This cartoon was inspired by “Yes means yes” is about much more than rape, by Amanda Taub.
Transcript:
The cartoon is in flow chart form.
Panel 1 is labeled “START HERE,” and shows a fashionable hipster man talking on a cell phone. He has a Van Dyke beard.
VAN DYKE: Come to the city and stay with me for the conference! You’ll meet important people!
An arrow labeled “If you’re a girl go this way” leads to a panel showing a young woman on the phone thinking “Should I go? I barely know this guy.” There are two paths leading from this panel: “YES, GO” and “DON’T GO.”
“DON’T GO” leads to a panel marked THE END, where we see an IMPORTANT PERSON IN A SUIT AND TIE speaking to VAN DYKE.
IMPORTANT PERSON: Whatever happened to her? I thought she was talented.
VAN DYKE: I tried helping her, but she’s SO standoffish.
THE END!
“YES, GO!” leads to a panel of the young woman and Van Dyke in a bedroom. He is grabbing her and she’s trying to fend him off.
VAN DYKE: Aw, c’mon, don’t tease!
WOMAN: Get OFF!
There are two routes out of this panel: “STAY IN HIS APARTMENT” and “FLEE HIS APARTMENT.” “STAY IN HIS APARTMENT” leads to a black panel labeled “HE RAPES YOU.” “FLEE HIS APARTMENT” leads to a panel of the young woman sitting on a sidewalk, shivering, in the dark, labeled “you’re broke on the streets of a strange city.” Whichever path you choose, they both lead to…
A panel marked “YOU GET BLAMED.” Fingers point at the young woman.
FINGER 1: She must have wanted it!
FINGER 2: What did she expect to happen?
The “YOU GET BLAMED” panel leads to an arrow marked “TIME OFF TO HEAL,” which in turn leads back to the THE END panel.
Going all the way back to the “START HERE” panel, there’s one more route in this flow chart. From “START HERE” (“Come to the city and stay with me for the conference! You’ll meet important people!”) choose “IF YOU’RE A BOY, GO THIS WAY.” A young man on the phone says “Thanks! I’d love to go!” We then see him at a party in the city, with lots of networking going on; the IMPORTANT PERSON is saying to him, “we should collaborate.” An arrow marked “YEARS LATER” leads to a panel of the now less young man, clearly now an important person himself, giving a speech at a podium.
YOUNG MAN: I never benefited from sexism… I just worked harder than my rivals!
Rape *is the black hole* you represent it as, but the social problem is not depended on that. You could *easily* rewrite that comic without any reference to rape just considereing the inherent lasting awkwardness of sexual attraction, whether mutual (at the point) or not.
I think that putting “he rapes you” against a black background really works well here.
This seems like a very middle class conception of what it means to be a woman with a career in America.
Most American women are working class, and work in low-skilled jobs where “going to a conference” is never going to play a role in their career.
I’m not saying the scenario provided here isn’t true, but it seems very narrow and to be lacking in explanatory power for women as a group.
Most American women are working class, and work in low-skilled jobs where “going to a conference” is never going to play a role in their career.
Point taken, but: (a) arguably, the opportunity gap between men and women is larger in middle class jobs—and how “networking” is gendered plays a big role, (b) it’s a small jump from “conference” to less expensive forms of networking (say, going for beers after work), (c) give Amp a break—he’s a cartoonist, and conferences in that line of work are roughly what hiring halls are in construction.
I’m a blue collar worker, and when I read it I equated “conference” to “traveling”. “Traveling” is what happens when there’s a lack of work in your Local, so you “sign books” (the hiring hall books) in other Locals, searching for work. Since traveling can get expensive (and especially during the “job hunt” phase, when you’re on unemployment benefits), people usually do it in groups. And yes, this presents some difficulties for tradeswomen.
I think it’s pretty telling that the first response to this cartoon expressed discomfort with the mention of rape, and instead wanted to talk about sexual attraction (“whether mutual (at the point) or not”….yeah, miss me with that shit). “Lasting awkwardness” over sexual attraction? Only if you feel entitled to having that attraction be reciprocal, and especially if you have a relative power imbalance that you can manipulate in order to push the issue—trying to get the un-attracted party to “reconsider”, or quit. And let’s face it, women are sexualized on the job in a way that men aren’t. Being personable and friendly, even—gasp!—outgoing, is interpreted by too fucking many men as “flirting” when coming from a woman. So—no need to be a middle-class woman going to a conference. The same basic issue is faced by working-class women who “stay late”, or “close up”. The end result is the same—women get alienated in any number of ways (sometimes due to constrained choices, sometimes due to not being given choices to begin with—work cultures differ) from participating fully in their workplace/career development.
(or the converse—they do, and then get accused of “sleeping their way to the top”, sans any actual sex taking place)
@La Lubu,
it was not discomfort with the mention of rape, just the suggestion that this particular problem would not necessarily disappear even in the complete absence of rape. Women are sexualised *everywhere* in a way men aren’t, not just on the job. That’s a fact of life, of differing female and male heterosexualities far more than a consequence of rape culture per se although it certainly figures in. That’s why I said it would be easy to leave rape out of this without changing the outcome too much.
Lots of things here seem really “forced”, and I’m not sure why.
As an example, look at the panel at the very top, in the middle. She is a woman, presumably with a good job of the conference-going sort, but she stays in the apartment of some stranger, and – according to the next panel in the decision tree – she doesn’t even have enough money for a Motel6. We have to also believe that the conference is in the city of the rapist, which would likely not be the case (usually conferences are held in nice places, away from the cities where the participants live).
Is a female participant just invariably poor enough that she has to crash at the rapist’s apartment? Would a man feel the same sense of entitlement? If a woman invites him to a conference, would he invariably crash in her apartment?
Just that one decision tree is weird. Lots of others as well – why is this so forced?
When I was a kid, my parents told me once, after I had really done some nasty things, that I was to go to my room without dinner. I had a whole forced scenario worked up about how if I starved to death it was their fault and the like. This feels just like that childish way of thinking. What is the purpose of this?
Also, one can just as readily interpret “conferences” as shorthand for other direct and indirect forms of professional advancement that require close, sometimes private contact with male strangers, like testing for licensing or recertifications, traveling to and from day- or week-long offsite training courses, pursuing management roles or keyholder positions that might require monitoring employees on opening and closing shifts (meaning one is more likely to be one of the first supervisors to arrive or the last to leave), securing apprenticeships in male-dominated industries, finding safe networking opportunities, et al. Keep in mind, part of the justification for keeping women out of certain specialized trades — by way of refusing entry or refusing advancement beyond entry-level — is that men can’t handle or can’t be expected to handle the provocative presence of women, that women who doggedly pursue certain professions are Asking for Trouble, the trouble signified being sexual or physical in nature.
That many US women are stuck in low-skill industries is sort of the point; the threat of sexual violence and harassment are tools used, perhaps inadvertently or a bit unconsciously, to segregate them and keep them in an economically inferior position. That this goes unnoticed, unremarked upon, is part of the reason why worshipping at the altar of the blind and just meritocracy is so absurd: men, in fact, benefit from a female population too reluctant to compete directly for the same jobs. The fellow in the last panel / bubble can’t possibly have worked harder than his competitors because almost half of them were never allowed to compete in the first place.
Keep in mind, part of the justification for keeping women out of certain specialized trades — by way of refusing entry or refusing advancement beyond entry-level — is that men can’t handle or can’t be expected to handle the provocative presence of women, that women who doggedly pursue certain professions are Asking for Trouble, the trouble signified being sexual or physical in nature.
YES. And look—here’s Exhibit A right above: “That’s a fact of life, of differing female and male heterosexualities far more than a consequence of rape culture per se although it certainly figures in.”
“Differing female and male heterosexualities?” FFS. We’re not talking about orientation; we’re talking about chosen behavior. Finding someone sexually attractive and acting on that are two different things. Thinking of sexual attraction as something that must be acted upon, especially in nonsexual scenarios like the jobsite, is a hallmark of rape culture.
Also: Women are sexualised *everywhere* in a way men aren’t, not just on the job. That IS rape culture.
SomeOne @5: “without changing the outcome too much”? One of the outcomes in the comic is a rape.
But more prestigious jobs just don’t apply higher levels of harassment to exclude women. Low skill industries are far more exposed to harassment. You’re more likely to be harassed as a waitress or shop keeper than an accountant, and the reason’s power and class. The people who get crap are always those at the bottom.
The specificity of the cartoon is outlandish. But if you want to know who gets help the focus on men of the man-woman, man-man, woman-man, woman-woman pairs is selective. It also cuts the other way, women would be much less likely to invite a strange man over than a woman because rape.
The word “conference” is obviously providing a distraction. (Although as La Lubu correctly points out, there are occupations – such as mine – where conferences are not expensive, not limited to people with good jobs, and happen in virtually all cities, not just “destination” cities).
But if you have to explain something, that’s no good.
What would people think if the dialog in the “START HERE” panel was changed? Maybe it could be “Come visit the city! You can stay with me, and I’ll introduce you to some important people.”
I have not found that people necessarily would say that it’s “OK to act on sexual attraction, even in a nonsexual scenario.”
I think that they would say “it is incorrect to classify so much of life as a nonsexual scenario where it is inappropriate to experience or act on any sort of sexual or romantic attraction.”
And frankly, that’s a tricky one.
My employee clients don’t want to experience harassment, and they shouldn’t experience harassment, and I think that makes sense, and I support them (and sue for them.) Same thing for students in school. Same thing in some public spaces.
So when I view it from the perspective of “someone who wants not to be harassed,” it seems reasonable.
OTOH, most of the couples I know–including my wife and I–met their partners in an environment which I suspect many folks would deem entirely “nonsexual:” in class, or at work. And all of us look back on this and think it was fine and good.
Similarly, most of them–including my wife and I–developed that relationship through flirting or other sexual/romantic behavior–also during class, or at work. And all of us look back on this, too, and think it was fine and good.
So when I view it from the perspective of personal reports (of men and women both, BTW) then the concept of “no attraction zones” seems less reasonable.
IMO the balance can only be reached if it is behavior based. It’s one thing to suggest “you should not continually harass people at work/school if they have told you to stop,” or some other reason. It’s harder to classify work/school as magic zones where people are no longer allowed to initiate or experience sexual attraction.
g&w,
” It’s harder to classify work/school as magic zones where people are no longer allowed to initiate or experience sexual attraction.”
No one did this. No one does this. You are arguing obvious things against straw feminists in your head. To do so, you took a sentence fragment, completely ignored its context (its context being the rest of the sentence) and went to battle against imaginary demons. You jumped from La Lubu arguing against “sexual attraction must be acted on” to positing that someone was arguing that “sexual attraction must never be acted upon.” That last argument is entirely in your head. No one else made that argument here.
If you really want to stick with heterosexual sleeping arrangements between strangers,** and especially if you want to match that article, it might be more accurate if you made him skeevier (“hey, little lady, come stay at my place, you can sleep in my bed”) But the problem is that once it becomes clear that his REAL motivation is sex, it weakens your comparison because we don’t have as much reason to think he’d actually help the guy.
I think it would be better (and have the same message) if the whole thing took place at a conference:
Man and Woman both go to conference in big hotel.
Woman must decide whether to talk to interesting people in private. If no, loses out. If yes, gets hit on/groped.
Woman must then decide to go to afterparty in room, with important people. If no, loses out. If yes, gets raped/blamed.
Etc.
Same message, same stuff. But it is clearer I think.
After all, the male advantage you’re trying to describe here is less about “receiving specific assistance due to maleness” than about “avoiding being targeted due to not-femaleness.”
** you selected (intentionally?) one of the very few areas where (a) being female tends to give applicants an advantage, and (b) normal social coding often (though obviously not always) involves some expectation of sexual interest. If you were to cross those two sets, “heterosexual sleeping arrangements between strangers” are probably near the top of the list. Choosing an example where an opposite-sex, same-age-group stranger has asked someone to share a room with them may be an overly distracting way to make your point.
CharlesS,
I am assuming LaLubu isn’t attacking a straw MRA.
So when she says, across multiple posts,:
I think it’s reasonable to take “nonsexual jobsite” literally (since she has was responding to an argument to the contrary, wrote quite a bit on the subject generally, and hasn’t said anything to qualify it.)
But I don’t think it’s reasonable to take “MUST be acted upon” literally since nobody here is arguing for it, and it otherwise seems like a straw.
Perhaps LaLubu will clarify what level–if any–of sexual behavior, thought, and interest she thinks is OK in a professional setting.
Re: “must be acted upon”. Take a look at Some One’s response again. Note: inherent lasting awkwardness of sexual attraction, whether mutual (at the point) or not and differing female and male heterosexualities. That’s what I was responding to. Some One’s phrasing intimates a certain inevitability to disparate impact on women’s workplace/career opportunities; that biology, rather than chosen behavior, is creating that impact. Now, perhaps I’m reading too much into Some One’s comment, but the thread is still open and Some One is free to come back and explain what “differing female and male heterosexualities” means. In my lived experience, that (and similar) phrasing is politespeak for “surely you can’t expect a healthy, sexually responsive, heterosexual man to treat a woman he is attracted to in a generic, nonsexual way?!” In other words, that it is an unreasonable expectation for a woman to expect a man to refrain from acting on his sexual attraction. I call bullshit on both points: that biology is the determining factor, and that control of one’s biological urges is unreasonable. I thought I explained above by saying that attraction and acting on that attraction were two different things. Let me offer an example if that helps: it’s one thing to think “Nice tits!!”, and yet another to say “Nice tits! (“can I stick my head between ’em and go “boogaboogaboogabooga”?”)
