But that’s just it. In the other thread, HR told them there was a complaint, and they belittled the woman and called her “chickenshit” and that she had to “run to poppa” or whatever it was.
I asked if men touch touch one another in that particular manner to control what they say. Who in this thread said yes(without changing it to grabbing wrists, back pats and the like)?
Have you discussed your condition with a physician?
If you have consent then you’re golden. If I hold my arms up to invite a hug from someone and they step in, I have consent for the hug. Now, if they decide that’s an invitation to grab my ass they’re gonna get a big surprise. Hugs are not the same thing as ass grabs. If I invite a hug and get an outstretched fist bump hand then I go for the fist bump, that’s the extent of consent I have.
If you work in a place where everyone has established they are okay with casual touch then fine, consent is there. When a new person gets hired, though, I’ll bet five bucks right now that all those casual touchers pull back until/unless the new person indicates they consent to the touching and if they’re just not comfortable with it then it would be absolutely not okay to insist they conform to the norm for the rest of the workplace. Because that person has the right to decide what level of body contact they’re comfortable with and everyone else has the absolute reponsibility to respect that.
Likewise, if you were okay with casual physical contact but have decided that in the case of one person that contact is not as casual as you’d assumed and you now feel uncomfortable, you have the absolute right to put up that boundary for that one person only and to have it respected. It’s not rocket surgery, FFS.
My take is that the “anti-touching” positions expressed here are the new and future norms, and your peculiar work environment is still following the old norms, possibly because teaching is a social activity and schools not a very formal environment. But that what you describe is going the way of the dodo in my opinion (which, once again, I regret).
New generations of teachers will probably have more and more restrictive views about what kind of touching is acceptable. Equating unwanted touching and assault has become so common that this kind of tolerance can’t last for long.
People who have been told all their life that one should never touch a stranger unless they’re 150% sure that this touch is welcome (for instance by people posting on this thread who are their parents), and that a stranger touching them is at best rude and at worst a criminal can’t feel comfortable when any coworker feels allowed to touch them for any random reason. We’re still at a stage where a lot of people haven’t been raised with the idea that touching is wrong by default, and that any touch requires a lot of soul-searching about body autonomy and sexual agression, but at some point only dinosaurs won’t have been raised this way.
Yeah, that’s absolutely a difference, and I meant to be clear on that: when I talked about what my response would be to HR, that’s because I think that’s a reasonable and appropriate response, not the hyperdefensive response the other poster had.
As for the changing of norms, my first extensive experience as an adult in an elementary school was an internship at an elementary school garden, back in the mid-nineties. The cooperating teacher was a man, and he told me that under no circumstances should I ever touch a child.
A decade later, in 2006, I went back to school to become a teacher, and checked with a couple of different professors to verify that that should be my policy. They looked at me like I was simple and said, “No, of course not. Kids need touch, and you need to be able to hug a sad kid, or put a hand on their back, that kind of thing.”
The no-touching idea has been around for at least 20 years, in my experience, but I’m not seeing it changing, at least in an elementary school setting.
I’m curious about other elementary schools, though. Folks with elementary school kids, do you see the adults at the school engaging in this kind of casual touch?
That’s a perfect example of what I say. Nowadays, the same language is used for touching and for sexual intercourse, and the same type of restraint is expected for both. As if touching a body in any way is something extremely intimate that requires prior authorization as opposed to a perfectly natural and usual way to communicate and interact between human beings. The body has become sacrosanct.
With this way of thinking becoming widespread, there’s no way relaxed attitude towards touching that ** Left hand of dorkness** experiences can last for long.
This is a fair point. I was trying to think about that in the context of a new team member who came on this year. She’s great–but she’s also far more conservative, in appearance and religion, than the rest of us casual heathens. She doesn’t come to afterschool events, she’s not interested in my rabble-rousing, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her touch anyone. If I needed to get her attention, I’d be a lot more hesitant to tap her on the shoulder than I would be with other co-workers. I’m not quite sure why.
Absolutely. This falls under the “tell people your needs” umbrella. If someone gives me the slightest glimmer of a hint that they don’t want me to touch them on the shoulder to get their attention, I’d be not quite mortified, but I’d be pretty abashed, and of course I wouldn’t touch them ever again.
The tricky part is where to draw rules. I’m imagining some responses to being touched on the shoulder:
- Person is fine with it.
- Person cringes.
- Person asks me nicely not to do so.
- Person asks HR to ask me not to do so.
I’d be okay with all of these.
- Person gets pissed off at me and asks HR to discipline me for touching them on the shoulder, without ever doing 3 or 4.
That’s where it’d be a little weird to me.
There’s another thing that may come into play: how do folks feel about verbal interruptions?
If I’m talking with a student about how they added some numbers together, trying to figure out where they went wrong, and another teacher has a super-quick question for me about whether we’re going out for recess despite the rain earlier that morning, the teacher’s got a few choices:
- Stand behind me and wait. This may take several minutes, depending on what I’m doing.
- Touch my shoulder to get my attention. This lets me finish my thought before turning my attention to them.
- Interrupt me verbally.
I would much rather the teacher do 2 than 1 or 3. The verbal interruption can be disorienting, and I get way more annoyed at verbal interruptions than I do at a shoulder-touch. And waiting for a long time will seem weird and inefficient to me if it’s a quick question.
