To clarify, I was referring to unreported workplace harassment, not criminal sexual assault cases, when I said

Does your company have an ombudsman specifically for flirting/romance etc.? If so, you might want to invite them to sit in with you two. Open a dialog. I would be quite cautious about straight-up reporting your boss.

Im not going to HR on her. She is like a friend and a very flirty person. I have no issues with her flirting even if it crosses HR lines a bit.

I was joking. I'm sure you know that but wanted to be clear.

Ah, okay. Still these behaviors are similarly motivated even if very different in intention and consequence, and a lot of the same concerns about victims' interests still apply. My main point was the one about increasing penalties regardless.

Yeah i got that, my post was to TrollyWantACracker.


Look i understand sexual harassment is a big problem and could give a few stories of people who rightly got fired for it. One very recently. Just think people are trying to take the human out of being human sometimes and go overboard the other way.

I mean, what do you want to increase the penalties to for some individual making inappropriate comments at work?

If you're really struggling to figure out how the workplace is any different from a singles bar, then yeah, I'm okay with it.

Reading back through the thread now that it's been moved. Narcissist that I am I have to comment on this:

This seems like a fusion of Nagle's and Phone Booth's argument more than whatever you were saying about sexual frustration in the other thread. Maybe I was just misunderstanding you and to be fair neither of us was taking the time to write all that clearly. I read Nagle's book the day it came out (which was in June IIRC) and had certainly read it when we were talking about Charlottesville. I mostly agree with her take. Plus my disagreement with PB turned out to be just semantic confusion. What I'm saying is I think we're all roughly in agreement about this.

That's pretty bizarre actually. IME, mothers, especially of young children, are much less likely than anyone else to participate in after-hours work/social events.

Oh no DrModern. Maybe we need a Nagle thread but yikes no she's garbage.

OK, now shave off areas that are literally reserved for sexual/romantic encounters, like a normal, non-wolf-raised person would do without being prompted. Still confident?

That's more or less what I said. Unclear where the bizarreness comes in.

Second a Nagle thread, I thought her book was very meh, but I've seen her get a lot of heat for reasons that are unclear to me. No bull****, would like to know what the story is.

She's very stupid and is a lock to transition over to the Jordan Peterson/Dave Rubin beat within 3 years because her liberal/left framing is skindeep. Kill All Normies is an atrociously bad book and the positive coverage it received was incredibly damaging. I don't mean "bad" the way Fast and Furious 2 is bad, I mean bad like The Bell Curve is bad. Actively harmful.

I felt her book really failed to make her case. She doesn't really offer any evidence that tumblrinas => the alt-right, she just seems to assume it's obvious. Granted that I don't know what such evidence might look like, but IYAM that's her problem, not mine. I think it's a lot more simply explained by the very nature of online discourse - I'm thinking here of the Greater Internet ****wad Theory, really - than by blaming the targets of the ****waddery it produces.

Book was very sloppily written, too, typos and weird, go-nowhere demi-paragraphs that left me thinking it was an academic thesis hastily ginned up into a book in light of Trump. Not sure if I see her going alt-lite, but maybe?

Well, you said "people whose partners are homemakers" are less likely to participate, which is not obviously a reference to working mothers. Anyways, regardless of how we got here, if we agree that after-hours socializing excludes working mothers, there's an independently good reason to view it as problematic. Go out to lunch with your coworkers and don't hit on them! Go out at night and flirt with nonwork friends and strangers.

Yes, I still think workplaces are different from other social settings, with different established norms and expected behaviors.

There are a few different topics re-work relationships being conflated here because they can overlap.

On topic, I don't know that harrasment is most often born out of a legitimate misunderstanding of a mutual desire for a romantic relationship, although I get that permission for behavior outside of a professional nature can lead to more misunderstanding or mistakes by those who have low social iq. Work relationships can develop free of inappropriate behavior on the job, though, as not every budding romance is driven by flirting and innuendo, floating trial balloons or going out on a limb at a work station.

Back to the other part being argued--that it is simply a bad personal decision to be strictly avoided because of the increased repercussions of it going bad, and statistical probability that it will, I'm not sure it is quite pencils down. The same math can be submitted for moving in together, becoming financially entwined, married or especially having kids. All of those have risk of consequences as bad or worse than the unhappy path of one of you having to find a new job or department in most sour cases. Really, relationships are always a bad gamble that most people lose many times before they win, if they ever do. It's a personal risk that is personally determined.

As far as reports of men being sexually harassed, that is a broad term and a useless stat without clarification. If we are talking legal definition of hostile work environment, I have experienced it in a reportable way literally countless times and I can't imagine every man hasn't. From inappropriate jokes, to unwelcome flirting, to uncomfortable conversations, sometimes by other men, sometimes women, sometimes in mixed groups, sometimes just in proximity... As mentioned earlier, as is usually the case for men I never felt in personal danger nor did I feel my job was threatened by it which is a district privilege most of the time. The decision of not reporting it for me, almost exclusively in hindsight, came down to my responsibility in combatting the behavior in general as the specific incidents did not affect me in a notable way. I didn't do it and I'm not convinced that isn't part of the problem.

Come on, man, don't hold back. One defense of the typos and such might be that they're, so to speak, an aesthetic choice--like this is an urgent dispatch about a threat to democracy, no time to correct it. Plus it's, like, embracing the Tumblr aesthetic (or something), since one of her points is that 4chan culture finds typos hilariously funny. Like, ha ha, look at you, even in your final moments, a pathetic person like you couldn't help but make mistakes; your suicide not contains a comma splice, ha ha. But maybe I'm overreaching to apologize for a sloppily edited product that was rushed to market because the topic was white hot? I think so but I'm more interested in your substantive critique of her thesis than in a brief statement that she's a stupid person.

Counterpoint: stop telling people what to do for no reason. In particular, stop telling people that they can't socialise outside work hours because of working mothers. The WMs will not thank you for it, they don't get to go out much anyway. Having kids can affect your social life, turns out - who knew?

Retreat to vagueness smells pretty wolfy to me.

If you seriously need me to me to explain in detail why the office is a different social setting from the local pub, then I'm still gonna say the raised by wolves assessment is accurate.

And parties? And loose groups of friends? And social clubs? And your gym? Your book club?

It's very telling that you keep veering towards traditional hook-up spots for contrast to the workplace, when that's exactly beside the point I'm making. Makes me wanna awooou (wolf Howl).

That's insane.

Well, to be fair, those things are probably -EV generally, and only happen because of huge social pressure to do so. It's good for society for parents to have exit barriers from the relationship.

And this is completely different because while of course having kids together is a huge risk, it is obviously a necessary thing to do if you want kids.

I think putting encounters of this nature in the sexual harassment bucket is dumb, which is my point.

Why do you think we have a bunch of laws regulating conduct in the workplace and not in loose groups of friends, social clubs, your gym, and your book club?

Trying very hard to wrap my head around "The WMs will not thank you for it, they don't get to go out much anyway" and not having much luck. The social life of parents is not what's at issue here...