Re: nonsexual jobsite. Believe it or not, most jobsites are nonsexual. (do I really need to explain that “nonsexual” doesn’t mean “anti-sexual”?) The primary purpose isn’t to find a mate amidst one’s coworkers. The routines, workplace cultures, and written policies are designed to inhibit sexuality playing a role in job performance and opportunity. Dress codes, especially for women, are set to downplay sexual attractiveness, rather than highlight it (seriously—women’s magazines geared toward professional women always emphasize the importance of downplaying one’s sexual attractiveness if one expects to be taken seriously—or even hired to begin with). Women whose workplace attire or appearance is deemed “too sexual” are soundly condemned as “unprofessional”. The “rules” on this are situational (by career type, institution, geography, workplace and local culture, etc.), byzantine, and even contradictory—hence, the perennial articles in women’s magazines offering rough guide to the labyrinthine process of acquiring and maintaining “proper” female appearance in the glass-and-concrete jungle. (men can just get dressed in the generic male uniform-of-the-jobsite, and be good to go)
In fact, a very, very common piece of advice offered to both men and women is: keep your dating life and your working life separate. Why? Because it is more common that workplace dating doesn’t “work out”, and a poisonous relationship between co-workers readily bleeds out into the jobsite at large.
I got the opposite message from Amp’s cartoon. The fact that the man has the straight-line through, which I read as “attend work event – meet mentors/network – succeed in career” is a recognition of the fact that he is getting assistance by attending the convention through networking/mentorship. The woman, even if she wasn’t targeted, always has the scenario in her head (leading to the standoffish remark.)
It makes it difficult for career women to network and interact safely in ways that are often taken for granted by men, including by making a would-be mentor (95.4% of current top 500 S&P CEOs are men) someone she has to debate whether or not to engage with on a professional level for fear of the private interference.
(Anecdote: I’ve been in my career for 10 years, and this year is the first time I’ve had a mentor. She’s not even in my field, but the difference is enormous. When people see someone in charge paying attention to a person, it makes you more attractive to work with and a lot more projects come through that you can be a part of. Huge, huge difference than trying to fight your way through the ranks of the uncaring bosses who just want you to shut up and do your job.)
Perhaps LaLubu will clarify what level–if any–of sexual behavior, thought, and interest she thinks is OK in a professional setting.
Sure. I already explained that for thoughts, the sky is the limit. Unshared, unexpressed thoughts of a sexual nature are going to happen, and are not a problem. Behavior is different. Sexual behavior and interest should never be expressed by a superior/supervisor to an employee of lower standing (even one not under that manager’s direct supervision) either on or off the job. Period. Any sexual behavior and interest between persons of equal standing in the workplace should be restricted to off-the-job, outside of workplace duties hours/areas only, and expressing sexual interest in one’s coworker should be assumed to be unwelcome unless explicit, overt welcome to such overtures has already been clearly demonstrated by that co-worker.
Sound draconian? Tough shit. You have to realize that I go to work for the same reasons that men do. I have to support myself and my family the same way that men do. But my sexuality is micromanaged and policed in my working environment to a degree that is unheard of with men. I have to navigate assumptions, expectations, and images that men do not (see also: there is no such thing as a male “slut”). I don’t have a choice in this—it is what it is.
What you describe above: “So when I view it from the perspective of personal reports (of men and women both, BTW) then the concept of “no attraction zones” seems less reasonable.
IMO the balance can only be reached if it is behavior based. It’s one thing to suggest “you should not continually harass people at work/school if they have told you to stop,” or some other reason. It’s harder to classify work/school as magic zones where people are no longer allowed to initiate or experience sexual attraction.”
Offers nothing but negative repercussions for women, no matter our choice. Understand: what I am asking for is routine for men on the job—that my sexuality have no bearing on my treatment or opportunities in the workplace. I’m not there for a date. I’ve got bills to pay. It’s not magic. And initiating sexual overtures is entirely different from “experiencing sexual attraction”.
Also understand: it’s not that I want to view all jobsite “come-ons” as “harassment”. They just end up being that way, because (a) you’d be surprised at the number of men who can’t seem to take “no” for an answer, (b) my “no’s” are always interrogated, and not just by the co-worker who received it. (“why not? why won’t you go out with him? ohhh, I get it; you expect every man you go out with to look like Brad Pitt/have a million dollars/etc.etc.etc. you don’t like the nice guys; you just want a Bad Boy, etc.etc., your daughter is going to grow up warped because you don’t have a Man in the House,etc. (c) my “yes” is interpreted by those same not-so-disinterested observers as gold-digging, using my sexuality to get ahead, being a slut (even if no actual sex takes place). There is no neutral ground for a woman who mixes her professional life with her dating life.
And that’s all I want—for my jobsite to be neutral ground, where—like the men—my work can be evaluated without my sexuality or appearance playing a role. I see this happen with men all day everyday—their work stands apart from their sexuality and appearance.
”It’s harder to classify work/school as magic zones where people are no longer allowed to initiate or experience sexual attraction.”
And still, I feel that this is a ridiculous and unproductive way to characterize what La Lubu describes. So yes, you were arguing with imaginary straw feminists in order to make yourself the reasonable middle.
[Hi La Lubu! I always really enjoy your comments on Alas!]
@SomeOne – the thing is, your comments are giving out vibes of:
“Rape? Nah, the real problem is the sexualisation of women.
That’s a bad thing, because the poor menz can’t help themselves from seeing all those stupid sexy women as prizes to be won. After all, men are slaves to incoming visual stimuli, and therefore are powerless to resist the allure of all those
ambulatory vaginaspoor poor women who have been sexualised by the mass media!When
said prizes display autonomy and reject the inappropriate advances of their male colleagueswomen say ” No!” to combining sex , andcompiling reports on sales projections (projections! Sexy!) for Q1, that gives the men sadfeels in their pants and leads to an awkward and strained work environment.In summation: Rapes are just one-offs, but brokenhearted boners are legion”
If you think that’s unfair, then try not to come to a post about rape, and immediately, reflexively, bang out patronising comments about how talking about rape distracts from the real issue, which seems to be awkwardness caused by women rejecting the advances of creeps in their place of employment
Derailing the topic away from the subject of the comic is not only super gross and 100% skeevy, but it speaks volumes about you.
@La Lubu – it’s always a losing game, isn’t it? Act in a friendly, approachable fashion? Clearly open to any, and every, sexual whim of her male colleagues. Turning down those bonergrams means she’s a tease, a sl*t, not a “team player” Try to remain professional, friendly but totally work focussed? Icy b*tch, standoffish, uncooperative, and not a “team player”.
“I’m a blue collar worker, and when I read it I equated “conference” to “traveling”. “Traveling” is what happens when there’s a lack of work in your Local, so you “sign books” (the hiring hall books) in other Locals, searching for work. Since traveling can get expensive (and especially during the “job hunt” phase, when you’re on unemployment benefits), people usually do it in groups. And yes, this presents some difficulties for tradeswomen.”
Fair point, and I agree that there is a similar dynamic. But it just bugs me when the middle class is presumed to be representative of society as a whole, when they’re not.
Why can’t the comic depict the explicit scenario that you’ve described, and the middle class variant be treated as what it is – a variant?
It could have. But it was based on the explicit scenario that was described in the article I link to – which was about a young, penniless writer making a trip to NYC.
I frequently draw cartoons showing what were (in my mind) working-class characters, but usually their class isn’t made explicit. But there are some strips where the characters are explicitly shown at working-class jobs, such as this one, this one, and this one. I’m sure I’ll do more in the future (I plan to start doing cartoons more frequently in a few months).
On the other hand, most of my friends in real life are penniless writer or artist types, so I can’t say I feel it’s wrong to sometimes show that sort of character in a cartoon too (which was what I was shooting for with this cartoon).
Would you like this cartoon any better with the wording change to panel one that I suggested in my previous comment?
@Amp: I think I’d still have the same problem. But hey, draw what you’re comfortable drawing, don’t feel like you have to please me.
@LaLubu
I’d say rape culture is *one* social expression thereof, which it not quite the same, but I think we agree on the phenomenon.
It’s totally reasonable to expect that. Yet – what you won’t be able to get rid of is what I called inherent lasting awkwardness of sexual attraction, whether mutual (at the point) or not. That’s not gender specific at all. But I do think that differing female and male heterosexualities will have an impact (yes! “biology”, I said it) that is compounded by the currently existing corporate power structure (“patriarchy”) in a way that is inherently and systematically disadvantaging women – I’m sure the threat of rape adds to that problem, but I think the problem itself would persist even in the complete absence of rapes.
It sounds, SomeOne, as if you’re saying in #24, sans hedging, that heterosexual men* feel sexually attracted to women (biology, I guess) and have no particular desire or need to hide it (patriarchy), and that this is, if not a good thing, an inevitable and perhaps “awkward” one. If I’ve got that right, I’m afraid I don’t follow your point. You’ve just described the prevailing explanation / apology for rape culture: men can’t help themselves and they’re not expected to.
*why homosexual men and their Uncontrollable! Biological! Desires! are always carefully bowdlerized from these discussions, I don’t wonder, but it is amusingly inconsistent
What’s interesting in the decision tree is that there are only two possiblities – she stays in the creepy guy’s apartment and he rapes her (there are no other alternatives) – or she doesn’t stay in his apartment and naturally has no money to stay anywhere else.
What this is saying is that a 100% certainty was built into this cartoon that the man will rape her if she stays in his apartment. I have to ask Ampersand: Would you rape a woman who stayed in your apartment? Do you think most men would?
At the same decision point, there is the inherent assumption that the woman has no money at all to stay anywhere so she has to crash with a complete stranger. A man would have to pay for a Motel6 room. If he can’t afford it, he doesn’t go. Just like the woman.
As I said above, these are just forced scenarios at every point trying to make women look like the victims at all times, and the scheming, leering, salivating men to be rapists. Why? It’s not reality, and I don’t see the purpose of such a forced scenario – how about the decision-tree node where she sleeps on his couch without rape, and she gets an advantage that a man would not get (being able to go to a conference that she cannot afford)?
how about the decision-tree node where she sleeps on his couch without rape, and she gets an advantage that a man would not get (being able to go to a conference that she cannot afford)?
Yeah, how ’bout that scenario? So, instead of the straight-line scenario of the man (he goes, sleeps on the couch, his buddy introduces him to influential people, he networks, he presents at a conference about his hard work rather than strategic connections playing a role in his success), here’s how it would go for the woman:
She sleeps on the couch—no rape, not even any ‘funny business’ from her compadre (no lewd jokes, no come-ons, no accidentally-on-purpose nudity, no nothin’). They go to the conference together, so he can introduce her around and speak well of her work. Here are some of the things she’s going to hear:
“so, how long have you two been dating?”
“that’s funny; I didn’t even know VanDyke had a girlfriend!”
“so, did you start drawing cartoons after you met VanDyke, or has this been your hobby even longer?”
“sooo…where are you staying in the city? ohhh, VanDyke’s place?”
And behind her back:
“typical. chick using sex to get ahead. Gee, wish I had those breaks.”
“as soon as she gets published she’s gonna drop VanDyke like yesterday’s news. Poor bastard. What a bitch.”
“gold-digger. who’s she trying to kid? she’s here to find a husband. or get knocked up and make mint off child-support.”
“wonder how many men she’s going to sleep with and steal their ideas.”
It doesn’t matter if VanDyke is the perfect friend and mentor. Neither his behavior nor her behavior are going to override the fact that they’re living and working in a sexist environment where women are still viewed as interlopers, and where it is assumed that the only interest a man could take in a woman to whom he isn’t related is sexual—not professional.
So yeah, rape is only part of the sexism that makes women poorer. But it’s still a factor. Because see, the woman is expected to say no to the couch-offering, and only a slut, or gold-digger wouldn’t, because the assumptions include rape or consensual sex—-they don’t include mentoring or professional friends-helping-others-in-their-field (even when their field relies heavily on collaboration and fresh ideas).
Here’s the thing: women’s relationship to their (our) jobs is still heavily gendered in the minds of outside observers. We’re still assumed to not be “serious” about our careers. We’re still assumed to have ulterior motives (catching a husband, or someone else’s husband) on our minds.
SomeOne: you keep mentioning “lasting awkwardess of sexual attraction”. We are going to keep talking past one another until you recognize that you are talking about feelings, and I am talking about actions. Feelings are not equivalent to actions. For instance: how would you even know if someone is sexually attracted to you unless that person takes action in that direction?
And please don’t delude yourself that men are more “highly sexed” than women. Remember, women are the ones with the average, everyday capacity for multiple orgasms.
Why can’t the comic depict the explicit scenario that you’ve described, and the middle class variant be treated as what it is – a variant?
I think Amp is already doing that—I think you’re letting the word “conference” get in the way. Not all conferences are in the corporate style (and that’s especially true for the arts, where “conference” more accurately translates to “festival”, and where audience participation is high and is an important element in the networking process).
“Middle class” is one of those phrases I love to hate because it is so goddam meaningless. People in the top 5% call themselves “middle class” without irony, and folks working one shift at Wal-Mart and the other at Burger King do too. One of my friends is a social worker. She is expected to attend conferences, seminars, trainings, etc. Sometimes her employer covers all or part of the expense. Sometimes not–but she’s still expected to attend these things as part of her career development, while chirpy supervisors cheerfully remind her that she “can deduct this from taxes!!”, which she can’t because as a lower-income single mother who doesn’t own property, she’s filling out 1040A, head-of-household. (same thing I fill out, even though I earn literally twice as much)
On one unit of measure, she’s “middle-class”, because she has a college degree and a white-collar (actually pink-collar, but I digress) job. But on her actual fucking paycheck? She’s working poor. Hands-down. She has a second job to make ends meet. That’s true of a lot of pink-collar work. In my city, for a schoolteacher to earn as much as a freshly-topped out electrician (as in, just received his-or-her journeyman card after the five-year apprenticeship), the teacher has to have a master’s degree and twenty years of teaching experience.
