Why should I? I have no fear the males who report to me will misinterpret what I say or file a false allegation. But I am very concerned a female will misinterpret what I say or file a false allegation. Not sure about other places, but where I work you are guilty until proven innocent (and good luck trying to prove you’re innocent) when an allegation occurs. I and other supervisors have seen this firsthand, and we have all adjusted accordingly.
This is not an illustration of the problem of a culture of reporting sexual harassment. This is an illustration of the problem of a culture of sexual harassment in the first place.
There’s a reason that women may be suspicious of male colleagues asking them to drink socially, and that’s because while some offers may be perfectly innocuous, with many others (and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s a majority of times) there is either an ulterior motive from the start or else the male colleague misreads the woman’s willingness to come for a drink as a willingness to do more than drink and the situation then evolves into something unpleasant. And so the woman either has to remain perpetually on guard (which isn’t relaxing and which can result in misinterpretation of her part of innocently-intended acts or statements) or refuse outright (and seem rude). And so we have a situation where neither party can fully relax and both must walk on eggshells to avoid giving the wrong signals. And while I’m not remotely suggesting that the level of risk is equivalent, it still creates the sort of problem you highlight.
If so many men didn’t act like entitled jerks and/or sexual predataors, women wouldn’t have to be so legitimately paranoid about this shit and maybe you could offer a drink without her worrying about your intentions.
TL;DR version: This is why we can’t have nice things.
(Genuine advice: try a noncommittal offer next time: “I’ll be in the bar later if you get bored and want to chat.” And leave it at that.)
Conversely, the women have a legitimate fear that you, as their boss, may attempt to coerce them (or worse) to have sex with them under threat of losing their job or other significant career damage, as happens to women A LOT MORE OFTEN than false allegations against men do. And even if they agree to the sex, they still have to worry about both their careers/jobs and their safety, because if they’ve agreed once their ability to protest any future coercion goes out the window AND their career gets destroyed.
But never mind all that. Let’s talk about your problems.
If you treat your employees differently based on their gender or sex, you should be disciplined for discrimination.
Your fears about your employees should not lead you to treat them differently.
At no point in this thread did I ever do anything remotely like “defend sexual assault”, either as a consequence of male libido or anything else. To claim that I did is insulting and so far off base as to be essentially threadshitting. In post #82 Gyrate said “If so many men didn’t act like entitled jerks and/or sexual predataors, women wouldn’t have to be so legitimately paranoid about this shit and maybe you could offer a drink without her worrying about your intentions.” I agree with this. If you think the word “horndog” sounds too innocent, then substitute “men who act like entitled jerks and/or sexual predators” because that was my intended meaning.
Up in post #74 I cited an article about the #MeToo backlash, from the Harvard Business Review, and about how it’s getting worse. It’s hardly the only one – Google “MeToo backlash” for thousands of others.
I wrote in the above-cited post about how I once managed a team of young interns, about a third of whom were young women. We worked hard, accomplished many successful projects that went into independent formal testing and then into production in a major organization, and socialized constantly. They were good times that I remember fondly. One of the girls during one term was a tremendous hockey fan and lamented the fact that it was virtually impossible in this town to get Toronto Maple Leafs tickets, except through scalpers. I had a contact at the NHL at the time and got a pair of free tickets that I gave her to an upcoming game (it may even have been a playoff game, can’t remember). She was delighted beyond words, I was happy that she was happy, and life went on, with a little bit more happiness in the world than before. I wouldn’t dare do that today – quid pro quo would be suspected.
The response from the naysayers to the new fear of women is filled with words like “if” and “should”. Sorry, guys, but the real world is not made up of "if"s and "should"s, it is what it is, full of unintended consequences. Women are being shunned and deprived of mentoring and networking opportunities because men are afraid of them. The term I used in a previous post is that #MeToo has made them, in the view of many innocent men, potential landmines. If I were still in the job of selecting interns, my conscience would force me to be equitable and hire interns only according to their skills, but I’d be very cautious about how I dealt with the young women. This could particularly be a problem if their work was substandard and they needed individual mentoring or needed to be warned that their rating at the end of the term would not be good if their work didn’t improve. These are legitimate management concerns, but fraught with peril in the #MeToo era.
…treating innocent women as “landmines” seems like a really fucking stupid thing for so called “innocent” men to be doing. And if they choose to punish women for these so called views then they aren’t really innocent at all.
