How would one tell the difference between someone punished for perfectly honorable behavior and one punished for misconduct?
Fine, I agree that accurate language is important. If someone was confused that I meant the truth will prevail in 100% of cases and for all eternity, then I apologise for misleading you and recommend you stay under adult supervision for the rest of your life.
Then that guy needs to be educated on what a violation is. It is unlikely that the woman will be mistaken, but, in that case, then she needs to be educated.
This isn’t nearly as complicated as people make it out to be. There are rules that already exist in most places, and are actually followed in the good places.
It actually is starting to anger me that people keep on acting like there is something new going on and that it’s hard to navigate. The only new thing is that we’re paying attention when you violate the rules. It should be no harder to navigate than it was before.
I’ve not seen a single instance of someone alleging something that was not at issue before all of this. Even Ansari wasn’t following the basic concepts, since he was pressuring someone after they said no. The rule is, once someone says no, then it’s up to them to resume.
That so many people find this difficult only makes me think how few people were listening in the first place, indicating that we just need to start pushing education on all this stuff. Maybe with them all scared, they’ll actually listen.
Workplaces have had seminars about this sort of thing forever. Get a good one, pay attention, and do what it says. Don’t assume there’s some sort of exception. Just do it.
Other than that, I have no idea what to say. But I definitely do not blame the #metoo movement. The problem with confusion is solely on those who have not been paying attention. It belongs to the people crying “SJW” all the time instead of paying attention to what people have been saying.
Because I have been listening, and there’s nothing new other than people actually getting in trouble for it.
Workplace seminars are often run by people who don’t know what they’re doing or have their own agenda. It may have been a while ago, but I sat through one in the early 90’s that was so offensive in accusing every man in the room and saying women were always right, that the person was removed from doing them due to the complaints.
I’ve sat through others that were extremely perfunctory “Hey, don’t do bad things to people around you, k?”
So workplace seminars and policy meetings aren’t a cure-all.
Oh, and in the same time period, I had a woman co-worker who had once put her hand on my inner thigh and was known for being very handsy with all the men, start screaming at me in a meeting because I pointed out a broken sequin on her dress - on the outer shoulder/upper arm - and when she couldn’t see it, I touched it. She leapt up and started screaming about unwanted contact. :rolleyes: Thankfully, our manager (a woman) shut her right down.
Yeah, she was mistaken, and frankly, she needed to be educated on violations given her tendency to put her hands all over her male co-workers. (Yeah, beside the thigh, she had frequently touched my knee, my shoulders, my head, my back, my arms…)
Robot Arm, ThelmaLou, what I see happening, has been happening a long time (or maybe over and over), because things change, standards change, society and culture change, is a sort of negotiation, working out what the words mean between to sides of a discussion so that each side understands what the other is saying. In the US, maybe the main surface topic has changed, first, universal suffrage, then, Equal Rights for women, and today it’s sexual harassment. The universal theme in all those is equality, in all areas. I’m just as anxious about false accusations as the next guy, it’s happened to me. I worry about accusations arising from misunderstanding happening to me. My work is very physical and there are only a few women in my company who do the work. Sometimes the humor can be, coarse. Mostly the women are just as rough as the guys, giving as good as they get and, seemingly, no feelings are upset. But this year we have a few new hires who are younger women, and around those women, the behavior changes for everybody. The work flow hasn’t suffered from it, but it does affect it, our customers see it and comment on it. Still waiting for guidance from management.
Universal sufferage, equal rights, those are topics with powerful, but more long term and subtle impact for men, generally, but not something necessarily felt right now(or then for sufferage). Sexual harassment is something that I think in the long term will have less actual impact on most men, but those who do feel its impact (ie those who are accused) will feel that impact in full force, be it legally, or socially, and they will feel it right now. I think part of the problem is the fact that this is an issue where the division of sides is very basic and primal. Two groups, not based on skin color, or religion, or national origin or political affiliation, but on what sex you are (mostly, as it is framed in this thread anyway).
But I do see the conversation happening in a diffuse sort of way across the whole of US society, when I try to look at the issue in the broader context of history, how our laws are set up and the future I think will come to be in the next few decades. It just doesn’t seem to look like what people expect.
Thank you for sharing.
As I have said earlier, men have been convicted/fired on an uncorroborated word of a single accuser since at least 1980s. Also, men are discriminated in Divorce, and male victims of Domestic Violence get very little help. (once again, thank you for sharing your story)
Now, most men publicly accused of Harassment are presumed guilty. Anyone who talks about Due Process and Presumption of Innocence is demonized.
Unless men stand for their Fundamental Human Rights, no one will. I am grateful to women who defend male victims of abuse and discrimination, but until most men will speak up for their human rights, things will get worse.
Men are more than 3 times more likely to be murdered than women in the US and 4 times more likely worldwide. Outside of sexual assault if you want to talk danger in general the world is a more dangerous place for men than it is for women.
Sexual assault and harassment specifically are serious dangers and vastly lopsided against women. But excluding men from the conversation will only make it take longer for things to change.
ThelmaLou makes some valid points. Starting long before the #metoo movement it has already been perilous in many workplaces (powerful billionaires excluded until recently) to say the wrong thing to the wrong person. Simple interactions can be frought with peril because it is often simpler to settle claims and fire people when any claim of even possible harassment is brought to a company’s attention. That already had a chilling effect on interpersonal relationships in the workplace long before #metoo.
