When engaged in flirtatious interlocution with a lithe, young bird, ya gotta understand the signals and body language. Once she's given you the 'big eye,' then and only then, may you advance your long-honed, deepest depravity.

Two of my bosses, who are now married, started dating at work. At the time, one was a partner and the other was an associate. Now the associate is president of the firm.

*shrugs*

I'm not in any disagreement with you about other sexual harassment but I was only considering employee on employee (including bosses) harassment.

On court cases. One of the historic problems has been how difficult it is for women to bring cases. It's an area where big improvements are possible. Generally I think there is much we can do but nothing is more important than addressing the power imbalance. Far better norms have to, in significant part, emerge from a system that properly includes women.

When 50% of marriages end in divorce, let’s not pretend your work wife is “the one.”

Terrible polls like this are how ridiculous "statistics" enter the popular domain. (Or at least terrible articles; I guess it doesn't provide enough details on the poll itself to determine if it was terrible.)

DVaut1, as usual, winning the thread.

I strongly doubt this is true in general even if it's true of users of the hashtag, which I strongly doubt you've surveyed in anything like a comprehensive way.

What? Why would you want to do away with workplace romances? Like it's not cool if two people consensually flirt at the office but it's fine if the same two people go home, match on Tinder, and then start sexting?


Unwanted advances are inappropriate pretty much by definition, and a norm of consent seems much easier to enforce than a blanket prohibition on workplace romance. I agree with whomstever said it that there are situations where power dynamics can make that problematic, but what makes Weinstein et al's behavior so contemptible is using that power in a coercive way--i.e., not "sleep with me and I'll make you VP of Media Acquisitions" (or whatever), which is unfair to people who didn't sleep with you who wanted the job, but "sleep with me or you'll lose your position as VP of Media Acquisitions," since that's basically using a financial threat to get sex, i.e. rape.

I doubt you have any evidence of this and think the main effect of this proposal would be to penalize a bunch of harmless behavior, a lot of which is going to happen anyway through surreptitious channels.

I swear, it's like none of these people who think it's a good idea to bang their co-workers have ever seen an ugly divorce/breakup.

Right, this is almost certainly due to a strong does of selection bias (dvault's facebook friends probably don't include a lot of poor blue-collar Appalachian women) plus something like higher status women feeling more secure in speaking out.

It's not, though. It's morally reprehensible, but it's common. Trying to make this about the unique perversion of one industry or another is entirely missing the point

Not about the unique perversion of one industry. More about the unique perversion of a couple guys.

If I understand correctly, the current sexual harassment discussion got started because of the Harvey Weinstein thing which involved him like following people around the hallways with his dick out and jacking it into potted plants. I am not an expert, but I don't think that is how most sexual harassment goes.

To be clear, I am not saying the "normal" stuff is not a problem, just that it's kind of a different problem.

Well, yeah, the real wild Weinstein and Richardson stuff is theirs, but like the Halperin and Trump **** is bog standard. I've seen that with mine own two eyes.

The goal isn't to be a buzzkill and stop workplace romances but make it a better environment for women (or whatever, even men who feel aggrieved and harassed).

Yes. I still think it's a bad idea for them to date but IF they are randomly matched up somehow magically, the potential for discomfort and harassment from a failed attempt to date/be flirty/whatever at work is removed.

But surely, unscrupulous or even just subtly if not unconsciously manipulative guys can move one or two degrees away from "lose your position for sex" to simply be kind of piggish and aggressive sexually at work, gambling that women won't run to HR because they don't want to be seen as cold, un-fun, bitchy, etc. or don't want to waste their time on stuff that makes them uncomfortable but which they can internalize and brush off to some extent.

Obviously I don't have any evidence of this; it's speculation, I can't prove it. Nor the bit about informal surveys of who is reporting harassment. Still I am confident that, consciously or not, men are likely to prey on the ambitious and aspirational -- people they see as having leverage over. Weinstein didn't prey only on his employees, he preyed on B-list actresses and models trying to make the leap to film with promises of access. Same with Halperin, apparently, who is accused of trading access to accompany him on high profile events like conventions. And that may be in situations where the aggressive dude is not necessarily a manager. It's probably ALSO true that powerless women are preyed upon for the same reasons (credibility, reputation) wherein social value dynamics play a role ("Steve in marketing? He would never jeopardize his career or his marriage with that lady who works in the cafeteria by trying to corner her and ask her out after lunch, right? She must be lying..."). It's why we can't simply count on ONLY "well, don't **** down" or "managers shouldn't date people who report to them" because leverage and lack of scruples can happen in many different dynamics.

I expect dating apps will continue to cut this number down, which is a good thing for a bunch of reasons.

The reason I'm making the distinction was to defend DVaut1's ideas against those who are saying they wouldn't prevent harassment.

I think a generally less permissive attitude toward dating in the workplace would have some effectiveness regarding what I called "normal" harassment, but I should really probably call "soft" harassment or something like that, basically stuff like:
- occasional comments that make people uncomfortable
- occasional inappropriate sexual jokes/banter
- repeated requests for dates (a few repetitions).
where there is no implied threat/reward for compliance/noncompliance, it's just really annoying/awkward etc.

