did you buy her a cashmere sweater to keep her quiet?

Even as a married man, if people decide to get married and start families young they should be aware that there will be trade-offs.

If a group of single people who work together want to go out drinking after work I can't see any reasonable objection to it. The suggestion that it should be frowned upon by righteous lefties is exactly the sort of terrible idea that arms the right.

It really smacks of conservative values imo. From the implication of normal social situations actually being impure when among the opposite sex, to the extreme limits in the name of protecting the frail, fairer sex, to the out it gives to men for boarish behavior by implying they just can't be expected to not be ****heads so let's protect them from themselves. I don't believe that is the driver of the suggestions by these posters, but I question that it is a truly liberal line of thinking. It reminds me of the religious right, tbh, and tracks Pence's personal work rules.

I don't know that you're arguing with me. You seem to just be saying what the motivations of corporations are, not telling them how they should act.

In regards to the bolded, I'm not talking about legal obligations. I would say that if you're a human being and you become aware of harassment you are morally on notice and required to escalate it. We're talking more about social norms than laws and I suggest that the world that prefers "the employer is legally obligated to escalate the situation" to "everyone is morally obligated to escalate the situation" is one which will have more harassment as bystanders in this world are trained to not feel responsible for their fellow citizens and to defer to authority. The idea that people have to report something to higher ups "see something, say something" doesn't help much. The point is that people just let things go thinking it's someone else's job and even well meaning people wonder if they have the authority to help other people.

I agree with everything you are saying here. The only point I was making is that the below is not possible as an official company position because the law states otherwise.

It doesn't just arm the right. It is being the right. I guess that depends on definitions though. I think of authoritarianism as right-wing. I have a libertarian friend who thinks of all authoritarianism as leftist. He calls Hitler a leftist and I call Stalin right wing. He has a hard time accepting left-libertarianism is a real thing and I have a hard time convincing him that corporate oppression over individuals is as bad as government oppression (maybe that's a little unfair - not that he's here to read this). The bigger the company the smaller the employee.

I think BobWoman is

Nah man, ways HR responds to this now is much different / better than how it was responded to 20 years ago, and from Don Draper on back women were either not working or norms included rape so suffice it to say we've come a long way.

The fact that we've got socially autistic man children and MRAs concern trolling over their inescapable fear of socializing with women in the work place speaks volumes. I'm not convinced we're in need as a society for stricter norms in this regard.

FYP

Companies are most definitely involved with educating their employees on sexual harassment.

I'm well aware, not sure why you think otherwise. Maybe my post sucked.

lol holy **** dude

And really nobody actually said coworkers should banned from having a drink after work so maybe dial it back a bit there.

No, but she told me our boss was very well endowed, so I think she got her sweaters somewhere else.

In rough order:

The thing with promoting social norms is that they are formally unenforceable. The idea is that the people who do not follow them are some degree or shunned or suffer some kind of collective social consequence.

I try sometimes to be both mildly amusing and make a point.

But take the analogy of someone who doesn't shower and smell like ****. We could predict that person might suffer the consequences of having rank BO, of having people gossip about them, of having it effect their career for being unpleasant to be around. We all intuitively understand this because "bathe" and "smell nice" are things most parents teach to kids and peers reinforce through stigma. No one needs a big enforcement mechanism, we just kind of do it. It probably has a social anthropological basis around hygiene and disease but that's neither here nor there.

Also, note it sometimes fails because hey, there are unkempt, smelly people in the world who don't bathe much. It isn't a norm because it's universally successful.

A bit silly of an example, but bear with me. That makes sense right? That's a norm we promote. Very informally, almost intuitive.

OK, now how do we tackle things like drunk driving or violent drunks?

We also sometimes norm build around behaviors that precede abusive or harmful ones. A restaurant or a bar, or an airline sometimes institute 2 drink maximums despite the fact a 350 lb guy might be able to drink 4 beers and not feel much. We recognize it probably unfairly burdens some if enforced very formally; informally, it sets a broadly understandable guideline: don't get ****faced, this isn't the place for it. The enforcement can range from lax to to stringent depending on the context. Oftentimes it just gets left to someone vaguely kind of monitoring it (a flight attendant, a waiter) to enforce. There's no law providing the enforcement mechanism but we just kind of count on the environment and a very light level oversight.

Similarly, those PSA campaigns that go like "buzzed driving IS drunk driving" and usually involve a friend trying to take the keys away from someone who has only had a little bit to drink. Sometimes they involve the buzzed person threatening to take the backroads to avoid detection and the friend is like "no, no, don't do that."

Take a third but related example: high schools in the US were noticing that after-prom events involved a bunch of behaviors they wanted to dissuade (binge drinking, property destruction at hotels, sexual assault at parties, whatever). They started hosting their own alternate overnight events in the schools with chaperones to give the kids other stuff to do.

