#MeToo backlash is hurting women (Bloomberg article)

Great Debates
101

You don’t know that. As pointed out by a previous poster, people almost always cite the same figures, whose reliability is very dubious, and it’s quite obvious to me that they pick this one because it supports their narrative by virtue of advancing an extremely low number, even though nobody can figure out how they even determined that an accusation was true or false.

What percentage of accusations are false is plainly unknown, and until we invent an actual lie detector, unknowable. Years ago, I saw a documentary about a sex crime police unit, and an officer guesstimated that 1/3 of rape accusations were false. I’m pretty sure you’ll think that the reason was that she didn’t believe women who were actually raped, but once again that’s just a preconceived notion on your part, and you don’t know that. And this police officer is probably as able to determine which accusation are true or false as the authors of a study that determine it’s rather 2%. The only thing you can possibly know, in the best case scenario, is how many accusations are proven false, which is likely to be only a fraction of the false ones since…how would you prove it, in most cases?
Believing that very few accusation of rape are false is an act of faith, especially knowing human nature. Plenty of people will lie for pretty much any reason : to obtain an advantage, for money, for revenge, to attract interest, to make people take care of them, to cover up something, because they’re psychologically imbalanced…In the same documentary I mentioned earlier, the two examples of false accusation that were shown were motivated one by some minor domestic dispute, the other by a minimal amount of money, say € 50, not reimbursed.

Assuming that pretty much everybody will shy away from a false accusation of sexual harassment/assault seems not just unproven but an absurd assumption to me. Let’s see : in 2016, there were apparently about 90 000 reported rapes in the USA. 2% of false report would be 1 800 women (for the sake of it, I’m assuming all reports are from women), or about or 0.001% of the female population. You think that it’s not credible that more than 0.001% of women would bring false accusations? That in a 200 000 pop. city, you couldn’t find even one single woman willing to bring a false accusation for whatever purpose? I’m rather surprised that real accusations aren’t drowned in an ocean of false ones.

I indeed don’t believe that false accusations are as rare as you think. I don’t even believe that most people quoting these figures believe them themselves unless they’ve been raised in a cave on Mars long away from any actual human being, or are as indoctrinated as a Stalinist in 1955. There’s a purpose for believing victims : when you have to deal with them personally. Otherwise, when discussing about what actually happens, how to deal with it, what principles should be followed, you have to take into account the fact that an accusation isn’t necessarily true. To deal with the fact that regardless of which side you pick, you’ve have a good chance to be wrong, and the consequences of being wrong are in neither case trivial. As bad as not believing a victim might be, assuming guilt in a case like rape has devastating consequences on the accused in our societies, even if no actual criminal sentence result from it. Pretending that false accusations are so extraordinarily rare that you can just ignore this possibility is just a way to avoid addressing this issue, and to summarily dismiss arguments that could make your position less easy to defend.

102

I don’t think the #METOO backlash in the workplace is primarily based on fear of false accusations.

There are a lot of jobs where people interact with people other than coworkers, bosses and subordinates. These people are called customers and clients. And sometimes a single customer or client can play an outsized role in the profitability of a business. And these clients and customers know this. Especially if they have a job where they have a lot of purchasing power - the ad buyer for a major media outlet, the guy that purchases the furnishings for major hotel chain, the guy that buys the studio equipment for a movie studio or TV network.

And these people are often jerks about this power. Some of them are straight up sexual harassers but most of them are just jerks to all their vendors. And if you are a commissioned salesperson handling these accounts, you are expected to deal with it. If a particular situation with a client gets really intolerable you can sometimes hand over the account to another salesperson but that hits you in the pocket. And it doesn’t look good if you do that too often.

And while companies will make a show of cleaning their own house and enacting all sorts of policies, you can’t force those policies on the client. And realistically, if you have invested everything you own to build a company that sells mattresses to hotel chains, you aren’t going to drop Hilton as a client because their purchaser made a suggestive remark to your salesperson. But you still know your employees shouldn’t have to put up with the that and you have to take their complaints seriously. So many companies take the easy way out and don’t hire females for those jobs.

I’ve dealt with these issues throughout my entire career. Only answer I see is to change the culture and the world so people treat each other better, but we seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

103

If it exists.

Unemployment is at a historic low. That would be difficult if businesses were being wary of hiring women.

No one has yet demonstrated that the Bloomberg article is anything more than fearmongering.

