Are we there yet? Sexual harassment at ICANN

I unironically love the implication that your readership is so ugly that only 1% of the opposite gender would consider having sexual relations with them.

Maria, my best wishes to the ICANN community as it works on this issue. And thanks for your post.

There are now a few different activists who use the Ada Initiative materials to offer trainings to help communities learn skills to be better allies. People who are not usually affected by sexist or other marginalizing/harassing behavior can learn to be more perceptive (to notice problems) and get tips on how to effectively prevent and stop problems. Is this kind of workshop something that you’d like to get onto the agenda for an upcoming ICANN meeting?

Wow. Way to miss the point, dooooodes.

I am very unclear about what is going on with comments 1 & 3 above. If I am reading them correctly, I hope one of the bloggers will either delete or disemvowel them. If I am not reading them correctly, I hope that someone will explicate them for me.

I dunno Lynne, I find Maria’s post straightforward and convincing (I attend math conferences not ICANN but I’m sure the dynamics are similar). I think flirting is flirting. Propositioning (“hey wanna go up to the room and do it”) isn’t flirting. Considering any apparently not paired up woman at the hotel bar open season isn’t flirting. It’s really strange to me every time this issue is brought up, there seems to be this concern that smiling at someone or making conversation will now be outlawed.

There seems to me to be a discrepancy between “Do you want to risk your colleague’s sense of wellbeing on the sub-1% chance that she really ‘wants it’?”, and this site, found by googling “chart where people met spouses”, which says that 17.9% of surveyed 18-34 year-olds met their significant other “through work”. I guess they are apple/oranges numbers, and I know nothing about that site.

I do feel very saddened by the harassment that women to have to go through. And my rule of thumb is, if a woman says I’m being sexist, then I am sure she is right. But, 17.9% of partners were met through work. Do we want that number to be 0%? Having 2 daughters in their mid-30s currently without significant others, I would say, definitely no. But I also don’t want my daughters harassed.

I’m not just saddened, I’m embarrassed and indignant about the BS and the harrassment that men put women through.

But like Chris, this seems to me to a slightly trickier issue than Maria is acknowledging. Tricky in that I hope we can all agree (OK, I know there are pick-up artists who will never agree) that we don’t want women harassed by sexual/romantic come-ons (or worse) while working (or anywhere else).

But for most of us humans, the part of our lives where we find partners to have sex with, and then frequently form stable relationships of some duration, and possibly have kids with, is a pretty big part of life, and we put quite a lot of effort and time into the first steps down that pathway. I don’t think that Maria or anyone else is trying to argue with that – the point is “Not at work, dammit!”. But isn’t the issue simultaneously broader and narrower than that?

Isn’t it really that too many men just don’t have a clue when it is appropriate to flirt with let alone proposition a woman? Too many men who fail to recognize that a woman acting in a professional capacity does not AT THAT MOMENT IN TIME (at the very least) want to also be considered a candidate for some male idea of flirting/propositioning, that she (like her male colleagues) would like her skill/ideas/suggestions acknowledged and processed for their worth, not her attractiveness. Too many men who fail to be willing to acknowledge anything other than a very strong “leave me alone!” or the “sorry, i already have a partner” before they will back off from what might otherwise have been some acceptable level of early dating repartee. Too many men who don’t even understand what acceptable early dating repartee looks like at all. Too many man who think that their position of employment (or possibly even just their basic masculinity) gives them a lever with which to convince (some would say force) a women to react differently to their propositioning and flirting.

Because it seems to me that if in fact all men got this stuff right, then whatever flirting and propositioning too place in the workplace would probably be considered reasonably acceptable. Sometimes it would still be “wrong” (as in, “oh my god, I’m not all interested in him, or anyone in this office”), but it wouldn’t take place in a way that women felt undermined their competence, autonomy, self-determination and safety.

But is that even possible? Even if it was possible to wash out the hogswill of masculine idiocy and offensiveness, can we even construct workplaces in which power relationships and other office politics could ever make this stuff work in a way that isn’t a problem for women?

Because people are going to carry on looking for other people to date, to have sex with, to maybe marry and have kids with. And they’re going to keep doing that even with people they work around, because that’s who they spend the most time with. I don’t believe we can stop this behaviour – so how can we shape it to make it either less or absolutely not threatening and offensive to women?

Having said the above, which has been a truism for a long time though phrased more crudely forty years ago…”Don’t **** where you eat” was the expression before the 2nd wave…

…I could look this under the perspective of biopolitics, in which the employer has total, undivided , and unarguable control of your sexual and emotional life while you are under her employ, telling you exactly when and where you can flirt and when and where it is forbidden…

…and we can see how modern feminism as “protection of women” serves capitalism in a new but very comparable way to 19th century patriarchy. Neoliberalism is kinda cool.

“…and we can see how modern feminism as “protection of women” serves capitalism in a new but very comparable way to 19th century patriarchy. Neoliberalism is kinda cool.”

Oh YAWN. That kind of brocialist pabulum goes down quite well at Spiked I’ve heard.

17: Like I said, neoliberalism is neat.

150 or 50 years ago, the “protection of women” from such as the brutal physical hardships or emotional stress or predatory men, was also used to limit wage competition and keep women at home providing free socially reproductive labour.

IOW, they also used extra-economic arguments (like religion) to disguise the capitalist purposes and create an illusion of agency and moral legitimation.

Sledge is correct. What had been 3 is now 4. I should have remembered that this occasionally happens on CT and linked as just have.

Most depressing. Comments. Ever

The world will not plunge into a “Children of Men” dystopia if dudes don’t mack on their colleagues. People who meet through work often have a set of acquaintances and friends whom they have met through work. Among these friends, two people might end up joining others for lunch with a number of other people. Then, one of the people might ask if the second is interested in getting together for coffee, just the two of them. Then, the second may agree and thus start a relationship through a series of meeting together outside work. If the second person seems even vaguely flaky about the one-on-one coffee, then the first person should shut up about it so it doesn’t make worklife hard for them. There isn’t a Boner Butterfly Event that will cause no one to have sex ever if people follow the soothing and low-key HR guidelines at their office.

Helen 16: “That doesn’t *rule out* approaching someone you like the cut of, but hey, it might be an idea to go for coffee of something rather than go the full on flirt, if lasting relationships are what you’re talking about…..Hope this helps somewhat.”

It is quite well established that there are circumstances in which asking someone to have coffee with you is semantically equivalent to openly propositioning them for sex. I hope marcel proust will join me in asking that Helen’s (and possibly Belle’s) comments be deleted, or at least disemvoweled.

But really: I think this might be a case where education and changing social norms could actually have a positive effect. There are some number of people (er, men) who don’t actually know just how awful they’re being.

There’s another way to look at it Bob. It’s much nicer to be treated like a colleague than an available ditz or a fireable crone.

As women became larger and more valuable factors of production, behavior that might impede efficient and profitable work processes came to be necessarily managed by corporate and capitalist norms

I might have mentioned this here before somewhere, but Larissa Remennik has written interesting things about the transitions Russian Jews make upon ending up in Israel. It seems that moving into the neoliberal economy from the former Soviet Union isn’t necessarily all that great because female engineers don’t get hired the way they would in the USSR (which did its ham-fisted best to educate and employ women in male-dominated fields).

In other words, Bob, capitalist norms have a long way to go to catch up with the socialist revolution.

26: About as accurate and fair as Mark Fisher’s “Vampire Castle” Google that one.

1st rule: Always personalize everything. Not about what is said, but who is saying it.

“There’s another way to look at it Bob. It’s much nicer to be treated like a colleague than an available ditz or a fireable crone.”

Yes, thanks, that was what I was getting at, TTN.

I don’t think anyone’s superior or supervisor should ever ask them out for coffee; it can be tantamount to asking, ‘hey, are you dtf?’ I also think it’s a good idea not to shit where you eat. I was just outlining a potential path to that love between co-workers which will otherwise dare not say its name. People could, in theory, start going out like that. It would be dumb because it will make work difficult after they break up, but it wouldn’t be of necessity immoral as a character arc. But the thing that is often missing from this discussion (though mentioned above) is that men are quite good at discerning the mental states of their male co-workers and bosses. They will know if someone dislikes them, for example, or is competitive with them, or is morose. That guys continually make “honest mistakes” about whether someone is sexually interested in them is disingenuous. They don’t. If you go out to coffee with a bunch of your co-workers you probably already know pretty well if any of them has eyed you with sexual interest. I’ve been sexually harassed plenty in my life and there’s never been any “honest mistakery”…save my middle and high-school teacher? I don’t know about him. Maybe the type of person who “falls in love at first sight” with a 13-year-old is fooling himself about her feelings? Naw, mostly predatory grooming, I think.

This is the perfect example of everything that’s wrong with corporate feminism.

The camel in the room is that ICANN55 is currently being held in Marrakech (where I assume this is addressed to / blogged from). Morocco being of course famous for couscous, tagine, Sharia courts, being rated number 129 of 135 countries for gender equality, women drinking rat poison to avoid marring their rapists, and so on…

What’s the travel advice for conference goers, you ask?

Observe and respect local clothing customs. Dress modestly to avoid drawing attention.

In some countries, a lone female traveller is a source of curiosity: avoid traveling alone outside of hotels and populated establishments.

Okay. So my main suggestion for ICANN on the sexual harassment front would not to hold conferences in Islamic shitholes; that way women attendees won’t have to be encouraged to cover up or have to worry about becoming a “source of curiosity” if they venture out alone in public. I think that’s possibly a higher priority than condemning Czechs for handing out postcards…

#4 (nee #3) nails it by pointing out that *if* the problem with sexual harassment is that it makes a “person feel offended, humiliated or intimidated”, then you’re basically taking a broad stance against any speech which causes offence. All sorts of groups can jump on the pro-inclusion anti-“offence” bandwagon, including Muslims. Unfortunately, if you get co-opted by that agenda you’ll end pretty much where ICANN is – spouting boilerplate inclusion rhetoric while cluelessly holding court in a country where women are treated like animals.

MacKinnon, to her credit, thought that sexual harassment was wrong because it was discrimination against women. That’s the problem, not offence, and if ICANN wanted to seriously object to that they wouldn’t be in Morocco.

