There are a couple of problems with the CEO who gets fired for consensual sex with a coworker.
Often (See former Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn) there has been misappropriation of corporate resources as part of the affair. Or other reasons a board might no longer trust the CEO - he lied or tried to cover up the affair (also Brian Dunn)
It can be difficult, when there is a large power imbalance, to be sure the the relationship was truly consensual - and until the person in question is out of power, someone who is a victim may feel there is too much to loose by saying anything except its consensual.
In a corporate environment OTHER employees can sue for sexual harassment if favors are given by the person in power to his lover. You can sue the company because “she only got that promotion because she was sleeping with the CEO.” The affair impacts more than just the two people involved.
#4 This relationship might be consensual - but if the CEO is willing to cross the line to fish in the company pond - the next woman (or man) that is hit on might decide to sue.
Man, realistic sex robots cannot come fast enough
And Henry Cavill is a tool. If you are worried that a person might misconstrue innocent gestures or think of flirting as rape then said person needs to be dropped as a potential date forthwith. No need to cast aspersions on #metoo.
The people in my mother’s book club whose opinion ranged from “this thing made me understand book-burning” on down are women as well. Every single one of them. So’s Spice Weasel. So am I.
Do some women like dominant men? Yeah. But many more do not, and even then there is a difference between “I like a guy who takes charge” and “I like a guy who treats me like I’m irrelevant” or “I like a guy who completely ignores anything I do or say when it doesn’t match his desires.”
I get the corporate CYA rationale Dangerosa, and I even agree with some of it. But the reason I called it fuzzy was because I don’t agree that corporate HR principles and morality are functionally equivalent. I’ve known co-workers who had perfectly healthy and human relationships with no predatory or disrespectful behaviors but who could/would have been terminated for those relationships if HR had known about them.
Most of the #metoo firings are probably defensible, but that isn’t the same as right or fair. After all, cops can defend their choice to use deadly force in lots of situations too.
Aziz Ansari is the most famous one I can think of, but I’m sure there have been others. You can read what he was accused of - it’s easy to find and widely discussed and happened on a date. The reactions pretty much range from maybe he was a jerk and/or his date did stuff she regretted in retrospect to him being called a full-on rapist. Matt Damon was killed for daring to suggest that patting an adult’s butt is not exactly the same thing as child molestation. There are also all these calls for needing to ask permission and having an explicit “yes” for every escalation in a date, which I think will just create more incels and MGTOW types to be honest.
Even Ansari wasn’t accused of rape for leaning in to kiss someone, so that’s not a good example.
It is difficult for men to get anything “right” when it comes to these discussions, but that’s partly because there are trolls aplenty who want to stir up trouble. I mean, if you have enough followers you could go on Twitter and say the sky is blue and have 1,000 responses arguing with you.
Do you have any actual cites of women accusing men of rape for leaning in for kiss? Much less just talking to them in a non-sexual way.
Matt Damon is alive and well. You’re not helping your case with these kind of hyperbolic statements. Aziz Ansari is in a high profile version of a classic he-said she-said conflict. But he’s not under arrest, he’s not been fired, and most people seem to be willing to reserve judgment because there’s no slew of other corroborating accounts showing a pattern of abusive and coercive behavior. The allegations against him are also much more substantial than “he tried to kiss me on a date when I didn’t want him to.”
I know this is a confusing time for guys. I’m recently single myself, and my sons are reaching the age of dating as well. I’m telling them to go slow and communicate clearly with your potential partner. If her passion doesn’t match yours then back off and figure out why. That’s just good life advice a lot of these guys don’t seem to be willing to live by.
I’ve been hearing that since the “women’s lib” era, 50 years ago.
That’s really all a guy has to do - “If her passion doesn’t match yours then back off and figure out why.” It’s not hard to do, and if you do that, things shouldn’t be confusing at all.
The #metoo firings are all quite public, so can you name any that you think are not moral? I cannot think of any. (Yes, this includes Hardwick, who has not been fired, but suspended during the investigation. Until that is done, we can’t know if firing is correct or not)
This is why I find all this hemming and hawing to be strange. Where is this guy who has gotten in trouble for doing things that guys normally do? This doesn’t even feel like a massive change to me–just people finally getting caught for things we all already agreed were bad.
It seems to me that it’s the people who want to get away with that stuff trying to fan the flames and make this all confusing. But, that, if you ignore their influence, it really isn’t hard to follow at all.
Nothing sounds any different than how I approached dating back when I got out a lot and was actually trying. And that was, what, 10-15 years ago?
Obvious caveats up front - I’m 100% on board with #MeToo, I think Cavill’s statements are very silly, I think sexual assault is a much bigger problem than anything I’m bringing up here…
…But speaking as a guy who is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, holy shit this is not easy. Many people intentionally or unintentionally make flirting a process which is anti-inductive. If you don’t naturally have a knack for it, it can be very difficult. If you’re mildly autistic, it’s really, really hard, and often, if you learn at all, you learn the hard way. (Typically - hopefully - this doesn’t mean sexual harassment, but rather just being a little weird and creepy, which still sucks.) It got to the point where I started just dodging the pattern altogether by asking a lot of questions, and explaining to people that this was the reason I was asking those questions - because if I don’t ask, I might have trouble figuring it out on my own - and also going out of my way to make the subtext in our communication text, because, again, if I don’t ask, I might not figure it out. Questions like “when you say, ‘Sorry, I can’t do that day’, are you saying ‘I’m not interested’ or are you just busy?” - because seriously, I need to ask that question. Some people really don’t like that, but those are the people I probably shouldn’t be dating anyways, so that kinda works out.
Maybe this kind of hard and fast rule works well for you, but please don’t extrapolate to “it’s easy for everyone, I don’t understand how anyone would struggle with it”. It’s not always easy to tell how into it any given person is, and for some it’s a lot harder than others.
As Budget Player Cadet said, it’s not that easy. Some women like to be contradictory or play hard to get or have their yes mean no or their no mean yes. I have a friend (a woman herself) who once urged me to NOT take another woman’s “no” for a no and that a man should persist and not give up in the face of a “no.” Now, in that situation, she was talking about dating/pursuing someone, not referring to sex itself, but the point stands - some women themselves hold the viewpoint that a woman’s no shouldn’t be taken as a no and that a real man should persist until the woman is finally wooed, or something of that sort. That message is mightily confusing to many men - all the more so when it comes from a woman.
The willful ambiguity makes things very dangerous for BOTH genders involved, especially in the #MeToo era.
Yes, even today some women play hard to get. The question I have is this: why would you want to bother with them? They’re playing games. They’re stringing you along. You can’t trust them. And they have a very shaky relationship with the concept of consent–encouraging men to ignore their “no.”
If there are any women I’m worried about giving consent and then withdrawing it after the fact, it’s these women. At best, they’re just playing you. They just aren’t worth the risk.
But even if you disagree with me about them, sticking with “enthusiastic consent” doesn’t put you at any more risk. And it discourages women from playing these games. If men start taking “no” for an answer, then women will have to stop saying “no” when they don’t mean it.
There’s a very easy way to solve that problem: you don’t take that advice. Let your yes be yes, let your no be no, and treat what anybody else says as if they mean it.
There’s a long-standing joke that “nobody has sex in the Basquelands”, yet little Basque children miraculously get born every day. The joke is on and about the people who either try to play it coy (and are surprised when the interested gentleman goes off to be interested in someone else who plays it straight) or expect our women to play it coy (and can’t understand a thing when they laugh in their face). Little Basque children keep being born, but no, “nobody has sex in the Basquelands”.