I do consider that kind of touch wrong in the workplace. It wasn’t to grab the attention of someone who was distracted or in his way. It wasn’t done as a friendly greeting. It wasn’t done for a positive purpose. It was done to control the person to get them to stop talking. There are more workplace-appropriate ways to handle that situation that don’t involve touching. A touch like was described is like telling the person to shut up. There was no need to touch her at all. Just saying “let’s table this for next time” is sufficient.
Giving someone a pat on the back for a job well done is a positive action even if the person might like to be touched. But putting a hand on their back (or wrist or wherever) and telling them that they need to stop talking is a controlling action. That’s what I see as a difference in the justification for someone being offended by being touched. They may not like being touched in general, but if the touch is done for a negative reason, then I think they are justified in being upset and that kind of touching should be generally not done at work.
No, a significant percentage of people have ALWAYS hated being randomly touched but have finally started sticking up for their right to bodily autonomy and aren’t submitting to bullying and shaming if they don’t want random people laying hands on them without permission. You want to touch someone, touch yourself. Anyone else, keep your hands OFF unless invited.
I think both should be OK. I have a serious issue with considering touching as a threat as opposed to a part of natural human interaction. I associate touching with human warmth, not with assault, and I wish our norms wouldn’t be switching towards the latter.
To answer your specific question about a work meeting, yes I would find that totally acceptable and in fact perfectly normal. I don’t think that we’re at point yet where a man touching another man will generally be considered untoward and unacceptable. We might be at this point though, wrt a man grabbing a woman.
No, it’s a natural way of effectively catching someone’s attention. Once again I deplore that nowadays there is more and more a tendency of interpreting touch in the most negative way possible.
Even if you assume that this gesture has an imperative aspect to it (it’s likely to be used to stop someone from doing something), there’s nothing inherently toxic in expressing an imperative in a work setting. You can do it with words, tone of voice, face expression, or touching. It’s perfectly normal to tell someone to stop talking in a workplace. Making the assumption that it’s some form of toxic expression of male dominance to put a woman in her place and whatever else is just something you dreamed up. Telling someone “the meeting is over, let’s stop this debate” is perfectly normal, and stay normal regardless of the gender of the persons involved. Expressing it by a gesture or touch rather than by words doesn’t suddenly makes it more sexist or whatever.
As for not having ever seen a man catching another man’s attention by grabbing his arm, I find it difficult to believe. But then again we aren’t from the same culture, and possibly not from the same generation, which might be even more important in this case. Even with these caveats, I still find it difficult to believe, though.
True enough, but at the same time it seems like an (ostensibly) zero-tolerance approach is what’s necessary to make some people think about what the fuck they’re doing in the workplace. As the late Pratchett wrote, laws are there to make you think long and hard before you break them.
An ex of mine once made the “mistake” of going to work in one of those wraparound tops. I’m not sure what the fashion word for it is - basically it’s a long swath of fabric you loop around your torso and all tie up in a big bow. Well, one of her coworkers undid the bow while she was Xeroxing some papers, in a corner of the very open space floor. I’m sure in his mind it was “as a joke”, or playfully, or possibly “what she was waiting for” even because some men are shit that way. And the worst part of that story is, she was afraid of being made to look like a cocktease. So she never reported it. She didn’t even bitch at the guy, just rushed away from the situation. The guy, I would assume, never learned a thing from the whole event - possibly even resented her for “not being a good sport about it” or however creeps like that think.
But if you think about it from a lawyer’s point of view, there was no harm no foul there. He didn’t touch her, didn’t impose himself on her, didn’t assault her, certainly didn’t rape her. He just tugged at a piece of loose fabric while she was making copies. Nothing more. It was all in good fun. Just a joke.
And yet she felt humiliated enough, taken advantage of enough, pissed off enough that she told me that one story that’d stuck in her craw, *years *after the fact. So, how would you go around preventing that kind of… abuse ? Well, it’s not really abuse, is it ? It’s all in good fun, et y a pas mort d’homme, hein ?..
It all boils down, again, to the golden rule. With a weirdo caveat - if you adhere stricly to the golden rule, you could technically boobs my ex as long as you would be OK with being pantsed yourself. So the updated golden rule would be : stick to your fucking job, Keith. At all times.