104

In fairness, if one reads the Bloomberg article, it’s not so much fearmongering as reporting on fearmongering.

105

Bloomberg article is based on the fears (justified or not) of Wall Street Executives, literally the most privileged workers in the fucking planet.

So forgive me if I have little time for extremely well paid executives worried that their behaviour will be misrepresented or high flyers fearful of losing an advantage in the cut throat competition that is the boardroom.

106

Hear, hear. In that sort of business, and in Wall Street, the expectation is that if the Writer of Big Checks or the representative thereof is an ass you just have to brush/laugh it off, “take it” as the way the world is, and if anything grow yourself into a hard-driving Always Be Closing cut-throat type for whom the important thing is the bottom line and scoring wins and who cares whose dignity got injured including your own, in the hope of one day being the guy whose prickishness people have to tolerate. If you are a big/valuable enough producer and the particular client is not that critical, you may be given the leeway to be a bit of a reciprocal prick… but then *that, *coming from females, is called bitchiness.

107

I suppose that we could also be scared of deliberate misunderstandings of our posts, complete with unjustifiable conclusions, as well, if this post of yours is any indication.

If you think that people in general have as poor an ability to respond to the actual facts and words that people post as this post of your indicates, then you have a reason to be afraid, you think that people will treat your words and actions as you treat the words and actions of others.

If you can somehow get “contempt and dismissal of due process in favor of the court of public opinion” from simply allowing people to speak, then I can see how you may think that others will get sexual harassment from an innocuous action.

Fortunately, not everyone out there is as desperate to score points, and so not everyone has as motivated interpretations as this post of yours indicates.

I have no contempt or dismissal of due process, I just question the contempt and dismissal of the experiences of women that you defend here.

What is it about not telling women to shut the hell up, as we have done for centuries (and longer) when it comes to sexual assault and harassment, that scares you so much?

That is all this is, is giving women a chance to speak up, rather than to shut them down. The only reason to be against that is if you have contempt and dismissal of women.

108

This is about as on the level as those who criticize the Black Lives Matter movement by claiming that it is saying “only” black lives matter.

For most of history, the default was “Don’t believe the women”. Saying “believe women” is not the same as saying “don’t believe men”, it is saying all it is saying, which is “believe women.” It does scare me that you have such a contempt and dismissal for the basic concept of believing women.

109

Excellent cite.

110

I agree. The #metoo movement is a good thing. I don’t know why its not enough that #metoo is 90% goo and 10% side effects. The cancer of sexism in places like wall street is particularly metastatized and chemotherapy has some side effects. Hopefully we will get to the point where the chemotherapy is no longer needed ad we have the wisdom to stop using it.

111

This is our justice system. it requires a fairly high threshold for conviction. Would you have it any other way?

Wait. 80% of women get raped?

Or we could use the criminal justice system.

No, we don’t. We have a process for determining guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

112

:rolleyes:, judging by conversations I’ve had with convicted rapists, 100% of accusations are false.

113

It’s gone out with other quaint things, like the “things have degrees”, and chance to defend oneself.

114

This is a typo, right?

115

Let’s face it. As a man chances are at some time in your working life, you WILL be accused by a woman of sexual harassment. I dont care how careful you are, it WILL happen.

116

Forget rape accusations. I know a guy in hot water for saying a female looked good in a short skirt.

117

This is not true. Of all of the men I’ve known in my life including me, no accusations have ever been made. Either my circle of family and friends is extremely lucky, or alternatively, we aren’t creeps that take liberties with women we work with. I’m going with option B.

It’s not hard to not harass women. This is only a scary issue to men that have engaged in questionable behaviors in the past and are now worried that maybe some of the creepy stuff they’ve done may come to light.

118

Good! Hopefully he’s learned not to make inappropriate comments about coworkers’ appearances (as well as using inappropriate terms like “female” to refer to women). Maybe a sharp lesson, but sharp lessons can be very useful.

119

Was the lady modelling a brand of short skirts? Cause, otherwise yeah, that’s inappropriate.

120

This is a perspective to be had by people who have committed sexual harassment. They are rightly concerned about being accused of what they have done.

They don’t think it is such a big deal to treat other people like objects, and get upset when they are called on it.

Case in point:

That really is a textbook example of sexual harassment. It may not be “that big a deal” to the guy who is treating women as objects that exist only for his pleasure, but it is a big deal to the human being that is denigrated and reduced to a pair of legs and their merit is based on how much of that leg they show.