattern of bad behavior, then you should not have behaved badly in the first place.

You can invent whatever descriptions you wish, but it is victim-blaming. Vague threats of a public backlash against sexual harassment lawsuits is an attempt to blame women for filing them and attach implicit suspicions to their claims. Reminder that Tinder has confirmed the inappropriate messages.

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