[quote=“QuickSilver, post:28, topic:803905”]
Well, you’re a stud and some may be flirting with you. Does it threaten you or make you uncomfortable? No? Awesome. Go you.
No. I’m not a stud. These are normal interactions between coworkers and colleagues. There is nothing suggestive about most of these things. Some of them are flirting but the notion that merely touching a coworker is off limits seems overboard.
I’m not part of a “hive”.
This reminds me of a joke going around on Facebook.
It says that Santa has been accused of sexual harassment. Why? He has little girls sit on his lap and asks them if they have been naughty.
Further, the offensive contact must be such that a reasonable person would consider it offensive. The example always given is when approaching a stranger to ask for directions and tapping him on the shoulder. That is not battery even if the stranger is hyper-sensitive and a germophobe who hates to be touched in any instance.
This last part seems to change in the workplace harassment debate.
This thread makes me think of this:
Resurrecting this thread because of a column on FiveThirtyEight today that addresses this subject:
We need a better way to talk about sexual misconduct.
Undoubtedly, had this thread used the term “Sexual Misconduct” as a jumping off point, rather than “Sexual Assault”, then the thread discussion would have been very different. Be that as it may, I think this column sums up my original feelings on the struggle of lumping diverse behaviors under a single term in public discussion. It offers a set of terms and definitions that I find useful in expanding the vocabulary:
[ul]
[li]Gender hostility refers to derogatory comments or actions that invoke sex or gender, rather than explicit requests for sex. There are two types — sexist hostility, which is specific to gender (for example, if someone made a joke about women in a meeting) and sexual hostility, which has a sexual component (for example, if someone asked about a co-worker’s sexual activities).[/li][li]Unwanted sexual attention includes unwelcome attempts to initiate sexual or romantic relations (for example, when someone repeatedly asks a co-worker out on dates).[/li][li]Sexual coercion involves many of the same behaviors as the previous category, but with the explicit threat of consequences — such as being refused a promotion — for not cooperating.[/li][/ul]
Assault (not the sexual kind) covers a lot of ground too. What’s the difference between when my friend hits me because it’s funny to hit me and I think it’s funny too, and when someone else hits me and it’s assault? Exactly the same answer as for the “new improved” sexual assault terminology.
I think the word “assault” is exactly the right word for all the things that are being referred to in the “new style”. I don’t think it’s particularly important to differentiate between a hand over here vs a hand over there.
“Aggravated sexual assault” - when force or violence is involved?
Is it helpful to articulate “sexual assault and rape” when rape occurs, or is the single word already enough? I think one word is enough.
But “he only touched her back” is the sound of me judging what she should have wanted. Nobody should care **what ** I think she should have wanted.
I’m with the OP. Right now, if Bob pats a woman’s ass when he’s walking past her, and Frank forces a woman to the ground, pulls off her pants, and fondles her labia, we call both of those “sexual assault”. If someone says “Did you hear that Bob sexually assaulted Linda?”, or “Did you hear that Frank sexually assaulted Mary?”, our responses to both incidents would be the same. But they really shouldn’t: Both men are creeps, and both need to stop, but I think it’s safe to say that Frank’s conduct is much worse, and should be treated much more harshly.
Maybe “sexual assault” is the appropriate term for Bob’s ass-patting. But in that case, then we need a new term for Frank’s almost-rape.
Does “aggravated sexual assault”, or “sexual assault with violence”, or similar wording, sound to you like adequate differentiation? I’m aware there’s more of a distinction implied in what you wrote, but is there a good reason to maintain that that distinction is significant?
I think maybe the entire point of the recent change in emphasis is the following dialogue, completely invented:
Woman: “What he did to me was sexual assault”
Man: “I realize that, but it’s not like he had his fingers inside you”
W: “Why isn’t it like that?”
M: “Seriously why? I mean, fingers inside is more sexual, I guess”
W: “Not to me - both are an invasion”
M: “So, you are suddenly dictating what ‘sexual’ means?”
W: “No, not suddenly, just this time I made sure you listened”
M: “That’s not what I meant, I mean why do you have the power to dictate what that means?”