Of those choices I’d see the light touch on the wrist as the least offensive and most appropriate way to communicate the need to move on, assuming that getting eye contact and communicating with facial expression is not possible. Overtly verbally interrupting a co-worker who is going on way too long, even without literally saying “shut up” is a bigger thing than the light touch on the wrist perhaps coupled with a quick look. Yes all communicate the same thing: “we need to wrap up here; please finish up.” … of the options the light touch on the wrist leaves the most power in the hands of the speaker as to whether or not to comply with the request and how to do it. Talking over the person, verbally cutting them off, with the request to wrap it up, would be worse, much more than what is “sufficient”.
Not sure what kinda lawyers you deal with, but I am a lawyer, married to a lawyer, and have worked as a lawyer 30+ years. Sure, certain lawyers would make a BS argument if they were paid to defend the guy, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine a single lawyer of the thousands I’ve known who would call the intentional disrobing of a cow-orker “no harm no foul.”
On the topic of touching (and sorry for a brief hijack), far more than any workplace touching, I’ve repeatedly been bothered by women - generally of a certain age - kissing me on the lips. Relatives, friends, whatever. I’m ok with a hug. If forced, a peck on the cheek is tolerable. But I have NO DESIRE to press lips against those of any female other than my wife.
Let me know when you see a male do that to another male in a business meeting…and let me know how the male being touched that way reacts, while you are at it. Every time I’ve seen it done it was a male coworker touching a female coworker and(farbeit from me to “mansplain” how females feel about such a maneuver, so corrections are certainly welcome) I have never seen the female being touched in that manner react positively.
Well, sure, but then again there’s “disrobing” and “intentional” in there. Surely a lawyer and husband/wife of lawyer can see where I’m going with this.
They didn’t expect the whole thing to fall off, they just saw a big old funny bow behind her back. Surely woman fashion is made so that your boobs don’t tumble out at the mere, literal tug of a string. Men aren’t expected to know about fripperies. And maybe if she didn’t want her boobs to fall out, she would have worn a pantsuit. CLEARLY she chose disreputable, unworkplace clothes, because she’s a whore. In support of my thesis on her being a whore, let me just tell you all about her sexual habits and past lovers that surely she won’t mind being made public…
And, well, maybe real court doesn’t work that way, even. Much less French court, when all of this is US court TV drama fare. I ain’t know. She ain’'t know. But that’s… kind of definitely part of the point ?
Do you know what really ticks me off? The fact that we have chased off too many females from this board to even pretend that this can be a fair debate. First person narratives from the point of the possible victims are needed in my opinion, but it may be too late in the life of this board to get a fair number of those.
Czarcasm, you keep asking if men do this to other men, posters keep saying ‘yes’ and you keep ignoring the answer you don’t like and asking it again. Yes I’ve seen men touch other men to ask a question or get their attention in a non-threatening way. It happens. It’s not viewed as harassment and it’s not only a male to female thing.
I’m the poster that brought this up in the other thread, and I’m apparently the outlier. The guy in question looked at the woman and question, and as he gestured to her lightly touched her wrist and said “we’re running out of time, let’s take this up first thing at the next meeting.”
My point was that it didn’t appear to be anything at the time, except to the woman in question of course. They guy wasn’t viewed as a “toucher.” This was among a group of pretty senior civilian leaders. The issue isn’t that she shouldn’t be touched if she doesn’t want to be. Or that she didn’t have rights. It was that there is some expectation, especially at the senior level, that peers should be able to work out minor issues with other peers. If you’re going to lead people, and manage millions (or billions) of dollars, you should have it in you to look someone in the eye and say “you touch my wrist at the end of the meeting, and I didn’t appreciate it, I hope that doesn’t happen again.”
If he says anything other than “I sincerely apologize, it won’t happen again” then she can still go to HR if she wants. But the issue many had in the office is that the ‘act’ didn’t appear to be commensurate with the reaction.
My point is that everything that happens between two co-workers isn’t a federal case as we used to say when we were kids, and everything doen’t have to go to HR.
As someone else said up thread, intent matters. The history between individuals matters. The actual act matters. As I said in that other thread, every interaction among peers that isn’t 100% satisfying to all doesn’t have to go to HR.