Belle @33 … granted, I haven’t worked in office for years (decades, even), but I am pretty sure that despite my general respect for your posts, you’re dead wrong about this:

If you go out to coffee with a bunch of your co-workers you probably already know pretty well if any of them has eyed you with sexual interest.

I might agree that in a LOT of cases, maybe even MOST cases, this is true. But I’m really deeply convinced that it isn’t true, especially in offices/workplaces with a lot of younger folk who haven’t entirely got the dating thing figured out yet.

Still, saying this from the cozy confines of solo-workspace-in-the-back-of-the-garage does expose me to some potential ridicule …

Sexual interest. I think it’s a hell of a lot harder to read than some are saying here. And in my case, I often got it wrong in the opposite direction. Still do.

As in, throughout most of my adult life, I’ve been overly sensitive to signals that had “no” in them somewhere, or so I thought. At work. Outside of work. Even on first dates. And second. And third. I was all too quick to assume that “no.” I pretty much saw that as the baseline — automatically. And in literally dozens of cases I found out later that the woman was sexually interested in me, in that moment, and wasn’t saying “no” at all. In fact, she thought she was clearly saying “yes,” but I couldn’t see it. This caused a great deal of frustration on her part, and then, of course, for me, too, once I discovered the truth. Or we had a really good laugh. Some of the best laughter, evah, in fact.

In short, anything that gets in the way of an honest, truthful, open display of sexual interest or the lack thereof . . . . be it the culture at large, religion, sexual politics gone wild, mixed messages of various kinds . . . . Well, if it’s not a tragedy, it sure does diminish potential for happiness, brief though it may be.

We need to stop the games, scrap the fictions, scrap all of the unnecessary guilt trips, and tell the truth. Life really is too short for this nonsense. And life is too short to make this more complex than it really is. Either it’s mutual or its not. And being mistaken about sexual interest isn’t a crime. Well, until it is. But until it’s a crime, I think people need to be a lot more forgiving. And we now know the act of forgiving itself is very, very healthy.

“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”?
Really?
…Really?
This is Crooked Timber, not the Daily Telegraph.

“I suppose cases like Plume’s may arise now and then …”
As I tried to say, they are in fact extremely common. What I think Plume is trying to say is that a clumsy, even inappropriate, but respectful pass is not sexual harassment – and I agree.

That said, mixing business and pleasure is often bad for both – worse for the pleasure than the business, in fact. Sensible people try to avoid sexual entanglements at work. But then sometimes the heart (or perhaps the genitalia) has its reasons of which reason knows nothing, so let’s cut people a little slack here.

Yeah, fairly depressing comments.

Can we try to define some points of agreement and disagreement though?

Let’s start with the things that (almost) everyone agrees are wrong in a work setting: physical molestation of any kind, gratuitous sexual comments, threats or intimidation, implication of favouritism as a result of sexual acts. These don’t need a lot of context to figure out – we don’t even really need to know the relationships between the people involved, these are just things that are verboten in a workplace context (and some of them are illegal in any context, though possibly not in Marrakech). Most of what we’d call “sexual harassment” falls into this category. I don’t think anyone above is arguing that these behaviours are edge cases that might sometimes be appropriate.

“Sexual harassment is any unwanted or unwelcome sexual behaviour, which makes a person feel offended, humiliated or intimidated.”

“Unwanted” or “unwelcome” behaviour that makes a person “feel” something is highly subjective. If the purpose of rules is to draw clear boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour then this doesn’t work terribly well as a rule. It’s probably better than no rules at all, but that’s not a very high bar.

My interpretation of the rules is something like this:

People might feel offended by any gratuitous or inappropriate display of sexuality. Yeah, this is socially-constructed, but we have collectively decided that many sexual expressions are inappropriate in non-intimate settings. It needn’t be ‘creepy’ behaviour (exposure, say), but could be something otherwise healthy – two consenting people having sex is perfectly OK, but not in the board room or in a conference booth. People would get offended, and predictably so.

Humiliation might come from commenting on another person’s sex life, either slut-shaming or whatever the opposite of that is. It’s an unwelcome attempt to assert values from one sphere of life into a different sphere, quite aside from the validity of that value system. Shaming people for their sex lives (or lack thereof) is straightforwardly inappropriate.

Intimidation is also clearly wrong. Physical or reputational threat is wrong (and frequently illegal). There’s some crossover with humiliation here, insofar as people may feel intimidated by the prospect of future humiliation. I don’t give a lot of credence to the idea of misunderstandings playing a large role here – intimidating someone is difficult to do by accident.

Now, someone else may say that “offence” is whatever some other person says it is, because anyone can claim to be offended by anything. And that’s broadly true. Some people claim to be offended by homosexuality, and they might therefore protest against shows of affection between homosexual couples in a workplace setting. In some locales, this might even be illegal! The rules as written would appear to side with the person claiming offence, and I doubt that this is the intent. Now, ICANN may have some house rules that are much more nuanced, but it would seem to me that if these exist, they should be publicised instead. I say this with due trepidation, but the gap between the vagueness of the rules and the clarity of Maria’s examples is close to being an example of the two-step of terrific triviality.

All that said, I find it odd that most people’s go-to example is of a woman being offended by a man chatting her up. The old saw that men fear being laughed at and women fear being killed would appear to be validated by this; comment #1 gets to the heart of the male fear that their advances will be deemed so unworthy as to be offensive. Now, I’m not one to deny or dismiss psychological pain, but it seems to me that if this is your problem, you should learn to handle it better. Women don’t owe you niceness or attention but, contrary to what some corners of the internet may say, nor are they plotting to humiliate you for showing interest in them (yes, this does occasionally happen, yes it is psychologically scarring, no it’s nowhere near the worst thing that can happen to a person). To the extent that there’s a male mindset which views these interactions as high-stakes mating opportunities* when they’re clearly not, then solving that underlying problem might make both men and women happier.

* Bullshit evo-psych alert: In highly gender-unequal environments where there are few women, maybe the lizard bit of the brain really does think “hmm, there’s three women and eighty-two men here” and thus adjusts the stakes accordingly. OK, this is probably total nonsense, but I’m struggling to find better explanations of the frankly bizarre male behaviours that appear to be regular occurrences in these kinds of settings.

But the thing that is often missing from this discussion (though mentioned above) is that men are quite good at discerning the mental states of their male co-workers and bosses. They will know if someone dislikes them, for example, or is competitive with them, or is morose. That guys continually make “honest mistakes” about whether someone is sexually interested in them is disingenuous.

Belle is entirely correct here. I would also add that the community of people who are so totally ignorant that they genuinely can’t pick up other people’s body language and nonverbal communications are is a) really a lot smaller than people seem to think and b) if they’re sensible, shy.

Yes, under sensible rules, trying to flirt with a co-worker is something that can be dangerous to your career. So tough luck, the world is a dangerous place and (controversial opinion) often more dangerous for women than for men. If you aren’t confident enough that your display of affection will be reciprocated to think it’s worth taking this risk then yes you shouldn’t do it. The statement “I would stake my career on it” is often used in business contexts and I don’t see any real problem with making this the relevant standard.

It really does distress me that modern men are so risk-averse that they claim that they won’t do anything at all if there’s any risk at all of adverse consequences to themselves, and that the world needs to be organised as a “safe space” for socially obtuse men, so they can go around bothering their co-workers and everyone has to pretend to ignore it. It’s so … cowardly. God help us if there’s ever another war.

Marias @45

I think we can deal with 80% of this stuff just by communicating that it’s not OK to slowly look up and down the body of a woman you’ve just met, address your conversation to her breasts, or suggest she wants to have sex with you. Let alone follow her around a meeting room or body block her from the exit – all stuff people have told me about just in the last 24 hours. Focusing on the whole ‘but if we have zero flirting at work, how will the species continue’ ignores the fact that most of this stuff is so, so clearly over the line, but goes on happening anyway.

It’s along the same continuum of rape advice that says to guys ‘don’t rape people’.

This seems roughly right to me, except that the definition you’ve offered isn’t really equivalent to “don’t rape people”, which is a clear directive to avoid relatively well-defined behaviour. The list of (appalling) behaviours you list in the first quote above are also relatively well-defined behaviours.

“Sexual harassment is any unwanted or unwelcome sexual behaviour, which makes a person feel offended, humiliated or intimidated.”

This makes sexual harassment 100% contingent on the reaction of the non-harrassing party. Even if it is true (and I agree that it probably is) that 80% of harassment is clearly behaviour that doesn’t fit into some gray zone associated with a “I couldn’t figure out what she was thinking”, this kind of definition leaves such a sense of ambiguity over what it encompasses.

I think we need a more precise definition, and one that acknowledges certain social/cultural norms. In “our” culture (not sure what I mean by that), it is generally accepted that there are very few contexts where the direct suggestion of sex is OK (people go to certain kinds of parties and clubs for that). Moreover, in “our” culture, it is generally accepted that dating follows a line from “getting to know you better” towards sex, even if there are widely varying timelines and intensity levels that people follow.

So, I’m thing about @ 47, and leaning toward something closer to “Sexual harassment is spoken or acted behaviour which introduces sex or the possibility of sex into a situation, dialog or discussion in which it is not clearly a topic, without the mutually acknowledged consent of all parties”.

This is on the one hand broader than Maria’s definition, because it makes a base assumption that bringing up sex in the wrong context is a priori wrong, even if nobody is actually offended, humiliated or intimidated. But it also narrower, because it doesn’t rely on anyone’s reaction, and leaves open the possibility of a consensual meandering towards “dating behaviour”. I also tried to work consent in there, since this seems to have been a valuable tool in defining what is and what is not rape.

But I could be way off….

Paul Davis: do you know what other book sold millions of copies?

It’s also possible to read reports of deep differences between male and female communicative strategies in a non-essentializing way, not as claims about what women always and everywhere are like by nature etc. but about how people respond to cultural environments.

E.g., I read Belle’s claims above about “you probably already know” etc. and I thought, of course *you* know: that has been vitally important information for you to know, given how often you have been harassed. People who live in areas with poisonous fauna quickly learn to recognize them, even when the fauna try to camouflage themselves.