W: “The question is, why did YOU have the power to dictate what it meant, up until yesterday?”
I think the word assault carries a connotation of the event being described as such being very serious. As Chronos says, there should be a good way to differentiate an almost rape from an unwanted hug. To take an example of a different crime, I think we would all agree that someone who takes your lunch out of the staff fridge is at a different level than someone who breaks into your house and steals all your valuables. I would say the former person swiped my lunch, while the latter person robbed me. Lumping them both in the same category is of little use.
FlikTheBlue I would say that in both cases you were robbed, and the difference is severity.
Let me ask this: if you were told that someone had been physically assaulted, and no other details, what would you expect? IME, the term covers a wide array of possibilities, and you need more information to understand what happened. Someone could have been punched, or their arm might be broken, or maybe they’ve been stabbed and they’re in the hospital. The term sexual assault is the same. If someone touches me against my will in a sexual manner, I have been, you guessed it, assaulted. Just like with physical assault, it could be something that many people seem to feel is minor, like a boob grab, or it could be a pussy grope, or, hey, it could be that time I was held still while a guy rubbed his cock against my ass until, well, you get the picture.
The point is that the term assault covers a spectrum not just in sexual situations, but in other situations as well. I do not understand the need to partition the types of assault in sexual situations when we don’t in other ones. If someone is touched in an improper way against their will, it’s assault. Changing the language doesn’t change that. Changing the language may minimize that, however, and I do not support anything that puts sexual assault, against anyone, back into the closet.
When I hear someone was assaulted I picture someone who has been beaten up by being punched and kicked. IMHO it also carries the connotation of it being inflicted unwillingly i.e. two guys who challenge each other to a fight and beat each other up doesn’t conjure up the word assault. Once you get into knives or guns I start thinking in terms of attempted murder rather than assault.
Edited to add. There are also more minor categories described by words like roughhousing or horseplay. Word like that make me think of things like someone being shoved without the intent of doing any serious physical harm.
I am not trying to be “asking questions”, I am not trying to undermine the arguments against sexual misconduct, and I admit that I don’t understand all the vocabulary and taxonomy. But I have to ask:
If “gender” and “sex” are two different things, shouldn’t misconduct relating to peoples’ gender - discriminating against them on that basis; calling them the improper name; etc - be entirely separate from “sexual misconduct?”
It seems to me that broadening the scope of “sexual misconduct” to include things that are not of an outright sexual nature - among which I would include unwanted sexual touching, unwanted sexual advances, crude sexual jokes, spreading gossip about someone’s sex life, or derogation of someone’s sexual orientation - and making this category include things like calling someone the wrong name for their gender, is casting too wide of a net. It’s not RIGHT to call someone by the wrong name for their gender; I believe in calling them what they prefer; but if someone transgresses this, even if they do it repeatedly, I still don’t think that qualifies as “sexual misconduct.” It qualifies as something bad, though.
Possibly. It depends on which specific offense we’re talking about. You go on to talk about what you mean, but I wanted to point out that splitting out someone’s gender doesn’t preclude the sexual assault issue. In fact, in some situations it just exacerbates it.
Other than the “unwanted sexual touching”, which I think does belong in the sexual misconduct or sexual assault category, I think what you’re describing would fall under “harassment” or “hostile workplace” if it happened at a place of employment. I’m not sure how to describe it outside of the workplace. Harassment might work as an umbrella term.
I think a lot of younger people don’t realize how different things were 30-40 years ago. No, I’m not claiming that it used to be acceptable to grope anyone at work. I’m looking at a broader picture.
I moved to New York in 1980 and I got a full time job and I often worked in theatre in the evenings. I didn’t really know anyone when I moved here. There weren’t a lot of young people in my apartment building, NYC doesnt have apartment houses that cater to young people the way some cities do. And the city was full of people like me— moving to NY from everywhere and working long hours.
This was before the internet. My opportunities to meet people outside of work were limited. Your opportunities to meet people at work were boundless, especially if you held multiple jobs. And I worked at places that hired lots of people like me. My coworkers were my friends. We took trips together and hung out on weekends. We dated and broke up. We made friends and enemies.