There’s a whole long conversation to be had about “middle-class” and where/when that terminology departed radically from traditional class analysis, and how sexism, gendered roles, and the development (and definition) of service-industry work played into that departure. A lot of so-called “middle-class” jobs are no longer so, either in terms of the size of the paycheck, in benefits, in job stability, and certainly in working conditions. The higher the percentage of women in any given career track makes that even more so.
@LaLubu
I don’t think that knowing is necessary for the consequences. If I’m a CEO and my new brilliant female assistant’s physical features and amazing personality make it impossible for me to work with her, even if I behave appropriately and she never notices anything, it’s likely that this will somehow lead to organisational changes that may or may not be beneficial to her career. This is not sexual harassment, quite to the contrary, but it’s a consequence of the fact that humans are sexual beings and the rest of the points that I made above. Again, couple the differences with the current corporate power structure, and you’ll inevitably get a situation that will disadvantage women, even in cases they won’t notice.
True, but to use fancy new sex research terminology used to describe old stereotypes: Female sexuality is usually “responsive”, while male sexuality is usually “spontaneous”, which is a pretty important difference and bound to have cultural consequences, which, in this case, are, likely inherently, disadvantaging women – which is why it may make sense to attempt to balance this by measures such as Norway’s quota of 40% female board members for public corporations.
@SomeOne: “quite the contrary”? You don’t seem aware that the legal framework underlying sexual harassment is discrimination. Dress it up in unsourced science if you like; it’s simply a retread of the idea that men, poor things, can’t control their sexuality and therefore women ought to just work around them.
It’s also quite telling that in your example, you are putting all the reponsibility on your assistant and accepting none for yourself: it’s “her physical features” and “brilliant personality” that are causing the problem, a problem which you are powerless to do anything about. (Although somehow, though you cannot actually work with her, you are nonetheless able to control your behavior to such a degree that she “never notices” either your feelings or your inability to do your job. Neat trick, that.)
gin-and-whiskey @12: that’s some first- class question-begging there. The cartoon is about behaviors not feelings, yet you try to shift the conversation to talk about “feelings”, with the contemptuous swipe about “magic zones”. You represent people who have been sexually harassed and as such, I assume you have a good-faith belief that they were in fact harassed under the meaning of the law. Are you trying to say that you have deep moral reservations about helping these people, since you met your wife through work? That while you understand that the law proscribes certain workplace conduct, maybe it shouldn’t? I have to wonder why you choose to accept such cases, if you are that conflicted about the potential of sexual harassment claims to turn the workplace into a grim “magic zone” in which none dare date.
@Mythago,
quite telling of what? How often does it work to rationally convince oneself to like someone or not like someone? Yes, I can deny that and act accordingly, but that requires an effort / has costs, if only mentally. To deny that effort is to deny, sorry, reality. Again, this part is very likely similar for women who are attracted to men, with the difference being attraction patterns and corporate structures.
Re-read the part of the quote sentence between “example” and the colon. You are blaming your assistant for being pretty and likeable.
I find your comment about “cost” puzzling. Didn’t your example assume that you are, in fact, capable of behaving professionally such that your assistant is totally unaware of your feelings? That has a mental cost too, does it not?
And yes, acting professionally has a mental cost. That is true regardless of whether sexuality is involved. Most people accept that it’s not OK to act on every emotion we have at work, even if it’s a strong or ongoing emotion.
@Mythago
honestly, I can’t follow you here.
Sure, but to say that this would not (for the reasons I gave) assymmetrically affect women even if there was no risk of being raped (which is my original point, if you remember) simply doesn’t make any sense to me.
Ah yes, the standard defense against classism – “What is middle class, anyway”?
If I’m a CEO and my new brilliant female assistant’s physical features and amazing personality make it impossible for me to work with her, even if I behave appropriately and she never notices anything, it’s likely that this will somehow lead to organisational changes that may or may not be beneficial to her career.
The only way your attraction to your assistant can make it “impossible” for you to work with her is if you choose it to be so. You are in fact, not powerless to make decisions about your behavior nor about her career trajectory. It is completely within your control to not have your attraction get in the way of your working relationship.
And “somehow” lead to organizational changes? Fucking please. People make these decisions. Organizational changes do not happen unless some one, or a group of some ones, take the actions that create those changes. It isn’t a fucking organic, biological process that happens outside the control of the human beings in charge of the workplace. Quit abrogating your responsibility.
Controlling your sexuality on the job is no different from controlling your sexuality anywhere else in public. And it’s no different from controlling your emotional reactions anywhere else in public, either. Being in control of yourself, making decisions that respect the human worth and dignity of others, and taking responsibility for your actions and your life (and those to whom you owe responsibilities—say, “your employees”) is a good part of what it means to be an adult. If you have difficulty with this, seek competent professional help. If your workplace policies are loosey-goosey enough to permit abuses of this nature, then seek professional help in tightening up those policies. It is your obligation to do so, as the CEO of a company.
Female sexuality is usually “responsive”, while male sexuality is usually “spontaneous”…
You know nothing about female sexuality, Jon Snow.
Ah yes, the standard defense against classism – “What is middle class, anyway”?
Well, you’re certainly not offering up any definition. From my perspective, actual wages takes pole position in determining whether or not one is “middle class”. I also stand firm that “middle class” is weasel-wording that can mean any damn thing the speaker wants it to.
Actual wages. Actual benefits. Actual job stability. Actual working conditions. Actual control over one’s hours or schedule, working conditions, and job duties. Actual job structure and chain-of-command. That, and not some outdated, corporate-oriented, male-centered definition will set you straight on who is or is not middle class. I won’t be weasel-y about it; I’ll flat out tell you that if you work a pink-collar job, whether or not you are male or female, you are working-class. Period. Go look at the wages. Go look at the conditions. The control of one’s duties or schedule. All the things that matter. College degree? Big fucking deal. What’s the nutritional value of a diploma?
@LaLubu,
you appear to have an oddly formalistic view of the corporate reality, just as you seem to have an oddly formalistic view of how attraction works in people (of either gender). It’s rarely something people are able to choose.
Be that as it may, I’m just quoting terminology, potentially mistakenly, but I don’t think so.
http://www.thedirtynormal.com/blog/2014/06/16/i-drew-this-graph-about-sexual-desire-and-i-think-it-might-change-your-life/
Somebody who has that much trouble controlling himself really has no business being the CEO of a company. What’s he going to do if he’s got to negotiate something with a female CEO of another company, and he finds it “impossible to work with” that woman, too? “Sorry, shareholders, but the deal fell through — I had to end the negotiations because I wanted to fuck the other company’s CEO.”
just as you seem to have an oddly formalistic view of how attraction works in people (of either gender). It’s rarely something people are able to choose.
And once again, you’re back to talking about feelings, while I’m talking about behavior. Your feelings may or may not be under your control. But your behavior is always under your control. You are claiming that grown adults cannot be expected to have any more control over their behavior than the typical toddler. This is demonstrably untrue.
“But what about my boner?” didn’t work as a line of argument when you were thirteen, and it isn’t going to work now. Try again.
SomeOne:
You are, actually–it’s a subtle but very important difference. The terms are meant to describe libido (interest in having sex right now) but you’ve conflated it with the very different level of sexual attraction to another human being. “Not feeling like you want to have sex until someone starts kissing you” (or…whatever) is not the same as “never notices whether another person is attractive until that person hits on them”, although that seems to be what you’re implying by calling the sexual attraction itself spontaneous or responsive. (Also, you are taking differences in reported average sexual arousal patterns w/r/t gender and calling that “biological” without evidence–the kind of difference shown in the post on thedirtynormal you linked is quite a bit larger than typical biological differences between cis men and cis women, so different socialization is almost certainly a part of this, if not all.)
Like others above, I dislike the terminology and most uses of it–though that thedirtynormal post, as with most of the posts there, puts it in the right context: you’re not broken in some way if you don’t experience spontaneous desire, which is usually treated as the norm. I can appreciate that the terminology makes it easier for her to help people who are struggling with their own sexual responses, while still feeling like it has unfortunate implications when we’re talking about gender relations.
Here’s the thing: it may be that it’s impossible to hide your attraction to someone. People are, generally, pretty bad at hiding emotions.
What you do have control over is not making your attraction someone else’s problem. If you think that your co-worker is hot, that’s fine. If your co-worker notices, that’s probably fine (or, at least, probably unavoidable). What’s not fine is overtly making it something that they have to deal with, by confessing to them, touching them, harassing them, pestering them, leering at them, giving inappropriate gifts, etc.
Emotion vs. action.
yrs–
–Ben
La Lubu:
Talk about a patronising attitude. The idea that people are so unable to handle sexuality in a professional manner is overly infantising. People spend a significant portion of their lives at work. For many people it is how they met their significant other. The idea that sex should be totally repressed during such a significant portion of people’s lives and in a way that many people would be denied not just sex but loving relationships is ridiculously dehumanising.
Sure, some people do not handle sex in a professional manner. However that’s no reason to overreact by insisting that sex should always be presumed a negative thing. Such an anti-sex position just makes it seem like you’re trying to found your own Abrahamic religion.
We already know people often don’t handle sex at work in a professional manner, desipis. That’s why gin-and-whiskey represents plaintiffs in harassment lawsuits. What patronizing and infantilizing is your frankly dishonest gloss on La Lubu’s discussing professionalism in the workplace, and your pretense that people who don’t understand the Hamburger Rule are just better at matters of the heart.
Harlequin,
no, I meant that responsive desire is apparently more environmentally depended, which means that it’s easier to control for conducive and non-conducive environments than spontaneous arousal. So I do think I used the terms correctly.
LaLubu,
I don’t think we’re gonna get any further here. I can’t make that particular point more clearly, I think, so I’m gonna leave it at that.
The idea that sex should be totally repressed during such a significant portion of people’s lives and in a way that many people would be denied not just sex but loving relationships is ridiculously dehumanising.
Well desipis, since you quoted the whole paragraph, perhaps you’d care to tell me which part you have a problem with. Is it the part where supervisors/bosses should not be able to leverage their power over a person’s livelihood in order to get a date/have sex? Or the part about waiting until after-hours, after-work activities to ask for dates? Or maybe it was the part about not assuming that being friendly and outgoing at work indicates sexual interest—that when attempting to mix one’s sex life with one’s working life (always a tricky combination, and definitely with more inherent negatives for a woman), one should wait until one’s co-worker is demonstrating explicit welcome to such overtures (as in, direct, overt messages or signals that said co-workers friendliness indicates an openness to being more-than-just-friends)?
Notably, you didn’t quote the paragraph immediately following. Let me refresh your memory: But my sexuality is micromanaged and policed in my working environment to a degree that is unheard of with men. I have to navigate assumptions, expectations, and images that men do not (see also: there is no such thing as a male “slut”).
I work in a male-dominated industry. As in, less than one percent of the people in my job classification are women. Given that, it’s fair to say that the existing workplace culture that I have to navigate was not created by me, or informed by women in general. Going to my jobsite is in many respects a walk backwards in time. All of the contractors I’ve worked for grew up at a time when the help-wanted ads were still segregated by sex, and back when apprenticeship application requirements still listed “male” in addition to “17 or over”. Their personal attitudes about women on the job have not changed. If it were not for equal-opportunity laws, they still wouldn’t hire women. Back in the day before smartphones were a thing, I could get some of them to speak with candor in private. They would flat-out admit that they had a hard time with a woman occupying nontraditional employment, or any “family-wage” job. Why couldn’t they just get married and leave those jobs for the men? They’d admit their fears about women’s sexuality—what if a woman dates someone on the job? or worse, what if she breaks up some poor guy’s marriage? why, even just having a woman on the job changes the work environment—breaks up the camaraderie!
And you know what? I had to suck it up and do my best to be an ambassador for my own presence and that of the women who’d follow me. I wish I wouldn’t have had to do that, and not just because my answers didn’t make a goddam bit of difference in their attitudes. No; go take another look at my response that you so selectively quoted: You have to realize that I go to work for the same reasons that men do. I have to support myself and my family the same way that men do and that’s all I want—for my jobsite to be neutral ground, where—like the men—my work can be evaluated without my sexuality or appearance playing a role.
If you believe that women go to work for the same reasons that men do, that we need our jobs for the same reasons that men do, and that just as for men, our work should be evaluated without our sexuality or appearance playing a role, then you shouldn’t have a problem with anything I’ve said.
Now, about “Abrahamic religion”. I’m actually glad you brought that up. See, patriarchal religions aren’t anti-sex; they’re anti sexual agency for women. The difference is salient. Patriarchal religion is pro-sexual-double-standards for men and women, and a lot of men who consider themselves sexually liberated, or claim to be non-religious, have still deeply internalized the values of patriarchal religion in regards to female sexuality, and still enjoy the benefits that come with sexual double-standards. Those attitudes don’t disappear when they clock in to work, and in more male-dominated and/or “traditional” industries, the effects on women in the workplace bleed over into our personal lives—despite our best efforts to keep our personal lives out of the mix. Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that in a lot of male-dominated and/or “traditional” workplaces, there is still a whole helluva lot of sex-segregated after-hours shit that is de rigueur for those seeking job longevity or advancement opportunities. Women are already explicitly excluded from a lot of that (as in, women are prohibited from membership in private clubs—Masons, K of C, various social clubs, hunting clubs, biker clubs). So, we’re already out here doing our damnedest to just be here at work, while you’re concerned about *gasp* not having the workplace be your own personal singles bar. Again, miss me with that shit.