But there is no comparable army of predators lying in wait for me, and so I have not had to develop those sensitive antennae. If I am more clueless about those social cues, it is because there has been no cost to my being clueless (or the trivial costs reflected in Plume’s story of frolics forgone). For most women, the costs of not catching those signals can be huge.

And indeed, this is another cost of harassment, or, if you like, another male privilege: I don’t have to attend to these signals and clues and channels, because no one is no one is going to rape me if I get it wrong.

Which in turn means that I have been able to devote more of my processing capacity to studying 14th c. Jongleur guilds, and less of it to trying to figure out why Ronnie is looking at me funny. The cognitive costs of harassment are real, even before the harasser strikes.

I’m happy to take instruction, Bianca, since I have never read the book. (More savings in cognitive economy!)

For crying out loud, I wasn’t suggesting that the mars/venus books were of any direct relevance to the matter at hand. Some commenters have suggested people find it easy to understand each other, both within and across gender boundaries, and I was merely pointing one single cultural manifestation whose popularity suggests that this isn’t so.

Those particular books can be complete garbage and it wouldn’t change the point I was trying to make: the claim that men believe that they understand women (or the men) around them (and ditto with the genders swapped) is too broad to be considered “true”.

Maria @ 59:

it puts the the burden of policing behaviour onto the potential bad actor.

but it doesn’t! The jerk just says “I had no idea it would offend her”. Saying that someone should be considered in their assessment about offence, humiliation or intimidation is pretty meaningless when we’re talking about people who by definition are not considerate.

Yes, under sensible rules, trying to flirt with a co-worker is something that can be dangerous to your career. So tough luck, the world is a dangerous place … The statement “I would stake my career on it” is often used in business contexts and I don’t see any real problem with making this the relevant standard. It really does distress me that modern men are so risk-averse that they claim that they won’t do anything at all if there’s any risk at all of adverse consequences

By this logic perhaps we should bring back stoning for adulterers (if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen…)

This conversation exposes huge analysis biases all over the place. Men exhibit huge selection effects (I don’t see it so it doesn’t really happen) which warp the conversation on their end. I’m not sure if it is an overreaction to that bias, but the Dunning-Kruger effect being shown from d-squared and Belle is just astonishing with this:

But the thing that is often missing from this discussion (though mentioned above) is that men are quite good at discerning the mental states of their male co-workers and bosses. They will know if someone dislikes them, for example, or is competitive with them, or is morose. That guys continually make “honest mistakes” about whether someone is sexually interested in them is disingenuous.

Yes, you are both smart and discerning people. LOTS of people are not as socially discerning as you. And there is a HUGE self-selection effect for smart and discerning people to filter out less smart and less self discerning people as much as they can over the course of their life times. Think of the stupidest person you are willing to hang out with on a regular basis. That person is probably average or even a bit above average. Think of the least discerning person you regularly hang out with. That person is very likely average. There is a whole world of people who make social discernment mistakes that you would consider completely trivial.

“Men are quite good at discerning the mental states of their male co-workers and bosses.”?!?!?!?!? Are you freaking kidding me? So many HR problems are caused by one person thinking their subtle cues are obvious to the person who doesn’t have a clue about them. Hell, sometimes even not so subtle cures. And I don’t mean harassment, I mean people who fundamentally misguess clues so they think everyone is mad at them, or likes them, or isn’t trying to help them. And that is at work, which presumably people have lots of experience at compared to flirting.

We are still at a stage with sexual harassment where we would be best served by really enforcing the clear 80% instead of trying to over police things at the ‘offended’ level. The non discerning people can understand “Look, don’t undress someone with your eyes” or “Talking about their breasts isn’t OK” and we aren’t even at the place where that level is routinely dealt with. The clear stuff can have harsh penalties because it is clear without feeling like we are squashing basic human interactions.

Trying to apply harsh penalties to the non-clear stuff as if we all had Belle and d-squared levels of discernment is likely to cause significant pushback which may bleed into the clear stuff. There is still a lot of work to be done on the clear stuff,

Is this so hard? Guys, unless and until a woman makes an unambiguous move/statement that she is interested in moving toward a sexual relationship, she isn’t.

JG

Every morning on the subway I see a truncated version (“If it’s unwanted it’s harassment.”) of the formula invoked here: “Sexual harassment is any unwanted or unwelcome sexual behavior, which makes a person feel offended, humiliated or intimidated.” I must admit it creeps me out a bit.

Maybe it marks me as aspiring harasser, but it seems to me that there is something inherently wrong with such formulae, hinging as they do on wholly subjective criteria, and positing a weird, sort of a priori linkage. It seems to me that there must be some venerable, slightly archaic name for this sort of logical or rhetorical fallacy. Anybody know it? Such a slogan may be useful as koan, helping to raise consciousness on the subject, but as administrative principle it seems otherwise unhelpful, and fraught with potential for abuse.

The definition isn’t great, but what you are missing, and what I missed at first, was the intended context: a conference which is a work environment where the unwanted actions are the things Maria described upthread.

lynne @ 73 maria’s definition didn’t describe specific behaviours, but described things based on the reaction of the person being harassed. She later mentioned specific behaviours which I think just about everyone here would agree should not take place.

The problem is defining some kind of policy/rule/behavioural guidance that unambiguously makes those behaviours unacceptable without (a) relying on the harasser being required to admit that they knew their behaviour would result in offence, humiliation or intimidation and (b) without excluding other work-place behaviour that isn’t actually offensive.

Even if 80% of all harassment is egregiously clearly harassment, I don’t see how it helps to frame a definition or rule about that is entirely based on post-facto response of the harassed, rather than what the harasser actually did. We don’t do this for rape (well, we try not to), where we do not ask “Did the victim feel raped?”. We ask “was there consent for the behaviour that took place?” and if the answer is no, then what took place was rape. I think using a similar standard for harassment would be a step in the right direction.

People here who would like better, clearer guidance on how to recognize and react to harassment might like the allies training materials developed by the no-longer-in-operation nonprofit The Ada Initiative, which also developed a facilitator’s guide and other materials. This is the workshop I was mentioning in my comment #3. It’s all freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike licence. If you’re interested in recommendations for experienced people to teach this workshop, I can offer those, but I also wanted to link to the curriculum since it offers some concrete dos and don’ts,* e.g., how to react when you’re at a professional conference and you see someone grab a woman’s butt.

* Incidentally: I’ve never been satisfied with how to elegantly and grammatically pluralize “do and don’t” in that phrase, and I welcome advice on that point.

@Sumana

Funny, I was just looking that up the other day. Here’s one link that summarizes a few usage guides.

I don’t think you can do it elegantly. ;-)

There’s no crime that’s entirely based on the subjective response of the victim. Even hate crimes depend on determining the mentality of the accused.

Collin Street @79 … the issue being raised is not the state of mind of the accused, but the idea of the threshold for harassment being based on the subjective response of the harassed. This has nothing to do with figuring out what the harasser was thinking (though that might ultimately play into it in some way) and everything to do with “X is harassment because it caused P offence, humiliation or intimidation”, a description that relies entirely on P’s subjective response. Even if the behaviour itself would clearly be considered harassment by any reasonable person, this definition doesn’t cover that (e.g. “sexual harassment is behaviour that would be assessed by any reasonable person as …” ; we all know about the rat holes such definitions lead societies down anyway).

Paul Davis @ 76 Yes, I know, but her comment @ 45 gave the intended context, and listed the behaviours she was talking about. The definition is not the main point here! The things Maria listed—if these could be got rid of, this would apparently be huge at these conferences. (I don’t go to conferences, I hate hearing how common this kind of harassment is.)

there are contexts (work being an obvious one) where sex or sex-related behaviour is almost never relevant

Just a heads up: 10% of hetero American couples met at work

88: Thanks for linking that, the curve for “met at work” is very interesting, apparently moving up as women moved into the workforce, and then falling off a cliff. The direction, trendline is certainly toward zero.

The direction, trendline is certainly toward zero.

Time to buy shares in Tindr

This thread perfectly demonstrates why men don’t and perhaps can’t get what it’s like to be a woman as seen by men, and why white people don’t get what it’s like to be black and seen by white people. And I don’t claim to get it either. But let’s try trusting those who do get it because they can’t avoid it.

JG

Oh, sorry – link to study and source of the quote in my comment:
http://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_How_Couples_Meet_Working_Paper.pdf

LOTS of people are not as socially discerning as you

Well for those people it’s no workplace nookie allowed at all then.

I haven’t read all the posts, but what MrMister says at 97 above seems like a reasonable take on the subject.

Apart from that, *if* indeed most women attending these conferences can agree that sexual propositioning or obvious courtship causes, on average, more discomfort than pleasure to them – sad as that would be – then, certainly, let it be banned. The less suffering in the world, the better. Obviously, ‘sexual behaviour’ will be a bit harder to delimit, though (stealthy ogling? smouldering gazes? suppressed sighs?), so it’s no use formulating a ban so broadly as to make it unenforceable.

@OP

> ‘simply believing people when they talk about it, because the barrier to talking about it is already dissuasively high’

That sounds as if anyone accused will automatically be considered guilty, though. However rare false accusations may be, this gives enormous arbitrary power to those who would make them. That is completely unacceptable in my view.

Paul Davis,

“The problem is defining some kind of policy/rule/behavioural guidance that unambiguously makes those behaviours unacceptable without (a) relying on the harasser being required to admit that they knew their behaviour would result in offence, humiliation or intimidation and (b) without excluding other work-place behaviour that isn’t actually offensive.”

Of you look up stalking and harassment statutes they are based on the effect the action has on the victim, eg. Causing distress etc.

There are clauses about the stalker knowing that what they were doing would offend or distress the person they stalked — but even if they don’t, as per the socially oblivious sexual harasser, if the judge thinks this is what a person should generally know, and the effect has been to cause distress and offence, then the action is stalking.

“Even if 80% of all harassment is egregiously clearly harassment, I don’t see how it helps to frame a definition or rule about that is entirely based on post-facto response of the harassed, rather than what the harasser actually did. We don’t do this for rape (well, we try not to), where we do not ask “Did the victim feel raped?”. We ask “was there consent for the behaviour that took place?” and if the answer is no, then what took place was rape. I think using a similar standard for harassment would be a step in the right direction.”

