Don't see a problem with saying that the President is kind of a dick, if that's what you think. He was also told before saying it that it wasn't going to be broadcast.

Sure, sure. I don't want to get in a circle firing squad of pearl clutching. But it shows how much these media all stars are full of ridiculous pretense. Obama kind of a dick for getting snippy with press, says man who sexually assaults his employees.

Re: Dvaut’s point, one common element in a lot of these stories is how predators put women in sexualized but ambiguous situations as a way of escalating their attacks. They try to set things up so that there’s no socially graceful way for their target to escape, and if the target does, they have some plausibly deniable story. If you just tell your subordinate they need to sleep with you to keep their job, it’s socially easier for them to tell you off, and, at least in some workplaces, a lot easier for you to get fired.

The thing that creates ambiguity is the frequency and acceptability of consensual sexual relationships in the workplace.

Right.

More generally, too, as we know from many other situations in life, that ambiguity is used by unscrupulous people and is absolutely part of their strategy to get bystanders to stand-down and let the abuse or bad things to happen.

So apologists who assume ambiguous interpretations by default ("well, can we PROVE their guilty intent?!") give predators all the space they need.

Normal people can easily spot this when it comes to say, racist dogwhistles, such that if dumbass right-winger pundits are like "hey, I wrote tons of screeds about Obama's birth certificate controversy because I was curious about his true origins, glad Trump settled that!," we're all like yeah get ****ing real, you know what you were doing, you're a racist idiot riling up racist idiots, there's no good reason to give you the benefit of the doubt.

But dudes invite women to their offices for private meetings where their tits get grabbed or they get an unwanted massage or get invited for a private meeting in the bathroom stall or whatever the ****, and hey, it all could be a misunderstood joke or maybe the job is stressful and she looked like she needed her shoulders rubbed, COULD BE?

"Well, it could have been this..." or "it could have been that..." grant ******* the space to operate. It's common in life in many areas where bad people use the potential for alternative interpretation and mens reas to excuse their own wrongdoings. So it is here. Unscrupulous guys use the tolerance and potential for innocent flirting or dating overtures to try to excuse away their behaviors that make women uncomfortable and so reasonable people, leaders, management, business owners, coworkers, etc. can adopt a pretty simple low-tolerance for all of the 'innocent' behaviors to combat that. Then there's no ambiguity for bad people to operate in. Is it an UNFAIR burden on well-meaning men who simply want to expand their dating pool to co-workers? I mean, this isn't a legal claim but just a personal ethical one, but it seems way overly entitled (and a bad ****ing idea to boot) for employees to claim they have a righteous claim to hit on co-workers, to flirt with them, whatever. The righteous idea seems more that work is sort of a more sacrosanct place where that **** is verboten if only through norms and social expectation, IF ONLY because we can look around and see how many women are put off by this and how many men sit in wonderment after the fact that women could ever feel this way.

I'm am under no allusions this stops all predatory behaviors but I think it addresses a frighteningly common environment for it.

I had to have a look at some research on the area, most of the harassment taking place at the workplace is between customer and employee - in resturants, bars, hotels, nursing homes and that sort of thing. Often where alcohol is served. I think the harassment going on outside the workplace is also very big but its not studied that much. On the street, public transportation, internet etc. That makes the authority figure vs the pretty female employee just a small portion of all sexual harassment going on in society. Possibly though its more damaging than the other types because having trouble with your boss is more problematic than having trouble with a customer.

If you want to focus specifically on the boss vs employee thing then one specific action is to have institutions for arbitration. Sexual harassment isnt suited to be in court systems, the cases rarely happen and when it happens the women lose iirc.

I really hope he's parody.

more satire than parody

That's all very well but ****ing in the shower room at work is a hell of a lot of fun.

I can picture DVaut being into PUA about as easily as I can imagine Dids being into rolling coal.

I feel like it would be better to go the other way and make sexual relationships in the workplace mandatory.

The Bill O'Reily thing is getting lost in all this. Settling for 30 million, dude must have just been groping everyone at work all the time.

Also he groped rich people.

Has there ever been a sexual harassment suit that was awarded 30 million? Rape? Anything even close?

I read the NYT article and not only does O'Reilly claim 100% innocence, he says he has iron clad proof. But he is not going to reveal it because he just wants to end things quickly and not put his family through the burden. His kids are very lucky imo. Sucks for those of us waiting for all the facts to come in before we form an opinion.