You would be offended if somebody asked you not to touch them?
So, because you thought he might potentially invade your space, you actually invaded his?
Why couldn’t you ask him to move away from the tripod without tapping him?
Tap on the table in front of them. Or raise your hand into their line of view – not a full hand block of their screen, just a bit of an attention gesture.
The question really isn’t only whether the touch is sexual, or even whether it’s controlling. Some of us get chalk-screeching-on-a-blackboard level effects by being touched unexpectedly, or in a context in which we didn’t invite the touch; even if we enthusiastically take place in touch in other circumstances.
Part of the problem is that if someone is oblivious to “tactful” attempts to get them to stop a behavior, they are going to feel like they were blind-sided and someone over-reacted when they finally DO get it. I’ve known plenty of people at work who got written up for something (not always involving touching/gender issues at all) and genuinely thought it literally came out of nowhere. But in each of those cases, their HAD been softer interventions, casual “heads-up” conversations, expressions of concern, etc., and they just whooooshed right over the head of the person targeted because the person just couldn’t grok that their behavior was problematic. So finally someone escalates it to a level they “get”, and then they are shocked and appalled that this came out of nowhere.
As a result, whenever anyone I don’t know tells me a story of work jumping their shit without any earlier indication about anything, I tend to reserve judgment.
So? You think it’s abnormal to get someone to stop talking in the workplace?
But telling her to shut up was the whole point. In fact the touch was immediately followed by a statement to this effect, if I remember correctly what the OP wrote. And once again, telling someone that it’s time to stop talking is not an abnormal behavior in the workplace. Are you arguing the contrary?
This is way too convoluted and overthought in my opinion. For one thing it’s you projecting all these hidden meanings in a simple gesture and a second thing is that there has never been a rule according to which touching should exclusively be used to express positive ideas and feelings.
That’s what I deplore : this injection of all sort of unwarranted assumptions about the meaning of a simple touch, and the desire to restrict it severely to some very specific circumstances. It makes it feel like touching is perceived as something inherently bad and to be avoided, except in some special, strictly limited, situations where it could be good. While the opposite used to be true, touching being a good thing by default, except in some special situations when it wasn’t.
As someone mentioned already, this isn’t some minor change to accommodate evolving sensibilities. It’s a massive change in how touching is perceived and of the resulting social norms. Pretty much a 180° turn.
Why are you giving him the benefit of the doubt here, and not her? How do you know it was the first time, that she hadn’t tried to talk to him about it first or that this hadn’t happened before between these two people? It’s okay to just reserve judgment if you don’t know.
The problem from my point of view is that there’s an assumption in this statement : the assumption that tapping him (or touching him in general) is inherently wrong, and can only become acceptable if there’s an imperative reason for it.
I’m genuinely bewildered by some of the attitudes here, because social norms are so different where I work. It’s a primarily (like 80%+) female work environment, and there’s a lot of casual touching. A hand on the shoulder is a very common and efficient way to get someone’s attention, and I’ve both used it and received it very often. Co-workers don’t hug a lot, but I definitely see hugs, especially with a teacher friend from a different school that you see at a meeting. Some coworkers will put a hand on your arm while telling a story.
A couple of weeks ago, the question of workplace touching came up, and I told a fellow teacher about our previous thread on the subject, and about the folks who said there should be no workplace touching at all. She was totally contemptuous: “That’s not assault,” she said, “That’s just normal human interaction.”
It may be different in part because we’re a pretty tight-knit group, and there’s a ton of socializing outside of work hours. We babysit for one another and go on trips together and hang out after work on Fridays and drink beer together and have book clubs together.
Of course if someone said they didn’t want to be touched I’d apologize and remember that. And if HR told me there’d been a complaint, I’d be mortified and I totally wouldn’t blame the complainer, and I’d change. And there are people here whose body language and level of formality makes me think that they wouldn’t want to be touched on the shoulder to get their attention.
But it seems to me that there are different legitimate cultural norms, and as in all situations, the best thing to do is to be aware of one another’s norms and make allowances. If you don’t like to be touched, let folks know; if someone lets you know, respect that.