In a sexual harassment situation, if it is at work and the sexual harasser is in a position of power compared to the person they harass, the woman may not know what to do about it immediately, and not express immediately that she does not consent to being treated in that fashion. This is why the laws put an emphasis on the effects of the action on the victim.

There is a famous book in Australia called The First Stone by Helen Garner from the 1990s about a sexual harassment case at a Residential College at Melbourne University. She wrote the young women who sought disciplinary action against the man who harassed them should be like the women in her day and elbow or slap the man instead of taking disciplinary action against him.

But elbowing or slapping the man is not so effective as disciplinary action, and maybe then he would sexually harass other young women, thinking all he would get is an elbow or a slap. I guess they could have elbowed him or slapped him and still taken disciplinary action, but maybe they were shocked and he was in a position of power, so they didn’t elbow him or slap him.

I don’t see why women should be in a position where men can constantly propose to sexually harass them, and the women have to either consent to being sexually harassed or say “no, actually, I don’t consent to be sexually harassed by you.”

Asking women if you can sexually harass them is sexual harassment in my view.

If I was constantly getting asked by random men if I would consent to them sexually harassing me I would find it offensive and distressing.

Maybe someone could start finishing schools for men.

The larger issue isn’t so much harassment as treating people differently because of they way they appear, distinguishing them by gender or ancestry or what have you. Odds are, the woman you’ve just met is more intent on discussing the professional concerns you share with her than pursuing your romantic fantasies.

Look at it from her point of view. How much fun is it to have all these ridiculous dorks hitting on you when you were looking forward to a discussion of inventory optimization or hashing functions?

We want women in the workplace. They’re pretty good at what we do. That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.

dsquared writes: It really does distress me that modern men are so risk-averse that they claim that they won’t do anything at all if there’s any risk at all of adverse consequences to themselves, and that the world needs to be organised as a “safe space” for socially obtuse men, so they can go around bothering their co-workers and everyone has to pretend to ignore it.

I just wanted to quote that because it is lovely.

My experience is that both men and women at work actually want to do their jobs. Some just for the paycheck, some because they find the work interesting, but nearly none just to be an object of entertainment.

A colleague of mine, on being informed that we were going to undergo sexual harassment training, complained that he didn’t need training, he’d been doing it all his life. When it was his turn in the conference room with an assortment of mid-level staffers, mostly women from accounting, there were complaints from the adjoining cubicles about the sound of the laughter within. A generous amount of crude humor is typical in manufacturing companies, and my friend is a master of the form.

Our company, though, had women in key positions throughout, including the VP of manufacturing, who more than held their own as apostles of best practices, typically known by Japanese names even though they were invented here. We had big parties, everybody got to meet each other’s spouses and children.

The dynamics are probably different when everyone is young and unattached. Maybe the stunt man’s rule is appropriate: if I do this now, could I get back up and do it again? If not, don’t.

As someone who’s been raped and, in a different context, pretty strikingly harassed (you would agree, I promise), I’m finding these “but what about men who aren’t good at flirting” arguments disheartening and frustrating. I’m sure this isn’t anybody’s intention, but what I’m hearing is “sexual harassment isn’t as important as my or my friend’s theoretical right to try to have sex.” There are a lot of places where the writer really would mean that. So I guess what I am asking for is some small acknowedgment somewhere that you’re friendly, and not an MRA.

Apologies for the r-word, but stats say that there are probably other readers here who have been assaulted too, reading about how regulations against sexual harassment play into the capitalists’ hands and reproductively disenfranching awkward people. Of course sexual harassment isn’t the same thing as rape, but I’ll tell you, I sure am flinchy about it.

Brett, if we’re talking legal offense proven in a court of law beyond reasonable doubt, yes.

If we are talking offense in the sense of giving offense to my co-workers in a professional setting by sexually harassing them, then no – if they feel it, you are doing it, and you should stop.

thereby functioning like nearly every other law governing crimes against people, wherein the victims aren’t obligated to report anything to police unless they want to

Actually in UK at least police are obliged to investigate a crime if anyone reports it regardless of the victim’s wishes. (In theory couldn’t the victim even be compelled to to testify in such a case – ianal and happy to be corrected…)

The only exact offences listed are placing a person in fear of death or serious bodily injury. The other stalking is all dependent on whether it is something distressing.

I guess this is to not make the statute too lengthy prohibiting all sorts of things that are stalking, as then it would go on for a long time, if the legislators had to think up every single thing that a stalker could do, and explicitly prohibit it.

Also the legislature might not think of something and then leave it out of the list of prohibited actions that constitute stalking, being as it was too odd for the legislature to even consider when they made the law, then there would be a problem. So its better just to have the stalking being causing substantial emotional distress.

Faustusnotes @ 120: did you read the Aunt Pythia column posted upthread by Doug K. ?

http://mathbabe.org/2015/10/14/romance-and-math-meetings/

Was that harassment or not?

Barb’s concept is more workable than most.

Quoting from a comment on mathbabe:

Everyone agrees that it is sexual harassment if the same man asks a woman out repeatedly. What people don’t realize is that if it is considered permissible to ask a women out at a conference once, then she will be asked out be many men, thus she will be having the annoying experience of repeatedly turning down sexual advances. This is why asking women out in a work environment where the male to female ratio is horrific is so absolutely uncomfortable for many of the women.

What people don’t realize is that if it is considered permissible to ask a women out at a conference once, then she will be asked out be many men, thus she will be having the annoying experience of repeatedly turning down sexual advances.

If this is the case then by all means make it a rule of the conference that attendees may not ask others out – just don’t equate this with harassment, which is a crime which involves a course of conduct and a men’s rea

we are really talking about a very small number of self-regarding and anti-social people

Arguably these are guys with Narcisstic Personality Disorder or who follow Pick-Up Artist ‘methods’ (which seem somewhat like an attempt to mimic NPD behaviour).

engels@127: men’s rea

!!!

men’s rea

To my great regret, a typo, for which I can not take credit.

@ 133

“It’s treating the inner life of others as completely and axiomatically opaque, that people don’t — can’t — have any insight into what other people are thinking unless they get told, or sometimes even if they get told. The ability to know what other people are thinking is treated as some mystical magical power, beyond normal human ken.

I mean… well, yeah. It’s long been my thesis that all right-wing behaviour is consistent with empathy impairment, and this thread — like every bloody thing else, that’s why I think what I think — certainly isn’t providing a counterexample.”

The basic problem with this is that ’empathy’ is essentially subjective. Short of a long interview, some kind of psychological fieldwork, or extensive access to someone’s private diary entries, it is difficult to read other people’s minds, or to accurately assess their feelings. Empathy can be very difficult on an individual level, and does require at least some invasion of privacy, or all relationships will be very distant and formulaic.

Ultimately this is why politeness and formal behaviour have evolved, because we often need to reject ‘overfriendliness’ and set limits to a relationship. That’s also why flirting takes place- a potential suitor needs to know whether they can cross the line into a more intimate relationship with someone. As such it remains perfectly innocent as long as the flirter acknowledges the fact that the ‘flirtee’ is entitled to respond in a formal fashion and reject the advance. If the flirter does not accept this, then we’re moving into harassment territory. On the other hand, to find it offensive to merely be asked, or to be flirted with, is something of an over-reaction and would make a great deal of normal social interaction untenable.

Paul Davis, the mathbabe example is clearly sexual harrassment. It’s also unprofessional, sexist and deeply insulting, which is why the woman who wrote the letter is so clearly upset. Obviously the standard of “repeated attention” doesn’t apply at a conference since the time frame is limited, but the woman who wrote that letter is going to be suffering this attention constantly at conferences and it’s the responsibility of the dude who pulled the slick moves to recognize that and treat her professionally. The end of her letter is so sad – that she’s wondering if she should tone down her warmth. It’s sad because a) that won’t change anything and b) she’s already, early in her career, thinking about policing her behavior at conferences to stop getting hit on, specifically thinking about not being as nice which sucks, and c) she’s already doubting her technical and professional ability and wondering how much of the support she receives is tits-based.

That’s why it’s harrassment.

Many people contributing here seem to be thinking about harrassment the way republicans think about rape – it’s not really rape unless it was egregiously rapey, and any grey areas need to be resolved in favor of the man because of fee fees. Just like most rapists are not the monster figure of legend, most sexual harrassers are not creepy weirdos with narcissistic personality disorders. They’re just dudes doing what they think is their right and not thinking about the effect of their behavior on the target. That’s why we have sexual harrassment policies – to get these dudes to think about and change their behavior, and ensure women understand that they don’t have to endure this stuff just to do their job.

So yeah, if you aren’t sure whether it’s sexual harrassment or not, don’t do it.

I don’t know what Mathbabe believes it is or isn’t, but I think it’s sexual harrassment. I also think that you will never get a policy that offers men no wiggle room, because this is a matter of human behavior, and there will always be complexities and grey areas. That’s why universities have compliance boards and equal opportunity officers and the like. And often these things are not resolved to anyone’s satisfaction.

It’s especially important that we have a stricter policy at conferences and workshops than at our normal workplaces precisely because they are one-off events where people gather outside of their normal structures, which makes this kind of thing very easy for men to try once, and women to experience continually. Sexual harassment policy isn’t just about punishing harassers, but also about ensuring that a safe work environment is created.

I have a friend who recently started working for a major Japanese car-maker (in Japan). During her training she was at a special training location with a bunch of people from lots of different subsidiary companies (hers was a subsidiary too), all juniors, and experienced something very similar to the mathbabe post. I and all her other friends (we have a shared chat through our gaming interests, so the issue was aired and debated instantly) encouraged her to report it; she did, and the same day was told the dude would be shifted to a different group in the training sessions, told exactly what he had done wrong and warned against it, and she was given a guarantee she would not have to deal with him again. Nobody was harmed, the offender was warned and the victim assured her presence in the company was valued.

If a Japanese car-maker and all my nerdy gaming friends (from diverse countries working in disparate industries in Japan) can get it, western academics can surely handle it too.