Some men are crap bosses and coworkers. We already knew that, with all the harassing, groping, and worse. Those men remain crap bosses (but bosses nonetheless), even if they’re more scared to harass or grope.
It hasn’t changed anything for me with my team at work. I’ve seen no rash of false accusations in workplaces. If you’re afraid, that’s your problem. Same goes for other men who feel fear about interacting with women. Just because you feel fear doesn’t mean something is wrong.
Yeah, the root problem here is creepy guys - I think that much we all agree on. A lot of HR training I have attended focuses on what sexual harassment is (and, more broadly, what is acceptable and unacceptable in the workplace); this, to me, feels misguided. I *know *what is okay and not okay - the vast majority of us do. The problem is that a significant minority don’t care.
I don’t see why on earth you can’t give free tickets to a game to a woman if you could give them to a man in the same situation. You gave her, I gather, a pair of tickets so she could invite whoever she pleased to go with her? That doesn’t carry any implications of sexual harassment. If you asked her to go to the game with you, that might be different; and might be inappropriate for employees of any gender, as not everybody wants to socialize with the boss in what’s supposed to be their off hours.
I agree with others here that the problem is your mistrust of women, not a genuine danger of false charges that exists only with women and not with men. Men can also bring charges of sexual harassment against other men; and this has been known to happen.
I haven’t seen a rash of false accusations in the workplace either. I’ve seen an uptick in complaints that a few years ago women might have just lived with but I consider that a good thing overall. I’d rather hear complaints about relatively minor issues and get those taken care of before they turn into larger issues. However, you’re wrong when you say, “that’s your problem.” The careers of women may be hindered if they’re denied mentoring or other opportunities to fully participate in the workplace. And even if those men’s fears are unfounded, it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.
Okay, yes – this is another consequence of shitty men with authority and power. But it’s not the fault of the movement. Shitty people will behave shittily. Ignorant people will behave ignorantly. Maybe some of it can be improved by better education – that there’s nothing non-abusers have to worry about.
As far as the idea that “no innocent men have been convicted” I would like to point out that many of the lynchings of African American men during the pre-Civil Rights era were instigated by spurious claims that they raped or flirted with white women. Most notably The Grizzard Brothers in1892, LLoyd Clay in 1919, and Emmett Till in 1955.
That has nothing to do with #MeToo, and everything to do with Jim Crow and the white supremacist system and culture of America at the time.
Lynching victims typically weren’t convicted in a court of law. Lynching was typically an extrajudicial activity.
I’ll try for the third time to wrap this up and perhaps clarify. I fully agree with iiandyiiii about the basic motivations and accomplishments of the #MeToo movement. Our primary point of disagreement is that I believe that any social movement that is emotionally driven and gains its strength and traction from such emotion runs the risk of creating injustices if it overwhelms normal social mores or judicial standards, and that such injustices, regardless of how noble the cause they serve, should never be tolerated as acceptable collateral damage in a free and just society. I’m not just talking about false convictions, but also about things like malicious gossip within an organization or community that becomes career-limiting or career-ending for man a without just cause or accountability. And, rightly or wrongly, agree with it or not, it now affects women, too, because men are adopting what’s been called the “Mike Pence” attitude about being alone with them, socializing, or mentoring them. Again, just Google “MeToo backlash” for lots of examples and commentary.
Let me again quote Jo Glanville, the former director of writers’ group English PEN and an editor on Index on Censorship (and a female journalist, BTW): “I am always afraid when a mob, however small and well-read, exercises power without any accountability, process or redress. That frightens me much more than the prospect of Woody Allen’s autobiography hitting the bookstores.”
That is precisely my point. I admit that I’m slightly biased because I enjoy most of his movies and all of his books and think he’s a highly talented director, but nothing has changed since the controversial allegations of a quarter-century ago, during all of which time Allen has led a blameless life as a prolific and award-winning film director. Nothing, that is, except Dylan Farrow, in collaboration with Ronan Farrow and his book, resurrecting the same old issues from 25 years ago in the new #MeToo environment, causing Allen to lose both his book deal and funding for three new movies – over events that may or may not have happened and for which two separate investigations found no evidence.
