A few thoughts on sexual harassment

Great Debates
1

As I meowed and stretched this morning, I thought of a few things I wanted to add to the inappropriate sexy stuff thread in ATMB, only to discover it closed. So I grabbed some coffee and decided to post them here.

I like boobs
'Cause they’re not shaped like cubes.
They’re not newbs on the intertubes.
They got more rhymes than “penis,”
Which only rhymes with “Venus.”
Word to your underwire.

I wrote it; I’m proud. Now let’s get serious.

Misogynist: Pertaining to hatred of women.
Sexist: Pertaining to the false belief that one sex is superior to the other. Note: Occasionally, one sex is superior to the other. Women are better than men at giving birth. Men are better at committing suicide and peeing into Coke bottles. I don’t count these as sexist.
Sexual: Pertaining to sex. Many women are sometimes touchy about this subject. When someone hurts you, by bringing up a touchy subject or otherwise, it’s natural to feel they hate you. That may or may not be accurate, but it does make for a well-trampled path between the three words.

I’m a guy. I got raped once. A teenager wanted to show what a sound sleeper I was, so he stuck pencils up my butt. Sure enough, I didn’t wake up. I don’t feel traumatized or violated or anything; I just see it as a stupid, childish, tiresome practical joke. I doubt a woman would have reacted like that. Men and women are different. This can make it harder to empathize with the opposite sex.

I once worked in an office where I started out acting like a gentleman, (hiding my true nature) only to discover I needn’t have bothered: the women were heavily into sexual banter. Not only are women different from men, women are different from each other . . . kind of like they’re . . . people. This can be confusing.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” has problems. “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them” is better. If some women are sometimes touchy about sex; well, I have my touchy subjects too, and maybe we can all watch out for each other’s and increase the amount of love and joy in the world. I do wish the emphasis in sexual harassment could be on harassment: it seems to me that if someone thinks women should be barefoot and pregnant, so he hides the new hire’s paperwork to try to drive her crazy, that that’s at least as much sexual harassment as if he told her she has a feminine hygiene problem–not in those words.

But then, I wish for a lot of things.

2

I think …
I don’t quite unders …
What is the poi …
I’d like to deba …

What the hell are you talking about?

3

Seconded. I’m interested in discussing this and understanding what people who say “misogyny” is occurring are talking about.

I did think you were off to a good start by laying out the different definitions. You also raise a very important and overlooked point about individual variability, including among women.

But, I’m not sure I see a good avenue to pursue laid out in your OP.

4

Yep, people sure are different, and even the same people have different rules of behavior and expectations in different environments. I’ve never taken offense among friends, not even when we are drinking at a party, not even when the guys gang up and throw out “you know how you women are” jokes or when they discuss matters of sex in gross terms. We like each other, we trust each other, and we can take a joke. We’re all pretty happy, well-adjusted folks with busy lives and enough experience in relationships and romance to know which lines not to cross. And there are few lines, really, among friends.

But at work, on the bus, at the store, it’s different. Strangers and coworkers don’t carry the same social credit, and I’m not comfortable with the same level of personal or intimate discussion with people I don’t know well. Let me try an example. In my personal experience, men who are sexually frustrated, bitter, or angry that they aren’t as successful with women as other guys are seem to carry around a seething hostility towards the very thing they want the most. Call it misogyny, call it sour grapes, call it the “nice guy” syndrome; I can’t label it easily because frankly, those labels are pretty offensive in and of themselves. But that uncurrent of hostility means that I don’t want that guy to flirt, to stand too close, to follow me to my car, to hover at work and make sexual comments. That guy is mad at women because we don’t do what he wants and we can all smell it on him. He’s no friend to us, and off-color comments from him aren’t welcome. I don’t trust that he has my best interests at heart and I don’t feel at ease or safe in his presence, either. That guy who feels entitled to the same level camaraderie and rapport as my male buddies tends to lack boundaries, and I’m not amused by fumbling, passive-aggressive jabs by that guy.