The basic problem with this is that ’empathy’ is essentially subjective. Short of a long interview, some kind of psychological fieldwork, or extensive access to someone’s private diary entries, it is difficult to read other people’s minds, or to accurately assess their feelings.

It’s not just people, is the part that particularly strikes me. It’s ICANN, which means programmers. Now, a programmer spends literally half their working life trying to figure out just how they fucked up, exactly how it was that despite their best efforts what they wrote down as what they wanted didn’t match what they actually wanted: you do that for a while and — I would have thought — you become reasonably comfortable with self-critique and the gaps between desire, intent, and outcomes. Get a bit humble and all that.

But no, or at least not realiably.

“Sexual harassment is spoken or acted behaviour which introduces sex or the possibility of sex or opinions about a person’s physical appearance into a context in which it is not clearly a topic, without the mutually acknowledged consent of all parties”

“That’s a nice shirt, you’re wearing.”

Based on the rules which are made, the codes will develop. If it’s not ok to ask, “Wanta jump into bed,” then people will ask, “do you want to meet for coffee?” And if that’s not ok, it will be, “Can I get a printed copy of your paper?”

Would you like to come over to check out my stamps collection?

Let me guess

introduces sex or the possibility of sex or opinions about a person’s physical appearance into a context in which it is not clearly a topic, without the mutually acknowledged consent of all parties

“Would anyone have any objections if I were to briefly mention that David’s shirt is hanging out? No? Great! David…”

“Harassment kills people, Ivor. OK? Not a minor problem. ”

This is why I object to classifying EVERYTHING we are talking about under the “harassment” label. You don’t get to count hinting once that coffee might be nice as harassment AND get to pull the “harassment kills people” card.

Either stick to a definition of harassment where that statement makes sense, or don’t try to shut people up with the statement. But only one of those two.

SH, only the truly empathetic know gets the benefit of empathy. It is kind of like the modest.

Some enterprises take the attitude that people do not come to work, generally speaking, in order to do sex, and therefore any sort of specifically sexual behavior is forbidden. (Regardless of supposed or explicit consent.) I have worked in such places and the workers did not die even if they were terribly frustrated. Given the inability, in this discussion, to define ‘harassment’, this simpler approach might be the best thing.

> Given the inability, in this discussion, to define ‘harassment’,

We’ve defined it; it’s just that working with the definition in real time requires insight into the state-of-mind of other people, which some people have difficulty with, even to the point where they believe that such a thing is impossible, not only for themselves but for essentially all humanity.

Given this state of affairs, we have two choices:
+ the non-empathic, those who don’t have insight into the mind-state of others and so cannot guarantee that their attempts to engage in sexual discussions will comply with our definition of harassment, can refrain from engaging in sexual discussions, or
+ people can be subject to sexual harassment.

Which, like I said, isn’t really a choice at all.

[and, no, you don’t get to make the “oh, I’m only asking for coffee” argument, if your argument is also predicated on your inability to tell whether you’re causing problems for the people you’re approaching, because… you don’t know whether or not you’re causing significant problems, and that means from time to time you will cause significant problems. Also, see discussion upthread about the cumulative effects: but predicting the large-scale consequences of individually-chosen actions under any particular incentive-scheme/social set-up requires, yes, the ability to predict how others will respond to any particular social setup, which, yes, means “empathy”. But I’ve made that point before in political contexts.]

If a Japanese car-maker and all my nerdy gaming friends (from diverse countries working in disparate industries in Japan) can get it

Of course I am not claiming perfect practice, but my impression is that the Japanese are instilled with a set of rigid ritualized somewhat asymmetrical anti-harassment social norms starting in elementary school to the point where it inhibits adult interaction.

“That’s a nice hairclip.”
“Don’t be creepy.” (ritualized response)

A compliment on a girl’s physical appearance is akin to a marriage proposal: daters don’t even do it. “It suits you.” is as good as it gets. Like I said ritualized as all hell.

Funny (not) how that happens

I hate to break this to you but some heterosexual men are pretty well-adapted in terms of social / same-sex interactions but clueless when it comes to women / intimate relationships. (But as I said above really feel the focus on this issue is misguided anyway – iirc most serious harassment is different in kind from a cack-handed sexual advance…)

Understand what Saurs is saying in 114 and you will start to get it.

An office environment where the charming studs fannypat the pretty women while the sad sacks of both sexes watch and ask “What are the rules anyway” is exactly what they want.

“We’ve defined it; it’s just that working with the definition in real time requires insight into the state-of-mind of other people, which some people have difficulty with, even to the point where they believe that such a thing is impossible, not only for themselves but for essentially all humanity. ”

And which some people appear to overestimate in themselves.

Act exactly according to my rigid American normative preferences even at internationally organisations or else people die and go to prison is rather the opposite of empathy.

No-one (afaics) is objecting to ‘uncomfortable silences’; they are objecting to the threat of criminal penalties and the apparatus of the US carceral state.

Of course, as the advanced economies seek to find surplus in service, information, education and financialization, social skills, emotional intelligence and verbal dexterity have become valuable commodities in the logic of late capitalism and a social hierarchy that prioritizes and rewards the most talented/attractive and punishes and excludes the inept will prove profitable and reproducible. But more, the avoidance of rigid codes and rules in favor of ambiguous guides will encourage and reward risk-taking and creativity and social distinctions (in intra-office politics and romance) precisely in those most productive workers capitalism needs to uncover.

Neoliberalism is a liberalism burying the old distinctions of race gender class in favor of the more productive distinctions above.

Of course those distinctions have long been considered more pronounced in women, and as women move into the workforce and become powerful, we are encountering the competitive codes of sexual management we have encountered before, for instance when men were off to the crusades and rules of chivalry and courtly love became fashionable. C. S. Lewis’ only readable book.

This is, as the protection of women by men, still all Patriarchy.

bob mcmanus,

“Of course I am not claiming perfect practice, but my impression is that the Japanese are instilled with a set of rigid ritualized somewhat asymmetrical anti-harassment social norms starting in elementary school to the point where it inhibits adult interaction.
“That’s a nice hairclip.”
“Don’t be creepy.” (ritualized response)
A compliment on a girl’s physical appearance is akin to a marriage proposal: daters don’t even do it. “It suits you.” is as good as it gets. Like I said ritualized as all hell.”

This does not seem to be the case where the Japanese are raised in a psych-rock band environment in my experience.

Then they will stalk and sexually harass and power harass (a Japanese concept for harassment in work situations like concerts)you from the stage even when they are a woman themselves.

This happened to me in 2005 by the daughter in the family psych-rock band Maher Shalal Hash Baz when she played in her band the Tenniscoats. Both bands played the concert with Joanna Newsom who stalked me on her records and Bill Callahan who from 1998 always sexually harassed me by staring at me from the stage in a way which made me look at the ground, apart from one time in around 2000 2001 I outstared the man. Turns out he stalked me on records too.

After the daughter in Maher Shalal Hash Baz stalked and sexually harassed me by staring at me for the whole of her song Sheepies from We Are Everyone I was so emotionally distressed I had a breakdown.

So, you see, Japanese women can sexually harass people too. Perhaps I’m wrong to blame her psych rock band upbringing, maybe it’s just her own personality.

I am going to make recommendations to the government for reforming the Creative Industries on account of what happened to me.

They need workplace procedures and regulations to stop this in the first place,, as now I only am left with taking criminal and civil legal action after the fact of being stalked and sexually harassed since I went to concerts in 1998.

And I got stalked and sexually harassed by Creative Industries women as well as men. And if I made a list of less and most worst – Joanna Newsom would be the worst, then Harmony Korine the film director who made a representation of me in black face and then lynched the representation of me like in Strange Fruits which is racist and sexist I think he is friends with the sadist since I saw in an interview the sadist’s mother likes Harmony Korine, then if you don’t count the sadist who doesn’t make music herself only sings back up, next is Chan Marshall of Cat Power. So 2 out of my worst 3 Creative Industry stalkers and sexual harassers are women.

If anyone has any suggestions how to regulate the Creative Industries so they can’t stalk and sexually harass women they don’t know, that would be helpful. All I thought of was they had to send privacy agreements out to people they wanted to represent and then you could tick a box saying you didn’t agree to be represented.

Nobody’s brought up incarceration for inviting someone out to a movie.

They said it was sexual harassment, which is a crime punishable by prison.

Perhaps unrelatedly, has there ever been a CT post on the topic of sexual harassment that wasn’t concerned exclusively with the experiences of upper-middle class women (ie. those who attend academic conferences or work at international organisations)? Eg. waitresses, domestic workers, factory workers, benefit claimants, sex workers, etc…

They said it was sexual harassment, which is a crime punishable by prison.

No. As an umbrella term you can apply “sexual harrassment” to other things that really are illegal – varieties of assault and so forth – but without the accompaniment of those also-illegal acts it is (if it reaches court) a civil matter. (I think – maybe there’s a stalking law that can be applied to persistent office assholery. Speaking as a not-attorney, corrections of what I’ve pulled out of my ass are welcome.)

AFAICT neither Maria nor any posts supporting her in this thread have called for criminal penalties against people who cause discomfort with requests or hinting about a date at professional conferences or in the workplace. It was Brett Bellmore who first insisted that an offense that “carries penalties” must have an objective definition (unclear if he meant even private penalties like a reprimand from a workplace supervisor), and you’re the first to say “criminal penalties.” This turning into a game of telephone where Brett introduces the requirement for formal specifications leading up to penalties, other people think he means criminal penalties, and a hundred posts later we’re going to be arguing about the American criminal justice system’s failures and retributive orientation in general as if Maria had actually proposed imprisoning men who keep hitting women up for dates at conferences. She didn’t. It was a classic bit of misdirection that took us here, like when someone manages to sucker people into debating government censorship and the limits of legal speech after “political correctness” makes their favorite ethnic jokes effectively off-limits in polite society.

The legal guidance is here: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/stalking_and_harassment/#a02a

That’s fairly far removed from being worried about coffee invitations, but thank you for the link.