This is basically stuff where socially inept people can "harass" by "accident" and if those people were less likely to try dating in the workplace in the first place, I think the incidence of those problems would decrease.

Above that is what I would actually call "sexual harassment" which would be like the non-physical stuff Halpein is accused of, basically explicit offers to trade sex for workplace advancement or jobs, constant/incessant commentary on someone's looks, constant/incessant sexual jokes/banter, etc. This stuff is a much bigger deal but less common, although still far too common. Also this pretty much has to be intentional.

The actual physical grabbing of private parts is sexual assault.

I think "frown on dating in the workplace" would help with category 1, maybe a tiiiiiny bit with category 2, and obviously have no effect on category 3.

If anything, I expect the number to go up, because society is moving in a direction where the number of places to meet people outside of work is dropping. I don't recall anything specific, but I was under the impression the short term trend is upward.

FWIW, Halperin's immediate defense was that he was unsuccessfully trying to pursue relationships:

Obviously we can say, well, that's obviously bull****, but one wonders what made him think that might work to buffer some of the backlash.

I've got my answer: he's try to build the notion that he was doing something acceptable ("pursue relationships") which his victims misunderstood.

Make it unacceptable by social convention and remove a common excuse/justification. This is how lots of social norms and conventions work; prohibit the acceptability of stuff before the worst outcomes to remove ambiguity.

The internet is only one "place", but it's a hell of a place.

Okay. I definitely agree that that's a reasonable goal.

I agree that it's unwise to date a colleague who you'll have to see every day unless you're absolutely sure you want to be with that person, but I don't think office drama from a break-up is something the law needs to intervene to prevent.

These are all good points, but I think a lot of what you're describing here is already prohibited under Title VII's hostile work environment provisions. The question in my mind is why victims don't feel empowered to report it; why it keeps being the case that women (and men) who are victimized find that the cost-benefit analysis is that pursuing a claim is not worth what they'd have to go through. Our legal system grants a lot of rights to the accused and does little to shelter victims who've been subjected to humiliating acts. There's not going to be a felicitous resolution where you keep working for someone at whom you're angry enough to sue; so it must be the case that the stakes are set such that abusers--especially wealthy ones--can basically proceed with impunity, viewing the potential losses in court as a cost of "doing business."

IANAL, but my impression is that labour laws, as a rule, are aimed at redressing the imbalance of power between employer and employee (and superior and subordinate etc). The point about there being nothing magical about the workplace was made in specific retort to bobman's proposal that all social interaction within and without the workplace should be beyond the pale. That's a silly idea and I'm sure you don't want to defend it.

Are you sure your impression about ambitious women being particularly vulnerable isn't coloured by ambitious women being more likely to speak out, even if only after some time? Or by the media really only being interested in cases that occur in industries that innately carry a high degree of public curiosity? I question the Twitter algorithms' impartiality here, too - I think I'd need to scroll a long, long way down before I started seeing #MeToo people with less than several thousand followers; ambitious types, you might presume.

I think it's far better to be enforcing norms about male attitudes to sexual encounters generally than encouraging people to distort their natural gregariousness even further out of shape simply because it's the workplace. The latter approach is too narrow in its general scope and far too reaching in its specific demands. You want to be dealing with the inclination of men to exploit power imbalance and their frequent impunity in doing so, not outright banning normal human interaction.

And I mean, again, game this out for me. Two people in a sufficiently white-collar work environment are engaging in flirtatious behaviour. You do your frowning and tongue-clucking routine like a good soldier. Later, the woman (being all heteronormative up in here) takes you to one side and says, Back the **** off, stop trying to police my sex life. What do you tell her?

We shouldn't ban workplace romance, but I do think pairings should be orchestrated and managed through HR.

It seems like a lot this handwaving about controlling dating in the work place is avoiding dealing with the issue that our society does a ****ty job teaching men how not to be dicks. How about instead of legislating away workplace romances we legislate some better education for men on not being douches to women?

Lol HR

Because legislating away romances is more likely to be effective.

I mean, this is always going to be the case right. Except in really egregious or ongoing cases, it's probably always going to be much more of a pain in the ass to submit some sort of claim than it is to just let it go. I'm not really sure how you solve that, except to try to convince people to deal with the pain in the ass in order to help prevent others being harassed by the same person.

This is a good thing.

We could certainly do better here.

This just seems like general problem of wealth inequality more than anything specific to sexual harassment.

Seems legit.

I think I see what you're saying, but it's the possibility of office dating that could lead some to harassment, not the act of dating itself. The unsuccessful tries are the problem, not the successful ones.

Because this isn't going to work and doesn't even specifically mean anything. It's just a bunch of words that vaguely sound nice but result in no action.

Some people are *******s. Nicely ask people not to do 'X' is not an effective way of stopping X from happening.

It seems like all these laws against murder haven't stopped murders from happening, clearly we are not properly educating people on the evils of murder. How about instead of police we spend that money on education for not murdering people?