Again, this is basically what I'm asking for, although perhaps my imagination is limited: a basic marketing campaign. More company structured fun instead of sending people off to bars. Signage in the workplace. Education. And we agree what the common precursors of sexual harassment are and what we should be on the lookout for: sexual jokes and stories. Requests to take work meetings offsite. Dating requests.

It's like literally any PSA campaign we're familiar with. Some investment in marketing/education wherein misconceptions are corrected and the acceptable standards are described, and the goal is to foster harm reduction by increasing protective behaviors rather than penalize the abuses.

I'm not opposed tougher penalties for companies that violate the current laws. I think it can be part of the solution. The problem is, as I've said, is that the current laws seem to be placing a very high burden on women such that lots of this goes unreported.

-------

I anticipate that ~everyone is going to say my ideas sound all well and good but get a bunch of push-back on the standards (don't use the office as the place to find dates, don't meet as much privately away from people, tell your sexual jokes somewhere else). Since we've been around and around on this, and many of you seem to say this is either a very unfair burden or you have no agency to stop it, or (lately, in the latest posts) a capitalist ethos that dampens the human spirit...

As I said, I can only chalk that up to male myopia. See my post in response to 6ix on this about how frankly awful many men are. A point you agreed with, I think. An INFORMAL, ADMITTEDLY UNSCIENTIFIC observation on this SEEMS like all of the fun and spirit-engagement and communal-agitation-against-the-capitalist-overlords is being had by males who are very, very defensive about the status quo standards and most of the downsides are being owned by women who report a startling amount of workplace sexual harassment.

Again, this isn't a legal case but an ethical one, but we can borrow from the law. And if you DON'T see a bunch of de jure burdens in your standards and systems but you do see a lot of de facto ones (huge amounts of sexually harassed women), you may have a problem with your standards even if they aren't formally patriarchal or misogynist in nature.

This, I hope you see on reflection, is a pretty huge fallacy. Actually a combination of three. Mind reading fallacy plus argument from ignorance plus the identity fallacy.

1a. you don't know what prominent feminists, even the ones you cited, agree or disagree with what I've written here (mind reading fallacy)
1b. the argument not articulated is not a disavowal (argument from ignorance)
2. the validity of an argument depends not on their own strength but rather on third party validation from someone who has the appropriate identity

You cited 4 articles of feminists, writing about sexual harassment, decried the absence of arguments that sound like mine (which I don't even think is true!) and then declare I've gone too far.

That's a hugely garbage argument. Put differently. As an analogy. If you said White Lives Matter rallies should be stopped by more FTC regulations on Fox News and Brietbart from covering them. Whatever.

And I said, but wait, Martin Luther King knew of white populist street backlashes, he had ever reason to be outraged, way more than you, and notice he never even mentioned FTC regulations once! THINK ABOUT IT.


...you'd probably recognize that's a pretty dumbass argument.

1. I didn't say "get it out of email" demonstrated a guilty mind. I specifically said "don't conclude that". I noted it to show that *everyone,* myself included, knows where not to put embarrassing stuff we wouldn't want people to read. Of any kind.

What does that tell us? Not that we're all serial sexual harassers but that everyone sort of understands how to obfuscate something unflattering or in violation of company rules or whatever.

Therefore we need new strategies to protect people because there's a common wisdom about how to shield wrongdoings: don't put it in writing, do it in private, etc.

2. the reference to offsite meeting at Starbucks was a hypothetical about common honeypot/bait and switch harassment tactics to get a woman out of the office and into a more private space with a guy where he can do stuff he doesn't want co-workers to see: pressure for dates, try to flirt, or worse.

I am *not* suggesting men and women can't meet in private in the office, that all coffee breaks are prima facie harassment. But see my post above. It's a common sexual harassment tactic. People should be aware and generally speaking we should probably have a lower tolerance for it when safer alternatives exist. Weinstein invited women to his hotel room (AFAIK Bill O'Reilly and Halperin did the same thing, reportedly). Consider why. Starbucks and the like are pretty safe from the risk of truly egregious rape pig stuff, but the whole "let's work at the bar or at Starbucks" with either the pretense you're there to work or others will join IS a common ruse to entrap women out of the office and start to try to engage in some form of romantic relationship with them.

We should educate people about this, minimally, but I suspect *most* of the requests actually have no real good justification besides feng shui and "well it's more fun" and other sort of stuff I don't find that compelling.

How about middling it? I'm not going full-bobman that we prohibit out of work socializing. Instead, have management or install a company culture that makes for decent meeting spaces with coffee or whatever other comforts people need that make up the pretense to go somewhere else, and then make it sort of a norm or convention that meetings at Starbucks or the brew pub generally are frowned upon *as work meeting spaces* because it's a common place for entrapment. Obviously if people want to go socialize, OK, that's a choice. But company guidelines that work meetings should generally be in the office environment because 'let's instead go work here in this private space away from here' is a common tactic that men use to prey on women.