> the would-be perpetrator knows he is committing it

Under no circumstances is this an acceptable requirement. Desireable, yes, as much as possible, but it’s not 100% possible and attempts to get 100% understanding are doomed. Pretty much any framework that requires some form of buy-in by the perpetrators runs into the pretty serious problem that most people think their actions — whatever their actions are — are justified and reasonable under the circumstances.

This is why the law is framed so that “ignorance” of it is no defence; it’s also why mediation is never any damned good for anything, ever, but that’s a side-issue.

>what I’m hearing is “sexual harassment isn’t as important as my or my friend’s theoretical right to try to have sex.”

>we have to make a choice between permitting your attempts to have sex and permitting the people you want to have sex with from not being traumatised by your, and other people’s, attempts to have sex with them, and y’know what? It’s no choice at all.

Again, to be absolutely clear, yes, I agree that propositioning people when they’ve already refused or clearly would be made uncomfortable by it is wrong, and I’m not against banning all sexual come-ons and suchlike at conferences etc., if the majority of women truly consider that to be desirable for their well-being. *But* if we’ll be making some kind of *absolute ranking* between ‘the right to try to have sex’ and ‘guaranteeing at any cost that no sexual harassment will ever, ever, ever take place’, then I suggest we just castrate everybody and call it a day.

TTN you are being a dick and a time-waster. You clearly thought it was a purely civil matter and not a criminal one, which was your objection to my mention of prison, and you were wrong. On the other issue please read the discussion properly, I clearly said (in #127) I was okay (ex hypothesi) with such invitations being specifically prohibited at a conference but not with them being treated as crime.

You clearly thought it was a purely civil matter and not a criminal one, which was your objection to my mention of prison, and you were wrong.

It’s true that I was wrong for the UK! But it’s not actually true that it’s the sole method even within the UK of dealing with sexual harrassment, as your 127 seems to imply.

On the other issue please read the discussion properly, I clearly said (in #127) I was okay (ex hypothesi) with such invitations being specifically prohibited at a conference but not with them being treated as crime.

Which zero people proposed, right? It’s an instructive panic, given that so many institutions in the UK have sexual harrassment policies in place that operate without the intervention of constables. So the definition of sexual harrassment in the UK is not solely as a criminal offense, and you’re freaking out over…whose comments again? That’s right, nobody’s.

further notes;
The Decent Human Beings’ Guide to Getting Laid at Atheist Conferences

You’re welcome.
=================================
For those asking for Bright Lines in the definition (ignoring, you know, CONTEXT):

This is a “How many Grains of Sand amount to a Heap?” problem. Try this, you (generic you that is) are a class A person. Daily you will encounter a significant number of people from class B. (Unless you are a hermit, haha) Almost all of these people can be counted on to touch your upper arm. A majority of these will undertake to poke your upper arm once or more. Some will, in addition, hit your upper arm. And then there is the person that otherwise would ignore, pat, poke or hit your upper arm suddenly decide to break it.
And when you say stop poking, hitting, breaking my arm and display your arm with the non-tattoo colours of blue-and-red from recent events, the black-and-purple last time, and the green-and-yellow from the last week you will get responses like; “Pokers are just saying Hi.”, “Hitters are just showing Comraderi.”, “Hey, class B people have arms broken too!”. And those special snowflakes that say “you don’t have any blood blisters, therefore you have nothing to complain about.”

The reason why Asking for this Bright Line is that is sea lion tactic like JAQing Off (Just Asking Questions). The Sea Lion is asking for a Bright Line so he (most likely candidate) can race up to this line lean over and reach out as far as possible, and announce “A portion of my shoe heels are still on the ‘allowable side’ of the Line (admittedly you’ll need a microscope to make the judgement), therefore what I am doing does not meet your definition.”

=====================

Candidate for CDC to monitor;

Name: Conference-induced Autism

Host: Male attendee. Most likely from one of the Dudebro population employed in a field of technology; example being a Brogrammer.

Symptoms: displays autistic behaviors towards female attendees and conference employees. This behavior is suppressed when the female attendee is their supervisor, recognizable upper management, or recruiter for another firm.
This lasts until the conference has concluded. There is some debate as to whether the agent causing this dies off until the next conference or if it goes into dormancy until conditions are right to trigger another occurrence.

Cures: None known. Suggested ways to alleviate are Constant Direct Supervision by Upper Management, Quarantine to venues that have no female attendees or employees, or Expulsion from the Conference. It has been suggested that outbreaks of this be treated in the same manner as a Zombie Apocalypse. One Female researcher has been quoted as saying; “Nuke them from orbit. Its the only way to make sure.”

Transmission: Unknown. However fresh hires that have not been exposed to the DudeBro corporate culture have been shown to be more resistant to this.

@Linnen 03.12.16 at 1:47 am

Sorry for your bad experiences. Still, bright lines are necessary (the alternative being an order where the police / security guards just automatically haul away anyone you point at), and of course they must be placed in such a way that you will be comfortable regardless of how much people lean over. We are not one big family, we can’t just trust each other, so bright lines are what we need to operate.

ENGELS @ 178: (sorry for the all caps, typing on a kindle) As I recall, sexual harassment was a pretty big component of the tipping thread a few months ago, so yeah, people here have considered the concerns of waitresses.

“Whys it always about upper middle class women” is a bullshit move. Even leaving aside (1) how true is that as a representation of all the posts written at ct about sexual harassment (2) what really are the major differences between being sexually harrased at an academic conference or while working cleaning a hotel bedroom ? ( it Seems the general principles are pretty much applicable acros both situations). It’s probably more generous, and accurate, to see the op as written in the context of someone’s workplace where this issue is at this moment salient , rather than the upper class trying to exert hegemony over the workers. Equally you could ask why are the critiques of capitalism at ct so often shrouded in the verbiage of Marxist jargon and so removed from the concerns of the working man ? Of course neither criticism has a huge amount of merit.
Beside that though, if this post was “don’t hit on your coworker at a low paid job” how would that change any if the sceptical takes expressed above ?

Which zero people proposed, right? It’s an instructive panic, given that so many institutions in the UK have sexual harrassment policies in place that operate without the intervention of constables. So the definition of sexual harrassment in the UK is not solely as a criminal offense, and you’re freaking out over…whose comments again? That’s right, nobody’s.

I wasn’t ‘freaking out’. Fuck off. I was arguing with several people who knew what I was talking about. See for ex. DSquared’s claim that misplaced flirting should be ‘career-wrecking’. Barging into other peoples’ nversation several dozen comments late, not reading it properly and repeatedly making stupid mistakes about what they have arguing over isn’t fun or interesting.

I presume you also think that the woman writing in to the mathbabe example is being hysterical in her self-doubt

wtf

?? What are the differences ? I’m not taking any opinion on the contested definitions of harassment on the thread, but assuming a definition we agree on I don’t see why there aren’t more similarities than differences between being harnessed in different workplaces.

(Ffs still spelled wrong, well you get the idea)

Ze k – I don’t neccesarily think the waiter flirting with the barmaid , or vice versa, is always objectionable, anymore than I do two conference goers flirting. Which is why I was saying working from a definition we all agree on (groping , consistent propositioning etc) why would class be a more important characteristic than gender ? I mean I could understand where women have different interests etc built on class, but I don’t see why this is one of two.

213- No, it obviously doesn’t imply “everyone’s in the same boat”, just that there are common interests.
Anyway , The shift to a class based argument seems to me like a sleight of hand. Your objections (afaict)were to (1) definitions of harassment people were working from, and (2) the idea of overly punishing transgressions. I think your objections were largely irrelevant after Maria’s 45 , but nonetheless a class based perspective has nothing to do with your objections, which were on definitions and responses. Bringing “upper class” concerns into it was largely an ad homenin. Imo if Maria’s 45 became closer to the societal norm (which I’m not saying it neccesarily would, based on economic power disparities) it would imo be in the interests of all women who didn’t wan t to be harassed. This implies to me a common interest.
Now if the question is actually over whether or not people should get fired or go to prison for asking someone to go for a coffee, then I agree they shouldn’t .

Okay. I have to go something so I’ll leave it there.

Engels you seem to have decided that the mathbabe correspondent was invited out for a coffee, not explicitly on a date. Am I wrong to think that is your conclusion, given you have repeatedly referred to the coffee date example? If you think she was only invited to coffee, then you must think she is overreacting, given she told the dude “never do that again” and is seeking reassurance that she’s not just a set of tits. If you believe she was just asked out on a coffee date, how do you interpret her reaction to this harmless coffee date except as hysteria? Any suggestions as to how we should understand this woman whose experience you are so intimately acquainted with?

F. Foundling @196
No worries. As male nerd, I doubt I would be a target. I was trying to give a simple, if graphic, example that people could relate. The second half of the middle third is a clumsy retelling of a response to a Bright Line request that I remember from a better commentator on a now nuked comment thread at scienceblogs. The thread in question predated the term “sea lioning” and was part of a group of ElevatorGate / Rebbecca Watson threads.

It is just that this is not the first thread about sexual harassment policies where there was a push-back encapsulating “What about Men?” that I have read. Nor is it the second, or third, or fourth. Thought I should try to open eyes.

Climate debate threads have climate warming deniers, gun control threads have 2nd amendment advocates, and sexual harassment threads have MRAs.

Getting deluged with accusatory questions and gotchas mostly based on tedious misreadings from four or five male nerds after I made it clear I wasn’t really interested in arguing with them on a thread about male nerd harassment hmm

Also sad and embarrassing

And yo disk drive

It’s certainly obvious in our political class, in our celebrity class and (by extension perhaps in this context) in ourselves. The problem isn’t a lack of risk taking, but a lack of responsibility.

Sounds like an awesome take. If you can spin it out to a couple of thousand words the Daily Telegraph might publish it…

Slightly preferred it to DSquared’s which was straight up neoliberalism (“men are rational sex-maximizers and require a regulatory framework which ensures their sex-seeking risk-taking carries an appropriate individual cost”)

Ronan (rf),

“It’s certainly obvious in our political class, in our celebrity class and (by extension perhaps in this context) in ourselves. The problem isn’t a lack of risk taking, but a lack of responsibility.”

I agree with this.

I also think one dispiriting thing of this thread is all the people who want lists of every action that is sexual harassment, and complain the law should be objective not rest on the woman being distressed.