Yes, of course.
That said, the type of behavior that my actual clients have tends to be, let us say, pretty obviously over the line.
Nope. I love helping these folks. In fact, suing employers on behalf of employees–whether for wage theft harassment, or otherwise–is quite literally my favorite area of practice.
I think it’s reasonable that the law paints in broad strokes, because generally speaking that’s how laws need to work. That doesn’t prevent me from remaining aware that those broad strokes will sometimes result in somewhat ridiculous results.
When I give a “how not to get sued for harassment” lecture, for example, I will always tell people that they should never compliment anyone’s physical appearance. Ever, although practically it means “of the opposite sex.”
That’s a broad stroke because it’s an easier law than telling people “be nice, not gross.” But it also prevents some perfectly normal behavior in the name of simplicity. In order to stop the “nice thong” shit, the rule also tends to prevent “nice haircut” and so on.
We are talking about two different things.
Other than this post, the thread is focused on moral questions rather than legal ones (there’s no laws with the words “rape culture,” for example.) Those are interesting things.
Let me try to explain better with a hypothetical.
Imagine a building with a 50/50 male/female ratio.
Each man does one very low-level thing per day–say, “notices when a woman is walking by and looks up to smile at her, which they don’t do for men,” or whatever you imagine.
Since there is one man per woman, then on average, each woman experiences a single incident per day.
Objectively, the men have not crossed the harassment line; the behavior isn’t bad enough.
Objectively, the women have not crossed the line either.
Then, put that same behavior in a situation with a 99/1 male/female ratio.
The men continue to do the exact same thing with the same frequency. But the women are now in a much worse situation: they experience this 99 times per day. They literally can’t walk down the hall without everyone staring and smiling at them.
Some of the women come to you and complain.
How do you resolve that problem?
Do you tell the men “don’t do ___” even if you think it’s objectively not a problem?
Do you tell the women “deal with it, it’s normal behavior” even as you recognize the validity of their complaints?
Do you do something else?
When you take action, how (if at all) do you consider gender?
When you take action, how (if at all) do you consider the number of people you’ll be affecting by your rules, and how upset they’ll be?
There are a lot of different solutions but the answer is very complex. One thing is likely, though: It is probably true that the “right solution” for the 50/50 office is not the same as the solution for the 99/1 office.
I recognize that La Lubu is in the equivalent of the 99/1 office. And I recognize the problems inherent to that situation; and I understand the arguments for harsher rules. But I perceive her as arguing for a set of 99/1 rules which should apply generally, and I am not sure I agree with that.
False equivalency. A smile or head-nod, or door-opening, “hello”, “good morning” or the like are not equivalent to The Dating Game. Furthermore, no one in a 99/1 jobsite is going to judge a woman harshly for responding to a nonsexual acknowledgement of presence. If a male co-worker tells me “good morning”, neither my co-workers nor my boss is going to question my morals, my competency, my collegiality, my intelligence, or my respectability if I respond in kind with a “thanks!”, “good morning to you as well!”, a smile or head-nod.
We do get judged harshly for responding to sexual acknowledgements or invitations, regardless of whether our response is positive or negative, or how that response is modulated. In a 99/1 jobsite, our mere presence is viewed as threatening to our employers. I’ve been told, by foremen and bosses, that less work gets done when women are on the jobsite because the men spend a certain amount of time trying to get dates/sex from us. That’s the backdrop I’m working against. That’s the problem I have to fight against. Not some ridiculous hypothetical of “some woman gets smiled at by 99 men; complains that that’s sexual harassment.” FFS.
Once more with a feeling: we’re on the job for the same reasons men are. We need our jobs for the same reasons me do.
But I perceive her as arguing for a set of 99/1 rules which should apply generally, and I am not sure I agree with that.
Okay, player. I’ll ask you the same question I asked desipis: which part of my preferred work rules governing sexuality do you take issue with? The part about supervisors and bosses not being able to use their economic leverage to get dates or sex? The part about having to wait for an off-the-clock, offsite activity to initiate any sexual interest? Or the part about assuming that a friendly, collegial demeanor does not indicate any openness to sexual invitations, and that one shouldn’t initiate sexual interest with a co-worker unless said co-worker has made his or her sexual interest explicit beforehand?
gin-and-whiskey: I find it hard to believe you believe what you’re arguing. If low-level harassment is coming from 50 people a day rather than 99, that’s totally different?
And yes, we are talking about moral issues. That’s why I asked why you choose to represent people in sexual harassment cases when a discussion about appropriate behavior in the workplace leads you to shift the discussion to one about feelings, asking La Lubu to justify herself as if she’d advocated thoughtcrime. The law paints a broad brush, but why are you wielding that brush if you feel the issue really merits a fine-tip pen?
SomeOne @45, could you rephrase #45? I genuinely have no idea what you meant there.
re @34, throughout your CEO example, you repeatedly point to things other than you-the-CEO as being responsible for your feelings and conduct. It is impossible for you to work with your assistant because her features and personality “make it impossible” – those things (really, your assistant) are, in your phrasing, the actors causing the problem. When talking about the effect your libido would have on her job, you suggest that “this” (meaning, the problem her looks and personality created for you) will somehow result in “organisational changes”, as if those are things that happen independently of, and without any actions by, you-the-CEO, who one would presume to have control over the organization if anyone does.
Consider how differently your argument would sound if you correctly centered you-the-CEO’s desires and actions as the cause of the problem, instead of acting as if these are things done to you or happening around you independent of you.
No, that isn’t what I think.
I’m not sure if I wrote it wrong or you’re reading it wrong. Either way, I intended to compare
(equal ratios + one incident/male/day = total of 50 incidents aimed at 50 women = average of 1 incident/day/woman)
to
(99/1 ratio + one incident/male/day = total of 99 incidents aimed at 1 woman = average of 99 incidents/day/woman)
Yes, I get that’s what you intended to compare. Other than throwing numbers in to make it sound as though we’re conducting an objective measurement of some kind, in both workplaces, every man at the workplace feels comfortable engaging in daily, low-level harassment of every woman at the workplace.
The silliness of the ‘ratio’ argument is evident if we assume that the workplace shifts. If the 99/1 company fires one man and hires one woman who also receives the same amount of harassment, are we supposed to assume that the woman with seniority thinks “Whew! One less comment per day!” If so, what’s the tipping point?
And how should this matter, in terms of morality, which is what we’re supposedly talking about? It should be OK to tell your female co-workers “Nice tits” as long as there is a sufficient male/female ratio that you’re the only one saying it to that particular co-worker today? I really don’t what you’re getting at here.
Are we reading the same discussion? That is serious, not snark: I didn’t see this as a “discussion on appropriate behavior in the workplace” alone, by any means. That isn’t the focus of the OP; it isn’t in a variety of responses which generically talk about “rape culture,” and so on.
Not to mention that the “and yes, we are talking about moral issues” doesn’t precisely match for “discussion on appropriate behavior in the workplace” anyway. As I tried to illustrate, you can have perfectly moral behavior which can produce very troubling practical consequences. And also, the post to which you are responding had more to do with behavior than feelings, right?
But to the degree you want to know what I actually tell employers about appropriate behavior: I err on the side of “don’t do anything which might even potentially be bad” as you can see from my example in #47.
And as for feelings: feelings have a great deal to do with harassment analysis. If someone doesn’t feel subjectively harassed, then there’s no harassment case. If they do feel subjectively harassed, there can be a harassment case–or not. Where it gets really tricky is if someone knows that the subject feels harassed, even by objectively-reasonable behavior, and does it anyway. But I digress.
I will say that although the “how can you do your job? thing strikes me as an unusually personal question, I appreciate you asking it in a respectful way and I will try to give it the solid answer it deserves.
I do it because my clients want help, and deserve help, and I’m good at giving it to them, and it makes me feel good to do so. The law is what it is: with the cases I do, my job is to make a kick-ass argument with the law (or rarely to argue for a change) irrespective of morals.
If the law advantages my clients, I’ll use it. That is my job as I see it; my job is not to apply my own opinions.
Example: Before I met her, I’d probably have agreed that my drop-dead-gorgeous extraordinarily-well-dressed harassment client (no, seriously) might be an unusually difficult person for an average heterosexual man to avoid looking at if he was sitting ten feet away. But I turned into a throat-ripping monster of an employee advocate the moment she walked in my door, and I was more than pleased to nail her boss to the wall on things like “staring,” and to get her a settlement large enough to afford to get married and go to college, because that. is. my. job.
Similarly, on a personal level I disagree with La Lubu about some of the basis for some of her arguments. But that’s personal. I don’t argue for reducing protections of harassment laws. And if La Lubu called me and described these same facts, I’d instantly flip to her side.
Outside the courtroom, there’s nothing to prevent me from recognizing areas where the law is not a perfect match for morality. Inside the courtroom I don’t give a shit.
In other words, I can very easily separate my own feelings from that of the causes I am working on. The fact that my mind happens to work that way is why, for example, I can simultaneously represent a rape victim one month, and argue against reductions in due process for accused rapists in the next month. It makes me unusually good at settlement discussions and complex multi-issue litigations because I am usually very able to understand and account for the other side’s position, more so than a single-issue zealot. It also has turned out to make me a very good mediator, for the same reason. However, it makes me relatively poor at identifying new arguments in the law or for arguing for changes in the law, which is why I leave the Supreme Court appeals and lobbying to other, more qualified, people. Outside a specific case, I am poor at “think only of this one side without considering the costs to the other side” advocacy. Even inside a case I only do that as needed.
Now you know more about my legal style than most people. That’s all I care to discuss about me. Can we please move on to the actual discussion?
That’s odd, because you said
and I would have expected either an “oh, sorry, misread,” or an “oh, OK, thanks for clarifying” instead of a “yeah, I always knew you were talking about 1:99.”
Anyway.
Well, that is the issue, isn’t it?
My example was “notices when a woman is walking by and looks up to smile at her, which they don’t do for men.”
Is that harassment if a woman gets smiled at once per day?
Even if the smile is because she is a woman?
Even if the smile is made (not that this was part of the hypothetical) with the hope that it might lead to romantic/sexual interest?
Generally speaking I don’t think the answer is “yes.” Smile are not objectively inappropriate; I don’t think it is appropriate to call that “low level harassment” at all. And I think it would be almost impossible to deter that sort of thing.
But the problem comes when you look at it in a different ratio. Because the statements conflict: “Looking up and smiling once per day is not harassment” is true. “100 people/day looking at me and smiling is harassing” is also true.
When I present a deliberately-difficult hypothetical to make the point, discussing problems and saying “There are a lot of different solutions but the answer is very complex,” I’m not sure why your response would basically be “this is silly because it’s not specific; I bet you can’t distinguish precise answers.”
Sure! Complex! Like I said!
I’m not so sure what is confusing about it, and I get the sense you’re trying to read more into it than I wrote. I was trying to point out that the issue of what is perceived as harassment can often be related to factors which have nothing to do with whether something is objectively offensive.
If someone doesn’t feel subjectively harassed, then there’s no harassment case.
I assume you mean for hostile-environment harassment rather than quid pro quo, sure. But we were talking about “feelings” because you tried to slip the ‘what about emotions’ argument into a discussion about behavior, as several people pointed out.
BTW, I’m not asking how you can do your job or suggesting that you’re a bad lawyer. I would expect that, having agreed to representation, you then are a zealous advocate for your clients, regardless of your personal misgivings about the law. What I asked is why you would accept those cases in the first place if you have moral qualms about the legal basis for them. A lawyer is not a bus, as the saying goes, and if you believed that requiring people to default to the Hamburger Rule at work denies humanity and uncontrollable feelings, you could avoid such work. If what you’re saying is “it’s just business”, then okay.
And I’m still not following the argument about feelings and morality. What La Lubu is pointed out is that, particularly in male-dominated workplaces, the default should be that your female co-workers are there to do a job, just like you, and the default should also be treating them as professionally as your male co-workers. “Yes, but people fall in love at work too” – okay, so what?
Honestly, we’re at post #57. We are in the middle of a multi-post conversation. I have now explained my first post, in considerable detail.
And yet you seem to be paying far less attention to what I explained and elaborated on than to what I first said. Can you move past the “trying to slip in feelings” issue, which related, if at all, to the very first post in the series?
Like I said, that’s all I care to discuss about me.
yes, that is becoming more and more clear.
OK, so now we are starting to get somewhere specific.
Are the rules the same irrespective of ratio? Should behavior standards change if it’s a male dominated workplace? If so, how?
What do you think?
Well, duh. But this is sort of like a bumper sticker “treat people like humans.” Because I think that we know full well that “treating them as professionally as your male co-workers” has no meaning in and of itself–or if it does, the meaning is different for La Lubu and her male co-workers.
I’m trying to talk about the hard task of defining professionalism, and of figuring out (and applying) rules that make sense in varying situations.
Your response is basically “just act professional.” That doesn’t mean much.
Well, what do YOU think? Is that a problem?
La Lubu said, for example,
Which is refreshingly clear.
Of course, it is fairly draconian, as she notes. Which is to say that it would classify a lot of currently-not-seen-as-unacceptable behavior (much flirting, for example) as harassment. (Or if not, it would would result in the tricky issue of distinguishing “Jan explicitly and overtly demonstrating welcome to overtures of sexual interest from Lee” and Jan expressing sexual interest in Lee,” which basically takes the same problem and gives it a different name.)
Do you agree? What’s your position?