It is a very fair-minded woman who, despite the despicable abuse so many have endured for so long, is able to recognize that there is indeed a downside to allowing the pendulum to swing too far the other way.
It sounds like chaperones may be coming back in the western world.
Perhaps a new economic niche is being opened!
I was thinking the exact same thing yesterday. Lol.
Not harassment, but sexism. The men were asking questions which they found unacceptable when addressed to themselves. They were also assuming that, since she was a woman, she’d be married and have children. Sometimes the first question after introductions was “oh, what does your husband do?”; she would reply “I don’t have one, what does your wife do?” and they’d reply “what? Why do you ask this?” “Because you did.”
Would you like it if someone’s first question was “oh, what does your wife do?” Would you consider it normal?
Asking a person if they are married can be misconstrued as interest (intended or not), especially a person of the opposite sex.
One of the things they taught us in Bar School, a woman wearing a ring; not necessarily married, a man not wearing one, not necessarily unmarried.
That “Sven test” has good prospects as a possible means to help ourselves become aware of our implicit sexism: behaviors that many who endorse no explicit sexist beliefs, if anything endorse feminist beliefs, engage in that have without their being aware of it sexist underpinnings or minimally sexist impacts.
That said it is not perfect.
There are things I would say to Sven at work that some women would consider inappropriate to be said to them at work. There are things that I would consider appropriate to be said to my wife or daughter, that they would find appropriate, that some other women would find not so.
There is only very small risk that Sven would consider a comment about them looking more fit and buff lately and asking if they are doing something new in the fitness realm as a sexual come on; there is a greater risk and greater potential impact that Mary might, even if my wife or daughter would not.
Still a good start. And one that moves from the “good” and “bad” men dynamic to how we all need to work together to clarify our communication.
It’s not so simple; people both know what is right and wrong, but also at the same time feel that their objectively inappropriate actions and behaviors are not in the same category as wrong behavior. I’m sure (well, 70% sure) that Ansari would pass the written test on what is appropriate and what is not. It’s nice to believe that “if people would just get educated and/or pay attention” we’d solve the problem, and while education is important, it will never trump the feeling that “this is just what people do”.
How often, in all realms of life, do we hear people say something about how people shouldn’t behave, and then go and do that very thing? And it’s always fine in their minds because the degree is different, the circumstances are different, or any number of things.
That said, I agree that there are no new rules here; it’s just that people’s sense of “this is just what people do” is running up against a stronger level of accountability. We’re approaching parity between how we treat actions in the text book and how we treat them in the real world. I can sympathize, because that change can be confusing, but on the other hand, too bad, so sad. The status quo is clearly broken, and if the solution makes you uncomfortable or on edge for a while, well, it’s a small price to pay.
Well, look, I’m sorry, but I simply don’t believe you. I work in a workplace with many women, I always have, in a number of places, and see no “peril.” I know of no one who has experienced this “peril.” Even secondhand stories of such “peril” are… well, I don’t remember ANY, to be honest, though I’m sure there must be one out there and someone will post an anecdote. Even the odd time you do hear about a supposedly wrong accusation, it got cleared up pretty easily.
I have heard a thousand accounts of how this “peril” exists. But it just isn’t something that happens with any kind of regularity, anywhere.
People seem to be obsessed with harping on the hypothetical danger of sexual harassment rules but there does not seem to be any significant actual danger. Where are the hordes of wrongly accused men out of jobs?
That’s why I avoid children and don’t even look at them. I’m exactly the same demographic as a child molester.
I’m surrounded by kids of all ages on the Metro every morning and leaving work at night. Some of the kids even sit RIGHT NEXT TO ME! And sometimes I smile and wave at the babies.
I sat next to a classmate of my daughter for 2 hours on a darkened bus on the way to Hershey Park. GASP! Not so surprisingly, no false charges were leveled at me.
You guys are scared over nothing.
Again, how does one tell the difference between a wrongly accused man out of a job and a guilty man out of a job?
Just because it didn’t happen to you, it isn’t NOTHING. Unlikely, yes. Improbable, yes. Zero possibility, no.
Each person has to remember that his/her experience is limited to… well, his/her experience. Each person’s world is relatively small when put against all the worlds that are possible, and even happening, for all other people.
I did not experience the #METOO moments that hundreds of women have described. But my career was in the private, nonprofit, charitable sector, which is mostly staffed by women. I never came in contact with cutthroat competition, and ferociously ambitious predatory men or women. I can imagine that in a high-powered law practice, ad firm, or government agency or at the top of a big corporation, #METOO moments did happen. But I don’t need to imagine them, because hundreds of women have described them. And I suspect many such moments happened to men, but they don’t feel they can come forward.
To say that these things simply can’t or didn’t happen is right next to being a flat-earther IMHO, “The world looks flat to me, so it must be.”
I’m not talking about being sexually harassed or whatever. I’m talking about the fear that some are saying that a man can’t even LOOK at a child, or be in a park, without being falsely accused of something.
:rolleyes:
I have in my career never worked in a place where the bosses were sexually inappropriate with female subordinates. Clearly, that means it never happens and all the women with Weinstein only imagined the kindly old man attempting to stick his todger in their orfices.