If someone wants to learn about actions which are criminal sexual harassment, they can read all the case law. This will not tell them everything since case law evolves, but it will give them an idea of the principles used in working out the decisions.

The statute cannot contain every possible action that could be sexual harassment, not only because it would be far too long, because women are not all the same.

The book I mentioned The First Stone shows this, since the author thinks the young women shouldn’t have taken disciplinary action just slapped or elbowed the man. Other women wrote essays in defence of disciplinary action. If one woman is happy to elbow a man who sexually harasses her, that is up to her, but it is not fair that other women who are more distressed about being sexually harassed can only elbow someone. That is why the law allows for some judicial discretion resting on whether significant distress has been caused, with the provision that the judge also thinks it would be reasonable to foresee the course of action would cause distress. If someone is not distressed, they can just happily elbow men who sexually harass them and not press charges.

It is up to men (or women) to work this out themselves about individual women (or men) I suppose, but they should err on the side of caution or they could go to gaol for years.

This is like other laws, such as recklessly causing injury by acting or failing to act. The cause of the injury can be all sorts of things, the injury can be all sorts of things. The law simply is about recklessly causing injury by acting or failing to act, with the general idea that people should not be reckless in their treatment of others.

But if you were working at a place with 50 women and 2 men, they’d be hitting on

Iirc there’s quite a funny scene where this happens in Made in Dagenham (which I highly recommend)

“Half the possible workforce finds collaboration nearly intolerable because of our behavior, our leering and groping and salacious invitations. Okay, I’m bullshitting; most of our potential collaborators were weeded out a long time ago because we all know women can’t do math, or they just have babies, and they bleed from wherever. The ones who persevere get patted on the butt and kissed on the forehead. At best.

We have a pervasive problem and guys are worried about getting laid.”

This encapsulates the problem with many of the comments on this thread, they massively overemphasise the breadth of this problem. It’s not a matter of guys ‘worrying about getting laid’. Whether because of existing relationships, a sense of decorum and decency, or just shyness, the vast majority of men do not behave in this manner towards women. The sex pests that do exist usually stand out a mile, and are treated with suspicion, dislike or disdain by most men. One of the problems is that they do have a measure of ‘success’ with certain women, which gives them an unfortunate sense of encouragement. Describing ‘men’ as a group with a shared attitude to women is just as crude a stereotype as applying characteristics to other groups in society.

The idea that romantic and/or sexual relationships should be outlawed at work seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It should really be possible to define behaviour that constitutes harassment, and everything else should be governed by the usual etiquette and social norms that regulate social behaviour. I’m sure that many women would choose to reject the kind of over-protection that has been suggested and do not want to follow a logic that leads to the chaperone or, god forbid, the burka.

Sexism and misogyny are rampant in society, and it goes without saying that sexual harassment is wrong. It also goes without saying we shouldn’t have a patriarchy. It shouldn’t exist.

That said, where things become problematic is with the idea of a different kind of repression and punishment regime put in place to deal with the above — especially if it isn’t directed at predators, but engulfs the entire workplace, etc. etc.

The key issue is equality, obviously. In this case, gender equality. If this is the goal, and I think it’s safe to say it’s the goal of most here, then this means that neither gender is “privileged” when it comes to having their assertions remain unquestioned. We get into dangerous territory when we just stop questioning all authority, male or female — or worse: attempt to shut down all questioning with variations of preemptive scolding from men or women.

One example of this is the morphing of “mansplaining” from a righteously implemented response to “There, there. Don’t worry your pretty little head about this. We men to can handle it!” . . . . to an automatic response to any question regarding a woman’s assertion that X is the case. Guys don’t get that privilege, as can easily be seen in any social interaction or online. We all (should) question assertions, and online, we often ask for links, evidence, etc. etc. That doesn’t somehow change when it’s a woman who makes the assertion. It’s the rough and tumble of debate, and guys can’t fall back on “You don’t get to question my perception of reality!!” It doesn’t instantly become another case of “mansplaining” if someone does.

No one should expect unquestioned acceptance of their words. No one. Of course, one should ask the questions in a fair manner, avoid patronizing, avoid condescension, ask for elaboration in a civil way, and never be abusive or overly persistent . . . but the mere questioning of someone’s take on an event shouldn’t automatically provoke scorn . . . . and online, endless piling on.

See the endless parade of false accusations levied throughout history by men and women — accusations which, like the religiously oppressed teenage girls in Salem, can sometimes lead to death (20 of them, in that case).

This morphing of “mansplaining” is now the go-to recourse in political arguments involving Hillary and Bernie supporters. I’ve seen “Berniesplaining” often used as an instant rebuke when people simply try to advocate for Sanders. When they just say why they support him, they’re often met with that passive-aggressive attempt to silence debate.

This helps no one, and it certainly goes entirely against the goals of achieving equality.

Wundering whats going to happen at USAicann if say an old Greek guy tries to kiss a young female attendee on the cheek. Or maybe there just arent any non US socialiced participants in the first place, but that would be something that needs to be changed as soon as possbile, not made harder.

Just publish the rules. ‘No sex.’ Then a long, long paragraph in small print in several languages defining ‘sex’ for the slow of uptake.

ZM, apologies: I should have said near-drought.

Bspencer at LGM gives me a review

“That being said, I’m still convinced that Crooked Timber regular, bob mcmanus, is doing some kind of Kaufman-esque performance art. All his posts are truly a thing of beauty. The revolution will come some day, my brother.”

Least I don’t totally fuck up a simple 8 word sentence. That comes from thinking in thought-free cliches. Try “truly things of beauty.”

@245: “All of his posts are things of beauty” sounds a little clumsy to me. Better: “Each of his posts is a thing of beauty.”

True, too.

(I would have posted the above question at LGM but it seems you have to register.)

Engels @248,

That seems to be a distinction with a difference.

And the key here is legal punishment. If it’s just a matter of insisting on a very broad definition, in social terms, to provoke an overall change in the culture, that’s one thing. If, however, this definition becomes a legal standard, then it must be made tighter, and as “objective” as it can be. The difference between how someone makes us “feel,” subjectively, versus an actual, concrete offense, which hopefully can be corroborated . . . The first becomes an even more untenable definition if we are not even allowed to question these “feelings,” if the mere questioning then becomes a part of the original complaint, folds into it, adds to it, causes further pile-ons, etc. etc.

And this obviously works in reverse. A male complaint about women, too. No one should be above questioning. No one. Again, it should be done with respect and civility, and without condescension, etc. etc. But it should be okay to question all authority and all assumptions.

Thanks, Sledge at 112. Important points.

As far as the thread overall, I’ll just say again what many others have said before: When the overwhelming response to people raising serious concerns about their safety and health is other people defensively demanding a list of ways they are permitted to behave, the meta message is very clear: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR SAFETY OR HEALTH.

I don’t find it terribly surprising that the same blog that regards Hillary Clinton as intolerably evil also attracts commenters who think sexual harassment is just a feminist fraud.

245: that’s “all his posts,” singular, Bob, as the opaque mass they are, rather than making the indefensible statement that each and every one of your comments is a thing of beauty – something I feel confident that no one has ever, ever thought.

Anderson @255,

“I don’t find it terribly surprising that the same blog that regards Hillary Clinton as intolerably evil also attracts commenters who think sexual harassment is just a feminist fraud.”

Admittedly, I haven’t come close to reading all 258 comments in this thread. So I may have missed them. But I haven’t seen anyone here comment that “sexual harassment is just a feminist fraud,” nor have I seen anyone say Clinton is “intolerably evil.” The hyperbole in the first part of your comment doesn’t exactly make a person too confident regarding the second part.

Basically, this looks like a case of talking past one another:

“Look at my child!! He has bruises all over him!!”
“We are investigating this, Mr. Smith. Our school counselors are busy talking to his classmates and –”
“So you’re okay with children being abused in your school!!”
“No, Mr. Smith. We are adamantly opposed to that. No one here wants –”
“I’m not surprised you don’t care about child abuse here, given your condemnation of Christianity, every chance you get!!”
“Sir, we’ve never condemned Christianity and would never do –”
“I should have known it! Godless communists, the lot of you!!”

There seems to be a general lack of understanding that a sexualized workplace is acutely uncomfortable for a great many people, and generally works to women’s disadvantage.

Back when I was the part owner of a company, I found that executive conferences became less stressful and more productive as the proportion of women increased. Granted, that was largely due to getting rid of one male asshole, and one of the women was an old friend, but I’m still of the opinion that powerful women are an asset, and you don’t get them by treating anyone with tits more as a potential recipient of sex than an equal partner.

if you misread the situation and make the other person feel uncomfortable… that is on you. There will, and should, be consequences. So take the risk if you want but don’t bitch about the consequences or try and lawyer your way out.

Does this principle apply to all human interactions or just sex?

When the overwhelming response to people raising serious concerns about their safety and health is other people defensively demanding a list of ways they are permitted to behave, the meta message is very clear: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR SAFETY OR HEALTH.

So mananger is concerned about fire risk at work, bans ‘smoking on company property’. Employee asks can you clarify if people can still smoke outside the building?
“the meta message is very clear: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR SAFETY OR HEALTH”

personal anecdote:
I was at a professional conference a few years ago. The hotel bar closed. The nice woman I was talking to said where can we get another drink. I said my hotel room had a minibar. She said great, let’s go have a drink. Yay me. Nice attractive woman wants to come up to my hotel room! But here’s the thing. At no moment did I think nice attractive woman wants to shag me in my hotel room. She said let’s go for a drink. We had a drink. Then she left. I don’t think my superpower is reading people, or women, but at no point did I get the sense that she wanted to do anything but talk. We talked and had a nice time! Later we actually did start a relationship, but pretty sure if I’d made a drunk pass at her that night we wouldn’t have. Again, yay me, I did something right. Met a nice woman at a professional conference and eventually dated her for a few years.