What purpose does this serve and how does it the further the interests of a civilized society where everyone should feel they will be treated fairly? Women have certainly been treated unfairly for a long time, but the social environment has changed a great deal in recent years to correct that. Yes, iiandyiiii, there really is such a thing as “the old way of thinking”, but that’s pretty much gone out the window these days for most of us. There was a judge out west in Canada a few years ago who rather rudely suggested to the complainant in a rape trial that she should have been able to prevent it. I don’t know what he’s doing today but he’s not a judge any more, and has been disbarred. And so progress moves on.
iiandyiiii, I’m also disturbed by your superficial look at the Wikipedia entry on Jian Ghomeshi and concluding that the judge was an old fogey subject to “the old way of thinking” who erred in not finding Ghomeshi guilty. If you had been on the jury I have no doubt how you would have voted, regardless of the evidence. Others might have agreed with you, based on what I would call the “obviously a scumbag” theory, which fortunately for the cause of justice is not a theory in law, and this was a trial by judge alone. I suggest, if you’re interested, that you read the entire ruling which you can find in various formats by clicking on the first link in this article.
The short version is that each of the three witnesses lied about or omitted material facts in ways that were obviously calculated and not the mere confusion of victims of trauma. There are too many interesting points to list explicitly, but you might find paragraphs 88 through 94 of particular interest. Lucy DeCoutere is the only witness who openly identified herself. She is an aspiring professional actress who became a #MeToo advocate, which the judge noted as being entirely understandable, except for the extent to which she “embraced and cultivated her role as an advocate for the cause of victims of sexual violence [which] may explain some of her questionable conduct as a witness in these proceedings”.
Prior to the trial, she wrote to one of the other witnesses that she was excited for the trial because it was going to be “…theatre at its best. …Dude, with my background I literally feel like I was prepped to take this on, no shit. …This trial does not freak me out. I invite the media shit.”
And invite it she did. She hired a publicist, and gave 19 media interviews and received massive attention for her role in this case. Hashtag “ibelievelucy” became very popular on Twitter and she was very excited when the actor Mia Farrow tweeted support and joined what Ms. DeCoutere referred to as the “team”. In an interview with CTV news, Ms. DeCoutere even analogized her role in this whole matter to David Beckham’s role as a spokesperson with Armani.
There’s a lot more about her lying and attention-seeking but the judge concludes his analysis of this particular witness with the following:
“Let me emphasize strongly, it is the suppression of evidence and the deceptions maintained under oath that drive my concerns with the reliability of this witness, not necessarily her undetermined motivations for doing so. It is difficult to have trust in a witness who engages in the selective withholding [of] relevant information.”
I’m not celebrating Gomeshi’s acquittal. I’m celebrating the success of the rule of law. A guilty verdict given the evidence would almost certainly have been overturned on appeal. The omission of materially important facts by a publicity-hungry attention-seeker with a personal publicist and a personal vendetta is just one of many interesting sidelights of this case. It doesn’t mean she or any of the others weren’t genuinely victimized. It means they chose to be dishonest and didn’t get away with it.
ETA: Here’s a good article on the Ghomeshi verdict from Neil MacDonald, one of the CBC’s most respected senior correspondents and columnists:
You don’t like the Ghomeshi verdict, fine, but don’t take it out on the judge
It’s a good read, but for those without the patience, here are the first three paragraphs, and then the concluding paragraphs:
Even before Ontario Court of Justice Judge William Horkins finished reading his reasons for acquitting Jian Ghomeshi, social media began to fill up with the inchoate, point-and-screech bile for which it’s renowned.
The judge was immediately portrayed as an aging, shameful, misogynistic, hate-filled, victim-blaming, ignorant, abusive, sickening, brutally vilifying, mansplaining, privileged white male.
Those words are all chosen verbatim from tweets, some of them posted by educated people.
And it ends as follows:
But it was their lies that created the reasonable doubt, he said, and once that was created, “Even if you believe the accused is probably guilty or likely guilty, that is not sufficient. In those circumstances you must give the benefit of the doubt to the accused and acquit.”
Which he proceeded to do.
Windbaggery? Misogyny? Victim-blaming?
Sorry. What I heard today was a senior jurist behaving with the rigour expected of someone in his office.
Why is this movement any more “emotionally driven” than the Civil Rights movement, or the gay rights movement, or the abolitionist movement?
Why is this relevant? Shitty men will behave shittily. Ignorant men will behave ignorantly. Why is this the fault of #MeToo, rather than the men who behave inappropriately and don’t grant women the same opportunities?