Like I said, the leverage the unscrupulous guys are usually pulling is "let's do this to improve your career network" or "let's go here and do some actual work." People usually have an easier time saying no to social requests than ones that feel more like professional obligations. So make sure that there are clear guidelines that women will never have a professional obligation to go sit with a guy over a glass of wine or coffee or whatever.

I'm arguing preemptively here. I'm not suggesting you're arguing this. Just trying to anticipate where this is headed:

I anticipate a "well, that's obvious? Women surely must know they *could* refuse to go to Starbucks or the bar? We have laws against harassment already" type objections. See my post above to DrModern and elsewhere ITT. When you have a lot of harms, sometimes you need to reconsider if you have the right norms. A bunch of this sounds eerily reminiscent of the ACist/right-winger arguments that you simply argue from priors (rather than empirical evidence) to deduce if you've got the right rules: "women can probably always say no to something that is a little uncomfortable" feels a lot like "business would NEVER do racism, it's bad for business." Any of these arguments that assume the status quo has sufficient room to prevent these sorts of harms has to explain the preponderance of harm.

Here's the problem. And microbet smartly figured this out. Which is that this isn't an especially consistent wonderment. And the way out is like a radical transformation to end employment.

I have some sympathies there and the sort of "man, how ****ing robotic do we have to become simply to satisfy our ****ing jobs, man, have you no humanity in you at all?" -- I get the argument. There IS alot to say about how much modern labor crushes human flourishing.

But the status quo compromise here seems potentially disastrous. Unless we're actively working to upend hyper competitive capitalism and patriarchal norms in which men still hold tons of power in private business, the whole "we accept employment and management and capitalism or we are working very, very slowly to erode that... but in the meantime we must accept lax and unclear standards around workplace socializing that do not inhibit too much human sexual expression" feels like a direct path to a bunch of sexually harassed women.

I think microbet was approaching this point, too, and I've seen it written before by others and out on the internet numerous times. But the modern economic and social system of hyper libertarian personal ethos AND hyper capitalist economic context can produce some really bad outcomes. It's glib but instructive to point to the Weinsteins and O'Reillys and Halperins of the world as like the inevitable result, where female ambition to climb the ladder and get access to the money and successes that the men control goes through their hotel rooms.

It's fair to point out this is genuflecting somewhat to an authoritarian mindset. I accept it as a criticism. Insofar as we have these sort of stiffling, miserable offices and work environments, making a unique exception for sexual expression and lax sexual attitudes is curious. Left libertarians can absolutely make a strong case here, but the sort of point of view I'm being very dismissive of is the social left libertarian that still genuflects to the structures of laissez faire capitalism as a system to work in. That is, the whole "everyone take a chill pill, maaaan, stop being such a square, we gotta express ourselves" COUPLED WITH (and only coupled with) "well, let's work together to make the hyper capitalist system a little less egregious sometime in the next few decades" is an unacceptable halfway solution.

This is me acknowledging what I think is the absolute inarguable reality: for the moment, capitalism isn't going anywhere and so we're going to have to accept limitations, for now, on sexual expression at work. The status quo dynamics seem to result in just too many self-satisfied apologist dudes having all the fun of the expression and too many victimized women sharing stories of harassment on social media.

What an *******.

They should go **** themselves. Literally.

Seriously, they are poor souls having been partly encouraged by the system into what they think is the unofficial right way to be. Getting too much understanding on the way. Not being able to think for themselves. In addition to being narcissists of course, maybe psychopaths. Maybe the best way to put it: idiots.

At Bush's age I would just act like it was some sort of involuntary movement.

I think you had it right in an earlier post (somewhere): authoritarianism is an extra dimension to the traditional left/right axis which can apply in various measures to both.

The idea that companies have to be vigilant never to exclude anyone from social activities ends up with us all in a tedious non-alcoholic vegetarian restaurant at lunch time only, and makes a laughing stock (and ammunition) of the left.

If anyone thinks that's reductio ad absurdum, think again. Here in the mildly PC UK, my organisation has announced a policy of inclusion, a rigorous application of which led to one person's leaving drinks being a non-alcoholic trip to a tea house after work. instead of what the vast majorty wanted which was a traditional piss up in the pub.

I wouldn't. If the upper department works for him good enough for being out in the public and "telling jokes", he can control his hands too.

Apparently he touched the bottom of another human being. Would you like to be touched in your bottom by HW, in a probably sexual way? However old he is?

This old and still having to learn basic things.

Aren't these GOP Presidents such cards.