The negative side of this story is that her colleague, not quite her boss, but someone higher up in the food chain in her organization, saw us going up to my room and spread lots of gossip under the guise of “I don’t know if this appropriate behavior.” Even though it was completely appropriate. This woman was an adult. I was an adult. We can have a drink or have sex or whatever and it would be appropriate if it was consensual of course. He certainly would not have done that to a male colleague, who would have gotten a big high five instead. Fortunately this did not negatively impact this woman’s career in any way I could discern. Anyway I tell this story because a)I’m bragbragging about the wonderful woman I got to spend a few years with (not everything lasts forever) and b) to point out that slut-shaming is also something women have to deal with in the workplace. Your male colleagues might want to bone you, but they’re going to trash talk you if you bone anyone else.

“Does this principle apply to all human interactions or just sex?”

It applies to sexual harassment in the workplace which is the topic under discussion you turnip.

@270 It depends.

Sorry – X’d

There are exceptions, of course. But if a guy asks out a woman — for the first time, which is an important detail here — chances are he doesn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable at all. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to want this, if he really wants her to say yes. Even if he’s a really awkward guy, with no social skills, whatsoever, his intention is unlikely to be “I hope she’s really pizzed off at me for doing this.”

I think it’s also safe to say that most of us feel at least some discomfort and anxiety before we do make that first attempt. It’s not easy to take that step. We feel “uncomfortable,” but if we like the woman enough, we think it’s worth the risk of being shot down — and hope she won’t.

To me, it’s just not a “crime” to take that first step — with exceptions, depending upon how it’s done, etc. etc, which is why these things do need additional investigation, questioning and so on. It can move into the realm of the criminal if it persists beyond the first no. She says no, and that should end any further attempts by the guy. That’s a one and done situation. No more. Nada. Zilch. End of story. She said no. Move on, brother, etc. etc. and don’t look back.

But I think a lot of the conversation in this thread has been directed at even that first attempt. And if we “criminalize” such a thing, and go solely on the basis of how the askee feels, we’ve entered dangerous (repressive) waters as a society.

“The definition of any offense which carries penalties MUST be objective. Not subjective. That’s the problem here.”

There are plenty of crimes that depend on other people’s reactions. Like laws against public lewdness and nudity.

Dallas’s law about public nudity got some fame a few years ago when the cops raided a gay bathhouse and arrested people under a law that had some wording like “behavior is lewd if it could offend or shock”… ok googled:

Of the three individuals whose arrest reports were released to Dallas Voice, one was charged with public lewdness and two were charged with indecent exposure, which is defined as exposing one’s genitals with the intent to arouse or gratify and in a manner that is “reckless about whether another is present who will be offended or alarmed …”

I suppose you can take the “reckless about whether” part to mean that the law is objective and not subjective, but, really, does that provide any kind of brightline to would-be offenders?

All those (apparently male) commenters who claim that sexual harassment policies mean that anything women don’t like is automatically harassment are just creating a red herring. At least under US law, there is both an objective and a subjective component to a claim of harassment. That is, not only must the conduct be subjectively unwelcome, it must also be bad enough that a reasonable person in the place of the victim would find it offensive–the objective component.

I do not trust women with the unrestricted unquestioned “believe utterly” power in principle to destroy my life.

If your fine behaviour in workplace situations slips a little, I’m betting someone will give you a talking-to long before you end up being slapped in irons.

I think the last couple of comments are a bit over the top. Afaics the glee about ‘wrecking careers’ etc seems to have issued from ‘male feminists,’ not women and the sanctions discussed in the OP were much more mild. (If I contributed to this current by mentioning the US prison system in one comment then I apologise).

ll those (apparently male) commenters who claim that sexual harassment policies mean that anything women don’t like is automatically harassment are just creating a red herring

No, they’re addressing the formulation on the OP, not positive law.

278 see 140 Japan anecdote. Not saying anything about her veracity, I’m sure a career was damaged.

283: You don’t have an entire OP and thread over at the other blog dedicated to damaging your reputation, apparently because it’s just plain fun. Tends to make me skeptical about motivations and behavior.

288: No question mark….

Going on further about the international context problem. In many cultures it’s just polite to say no the first 3 times at least.

And why on earth is there supposed to be a ban on making someone feal uncomfortable. That’s ridiculous, just like the expectation expressed in the op that one has to turn someone down in non hurtful way. The basic problem it seems to me is the excessive regard for public appearance in US culture almost amounting to the assumption that everyone should be threatened as if they had a narcissistic personality disorder.

hix @292? Cites seriously. the only one that Wiki has is the Persian custom of Taarof (maybe the Chinese’s Limao, but that is not an article) where the host wishes to give the guest a gift and the polite guest should refuse at least three times.

An instance in the other direction is the custom in some Asian countries, like Japan, that the direct “No” is impolite.

I see a LGM commenter has now diagnosed everyone objecting to Maria as ‘neuroatypical’. Empathy FTW

It’s not the kind of discussion men and women TEND to have either. After nearly 300 comments it might be nice for people to acknowledge that not all men are sex pests or even potential harassers of women.

what really are the major differences between being sexually harrased at an academic conference or while working cleaning a hotel bedroom

Some hotel workers’ experiences here. NB this is NOT to minimise any female academics’ experiences of sexual harassment but I think the idea that there aren’t likely to be “major differences” in both the wrongs suffered and the actions taken by management is… problematic.

Also take the point that there is something very wrong about the overwhelmingly male participation on this thread….

And late for what? I don’t understand your point at all I’m afraid, or your reply to Igor, not that I exactly agree with him

Engels @ 303, your references to men asking women out for coffee when the OP was not about something so innocuous seemed to minimize the harassment Maria was writing about.

re Igor’s comment about not all men are abusers. No one suggested such a thing, but many comments have been written about what men might want to do at a conference that would be innocent —innocent!— again, after a post about women being sexually harassed at conferences.

Trying (why? this late) to bring the original topic back.

No wonder the women CT bloggers hardly ever blog.

@298 “not all men”
Jesus fucking Christ, is this a parody website now?
http://time.com/79357/not-all-men-a-brief-history-of-every-dudes-favorite-argument/

And a quick update, I’ve heard that ICANN staff have been told to be ‘careful’ about kissing, hugging, faire la bise etc. with community members. AGHGHGHGHGHGH!!!! 1) as employees, they already have a sexual harassment policy. It’s some community members that are the problem. 2)Why oh why do people focus on the most likely harmless grey area stuff instead of the really obvious ‘don’t proposition a young women you just met in the coffee break’ stuff?

Seriously, what the fuck has gone wrong with feminism? Do you really need me to spell out what’s happening? This is heartbreaking. I swear, they could hand out leaflets saying “PUT A HIJAB ON WHORES” and most of you still wouldn’t understand what was going on.

Engels, I agree that it should not be impossible to mingle dating and work, and I agree that there are lots of hang-ups about sex in the west that it would be really good to eliminate with the march of feminism through our institutions, but I think the reality is (from my experience of working with women) that women almost universally don’t appreciate this attention, they get too much of it, and they are much more likely to react like the Canonical Mathbabe Example than go all gushy at the thought that their colleague respects their work and wants their body. I think it’s also pretty well established that most women (and most feminists) want to rid the workplace of its old gender battlefields (e.g. lack of respect for being a woman, not able to be heard in meetings, lack of promotion, family leave issues) before they start using it as a battlefield to resolve the final psychosexual issues of western culture.

A lot of what you’re saying in this comment about this issue of desexualization sounds a lot like what older feminists have heard before, during the 1960s and 1970s, when as soon as women started getting any form of equality at all men parlayed it into opportunities for free love. Until the power differentials in the rest of the social system are removed or weakened, it’s hard for women to view those free love opportunities in specific spaces the same way that men do. It’s important to respect that.

I have personal opinions about patterns of misogyny in western culture that make it uniquely unsuited to respecting women as women in the workplace, which make me think it’s very dangerous to try and mix these things until a whole bunch of other sexual attitudes have been resolved. In particular, until western people can learn to respect femininity and to see women’s difference not as always inferior and suspect; and until western society can remove the deep stain of sexual violence that hangs over all its interactions, I don’t think it can mix sex with work comfortably. Looking now on the west from an outsider perspective in Japan, I no longer view western interactions as being as gender equal as a lot of westerners think of them, and in particular I see a deep, deep hatred of femininity and female sexuality reflected in multitudes of ways through the current of ordinary society. Bringing up sexuality at work ties women to that deep hatred, and until that poison is drawn out of society, I don’t think it’s possible to have a properly sexualized workplace.

You clearly disagree; I hope my perspective from outside, now properly explained, makes some sense; and I think you should consider that 1960s and 1970s experience of women becoming fresh meat in new marketplaces after feminism opened them when considering how to deal with sexual harrassment in modern workplaces.

Engels, Maria’s post was about a specific conference, not the workplace in general, and while her definition in the OP sucked, she elaborated at # 45, thus giving context for her definition, which made it less sucky, or at least more understandable. Yet many commentators have not been taking this into consideration, preferring to harp on the definition without its context. You are entitled to look at larger issues, of course, but in this case that is changing the subject.

When you talk about the experiences of nonprofessional women you aren’t wrong, but again, it is changing the subject. When you talk about sexual behaviour in general being problematic…well, why would you talk about that in this thread in response to the behaviours Maria mentioned at 45? It isn’t wrong, it’s worth talking about, but it’s ignoring the kind of offensive, even menacing behaviour she mentions.

If you are a woman at a large, male-dominated conference, chances are that the vast majority of the other people there are bigger and stronger than you are, and if one of them follows you into an empty room and blocks the doorway, you are instantly aware of that. I would like to have seen you and some others here try to understand what Maria is talking about, because while I can’t speak for her, it does seem to me that you have missed it. Come to think of it, we all could have asked her for more examples, to be sure we understood what she meant.

Okay, that’s it for me too, now. Maybe we’ve been talking past each other, maybe a conversation about anything to do with sexual violence or harassment is always going to be a train wreck here.

Ah, LGM. The commentariat seems to be devolving to little more than reflexive twitching; not quite to FTB levels, but getting there. Those poor, sad, empty souls!

“I can’t understand how their minds work, what’s the matter don’t they watch Les Crain?”

I haven’t been taking part in this—partly because I can really only handle one extraordinarily frustrating thread per week—but cheers to Lynne, faustusnotes etc. for making some very sensible points.