Are the rules the same irrespective of ratio? Should behavior standards change if it’s a male dominated workplace? If so, how?
Yes—the rules are the same irrespective of ratio. You don’t seem to understand that the problem is centered in the differing societal views of proper behavior (and especially proper sexual behavior) for women, along with harsher treatment (up to and including dismissal from employment) for women who step outside those bounds. The only difference between my workplace and the 50/50 workplace is that in most 50/50 workplaces, a woman can have “one free pass”—she can date one male co-worker at her workplace (for the longevity of her employment there) without being regarded as a slut or gold-digger. That’s all.
Yes,
Virginiagin-and-whiskey, sexual double standards are real. They also disproportionately affect women in the workplace. I didn’t form my existing opinion in a vacuum; it was formed in the crucible of the workplace where I have (as I said before, up above) to navigate assumptions, expectations, and images that men do not. Big Pink Box said it succinctly with:The fact that women are treated differently when we are regarded as open for sexual overtures doesn’t change according to the ratio of men to women in the workplace. This different treatment has an impact on our job opportunities and job assignments—and usually in a way in which the best attorney in the world wouldn’t be able to “prove”, even when everyone in the workplace knows the score. So no, I don’t think my idea for rules is draconian at all. It puts me on as even ground as I’m ever going to get as long as sexism exists if everyone abides by those rules. It means that during the workday, I will be treated the same way my male co-workers are.
I’m going to be very blunt: this is a male problem. A critical mass of men are the ones who seem to have difficulty accepting boundaries. Difficulty thinking that unmarried women with a sex life aren’t moral degenerates. Difficulty respecting women they also find sexually attractive. You wanna fix a problem? Have at it—go to work on your fellow men, and see what you can do about changing attitudes. When the time comes that people no longer have any concept or terminology for “slut”, then you can pat yourself on the back. Until then, I’ll say it again: that’s all I want—for my jobsite to be neutral ground, where—like the men—my work can be evaluated without my sexuality or appearance playing a role.
It is not a burden for people to restrict their dating/sexual interest outside of work. Given eight hours sleep and eight hours on the clock, there’s still eight solid hours during the work week to find a mate, in umpteen different locations other than work. It’s not burdensome to avoid the captive audience at work.
yes, that is becoming more and more clear
I now estimate five posts before you start complaining that somebody is being snarky at you instead of engaging in rational, calm debate.
The reason your hypotheticals aren’t working, charitably, is that it’s difficult for them to be useful examples when your hypothesis keeps changing. Are we trying to invent a single, ironclad code of conduct by which every person can behave so as to balance a sexism-free workplace against the possibility of falling in love with people you spend a vast number of waking hours around? Are we nailing down exactly how many smiles per work-hour counts as “severe and pervasive” hostile work environment harassment?
So when you ask what I think: about what? How individuals should behave? “Be professional” is only problematic for the reasons La Lubu points out, that is, the feeling that women in the workplace are Different because what if you want to romance them. If we were discussing how men should behave “professionally” to other men I don’t think the conversation would have all of these jump cuts.
If we were discussing how men should behave “professionally” to other men I don’t think the conversation would have all of these jump cuts.
This bears highlighting.
Also: still waiting on the answer as to which part—if not all—of my three “rules” gin-and-whiskey takes issue with.
Missed it. Repost them; I’m happy to respond.
Repost? They’re still there, at comment 50, I believe. Scroll up.
This comic resonated with me on a personal level – I am not saying it needs to resonate with everyone; many people work jobs where conferences and networking events don’t play large roles – for a couple of reasons.
1) I’m a grad student in a field that is hugely conference-based (conference papers are peer-reviewed and some conferences are more prestigious than almost any journal). I’m also at a small school with a limited travel budget. When I go to conferences and have no or limited travel funds, I often stay with someone to save money. So far, when this happens I’ve been able to stay with people I trust. But that won’t always be the case.
2) I know the feeling of not wanting to pursue a professional activity because of fears around sexual violence, albeit from a less dramatic incident. Back when I was in industry, out of work and jobhunting, I went to a networking event and met a pair of startup founders whose (now-defunct) startup I thought would be a great fit for me, and they seemed to agree. We talked for more than half an hour and I gave them my resume. One of them contacted me to set up a meeting to discuss a job opportunity! I’d be a great fit! I could be their first employee! Turned out his intention was to offer me a job in exchange for sex. Also he now had my home address and contact info because it was on my resume. As there were no other employees yet, there was no HR department, nobody useful to complain to – even if I’d wanted to file a complaint with the state, the company was too small to fall under nondiscrimination laws.
After that, I didn’t want to look for jobs with early-stage startups anymore, even though getting in early with a successful startup can mean fame and fortune, unless I knew and trusted the people involved. Kind of like the woman in the cartoon was doubtful about staying with the hipster guy she didn’t know well to advance her career.
Nope.
Yup, absent other coercive stuff, subject to various qualifications below.
Of course, in legal terms I would advise anyone to avoid it for fear that it could subsequently be considered harassment in a post hoc analysis, whether or not it was considered harassment at the time.
And I also agree that there are environments where this would cause a problem, such as the 99/1, and I may be convinced that we should use stricter rules in general to be safe even if they are overkill.
And as noted below, we may have a semantic disagreement w/r/t interest.
But overall this strikes me as too harsh.
It doesn’t indicate openness. It indicates not-non-openness. If Lee is interested in Jo because she seems nice, and Jo smiles and is chatty, Lee can probably conclude that Jo doesn’t despise Lee.
Yup, same caveats as above.
As noted above we may be using a different definition of “sexual interest” If you mean “nice tits hot stuff can I lick ’em” then my answer will change. I’m assuming a traditional “I think you’re cute; do you want to go to drink/eat/concert/ski/party/etc.” line.
And I don’t know how said co-worker can make his or her sexual interest explicit beforehand, unless you’re also talking about out-of-work behavior. Certainly there’s no way to do it at work within your framework, right?
FFS. you found it appropriate to question my personal motivations for doing my own damn job; you’ve ignored half of the stuff I wrote in favor of focusing on the fact that I referenced feelings 40 posts up; you ignore the conversation even now; you fully deserved that minor bit of snark.
It does? What do you think it was, and is? Quotes might help.
I don’t know what “we” are trying to do, assuming you’re part of it. I don’t know what you are trying to say, in most cases. That is why I am asking YOU.
Sigh. Hard to remain snark-free, you know, when I ask this:
And you give the old “whatever are you asking here” line.
La Lubu seemed to understand just fine, no surprise there.
No. No, it’s not. All it does is to shift the “what to do” argument to a different set of semantics, i.e. “what is professional.”
In my experience there is a lot of disagreement about what “professional” behavior actually means between men, and a lot of variance. Of course that doesn’t apply in environments where someone (person, board, group) just imposes their own choice on a set of underlings, but that wouldn’t be expected.
More generally: La Lubu seems to take a view of things in which men’s freedom to act is very unlimited, and with almost no consequences; and in which women’s freedom to act is extraordinarily restricted, and with immense consequences. And I certainly expect that her view is accurate in her industry, both because she says so, and because she also explains that there were no women (and little reason for men to consider non-male interests) until fairly recently.
But the question then becomes (a) whether her situation is a reasonable model for general use; and (b) if not, what the general rules should be and how they would deal with situations like hers.
I’ve smiled and been chatty with people I despise, plenty of times. If I’m working on a project, and the project has to get done, then I have to grit my teeth and work with the people I’m supposed to work with, even if I don’t like them. If I don’t smile and talk to them, then I’m considered to be the one creating the problem by not being a team player. (Hell, if I don’t smile enough when I’m teaching, then my student evaluations all say that I’m “not that friendly.”)
(Or, my personal favorite of my evaluations from last semester: “[Ruchama] is a robot without human emotion.” They’re anonymous, but I’m positive I know who that one is from. I wouldn’t let him make up a quiz, when he came to me a week after the quiz and told me that he’d missed the quiz because his father had just been diagnosed with cancer.)
gin-and-whiskey: you realize, of course, that you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth? It seems to indicate that you realize there are distinct drawbacks to a workplace where the employer tacitly condones employees devoting a certain number of paid hours to finding dates and/or sex partners at work—but that there are no drawbacks to a policy of discouraging such.
You have indicated in past comments on this blog that you are an employer. Are you copasetic with your employees dating or sexually propositioning clients? Or no? Dating or sexually propositioning other employees? Or no? How many hours per week are you willing to pay your employees for time spent trying to improve their sex lives?
I’m not at all convinced that women in 50/50 workplace environments aren’t subject to the same sexual double standards that women in nontraditional workplaces are. They may have an easier time getting hired and proving their worth, but that’s still separate and apart from societal attitudes about “how many dating partners per year can a woman have before she has loose morals?” or “how many lifetime sexual partners can a woman have before she’s a slut?”
Because y’know…in my jurisdiction, we do a lot of remodels—it’s not all new construction and power plants. I’ve been the fly-on-the-wall in any number of more traditional working environments, because tool belts and Carharrts cloak a person in what amounts to effective invisibility. Trust that sexism is definitely A Thing in 50/50 gender ratio workplaces too, and so is the loss of respect for women (and not men) who mix their dating and professional lives.
Here’s what you don’t seem to get: most people need their jobs to pay their bills. But no one “needs” to be able to date or sexually proposition co-workers. There are so many other avenues and venues for finding dates or sex other than their place of employment.
Boundaries. I like them. When workplace policy is “ask your co-workers for dates on the clock at risk to your own employment”, then a friendly demeanor gets to be seen, and more importantly, treated as professional collegiality no matter who it comes from. In the absence of such a policy, not so much. What I’m advocating has clear advantages for both employees and employers—while not having any clear disadvantages. Win-win. What’s not to love?
Are you mixing up some “not” things here? I am not sure I’m reading this correctly.
I am certainly acknowledging that there is no perfect system. And I am growing more convinced by your argument, though it seems, as I said, overly harsh.
The downsides to your argument are pretty straight forward in my view. First, it plain old seems harsh, in simple terms. Second, the harshness seems very likely to lead to selective enforcement, where most people are violators and only a few are punished. It also seems likely to lead to class-specific exclusions, where (for example) you might not get fired for making a joke that would get your coworker fired.
Sometimes, yes.
With respect to the following questions: of course as an employment lawyer seeking to avoid liability I’d crack down on it. I’m not a fool.
I grok you’re asking about what I’m personally comfortable with and not how I’d manage risk. I am answering these questions with that in mind.
We seem to be having a disconnect because you keep talking about things like “dating” and “sexual propositioning” as if they are the same, and I don’t think they are.
You may not know, but I could lose my license if an employee propositioned a client. But I’d fire them anyway because I don’t view that as acceptable.
Assuming the bar didn’t care, I wouldn’t care if an employee dated a client.
Re dating only: in my workplace ,we would only have max one or two employees. So long as nobody got too pissed off at each other in a way that affected their work, I doubt I’d mind all that much, but the risks are obviously pretty high with only two.
If I ran a much larger workplace, I’d care less.
Or no?
[shrug] I’d cut them the same amount of slacking off time as anyone else, which is “some.” In theory, whether they would choose to use that time talking about sex, Obama, feminism, or ISIS, or picking their nose in the break room, or surfing Facebook, is not my concern–so long as nobody gets too upset.
Probably this is my last post for tonight.
gin-and-whiskey:
Lee can conclude anything he likes, but if he concludes that Jo doesn’t despise him, he may be doing it when in fact Jo dislikes him and is smiling and getting along (a) because she needs the job and does not want to get told that she’s not a team player, and (b) because women are trained by our society to smile and get along in a way that men are not trained to be. Men typically have no experience of the “don’t hurt me” smile, and the worthwhile ones I’ve managed to explain it to have been horrified… and had no idea until then that many, many of the women who have smiled at them during their life experience have done it out of fear of repercussions, and not because they felt like smiling.
Gin-and-whiskey, you have postulated three states: open, non-open, and not-non-open. In your world, clearly, in two of those states it’s okay to ask a co-worker out. Now consider the point-of-view of the worker who has been socially friendly but is not, in fact, interested: from that worker’s world, “not-non-open” is not a condition in which a pass is welcome, it’s just a world in which they don’t want to be bothered.
It’s that middle state where the uncertainty and division comes in. You’re certainly aware of that, since you counsel your clients, essentially, to cede the middle ground so that there can be no possible doubt.
If only that sentiment were more widespread in the workplace. When in doubt, assume that your co-workers want to work, and not play.
While I don’t know for certain the genders of all people involved, this conversation looks an awful lot like ALL the men are on one side, and ALL the women are on the other side. That’s probably worth pondering. Whether it’s nature or nurture, in our society the default assumption is that men pursue and women select. That is inevitably going to lead to conflict in the middle ground, where for women neutral = not interested and for men, neutral = you never know! If that’s generally true, then conflict is inevitable, and any rule is basically making a decision about that middle ground.
I know which rule I favor — I side with both women and men being able to make a living on an equal footing. I have no experience working in a place where no one knew I was trans, but based on what I used to listen to before people knew I was a woman, we have a long way to go.
Grace
gin-and-whiskey, can we just take the ‘how dare you question me about something I brought up’ outrage and the ‘oh, now you’re MAKING me snark’ as read because it’s both predictable and tedious, or perhaps you could make good on your earlier threat to stop talking to me unless I apologize?
La Lubu’s experiences may be more intense because she is in a very openly sexist, very imbalanced environment. But she is right that it’s not a phenomenon limited to a particular class of jobs or a particular gender balance. And that it’s a problem of the work environment, not of one particular dude smiling at a good-looking co-worker. Why are her rules “harsh”? Because some people have consensual romances that turn out well? A lot of people have workplace romances of varying consensuality that don’t turn out well at all, and which tend to turn out worse for women.