5

Sexism is my Dad complaining about women drivers circa 1985. Misogyny is Rush Lambaugh’s on-air days-long character assassination of Sandra Fluke in 2012. Oh yes it is. I’d fight about it.

But really not willing to argue over matters of rape, what constitutes assault vs. practical joke, degrees of trauma, etc., pertaining to someone’s personal experience. Hell no. Thanks for the lyrics though.

6

So then the years long character assassination of Clarence Thomas must be racism, right?

7

Don’t know about that, but he is such a slut!

8

Leave one pube on one soda can and they never let it go!

9

FWIW, when I came back to that thread, I’d planned on saying that after thinking about it, I don’t consider the jokes in the Popey Protestor thread to be jokes about sexual assault. Some folks put up some convincingly-reasoned arguments and I was convinced. (Others, of course, ranted incoherently, but that’s neither here nor there).

Just wanted to put that out there :).

10

Without knowing the individual jokey posters better, I can’t say for certain what they are motivated by, but I’m sure at least one observer felt that half-dressed Pope hat girl was naked because she was horny and in need rather than boldly making a political statement. The kind of guys who would interrupt her protest to flirt, make suggestive comments, or track her down afterwards and proposition her are certainly guilty of cluelessness, entitlement, or blatantly guilty of sexual harassment. And I don’t know how or why anyone would have to explain the difference between this protestor and an exotic dancer to an adult, but I guarantee there are some who would dispute the difference.

11

Are you suggesting that exotic dancers want to have sex or should be sexually harassed?

12

Actually there was a recent thread in ATMB where several posters were insisting that sexism is a one way thing, and that men cannot be the target of sexism. If an army rounds up and kills every male in a town, that’s not sexist.

13

Yes, but the jokes made in the thread were jokes about desires to perform acts. What convinced me was olive’s point–it’s perfectly fine to have desires to perform acts with particular people and to fantasize that those people would be down for it. It’s crude to tell random strangers about those acts, and those fantasies are fantasy, but they’re not fantasies about sexual assault so much as they’re fantasies about people being a lot less discriminating in their partners than people generally are.

Anyway, that’s what convinced me.

14

You’re kidding, right?

15

Frankly, I was surprised to read what you wrote, so I thought I would check.

16

I missed something, not sure what prompted this. Elaborate if you don’t mind.

17

The idea that they were fantasizing about rape was never the argument, though. The problem was entirely that they saw the woman and made the assumption she was up for sex based on how she was dressed, even though there was ample evidence otherwise. Over and over we had people arguing that the thread was inherently sexual because of the girl’s actions.

The argument was about results, not about thoughts. Their assumption that she invited sex was wrong, so that resulted in the jokes being about sexual assault, even if that was not their original intent. Of course their fantasies were about a willing partner.

No one argued that the jokers themselves were misogynistic, just that their jokes depended on the misogyny of assuming the girl was up for sex in order to make sense. There is no joke if you think they walked up to the girl and asked if they could spank her, for example. There is no joke on the licking the crucifix unless you think the guy went up and asked her to allow that, which, in the form stated, would be a form of harassment.

The jokers are not rapists. They don’t support sexual harassment. They probably wouldn’t do whatever was in their jokes. That doesn’t mean that there’s no misogyny present. It’s not a simple dichotomy. And what was so infuriating to me was everyone falling over themselves to say there was no way any misogyny was present.

Heck, the jokes themselves didn’t faze me. It was the adamant defense of them that led me to post. You might think the joke was acceptable, but it makes no sense to deny even the remotest possibility of misogyny.

18

Yes, people were literally expressing their planned, intended behavior based on their belief that she was soliciting sex. Quite an astute read on the situation there.

19

If the argument had been that there was the remotest possibility of misogyny in some of those jokes, I doubt there would have been much argument.

20

IMO, the term misogynist is way incorrectly over used.

Most people use that word when they actually mean “Chauvinist”