You're thinking of a hierarchical structure, I think. There are plenty of situations where co-workers are at an equal standing in whatever hierarchy. There's already a norm (and sometimes laws, IIRC) surrounding sexual activity between teaching staff and students, as there should be. There's no norm surrounding students and students, nor should there be. I'm happy to cosign something along the lines of 'Managers shouldn't date subordinates', but I have way more misgivings about making it universal. Don't **** down, let's say.

There is something else even between peers about people not being able to get away. I wouldn't be absolutist. Like I mentioned in the other thread my brother and his wife both work for Boeing, but not in the same department or even city. But, there is generally a reasonable barrier to approaching someone who you directly work with. I dated someone who I had worked with, but I waited until I quit to ask her out. I wasn't thinking of harassment at the time and she wasn't really lower ranked than me and certainly didn't report to me, but it's a pretty awkward situation.

Do me next.

lol Mark Halperin GET REKT

There are all kinds of reasons why dating in the workplace is a bad idea, starting with what happens if it ends badly. I suppose I'm already importing the notion of not being an *******, but I'm just not seeing any innate problem of the kind you're referring to. Wherever there's an in-built power imbalance, for sure, I can see that, and in, for example, small workplaces, those are often present even between notional equals. But if you're working for a relatively large company and there's a culture of socialising after work hours, hookups and whatnot are basically inevitable, and I don't see it as innately objectionable.

That's pretty much what I was saying about Boeing. But even there if you're in a small work group it's fraught. But love >>>> work, so like Pincess Bride kind of true love is one thing, but tinder style hookups are another.

lol DVaut being a PUA. He wouldn't be here if he was that. He'd either be on Reddit posting on their MRA sub reddit and admiring Stefan Molyneux.

I'm not saying you're arguing this but yet again I would point out "well, the heart wants what it wants / chemistry I just couldn't help it / love is a heckuva drug" etc etc are all arguments that assume people lack agency to stop themselves from dating at work.

I will begin shouting now that I UNDERSTAND THERE ARE MATTERS OF DEGREES

AND YET

...the distance between "the heart wants what it wants and I just couldn't help myself asking her out on a date, love is a cruel mistress, my heart was burning with desire, we had so much chemistry" is sort perhaps only a short distance away from what stooges use to justify their unwanted harassment. Or worse. Just varying degrees of my libido/romantic desires overcame my rational side and I just had to act.

I find them uncompelling. I can, for instance, acknowledge say the strong biological urge to masturbate and yet I would expect any employee in a professional setting to behave themselves and wait until they get home or wherever people jerk off.

So I find all arguments that are like "well, dating at work, just accept it, love is so powerful" to be uncompelling removal of agency from the speaker. People absolutely have control over who they pursue, romantically, and you remove all the grey areas by enforcing norms against dating and flirtation so that people with low self-awareness, no social graces, *******s, etc. or a combination can't hide behind ambiguity to turn the workplace into their own personal Tinder.

All arguments after that where people continue to shrug or justify the practice of dating at work feel like simple social choices, much like gun ownership. I'm not outraged by them, I understand the assumptions, but they sound like this to me, the same way gun owners do when there's a mass shooting: yeah well we know there's all this sexual harassment and it seems like a pretty bad epidemic but we value the social freedom to flirt and date on the job without much censorship more than we value the scores of harassed women.

Most everything is fuzzy and it should be. Some people will be wrong, fail, and be judged. If one thinks masturbation is more important than work, then I will punish or shun them. If they think hookups are more important than work, I will punish or shun them. If they think work is more important than love, I will pity them. edit: Well, 'pity' is melodramatic, but w/e. In general I don't think hard and fast rules are better than looking at a specific situation and judging it. To the point, I don't generally trust lawmakers/rulemakers to have better judgement than individuals - especially when they are quite separated from the specific circumstances. And regarding sexual harassment in the workplace, it seems like the situation is being addressed right now in a very anarchic manner and who's to say that it isn't more effective than any top down rule making process has been or would be?

Like I said in another post, I quit before I asked someone one who I worked with out. But, it wasn't Princess Bride True Love and I wasn't going to starve by quitting.

I don't think sternly written HR policy is going to be terribly effective at curbing one of humanity's most primal urges. We're hard wired to mate up pretty much anywhere and everywhere a suitable partner might be found.

Do women get a say in the new "don't date at work" rule, or are we forcing this on them out of concerned patriarchy because some of us guys just can't help being gropey and creepy without official corporate strictures?

I know a janitor that ended up marrying a student worker. They seem happy. Kind of different since there was no power dynamic like there is with facility.

Very few porn stars stay in the porn industry forever.