The other possibility is that work cultures that promote going out and drinking after work with your coworkers are problematic.

"Can't help being gropey" is a bit of a benign way to put it. Some people actively use their workplace power to exploit people they have power over. It's not some oops-accidental-gropiness. You can sternly say "being a predator is bad," but that doesn't really deter the predator or help other people identify who they are. Clarifying that all sexual overtures at work are bad would make it easier to identify the predators, because you no longer have to distinguish between well-intentioned groping and malevolent groping. It's all bad!

this is pretty bull****ty, creeps who grab women and press their dicks against them aren’t doing it because their isn’t a rule against it, there is. They do it because they have power over their victims and have no idea how to treat people around them.

Conservatives ***** about everything getting called racist, but they're just trying to poison the well. Like, fly doesn't just go around calling everyone racist at random, contrary to what the SMP crowd tells you.

Also, we already tried this! The term "micro-aggression" was coined precisely to politely describe racism-lite situations like wearing blackface for Halloween, and instead of fostering a dialogue, it led to conservatives whining about political correctness and deciding the whole thing is bull****.

If he had proof he wouldn’t have settled. Don’t be ****ing stupid like his audience.

Work is already ****ty for basically most people. Proscribing the ability to vent about shared grievances in a relaxed environment will make it even ****tier.

There's nothing magic about 'the workplace', though. Every environment features power dynamics. There is nothing except your own innate reasonableness to stop this logic being applied to literally every walk of life.

Yeah, we are really veering into infantilisation territory here, I think.

By definition, if you don't want to be reasonable, there is nothing to stop you from making all kinds of unreasonable arguments. It's almost a requirement.

Right, but all you'll be able to say to someone doing that is that you think they're being unreasonable in applying the logic you yourself have presented. You won't be able to make any argument that they're actually wrong, except maybe that the workplace is different for some reason.

And I mean, flesh this out for me. We instill a norm that workplace dating is bad. Two of your co-workers start dating. What do you do, frown at them? Do you frown more at one than at the other, and if so, which?

Scott Brown, the American ambassador to Samoa (who knew?), facing criticism for telling a server she should come to America and make way more money because of her looks

In which the former senator could probably learn a thing or two about not digging deeper:

That's not how they justify to themselves, though. Nobody thinks they are being an abusive creep.

And I'm not saying there should be a social norm against it or we should look down on people who do it, but just as general life advice for everyone, male and female... unless you're stationed at an Antarctic research station or something I really think you can find someone outside your office! There's a great big world out there and I'm skeptical that the hot intern is your one and only soulmate because she laughs when you make fun of the office grouch or whatever.

The latter for me.

I may be an unusually skilled debater, but if someone wants to come at me and say that there isn't a meaningful difference in the relationship between a man and a female subordinate and a man and a woman he meets at a party ("it's all just power dynamics!"), I feel confident in my ability to meet that challenge.

TBD

You very well may be an unusually skilled debater, but it only takes a hack to present an already-conceded point as the one in contention. I've already said Don't **** Down. That wasn't good enough for you, remember? You wanted a wholesale ban on workplace dating, hierarchical parity be damned, and along with that bathwater you were willing to throw out the baby of socialising with workmates at all.

Your job, if you feel like it, is to explain why we shouldn't throw out the baby of anything outside of chastely-negotiated contract marriages for purely procreative purposes. Or hell, IVF lotteries or something. Bearing in mind that "Because it seems unreasonable to me" isn't good enough, because you already seem pretty unreasonable to me with this notion of stigmatising workplace socialising.

You have strong opinions for a man with no idea what he actually thinks, I must say.

One of my favourite utopian novels.

What makes you think they need to justify it. No one tells them not to do it, so why shouldn't they? Thinking that dating at the office has anything to do with sexual harassment is ridiculous on the face of it.

I was under the impression that some significant percentage of marriages began as office flings.

If true, should that influence our opinion on norms about dating colleagues? What if like 30% of the time Americans meet their life partners in the workplace?

The stat in the other thread was 20%.

People spend 60 hours a week for years on end working in confined spaces with people who've got key common interests (assuming job is a vocation of sorts).

Groping interns is terribad, but having coffee or lunch with a colleague you've got chemistry with while taking things slowly / cautiously is something else entirely. If you're autistic or a basement dweller or something then I'm ok with avoiding dating coworkers entirely. But there's a reason so many people find the one at work, would be too bad if as a rule that door were closed, at least IMO.

I'm making a principally ethical case, not a legal one, but you know there's a whole Title of USC with 30 chapters of something dedicated strictly to labor law and regulations, there's a whole executive department for it, some Constitutional amendments touch on it and notable SCOTUS cases deal precisely with the workplace and its special role in society.

Perhaps we can use that as a guidepost to note that actually, yes, there is something kind of magical, exceptional and unique about the workplace that deserves special considerations for how we treat each other.

Sure. There will always be bad people in the world. We construct norms and guidelines to mark out what's acceptable and what's not, and bad or non-existent norms or murky norms and social conventions are where unscrupulous bad people, or selfish and unaware people can thrive under the ambiguity.