But IMO that’s not the right POV, or even a realistic one. The assumption is that the receiver or the Touch gets to decide for themselves whether it’s an OK Touch or a Bad Touch ; and in the latter case will be helped by the law.
In the overwhelming majority of innocent cases however, it will be just that : innocent. And yeah, the touchee coulda sued your ass but they won’t, because it didn’t bother them and they don’t want to make a fuss about it and it’s pretty much a non-event, yadda yadda.
In those case that are problematic, for one reason or another, it’s better to be able to point out to a baseline, simple, but most importantly *provable *infraction. See my post in the “military rape” thread. Yeah, a woman might sue you for touching her wrist. But if she’s suing you for that, there’s a good chance you did far more than that to her - it’s just easier to prove and less damaging to her reputation to sue you over touching her wrist in the cafeteria than raping her in the copy room.
At the same time, the sheer amount of opprobrium doled out by employers, coworkers, industry and society alike to any whistleblower, about any corporate dysfunction (nevermind social, sexual dysfunction), ensures that yeah, no, you’re not going to get sued by the redhead from accounting you’ve never even talked to, Keith. And **if **you do and **if **she’s just a gold digger, it’s gonna come up. It’s gonna come up even if you forcibly raped her in the arse on camera, buddy. It’s fine. For you.
- Stand next to you yelling “HEY! HEY!” as loud as I can while waving my hands in front of your face.
What?
Have already.
Yes in actual meetings. It’s usually a subtle thing in the meeting in progress and much more often the female chair/director to the other (male) leader; they sit next to each other. I’ve seen the other way too. Both reacted tp the message that was intended to be communicated. A look and then wrapping it up, sometimes with a comment of not realizing the time.
And I’ve been gently touched during same monthly meeting by male and female docs next to me in these same meetings to get my attention to ask something (relevant to the main discussion) in a whisper that would not disrupt the meeting.
This is every day normal communication behavior to me.
This seems like a perfect opportunity to promote my new, unisex business burka.
Head to toe coverage from prying eyes, unwanted touches, and troublesome HR issues.
Comes in navy and charcoal pinstripe.
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Heh. I see you’ve been around elementary school students.
I actually have an ongoing conversation with my kiddos about this. A lot of kids want to get my attention by shouting, “Mr. Dorkness! Mr. Dorkness!” over and over, or else just shouting their question at me.
The worst are the kids who literally poke me in the arm to get my attention. My response is to whirl on them with my best angry emu face and poke them in the arm over and over until they cringe away giggling; it only ever takes one time for them to get the idea that maybe I don’t like to be poked.
For kids, then, I have a rule: if you want my attention for a non-emergency, sit at your seat with one hand raised and the other hand working. I’ll get to you as soon as I can, and if it’s going to be awhile, I’ll tell you that.
But with adults, the rules are a little different, because we all respect each other’s time and ask for help a lot more rarely.
…I’m getting pretty off topic, aren’t I? Sorry.
New and less of an extreme abnormal outlier than before but not to my view or experience the norm.
Non-sexual touch has been part of normal communication, well, forever. Certain cultures have forbidden it between genders outside of marriage (see Orthodox Judaism for example) but they have been exceptional and have some difficulties with those rules when interacting with the secular world.
Should we have prior consent for all communication?
My own kids were once that age 
I’m wondering if the real object of concern should be gendered touch, or Bidening.
If there’s a kind of touch you’re only willing to give to women, but not to men, maybe that’s the problem?
I totally wouldn’t mind. I’m at the grocery store looking for something,with my earbuds in, listening to a podcast. A stranger taps me on the shoulder. I have to turn off my podcast, remove my earbuds, get my hearing aid container out of my pocket, power up the device, put it in my ear, and say, “yes?”.
“Ummmmmmm. . . Do you know what aisle the pickles are in, they used to be right after the mustard, but they aren’t anymore. My husband likes pickles, but not the sour kind.”
It’s not that important to touch people at work. The benefits are not so tremendously great that they outweigh all the negatives. If no one touched anyone at work there would hardly be any difference. Say “Excuse me” to get someone’s attention. If they don’t respond, say it louder. Tell someone they did a good job without putting their hand on their shoulder. They’ll still get the compliment and you won’t have to worry if they’re icked out by being touched. It’s almost always unnecessary to touch someone at work. Certainly it can be effective in some case, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way and that non-contact methods would be ineffective. I highly doubt that the man touched her wrist as a last resort to get her to stop talking. It sounds like it’s the first thing he did. Why not just say “Let’s table it until next time” and leave out the touch?
And in this example:
Although that’s pretty benign touching, it would probably be just about as effective if they just said your name first instead of touching “DSeid… what did they mean by that”. I can’t imagine that it would be impossible or disruptive to get your attention without touching.
And this is sidestepping the issue that touch is often part of real sexual harassment: That the touch is sometimes done because one person is attracted to the other and wants to engage in physical contact. The harasser starts with something small that can be explained away if the person objects. “Oh, I was just trying to get her attention.” And then the accuser is made to like they get offended easily because they made the accusation. If a “no touching in the office” rule makes harassment that much harder, I’m all for it.
Well, there are several kinds of touch I’m only willing to give to women.