Progress has been made, but not nearly enough. As for Allen, what do you object to? That many workers at the publishing firm didn’t want to work with a possible child molester? Or that the publishing firm acquiesced to these worker’s demands? Allen can still write and publish – but no firm is obligated work with him. There may be no way to determine factually whether Allen is guilty or not, but that is a legacy of our broken society – back then, men got away with the stuff, as a rule with few exceptions. If he’s innocent, it’s a shame if many people think poorly of him. But that’s not the fault of #MeToo – that’s the fault of a broken society that tolerated this kind of behavior for so long, making it impossible to determine all the facts in many circumstances.
That you’re still comfortable with these errors necessarily being described as “dishonest” or “deceptions” demonstrates that you still don’t get it. So often, society places women (and especially victims and survivors) in an utterly impossible position. Telling the whole truth is harmful. And sometimes, with the incredible gaslighting victims and survivors must endure, potentially beyond human endurance.
Your problem here is trust in a broken system, and a broken culture. I don’t know how I would have voted on such a jury, but I know that it’s wrong for the judge to have denigrated those women who were placed in an impossible situation by a broken society.
And your problem here is trust in a judge who still, demonstrably, doesn’t get it. “The expectation of how a victim of abuse will, or should, be expected to behave must not be assessed on the basis of stereotypical models. Having said that, I have no hesitation in saying that the behaviour of this complainant is, at the very least, odd.” He tries to pretend that he understand this stuff, but these sentences are in direct conflict. He still thinks there’s an “appropriate” and “inappropriate” way for victims of abuse to behave.
And “It is difficult for me to believe that someone who was choked as part of a sexual assault, would consider kissing sessions with the assailant both before and after the assault not worth mentioning when reporting the matter to the police,”
And “An inability to recall the sequence of such a traumatic event from over a decade ago is not very surprising and in most instances, it would be of little concern. However, what is troubling about this evidence is not the lack of clarity but, rather, the shifting of facts from one telling of the incident to the next. Each differing version of the events was put forward by this witness as a sincere and accurate recollection,”
Just again and again, he shows that he doesn’t understand the way society shits on victims and survivors. Maybe he didn’t find their testimony convincing, but it’s unacceptable to put this kind of impossible burden on accusers, adding to the gaslighting they face.
These women are placed in an absolutely impossible situation, period. Telling what appears to be relevant to them in the moment will likely screw them. Telling absolutely every detail of their lives will also likely screw them (“You must have enjoyed it if you send the guy flowers afterwards!”). No wonder they might be confused about what they should talk about. “The whole truth” is an easy-to-understand concept when you’re a man and you haven’t been gaslit your whole life about sexuality. But not necessarily when there’s never been anything approaching “the whole truth” in the way society has treated you with regards to sex, intimacy, and consent.
First I want say upfront my own experiences definitely color affect my views on these issues. I am a 44 year old male. I was sexually abused as a child more than once—once as as a toddler by a female babysitter, a second time at 8 by a 12 year old boy, and a violent assault at the age of 14 by three other teen boys. And I have seen one of my relatives be investigated by CPS and police of allegations that were proven to be false.
Second part of the reason I brought up lynchings is because at times the outrage mob on the internet at times resemble a lynch mob mentality. There have been numerous instances of people getting doxed and death threats because allegations and stories about what they allegedly did(or did not do) circulated on social media. And its not even people accused of sexual assault. Hunters have been harassed for posting pictures of game they killed online. People posted what they thought was George Zimmerman’s address online and an innocent couple was harrased who had nothing to do with. Look at the movie Richard Jewell—it’s about a security guard who was hounded by the media because they thought he was responsible for 1996 Olympics bombing. He received numerous death threats as well. It’s concerning because it’s easy to see the outrage and fury eventually leading to the killing of someone falsely accused even in today’s modern age.
Third I wrote and deleted, re-wrote and deleted what I was going to say multiple times. It’s frustrating to think about. On the one hand we don’t want a de facto anarchist state where serial killers and rapists have free reign to traumatize their victims. On the other hand we also don’t want a totalitarian state where a person can be convicted for life(or even executed) solely based on the word of one person. There’s got be a fair middle ground somewhere. But I’ll be damned to delineate what exactly it should be.(That’s part of the reason I kept re-writing this–I had hard time trying to figure out how we can protect the rights of victims and the rights of the accused.)
Can you identify a society that you think is doing it right? Maybe we can emulate that society a little bit. What society is doing it better than the USA?