Sigh. Don’t say things like that; my subscription just started. BC was a little less hard-hitting than I had anticipated, but I blame this forum for setting my expectations too high.
At the very least I think Stossel’s free speech special was useful in bringing the idea that we’re selling off our right to free speech in the name of safety to a wide audience.
I thought he played it a little fast and loose with the stuff on sexual harrassment, though. He kept saying that the standard for what is offensive is set by the offended party, but I thought that to hold up in court, an accusation of sexual harrassment had to pass the “reasonable man/woman” test. That is, it’s considered sexual harrassment only if a reasonable man or woman would find it offensive.
“Are you frightened of snakes?”
“Only when they dress like werewolves.”
-Preacher
Maybe, when it comes to litigation, but it rarely comes to that. I know of several situations in my company where men have been accused of sexal harassment and there was not even an investigation. In one case, a man was reassigned. There was no investigation, which would have shown, via witness testimony, that the guy was totally innocent. In a second case, a man was fired. Only after his lawyers threatened to sue the company did they check out the details and find out that they had their facts wrong. In a third case, a woman was reassigned when she complained that her supervisor was leering at her in a sexal manner. The manager had to go to sensitivity training and there’s a black mark on his permanent record. He is not allowed to have female subordinates. An investigation would have shown that the female employee was most likely striking back after a particularly low performance appraisal.
In the business world, the man is always presumed guilty and there’s rarely any chance to prove otherwise.
Having worked for a while in Human Resources (but mind you it’s been a few years), my understanding has always been that in sexual harassment matters it was the perceived interpretation of the incident that defined “sexual harassment” - i.e., if you put up nudie pictures of women in a workplace and the only woman there doesn’t mind, then it’s not sexual harassment, but if she does, then it is. True or false?
And I’m assuming we’re still not allowed to yell, “Fire!” in a crowded movie theatre, right? Damn!
I’m afraid that your broad generalization has been colored by the experiences in your company. I know several places, recently, where the woman was “presumed” to have been acting on a motive of revenge for warranted low grades or in vengeance for other motives and had to go to court to prove otherwise. My siser-in-law has been the EEOC officer at several companies in the last 15 years and her stories change with each company. Some companies treat the man as obvious scum, some companies treat the woman as an obvious slut, a few companies treat each incident as a situation to be investigated impartially.
I’m afraid that there are still many companies that assume that the woman is lying (or that the man is more valuable to the company).
I have to agree with JoeyBlades here. If only the number of instances I have seen or heard of amounted to only three. In almost every case, what happens is that the woman makes a complaint, and then HR speaks privately to the guy. If he isn’t sufficiently penitent, he gets either transferred or fired, depending on the severity of the act. If he is very penitent and the (alleged) incident was minor, he may be lucky enough just to get a blemish on his record. I have never seen anyone outside of the two parties questioned about any of these incidents, or any other sign of investigation.
I think things tend to be this way in the larger corporations that fear lawsuits/bad publicity more than they do losing any one person.
Not that I care; I’m a perfect gentleman at work anyway.
Sadly, rather than examining the merits of each case, companies are on one of the extremes: Either the woman is presumed to be lying, or the man is presumed to be guilty.
I’m a perfect gentleman at work, and I was forced out due to a SH complaint merely because a subordinate HR person didn’t like using contractors. I later found out that the “complaintant” didn’t even know she had made the complaint!
If Cecil Adams did not exist, we would be obliged to create Him.
Yuck, that sucks. You’re right, I shouldn’t have implied that being a perfect gentleman gives you any protection against this sort of thing - that’s the whole point.
Many years ago, before I had even heard the term sexual harassment, I had an ‘event’. I was working in a laboratory environment with a female coworker. Everything was going fine, as far as I could tell. At one point we were sitting next to each other, looking over some data. She had her leg crossed so that her shoe kept bumping my knee. At one point I noticed that her shoe looked like it was made of satin. This struck me as odd and I asked, “Is this satin?”, as I touched her shoe. Suddenly her face went ashen and she moved suddenly away from me. “What? Are you some kind of kinky, sicko freak with a foot fetish?”, she exclaimed. At first, I thought she was joking, but soon realized that she was totally serious and totally offended by the mere act of touching her shoe. I quickly appologized and assured her that it was totally innocent and eventually we were able to get back down to business. The episode really shook me up and I have always been careful ever since to never, under any circumstances, touch a female coworker.
Interestingly, female coworkers touch me all the time, often in a less than professional manner. They occasionally grab my hand, or walk up behind me and give me a mini shoulder massage, or touch my clothes and say “nice shirt”, etc… They wink, they make suggestive, flirtatious remarks, tell sexually oriented jokes, post beef-cake calendars, many of the things that get guys in trouble.
It’s an interesting American double standard… and it IS just an American thing. I lived and worked in Europe for the last three years and people (men and women) behave there in ways that would get them fired in the American corporate world.
**Esprix[b/], I think the answer to your first question may be found by examining the second with yet a third; “Is it OK to yell fire in an empty theater?”
If the theater contains people who might reasonably be expected to react with alarm, then yelling fire is wrong. If the theater is empty, or perhaps full of deaf people, where the potential for alarm is not present, then yelling fire is not wrong.
So let’s apply this to your first question. If there are women in the office that are offended by nudie pictures, then it is “sexual harassment”. If the women in your office don’t mind nudie pictures, it is like the empty theater, and there is no sexual harassment.
TT
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
–James Thurber
An interesting story on Media Bias. Turns out CNN has had Military PsyOps personal working on stories. If only this could silence the talk of the “so called” liberal bias in Media. If anything the mainstream media is excrutiatingly conservative.
Here is a link to CounterPunch, an excelent site that broke the story in the US. http://www.counterpunch.org/