DVaut,

The fact that you're talking about argumentum ad ignorantiam instead of trying to engage with the clear intention behind what I wrote--to provide you with representative examples of feminist women's positions, clearly articulated--is a sign we're way off track. To that end, I'll just say that if you look at large-scale studies of this issue like this one, it turns out victims are generally concerned that:

(1) damages awards are too small;

(2) it's too difficult to report a claim;

(3) they weren't believed and taken seriously during the process of pursuing a claim because managers, judges, advocates, and others involved subscribed to stereotyped views of male and female behavior.

Notice how that aligns with what All In, myself, and others are saying needs to be done. It's clear under the letter of current law what is and isn't harassment and, yes, consent is a major part of the definition. The problem is unambiguously that the system for penalizing bad behavior doesn't work. Maybe that means we need to think about fixing the specific problems that exist with that system, which have been identified over and over again (they're right there^^), rather than putting up a bunch of signs that say HARASSMENT IS EXTREMELY BAD and then setting up filters to catch employee emails with the word "tits" or whatever.

If you're in charge of setting company policies somewhere, I really, really hope you'll think carefully about what your opponents ITT are saying before going ahead with anything like what you're proposing. Cracking down on consensual--meaning mutually desired and assented-to--sexual behavior is, for the zillionth time, not going to help and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Also, it's candidly a bit baffling for you to take this indignant, moralizing tone when we're basically just repeating the feminist consensus on the issue.

IOW, I'm saying yes, we should fix capitalism and that would obviously help, but I'd want to see reforms to address the issues above regardless.

I'll take these both at once since it's really the same point:

One other point here in the sort of left-libertarian mindset which seems to both acknowledge the problem and take it seriously, and wants to solve it earnestly, but which thinks crafting social norms against workplace dating and sexual banter is draconian and overwrought but INSTEAD proposes harsher punishments for harassment and increased company liability: how exactly do we think firms, management, and our capitalist overlords are going to respond to *those* incentives? Because that's all those are: they're simply incentives to make enforcement taken more seriously.

I'd argue it ain't gonna be drastically different from what bob and I are proposing. I think it's incredibly naive to assume firms are going to put together sexual harassment czars and response teams to turn themselves into private sexual harassment arbitrators, strenuously investigating each sexual harassment claim so that everyone can behave exactly the same way but we just do a better job nabbing the bad guys.

IMO, world doesn't work that way. Money isn't going to fall out of the sky to turn HR into courts. For better or worse, I think the very predictable outcome is they're going to burden shift downward the enforcement responsibilities onto workers and labor and come up with a bunch of strict policies, automated detection schemes, and tell people to police themselves, not really any different from what bob and I are proposing at all. It has the whiff of respecting labor freedoms but it's hard to see how that works in totality. IF the state started levying heavy fines and allow firms to assume way more liability for sexual harassment, firms aren't going to turn themselves in the Special Victims Unit of Law and Order so workers can keep having their lighthearted sexual social fun and get the bad guys out of the company, they're just going to make a bunch of draconian policies, automated email filters, "see something say something" overbroad advice and tell workers to figure out amongst themselves. It's not a bad or offensive idea but it's not really even a meaningful alternative to what we're talking about.

And related, the whole "cracking down on CONSENSUAL sexual behavior, just madness!" -- as I've written dozens of times now, TAKING MEN AT THEIR WORD, the problem here seems to be for innocent, put-upon men is that all these ambiguous conventions around consent make them victims of overly sensitive women who misunderstand their innocent flirtation and jokes and overtures and cry foul too often, and our norms around consent similarly give unscrupulous, predatory men the ability to harass women with schemes (see above about honeypots) that involve a pretense of consent wherein the harasser had other intentions, or plied consent out of someone's natural inclination to show willingness and ambition for tasks.

That is, "cracking down on mutually agreed to sexual conduct" isn't even engaging in the discussion. Who the **** would REALLY try to crack down on mutually agreed to flirations and sex and dates? That's a given, we should allow those. The problem is there seems to be mass confusion on exactly what is consented to and welcomed, and a large number of aggrieved women at work. That is: a huge problem to thwart the bad people AND protect the supposedly innocent people caught up in misunderstandings is that "mutual agreement" and "consent" isn't some bright line we all agree to or understand. A simple rule to clear up the confusion is simply to have a very low tolerance for it at work. The result is some potentially consented-to-fun is disincentivized but we incentivize collective social protections for people. "Oh, he sent you an email that referenced your butt? Well I gotta understand all the background and your total personal history and interactions to see if perhaps he misunderstand your friendliness for implicit consent" becomes a much simpler --> "Oh, he sent you an email that referenced your butt? Go tell HR, we all know not to do that, lol it's on that sign right when we walk on the door."

Hence the undertaking I'm suggesting: we all take seriously the idea that our current norms are insufficient and improve them.