No, I'm not thinking of a hierarchical structure specifically. I do agree there are some potential exception cases where you would relax hypothetical norms and I've made them. Part of the perniciousness of even 'soft' sexual harassment or the potential discomfort of romance at work is that it specifically burdens ambitious and aspirational people. Think of all the notable examples of O'Reilly, Halperin, Weinstein, etc. essentially trying to trading career advancement, access and perceived job benefits for sex. That works at all levels and all jobs and yes, is felt PARTLY because of the hierarchical considerations but PARTLY because it targets specifically women who are trying to advance and are ambitious and want long term careers in their industry. I think if you actually look around at the #MeToo stories and make a mental inventory as you read them, you'll notice that the victims ARE usually more high status, successful women. That's partly for lots of reasons, many of which may simply be access / size of audience to tell the story, but also because it's pretty clearly a common experience for specifically ambitious women. Consciously or not, I suspect there are lots of men who are hip to precisely this fact and are plying female ambition and unclear workplace norms in these areas to take advantage of the power dynamic -- that is, women can easily get effectively black balled and develop unfair reputations for being perceived as bitchy and not playing along.

And so, as I said: if the job is sort of transient, or for younger people not really on career tracks, whatever, perhaps we could excuse people who are excessively flirting at work or dating or whatever. I went back to like two people who work in food service; say two baristas at Starbucks who are flirting or whatever. Am I looking for their manager to aggressively monitor and police that behavior? Probably not. Take say instead two sales professionals in an office; should norms exist to prevent them from dating? Should co-workers be vigilant and look down on sex jokes, various dating pre-ritual stuff, etc.? Probably?

If I were a master of the universe, I'd probably just wish we had social norms against all of it and call it a day. That's not to say it's ****ing open season to start harassing young women in this or that menial job or that. And I'll repeat that I'm not naive enough to think workplace romance would ever go away.

But I think it's important to recognize that even in relationships with ~relatively equal power dynamics, a work culture that allows for romantic overtures and dating and flirting or whatever else is one that will necessarily make it hard for ambitious and career oriented people dealing with unwanted advances of any sort, even the 'appropriate' ones. The natural inclination is to brush it off and not make a big deal out of it because hey, we all got **** to do, who wants to sit in HR all day hashing this **** out, plus if you're a women, it can make you feel like you're not cooperative and a team player and aggressively bitchy or whatever.

Simply don't tolerate asking people out on dates, sexual banter, etc. and all the ambiguity goes away about what's tolerated and what's not. It's clear who's in the wrong.

Again, I think work culture conventions that are like "dating? -> OK; flirting? -> OK; harassment -> crosses the line" are precisely the sort of gradient areas where harassment can become surprisingly common. Draw the line further on the curve and get less of the really egregious behavior.

paralyzed by fear is the way to comport oneself

Worth reiterating these arguments should only work on the hilariously naive. I have been at my job since 2005 and never once have I: 1) hit on my coworkers or asked them out for dates or 2) been paralyzed at work

You can do it, I swear. You can go to work and talk about the baseball game last night, your camping trip this weekend, your dog, and heaven forfend, topics related to your ****ing job without trying to **** your co-workers and NOT undergo any physical or mental paralysis at all. Millions of people do this every day, I promise. Get the **** out of here with this ****. The only people who should worry about being literally paralyzed by fear due to a social norm that looks down on asking your coworkers to date are the kinds of people who have severe self control issues and why we may not need to wonder too long for why incredible amounts of women feel sexually harassed.

Again, sometimes worth reiterating these arguments at their core:

Everyone: wow, tons of sexual harassment out there, shocking
Me: hey, one factor might be permissive attitudes toward workplace dating and romance, we could perhaps not tolerate that
People ITT: woah woah woah, how do you expect us to overcome the crippling paralysis of having to control ourselves?!

I'm sure you're all lovely people, really, but the multitude and depth of the various "I can't control myself" apologetics ("love is so powerful! Chemistry! Having to think even a little bit about how I interact with women is paralysis!") are not very compelling.

Don't these inappropriately talking monkeys know that Eden has enough to go around?

"Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability to lift an eye to heaven conscious of his fleeting time here to grope.".

Yeah, but this is a wild guess. The harassment in the headlines was not ok, yet it was done. You don't know that a more open environment where people less compartmentalized about business behavior and human behavior isn't less conducive to abuse. Perhaps people who feel more free with their regular human behavior more readily tell harassers to **** off while people who transform into proper behavior for the special magical workplace try to keep things professional and resist admitting that a perpetrator's behavior is unprofessional. People resist making a big deal about things. If someone is getting hit on and saying something about that means someone is fired and their friends all hate you maybe you're going to let things go and excuse them as not that important. I can make guesses too and mine seem right to me. I think empowering the individuals rather than the institution will has better results, and often that just means not giving power to institutions. When that happens people tend to surrender their own power. But, either way I can't really think of anything empirical, so it's just my guess.

At any rate, there's already something of a taboo about dating at work, so I assume you're suggesting something stronger than the conventional wisdom.