It’s hard for me to find the idea of hugging a coworker to be outrageous. In many circumstances it’s highly inappropriate, but I don’t think it always is. But I believe it’s healthy to have friendship and social interaction at work. I also think it’s a tougher environment for harassment, because if it’s strictly forbidden to have social relationships at work, harassers can make that isolation work for them. I’ve seen people that work together join forces to shut down the office creep. It alway worked pretty well.
I have no idea how it’s typically handled now, but they didn’t have HR departments back in the day.
The (supposed) need for more precise terms when talking about sexual assault has been getting a lot of attention lately. This article even has a graphic sketching out a taxonomy of sexual harassment.
Some of the talk around this kind of bugs me though. There seems to be an implication that people who were only guilty of “lesser offenses” are being unfairly lumped in with rapists. But in most of these cases, the punishment being meted out for these “lesser” offenses is completely justified, if not too mild. I don’t think a person fired from their job for, say, groping someone is being unfairly lumped in with the person fired from their job for rape – both of those are absolutely deserving of firing (and more), and in both cases I see nothing unfair in saying they were fired for “sexual assault”. Is rape nevertheless worse than groping someone? Sure, and that’s why it should be charged differently in criminal court. But of course, it is charged differently. In fact the criminal statues already define a bunch of different degrees of sexual assault.
In a context like the workplace, we don’t really need to distinguish degrees of sexual assault, as anything that could reasonably be termed sexual assault should already be getting the maximum penalty your employer can impose – termination of employment. Subdividing sexual assault into multiple categories in that context seems to just be serving the needs of the perpetrators who perhaps want to slide down the slope from “I didn’t do anything as bad as rape” to “I didn’t do anything bad enough that I should be fired”.
Sure, there are some forms of sexual misconduct that probably shouldn’t rise to firing offenses, like, say, making an inappropriate dirty joke (if it isn’t a recurring pattern). But I don’t think anyone’s calling that “sexual assault”; there are plenty of other existing terms that describe such behavior, like “sexual harassment.”
While there are some catchall terms that encompass the whole spectrum from harassment to rape – such as “sexual misconduct” the way I used it in the previous paragraph – these are mostly just being used by journalists to talk about the pattern of men facing stricter penalties for this conduct in the wake of the #MeToo movement. But it’s totally appropriate to use a catchall term in that way to describe a trend that spans multiple areas of offense. Similarly, if the media were to say “violent crime is down”, no one could accuse them of unfairly lumping simple assault in with murder – they’re just saying violent crime is down across the whole spectrum of such offenses, not claiming that those two crimes are at the same end of the spectrum.
Because of two things:
force vs no force
invading your space vs stealing from a public location.
Sexual assault is always an invasion not just of your house but of your self.
Distinguishing force vs no force, and calling use of force a worse kind of sexual assault, makes perfect sense to me.
There is however also the issue of power imbalance, when for example a boss assaults an employee, or an adult assaults a child. I’m inclined to say that in those cases it is always as if force had been used, even though the force is not physical.
I’m too lazy to look up the post to quote, but paraphrasing…
“The word ‘assault’ generally connotes something very bad.”
It sure does.
No, not everything defined as “sexual assault” should be a firing offense. Take the example of patting a woman on the butt. Joe is showing something on his computer to Mary, in a crowded cubicle farm, so Mary’s standing behind Joe’s chair. Phil is walking past to his own desk, when suddenly Mary shifts position to better see something on Joe’s screen. It sometimes happens, in a situation like this, that Phil’s hand and Mary’s buttocks will come into contact. Was it deliberate? There’s no way to know, at least for the first offense (if it happens multiple times, that might be a pattern, or might just be a coincidence). But if the office’s policy is that any contact with a co-worker’s buttocks is sexual assault, and any sexual assault is a firing offense, then Phil’s going to get fired just for walking through a crowded cubicle farm.
Humans tend to go from extreme to the other. Protecting women shouldn’t mean that men are afraid to even breath when there is a woman in the room. Protecting women should mean what the term clearly states, no “Sexual Assault”. That means “hands off”, and it means no lewd, demeaning, or sexually suggestive language. Sounds pretty simple and straight forward to me. What am I missing here?