We seem to be having a disconnect because you keep talking about things like “dating” and “sexual propositioning” as if they are the same, and I don’t think they are.
Perhaps I should be more blunt. Not all sexual propositioning results in dating, or is intended to result in a dating/romance type of relationship; “fuckbuddies” is the term of art where I’m from. However, all dating/romance type of relationships are intended to lead to sex. So, I think it’s eminently fair to say that workplace come-ons are intended to lead to sex.
For whom? Not having that policy means those of us who want to keep our professional lives separate from our dating lives have to run a gauntlet of sorts, and have to manage to walk the fine line of rebuffing would-be romeos in what one hopes will be a way that won’t have negative repercussions. We get to tiptoe through the egos of our co-workers, when all we really want to do is go to work and get paid. Our distancing/not-open-to-romance signals are willfully ignored, sometimes other co-workers are enlisted in the effort, and if one tries to complain about it one is told it’s no big deal, just ignore him–he’ll go away eventually, and besides can’t you take a compliment? And that’s setting aside all the passive-aggressive bullshit that tends to be the norm after one’s “no” is finally taken to heart. All that is significantly more harsh than the alternative. What part of “work—not a single’s bar” is so hard to grasp?
Consider how harsh it is to be a captive audience for some pickup artist; how at work, you can’t just walk away without risking your job. Why shouldn’t the pickup artist have to postpone amorous intentions to offsite, off-the-clock scenes where the target can effortlessly walk away with no negative repercussions?
Second, the harshness seems very likely to lead to selective enforcement, where most people are violators and only a few are punished.
Only if the employer chooses for that to be so. If it’s a written policy with clearly-stated discipline and/or progression of discipline, with clear demarcation of what constitutes a violation, and clear process of what circumstances initiate being written up as being in violation—then frankly, most people will not be violators in order to avoid negative impact on their employment.
It also seems likely to lead to class-specific exclusions, where (for example) you might not get fired for making a joke that would get your coworker fired.
Oh, now we’ve moved from sexual overtures to jokes? More traditional sexual harassment territory? Again, that’s a matter of whether an employer enforces the written policy equally. If there is a written policy, it’s actually easier for both employers and employees to defend themselves. Having a substantive policy is always better than the read minds/play-it-by-ear method.
In the absence of the policy I advocate, the burden is placed on the shoulders of the individual employees, most of whom aren’t open to sexual overtures (either because they are already in an exclusive relationship or because they want to avoid the drawbacks of mixing work with their intimate life). With the policy I advocate, the burden is placed first on the shoulders of the employer, who is tasked with forming and communicating the policy, and second on the shoulders of the employees who would like to ask out their co-workers, but now have to refrain from doing so on the clock. When everyone has the same expectations, there will be fewer problems. Will it change the workplace culture? Sure—by making it more egalitarian. Everyone gets to experience the same neutral ground. We’re talking about workplace conditions that interfere with normal job duties. The burden for reducing conditions that interfere with normal job duties should be with the employer.
La Lubu@46:
There seems to be a bit of difference in your two set of points, so I’ll try to address them both.
These two are not equivilant. I agree the later is problematic. I don’t think that the problematic nature extends to all examples that would fit the former. A direct supervisor expressing romantic/sexual interest poses an obvious conflict of interest. Beyond that I would say ‘it depends’ as to whether there is a an abuse of power or not.
Are you suggesting that people need to orchestrate non-date activities in order to facilitate the opportunity to ask someone out? That seems deceptive and problematic for its own reasons. Or are you suggesting that if you don’t currently meet colleagues outside work they are off limits for romantic/sexual interests?
How do you declare to someone you’d welcome their sexual interest without that declaration itself being an expression of sexual interest? The alternative is to have some sort of public ‘available-to-date’ register at the workplace which seems like the sort of thing that would only exacerbate the problem by exposing people to public embarassment and ridicule. I doubt would not be taken seriously by anyone. Perhaps you could explain further how this is suppose to work?
I never said this was untrue or that it was acceptable. I was criticising your proposed solution.
Again, I don’t disagree with this. However, men (and women) don’t just live in order to work. Sex and romance are important parts of life. As employment consumes a significant portion of peoples lives and involves social interaction with a range of people it will inherently overlap with the sex and romance parts. Sex and romance are not trivial things that can be totally trumped by concerns about workplace sexism. Any rules need to balance the interests of everyone involved and ensure they are treated with respect. A strict rule against sexual relationships is not treating people with respect.
A strict rule also has as much chance at success as abstinence-only sex education. People like to fuck. People really like to fuck. A rule designed to stop sexual expression and activity wholesale is bound to be ignored wholesale. This leaves us with the problem of selective enforcement as observed from gin-and-whiskey @71 in addition to an unsolved sexism issue.
My experience with religion made it ubundantly clear they were anti-sex agency for men too. Unless you’re going to somehow contrive a link between being anti (male) masturbation and sexual agency for women.
Happy, to, given that it seems to be a waste of my time–you are apparently much more interested in talking about me than talking about the subject, and even when I point out the questions which you don’t answer, you still don’t answer them, and… well, La Lubu and I are having a perfectly straight forward conversation and it would be great to do it without your interference.
Beyond that I would say ‘it depends’ as to whether there is an abuse of power or not.
And therein is a big problem—because supervisors, even those not in one’s direct chain of command, carry power and influence within an organization that can easily be abused—and nothing is quite ripe for abuse than engineering someone else’s lack of financial and organizational clout into one’s own sexual benefit. The implication of “sleep with me or Bad Things Happen To Your Job” is always present. No one with any integrity would put a person in that position.
Are you suggesting that people need to orchestrate non-date activities in order to facilitate the opportunity to ask someone out? That seems deceptive and problematic for its own reasons. Or are you suggesting that if you don’t currently meet colleagues outside work they are off limits for romantic/sexual interests?
No, I’m saying if you happen to serendipitously see someone outside of work, go ahead and ask. It should probably go without saying that you are more likely to get a positive response. But that’s not my concern. See, what I’m after is getting rid of the assumption that every unmarried woman on the job is automatically registered on the “available to date” list. I’m saying, if you can’t already tell if someone is interested in you, she’s probably not.
Sex and romance are important parts of life.
Yes. But it is so easy to find these important parts of life outside of work, where there are little-to-no drawbacks.
Sex and romance are not trivial things that can be totally trumped by concerns about workplace sexism.
And that’s where you’re wrong. You don’t have to deal with workplace sexism. Women do. So yeah—it’s effortless for me to not want to complicate my life with the distinct increase in sexism I experience when “sex and romance” are treated as if dealing with propositions is a part of my job description. It isn’t. When men are asking me out on the job, my employers see ME as the problem. When they’re wasting time testing out all the PUA techniques they’ve read about on the internet, my foremen and my employers see me as the cause of that waste of time.
Which is to say, women already have a disparate—and negative—impact when our workplaces are seen as proper places for a “pickup”. Quit overlooking that. Sexism creates that disparate impact. Sexism informs the behaviors the exemplify that disparate impact. And having a “don’t ask your co-workers out on the job” policy changes behavior on the jobsite. For the better. It increases the level of professionalism on the jobsite. It decreases sexual harassment. It decreases other problematic personal behaviors that may not fall under the rubric of ‘sexual harassment’, but that still have negative impact (sometimes disparate impact by gender). It increases the number of people willing to treat women with the same level of professionalism that they do the men. It decreases gossip and its bleed-through into work assignments.
Any rules need to balance the interests of everyone involved and ensure they are treated with respect.
I agree. The primary interest of people going to work is to earn a living—not to get a date. What I am recommending is no different than the ubiquitous “no-smoking” rules. Smokers aren’t being disrespected by being asked to restrict their smoking to outside of work. Further, there wasn’t—and isn’t—widespread ignoring of no-smoking-at-work rules. When given the choice as to what is more important, people picked “keeping my job”. Tar-and-nicotine-free air to breathe at work for everyone, while smokers can still choose to smoke outside of work. Everyone wins.
People like to fuck. People really like to fuck. A rule designed to stop sexual expression and activity wholesale is bound to be ignored wholesale.
Yes, people like to fuck. I’m one of them. But a “don’t proposition your co-workers on the job” rule is NOT “stopping sexual expression and activity wholesale”. What you do on your off-time is your own business, just like it is for smokers. What it does is remove a large component of sexism from the workplace. Sex and romance are easily, readily found outside the workplace.
Grace called it—so far, all the proponents of the laissez-faire attitude are men, all of the women in the thread are proponents of setting a firm boundary that affects everyone equally as a matter of policy. Here’s what you’re missing: personal boundaries set by individual women are routinely ignored. In fact, there’s a large body of dating/sex/romance advice and literature that flat-out states “no” means “try harder”. I can’t help but think that proponents of the laissez-faire attitude really like the “captive audience” aspect (not to mention the “I have access to her personal information” aspect)—and trust that’s not an argument in your favor. Boundaries set by employers as a matter of workplace policy, that have progressive discipline attached? Those are SELDOM ignored, and the people who ignore them get fired and thus take themselves out of the equation via their own choices.
well, La Lubu and I are having a perfectly straight forward conversation and it would be great to do it without your interference
Dude, quit force-teaming me. Mythago was giving you a taste of your own medicine by reverting to “attorney-speak”, and you’ve been around these parts long enough to know she was doing so deliberately (and is well-practiced at it). I’m blunt because that’s what 25+ years on construction sites (and union halls) tends to bring out in a person. (though to be frank, my personal and cultural makeup sent me in that direction to begin with). Also: I’ve been around these parts long enough to recognize you have a tendency to use other people as foils to pick fights with mythago in particular. Stop doing that with my statements.
@Mythago
Well, it’s really simple: people with responsive desire (way more women than men) need to get (themselves) into “the mood” before they experience desire (accompanied by a usually lower libido), people with spontaneous desire (way more men than women) are easier spontaneously aroused by sexual stimuli. It is thus much easier to control “repsonsive” than “spontaneous” desire, because you can plan when to light the candles in the bathroom, you probably cannot plan when you feel aroused by the bangs of a coworker’s haircut.
See that’s the thing, if I centered me, this example would sound like this. I am CEO, my focus is distracted by external stimuli, so I need to reduce exposure to those stimuli if I want to work more productively. Hence I change the organisational chart and hire an unattractive assistant – as I said, that may or may not benefit my pretty assistant.
Centering *my* arousal as the problem even further would be completely unfair, as it’s not something I (or anyone) has control over. It’s not reasonable to ask for chemical castration or something because the difference in libinal patterns disadvantages women in the current social and corporate setup.
Outside a few specific circumstances, this simply isn’t how it works in my experience.
My experience is most often with broad rules designed to avoid lawsuits, like, say “no dating a co worker.” Those rules are routinely violated, because most employers don’t really care about dating, they care about the fallout from dating. But the result is that you end up with people dating under the radar, and then a few random ones who happen to get busted for it.
Generally I don’t like rules which don’t seem likely to be followed.
Again, my experience is that this simply becomes the same method, with higher consequences.
I’ve seen a lot of speech and action codes. Almost none of the really broad ones are followed. Joe and Joe’s friend will discuss whatever they want, using whatever language they want, assuming they’re like most friends. So will everyone else. They will get punished if they are overheard; they will get punished if they slip up and use the same language to someone else if that person happens to be easily offended; they will get punished if one of their friends gets in a fight and decides to report them; and so on. But nobody cares about it otherwise, which is to say that the rule isn’t really enforced.
They are less likely to have someone proposition them, which is a benefit. They can get their work done if that is otherwise a distraction.
They are required to watch what they do more closely, and to make more significant changes to their behavior in order to keep a job. That can be very difficult. And of course, they are likely to end up getting fired for breaking the rules, if they aren’t able to manage it.
It depends on what the rule is.
If the rule is “don’t yell NICE TITS at people” that’s easy.
If the rule is “do not ask anyone for sex, or on a date” most folks can follow it…. most of the time. Even these rules run into life, so when a bunch of guy friends go out they don’t invite a girl–or if they do then they bear the risk of violations. Or when the employer has to try to figure out what a “date” is, in retrospect, after someone complains.
If the rule is “leave me the fuck alone and let me do my job” then I suspect most folks can’t follow it. You will filter for a very specific type of person. and that may or may not be what you want, as an employer. Certainly not in all jobs.
Well, that’s not really accurate: there is no “neutral” here. There’s only picking one set of preferences over another.
The rules you want would be easily followed by some of your male coworkers; they wouldn’t be affected; they would go on wiring.
Another group would find it difficult. It would take mental effort. Perhaps it would take more mental effort than it takes some folks to ignore a proposition. This effort would be just as distracting from their “do wiring” job as any other non-wiring effort.
The final group would find it very hard. Sure, they could manage not to directly ask girls for hot sexytime, but they might keep forgetting and telling dirty jokes; or they might get overheard asking a friend “when they hired the hot chick at reception,” or whatever. These people probably end up getting fired, irrespective of how good they are at wiring.
That is why employers often try not to enforce these things. They don’t want to fire a lot of their staff.
I have been staying out of this thread only because I don’t have the time, but this—I haven’t read Grace’s comment yet—did make me want to chime in and say that I support the kinds of strong boundaries La Lubu is talking about, and I say that as someone who met my wife when she was my student. (That’s a whole story that I’m not going to go into here right now, except to say that we did not start dating until after she’d been out of my class for at least a semester. In other words, the direct conflict of interest was long past.)
What I don’t get is this, and I am talking here about colleagues/peers, not supervisor/supervisee-type relationships: rules like the one’s La Lubu is talking about do not prevent people from flirting, from having the kinds of tentative, exploratory interactions that go on all the time when people are getting to know each other in situations where “getting to know each other” is not the purpose. They do not prevent the kinds of signals that are sent through body language, the subtle “inside messages” that two co-workers who are finding out that they are attracted to each other can send without it at all interfering with work. They do not prevent someone saying, “Would you like to get a drink after work?” or from getting a little bit more informal if you go out to lunch with a coworker because the two of you have felt some kind of “click.”
I’m not going to take a position on whether romance in the workplace is good, bad, or indifferent, since where I work there are no rules preventing or even discouraging it. (Except for teacher-student relationships, but even there, it’s a suggestion, not a prohibition—which I think is a big problem, despite the fact of how I met my wife.) My point is simply that the rules will do not preclude people finding each other who want to find each other. What the rules do is provide a clear and consistent and authoritative and enforceable boundary, established by and in the interests of the workplace that takes the onus off any individual worker to have to enforce her or his boundaries on their own.
I realize that I am typing quickly and that there are a lot of questions that can be asked about what I’ve written, and I hope people will forgive me if I don’t respond quickly or even at all to anything they might have to say. I just wanted to voice my general support for La Lubu’s position.
SomeOne: I am floored that you are claiming that women have to be physically aroused before being able to find a person sexually attractive, not to mention that we require elaborate rituals as part and parcel of our sexual experience or desire. You know even less about average female sexual response than I thought you did. Good Maude are you wrong!
I am CEO, my focus is distracted by external stimuli, so I need to reduce exposure to those stimuli if I want to work more productively. Hence I change the organisational chart and hire an unattractive assistant – as I said, that may or may not benefit my pretty assistant.
Do you drive? As in, drive a motor vehicle of some sort? How do you deal with distractions by external stimuli when you’re behind the wheel? Do you allow them to overcome your primary focus of getting somewhere on time and in one piece, or do you just (as we ADD folks call it) “follow the shiny”?
Do you ever experience anger? As in, do people sometimes piss you off? Maybe even in person? So, how often have you given in to that anger and beaten the shit out of the offender? Or do you instead find other means of dealing with your anger that are more productive?
Point being, you are no more a helpless puppet to your boner than you are to anything else. Unless you choose to be, of course. Let me know how well that works out for you.
Centering *my* arousal as the problem even further would be completely unfair, as it’s not something I (or anyone) has control over. It’s not reasonable to ask for chemical castration or something because the difference in libinal patterns disadvantages women in the current social and corporate setup.
Your arousal isn’t the problem. It’s your actions in the aftermath that will either be a problem or a solution for you. Unless you have extraordinarily exclusive standards for whom you find sexually attractive, firing all the women you find sexually attractive is going to leave you with (a) one hell of a pattern trail for sex discrimination, and (b) a seriously limited pool of potential employees. Do you honestly think most men in the workforce are undergoing or have considered chemical castration (FFS, talk about hyperbole!) as a means for dealing with sexual attraction in the workplace? Sweet bedda matri. You do realize that you are not required to act on every instance of sexual attraction, right? And that part of being a grown-up means dealing with your own emotions—yes, including the strong ones—in a productive manner, in a way that respects the human worth and dignity of others, yes?
You are writing about your assistant as if she were an object and not a person. See her instead as a person, and while you will still think she is pretty, maybe even pretty enough to go to bed with, you won’t find that to be a barrier in your workplace interactions. You will feel less obligated to act on your attraction if you see her as a person with her own thoughts, feelings, experiences, responsibilities, agency etc. than if you view her as an object to be acted upon.
Honestly, you sound like a sociopath.
First of all, I’m not advocating a “no dating a co worker” rule. What people do off the clock, outside of the workplace, of their own volition with no coercion is their own choice and own business. What I am advocating is a workplace policy of don’t proposition co-workers in the workplace. The difference is important. Employers are not responsible for what employees choose to do in their off-time; they are responsible for what happens in the workplace.
Another group would find it difficult. It would take mental effort. Perhaps it would take more mental effort than it takes some folks to ignore a proposition. This effort would be just as distracting from their “do wiring” job as any other non-wiring effort.
Tough. Being a grown-up means not giving in to every emotional whim like a toddler. There is literally no difference in the mental effort required to avoid propositioning a co-worker than there is in avoiding saying “NICE TITS”, or avoiding escalating a disagreement into a fistfight, or any other emotionally-charged scenario. No, I do not accept that some people are going to find it too burdensome to refrain from propositioning co-workers on the job. That is complete and utter bullshit. Those same people magically have no problem accepting no-smoking rules. Your “but this is toooo haaaard! argument is the same one used during the struggle to abolish groping and other forms of sexual harassment in the workplace. It was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now.
Here’s what I don’t get about the argument that La Lubu’s rules are harsh, repress desire and are unworkable. There is a consensus, is there not, that we are talking about co-workers, that nobody really thinks it’s OK for a boss to start hitting on her direct reports, and that we all think the rules should be different when the person making a romantic approach has power over the approachee’s work. And yet we don’t think of that as repressing desire, or unworkable, or too harsh, because the risk of a use of power is too great and outweighs “but I know this one guy who hit on his new associate and they’ve been happily married for fifty years.” Right?
So if we’re saying on-the-clock romancing is totally ok between colleagues, what we’re really saying is there is no balancing cost to that, as there is with supervisors. And that’s where the disconnect comes in, because La Lubu and others are pointing out that there is still a power issue. That is, after all, why “hostile work environment” is a thing: because the law finally recognized that when a workplace allows harassment and aggression, even when nobody explicitly says “sleep with me or I’ll fire you”, tolerating that harassment still becomes a condition of employment.
@SomeOne, again, even if that chart says something about “men” and “women” universally, you are badly misreading it. More importantly, you are conflating feeling desire with controlling that desire. You keep presenting this hypothesis that men looking at attractive subordinates are inexorably forced to feel desire they will struggle to control, while women don’t have this problem. That’s a rather unpleasant thing to say about men, and it’s not supported by one chart.
If the rule is “leave me the fuck alone and let me do my job” then I suspect most folks can’t follow it. You will filter for a very specific type of person. and that may or may not be what you want, as an employer. Certainly not in all jobs.
I want to highlight this because this illustrates a big part of the problem (which is also highly gendered, though this comment doesn’t necessarily illustrate that). Not being open at the workplace, during working hours, to overtures of a sexual nature is being reinterpreted as “leave me the fuck alone and let me do my job”—which reads quite differently than “I, a woman, want the same workplace treatment my male co-workers receive.” Further, this “leeme the fuckalone” is presented as a definitive statement on an individual’s personality or character. The person is now a “type” that is not suitable for certain work assignments.
How often do I have to keep saying, “I want the same workplace treatment, the same opportunities for assignments and advancements that my male co-workers receive” before you’re going to understand that a non-policy of open-season defaults automatically to disparate treatment? Disparate imagery? Disparate assumptions?
You know how I mentioned “boundaries”? Well, here’s another concept for you: “circles of intimacy”. When the workplace is open-season for sexual overtures, what that means in practice is that certain co-workers can take advantage of daily physical proximity (and/or knowledge of personal information and schedules) to attempt to impose a greater level of intimacy than another co-worker desires. Against a backdrop of gendered assumptions that mostly have a disparate and negative effect on women.
“…a friendly demeanor gets to be seen, and more importantly, treated as professional collegiality no matter who it comes from.”
THIS. THIS A THOUSAND TIMES.
@La Lubu, to me, you have not hit a misstep in your argument yet. I appreciate the way you are willing to vocally (and repeatedly) stand up for what seems to be invisible to many of the men in this conversation.
@gin-and-whiskey: You don’t want rules that don’t get followed, but you of all people know from being a lawyer that our society has a thousand rules like that (look at the vehicle code.) It seems to me you’re rather protective of being able to meet women at work because you think that’s how the “natural course” runs. La Lubu is explicitly telling you that many women (all on this board, it seems) do not like the fact that work is seen as a supermarket for men to shop for a mate. We want to be able to do our jobs, be productive, earn a living, and go back home to our lives without interference. This is a power imbalance, as Amp’s original cartoon deftly demonstrates one possible outcome of.
ETA: Women would like to be respected at work. Asking someone on a date isn’t respect – it’s trying to insert yourself into their personal life because you think it will benefit you. It’s a selfish thing, at its core.
La Lubu writes:
However, my own company’s employee handbook reads:
The workplace and sexual harassment policies apply to “co-workers, clients, customers, visitors and guests.” By policy and practice, if one of our employees harassed a colleague from another company at a conference (or after hours during conference travel) they would face discipline under our policies. In fact, there was one employee who was disciplined for sexually suggestive invitations made at an informal happy hour that was organized and attended by a rival company that does work in the same building as us.
So my company’s policies apply to a far wider range of situations than La Lubu addresses. On the other hand, where the policy applies, my company does allow more behavior than La Lubu would. For instance asking someone out on a date is not considered automatically to be a sexual proposition. Nor is the policy generally interpreted to mean that anytime an employee asks a colleague out and is turned down that the advance was “unwelcome.” To be considered harassing there would probably need to be:
-Persistent requests
-Inappropriately suggestive language
-Real or implied quid pro quo (any supervisory relationship would probably be seen as implied quid pro quo)
-Some other reason that the employee should have known the request would be actively unwelcome (specifically that it would create an environment that is “intimidating, hostile, or offensive.”)
I think there is a tension here and that different companies will respond differently, those whose policies apply to a wide range of activities outside the actual workplace aren’t going to be as aggressive about defining conduct as harassing. Those for whom professional relationships outside the workplace aren’t important can more easily draw a bright line and by policy and practice crack down on all kinds of personal relationships.
La Lubu, I’m convinced by your arguments, and you’ve been doing a great job presenting them.
But I really have to object to this:
With all respect, please try not to post comments like that on “Alas.” Thanks.
What, precisely, do you think we are disagreeing about?
This is an honest question. I’ve already tried to distinguish between what I referred to as “dating” and “sexually propositioning.” That didn’t seem to work (and until I saw this paragraph above, I would have said “dating” as a disagreement, so it’s nice to knock that one off) But it seems perfectly clear that there is a lot of behavior we don’t disagree about.
So, I’m trying to figure out what we actually do disagree about. A lot of it seems like it’s tied up in the different way we are using the word “propositioning.”
I am happy to use your language if I can understand what the definition is. We may not disagree about as much as we think. Before I respond further, can you try to define it precisely?
I am tentatively supportive of not asking co-workers out while at work, at least repeatedly, nor overly sexualizing the workplace, but this comes with a lot of misgivings about how this discussion is evolving. Very long comment ahead.
1. I don’t think “no asking co-workers out while on the job” necessarily has to be draconian. The issue is basically one of trust. Even a non-draconian “no asking co-workers out while on the job” can be turned into one, and I completely lack trust for the proponents of this rule to safeguard the distinction. Not when, for instance, the main proponent on this thread seriously tried to claim with a straight face that old time religion is not anti-sex for men. I don’t trust them not to push the rule further and further, as soon as the old version of the rule has reached fixation and it’s politically safer to do so, to the point where it does becomes draconian.
So for me and I’d suspect most other critics, we’d need to see some clear self-limitations to this sort of rule that proponents cannot walk back later on without seriously losing credibility, before we agree to any sort of rule at all.
2. I agree with gin-and-whiskey that unenforceable rules are bad.
“If”? “Whether”? The burden of proof is on those trying to push a new rule on everyone, to show that it is very likely to be enforced fairly in the real world, before any such rule is adopted in the first place. If many people are being wronged by selective or class-specific enforcement, that’s not a call for each of them to laboriously build their case individually, that’s a call for throwing out the rule entirely and going back to the drawing board.
In a general sense, rules that can’t be enforced fairly shouldn’t be rules in the first place, because they become corrupted into vehicles for selective enforcement. However, one could argue that no rule can be enforced perfectly, and every rule suffers from this to some degree. The acceptable trade-off should be that rules should be clear and self-limiting with clear Schelling points*. “No sexual overtures in the workplace” is fine; while there can be some ambiguity over what constitutes a sexual overture, there is a hell of a lot less ambiguity than for a rule that basically amounts to “no excessive social attention to the young, single women in the workplace”, which is not fine. (And I’m judging by how a rule is likely to be enforced in real life, not whatever its true inner-heart intentions that its proponents will claim.) The aim should be the least amount of subjectivity.
[[*I’m somewhat abusing the term “Schelling point” here, which is a game-theoretical term that means “neutral reference point for everyone”. I first came across its use in a political context at Slate Star Codex, where the analogy was to a tree in a field. In a political football, a lot of people consider conceding any ground to be dangerous because opponents will simply demand more and any patch of unmarked field looks the same as any other. By contrast, one can use a visible, agreed-upon landmark such as a tree in the field as a neutral reference point. “In the interests of fairness, we’ll let you go up to that tree but no further, and to protect the integrity of the boundary, any crossing of it will result in a ten-step penalty in the opposite direction.” This use of the term “Schelling point” in the context of a political debate isn’t perfectly true to its original meaning, but language evolves, and if enough people understand the term, the bastardized political definition of “Schelling point” itself will become an actual, genuine Schelling point.
If people understand what I mean by the term, it’s better than using that cumbersome “tree in a field” analogy every time.]]
3. I really like desipis’ comment #75, in particular two comments that he made. In response to people claiming that one should only make romantic or sexual overtures if they’ve been given an explicit welcome:
Indeed. I notice that everyone ran away from this question, and that no one had an answer to it. And at least the formulation on this thread was restricted to workplace overtures only. I’ve seriously heard it from SJWs to apply to everywhere. In effect, what that’s arguing for is the right to make an expression of sexual interest for women only. That’s never going to happen, for very many reasons, but it’s sure going to cause a lot of rancor in the meantime.
In another thread, I mentioned how the calls for some to ban “inflammatory” words like charges of racism or homophobia would merely result in a euphemism treadmill, whereby whichever word replaces them will be the new term those same people will be complaining about in a decade.
I see a similar mechanism at work here. I suppose one could invite someone to a general social activity, and then ask them out there, but how do we know that this isn’t just going to be the new thing that’s banned, a decade down the line? Will people have to query others regarding their openness to an invitation to a general social activity with coworkers, at which perhaps a potential romantic overture will be made? How can we trust that that won’t be the next thing to be banned?
These aren’t just entirely rhetorical questions. I actually could get behind “no asking people out in the workplace, but you can fraternize and befriend, and then ask them out once off the workplace”, though I think the need for such a rule would depend on the workplace. Unlike desipis, I think people having to orchestrate non-date activities in order to facilitate the opportunity to ask someone out is an acceptable compromise, and I don’t think this is deceptive, necessarily. However, this necessitates some agreement on definitions and Schelling points. What qualifies as asking someone out and what doesn’t? Yes, any such distinction will always remain a bit fuzzy, but there must at least be a good faith attempt to answer this question.
For instance,
@ Richard Jeffrey Newman,
How is asking a co-worker out for drinks or lunch, not asking someone out? How do you invite someone to something where the atmosphere is more congenial to asking them out, without that invitation becoming the new “asking someone out on a date”?
I don’t think these questions are impossible to answer, but some clearly agreed upon definitions and boundaries are necessary.
4. I am sympathetic to the claims made by some that work takes up a huge amount of time of someone’s life, and that sex and romance are important, and so the two should be allowed to mix. I do think a “don’t shit where you eat” approach to office romance is already an informal rule for a lot of people, and most seem to be getting by fine. I think a “no sexual overtures” and “no asking people out on dates” rule can be okay, because something approximating an objective definition can be made for both of those events. Anything more subjective than that, then no, and “no flirting” is on the borderline; there needs to be a definition of unlawful flirting that won’t change based on the individual involved.
The above isn’t true of everyone, and new rules (including informal social ones) should not be enacted under the assumption that it is. And the problem is that the same people pushing for this rule at work, which I am tentatively supportive of, also tend to be the same people who also support stringent “no flirting” rules everywhere else as well; so in a sense, to the extent that this is even true, it’s no thanks to people like you, so it’s hardly an endorsement of your position. Again, it comes down to trust.
No overtures while at work, or while people are clearly very busy doing something? I can agree to that. When people are not busy, but still not able to easily escape (such as while on the subway, or while standing in line for something, or your server)? … I can get behind pushing social norms that enforce taking rejection earlier and more gracefully, and to always leave people an out, but I won’t support a standard that essentially eliminates all opportunities for social interaction outside of parties and outright meat markets. Lonely people tend not to be invited to parties in the first place, and not everyone is temperamentally suited to meat markets. (And hell, even there… “I’m just here to dance with my girlfriends! That’s why everyone comes here! The nerve of some people!”)
When people gather, a degree of social interaction is inevitable, and where social interaction exists, romantic overtures will as well. I don’t support putting the latter in a proscribed category on its own. Some restrictions are acceptable for extreme situations such as having to worry about your livelihood, but restrictions on venues for romantic overtures should be limited, effective, and rare.
When Republicans decide to be moderate, there’s something they have in common that I’ve noticed. From Crist to Schwarznegger to McCain, the environment is the one issue nearly all of them seem to break with right wing orthodoxy. That’s because the link between conservatism and anti-environmentalism was always one of the flimsier ones.
Similarly, I’ve noticed that an otherwise cultural liberal breaks with feminism, one of the first things to go is the idea of “objectification”, which was always flimsy and never made sense. As I said in another thread, humans have sexuality, objects don’t; seeing someone sexually is, if anything, emphasizing their humanity. Desexualizing someone, denying someone’s sexuality or demanding that they repress it, is treating them like objects, which are inherently sexless. That’s not to say that emphasizing someone’s sexuality can never be wrong or hurtful, but this “object” metaphor doesn’t work, hence why it’s the first thing that many people abandon. To the first paragraph, treating someone as something to be “acted upon” is something we do when we take any action toward a person, ever. Wanting someone sexually is not turning them into an object; demanding that they be not sexual is. Blocking all avenues of acceptable sexual overture outside of work as well, making the lonely lonelier and not caring, is treating people like objects.
@Fibi,
I think your company’s policies are exactly right and should be emulated by others.
Yes. I also know that in many cases those rules have led to some really bad consequences. (Like your example: because everyone does them and because they are still illegal, vehicle violations are low hanging fruit if you want to target someone. Ask POC motorists how well that has worked out for them.)
I’m more than happy to change the natural course. And I’m not arguing for a reduction in existing harassment laws for that reason, but am arguing against an increase.
I do think that expecting more than half the national workforce to radically change its existing behavior is a bit more of an issue than “just deal with it,” though.
For the purposes of this argument, I’ve basically been acting as if that’s true for all women, though anecdotally it obviously isn’t true for all women. I’m also acting as if it is only men who shop for mates, though that obviously isn’t true either.
Well, sure, though that is (like “just be professional”) just a way of arguing about what is, or is not, too much “interference.”
It’s a conflict of desires, not necessarily of power.
Matt wants to be able to talk to Brenda. He wants Brenda to be obligated to ignore what she doesn’t like and reject what she doesn’t choose. Matt wants to increase the boundaries of what he can say to Brenda (and what she has to deal with hearing) without getting fired.
Brenda wants Matt restricted from talking to her. She wants Matt to be obligated to avoid saying what she doesn’t like and to avoid asking her to choose. Brenda wants to decrease the boundaries of what Matt can say to her (and what she therefore has to hear) without getting fired.
Only one of them is going to end up happy. But unless their positions in the company are different, it’s not correct to suggest this as a power imbalance. It’s just a conflict of interest.
Of course, the imbalance may be somewhere else, such as–sorry to raise my hypothetical again–if there just so happen to be 99 Matts to every Brenda. But that is an imbalance of structure, not process.
I think a better way to think of “objectification” is not as object vs. human, but as object vs. subject. It’s treating women as people that stuff is done to, rather than as people who do stuff. A scenario that’s centered entirely around “I want to fuck her” without a single mention of what she wants is objectifying.
Sorry, this quote from Richard Jeffrey Newman:” … and I say that as someone who met my wife when she was my student. (That’s a whole story that I’m not going to go into here right now, except to say that we did not start dating until after she’d been out of my class for at least a semester. In other words, the direct conflict of interest was long past.)”Doesn’t strike me as being particularly realistic. If I get the drift, this guy is an instructor at a community college. I get the picture.It is my humble opinion that it did not happen in that way. Picture the details yourself, and I can provide clarity if you have questions.[Crossed out by Amp. What Mandolin and Myca said.]
This is not going to be a comment thread (or, indeed, a blog) in which we make these sorts of comments. If you wish to continue making these sorts of comments, it may be that another blog is better suited to your interests.
Further discussion on this topic is not invited.
—Myca
PS. FTR, I agree with everything La Lubu, Ruchama, and Mythago have to say on this topic, and I’m a guy. There’s no reason the workplace should become a de-facto singles bar.
As they say at feministe, giraffe alert. A mod with more time than I have right now should look at the personal attack from veloes.
Fair enough, Amp. But those comments were a huge red flag to me in terms of likely behavior IRL.
Before I respond further, can you try to define it precisely?
Sure. Like I said repeatedly throughout the thread, I want my male co-workers and employers to treat me in the same manner and with the same regard that they treat their fellow heterosexual males—easygoing, congenial, collegial, but without any sexual expectations or assumptions.
If it makes it easier for you, substitute the phrase “religious proselytizing” for “asking out on dates” or “seeking romance”. Sure, some people are very open to that sort of thing, but frankly most of one’s co-workers won’t be, and mostly for the same reason—they’ve already got theirs, thankya very much. Plus, religion is part of one’s intimate private life, just as their sex life is—not really open for inspection to casual acquaintances at work, and fraught with a lot of drama if not everyone in the workplace (other employees, supervisors, and employers) are on the exact same page with the exact same beliefs. At best, it’s just not relevant to the workplace, so why bring it in?
And that’s where the problems start, isn’t it? That not everyone is on the same page, with the same beliefs?
Indeed. I notice that everyone ran away from this question, and that no one had an answer to it.
Scroll backward—I did answer it. You just apparently didn’t like the answer.
As I said in another thread, humans have sexuality, objects don’t; seeing someone sexually is, if anything, emphasizing their humanity.
I suggest you scroll back up to that conversation. Some One, as the hypothetical CEO with the hypothetical sexually attractive assistant, believes so much in his assistant’s humanity, that he feels his only recourse to avoid being distracted by his attraction to her is to fire her. Even, presumably, were said hypothetical assistant to clear the air by saying, “oh, don’t worry Mr. CEO—I’m not going to have sex with you; you’re not my type. I don’t have the same feelings for you.” Because as an object, her thoughts, feelings, intent, behavior, etc. don’t matter. She isn’t being viewed as a person with the agency to make her own decisions.
It has also been my experience that when someone, particularly someone who only knows me casually (or not at all) sees me primarily through how sexually attractive they find me (pro or con), they aren’t recognizing my humanity. (see also: “circles of intimacy”)
gin-and-whiskey: the “Matt” and “Brenda” in your example are not the only ones in the equation. The workplace dynamic changes when Matt asks Brenda out, regardless of her answer. Matt is unlikely to experience negative treatment from his coworkers or employer for asking for a date; Brenda on the other hand, is going to deal with being (a) a slut, using her sexuality to get ahead or get out of some work, (b) a bimbo who doesn’t belong there, just using her looks and p*ssy to get paid, (c) a cold, stuck-up bitch who thinks she’s too good for an average man, or (d) a dyke, not a “real” woman. There are no counterparts to any of those stereotypes for Matt. So, even operating on the assumption that “Matt” has the best of intentions, things still won’t work out well for Brenda, because their coworkers are still right there on the jobsite to inject their two cents into any and all future interactions between Matt and Brenda.
Note: although it’s not clear from La Lubu’s most recent post, only the first of her quotes is from me. The “don’t run away” and “sexuality” quotes are not mine. (and La Lubu, since I don’t agree with SomeOne and don’t want to be confused, would you mind using names next time?)
I get that is what you do want.** But since you say “don’t proposition people” I’m asking you to define what you don’t want.
I swear I’m not doing this to be a pain. It’s just because the definition of “what not to do” is–for most purposes–basically the same as the new law. I was hoping to get a summary of the law; the statement above is more like the desired outcome of the law. I don’t think you’re trying to duck the question, but I don’t think you’ve fairly answered it, either.
OK.
Religious stuff is commonly pretty public anyway. And declaring your own personal interest in religion (or wearing your religion literally on your sleeve so others see it, or making your employer give you special perks because your religion says so) is often common, and is often legally protected.
We recognize that it’s inappropriate to actually try to stand on a soapbox on the sales floor and preach abut Christ, just as we recognize that it’s inappropriate to stand on a soapbox and yell about your penis. But minor stuff? Asking your coworkers if they want to come to church? Publicly reading your religious texts in the break room? Praying with your like-minded coworkers before eating lunch? Heck, if that’s the standard we applied to sexystuff then we’d have a lot more sexystuff.
Well, some places (Hobby Lobby) think it helps, crazy though it seems to me. And some people like it.
But more to the point, I think, you’re reversing the question. Most things aren’t relevant to the workplace, whether baseball or fashion or NASA or Pokemon or politics or Amp’s comic strips. Most of them are distracting or annoying to people who don’t like them or give a shit.
But of the ton of things which are possible, only a very small number are actually barred. If you’re arguing to increase the restricted zone, I don’t think a “why not” is a fair way to look at it. Unlike most of your other points, this one seems relatively weak.
**At least I think so. There are a ton of male-male interactions which are non-easygoing, non-congenial, non-collegial, and which contain a shitload of sexual expectations and/or assumptions. “Treat me just like you would treat a male colleague” and “treat me nicely” aren’t the same thing, at all. Men are often not very nice to other men.
Many people–though not necessarily you–actually mean “treat me like a man” to imply “treat me like I wish men would act” or “change your behavior to combine the best aspects of your treatment of both genders,” which is a much more difficult request and, to me, a far less reasonable one. ETA: Based on your posts I don’t think you intend the slippery answer, and don’t mean to imply otherwise, but it seemed worth clarifying since your description of “man treatment” seems pretty off.
I don’t get this Matt-and-Brenda example. Why should the power difference matter? Matt wants X, Brenda wants not-X, and we should purely determine who has the moral right to impose their choice on the other: with this premise, where does the power difference come in? Why is Matt’s “let’s date” invalid if he is Brenda’s boss, or her HR representative, or an executive of her employer?
And WRT to the claim that wanting to sleep with someone actually humanizes them, that’s nice wordplay, but no. Sexual interest != recognizing someone’s sexuality. That’s why people say things like “I’d hit that” or “I’d totally do her” or refer to having sex by “getting some” (or cruder terms).
SomeOne @79:
Centering *my* arousal as the problem even further would be completely unfair, as it’s not something I (or anyone) has control over
Actually yes, it is fair, because you know who has absolutely zero control over your arousal? Literally everyone else on the planet who isn’t you. Which includes your assistant. You know who has some degree of control over both your arousal and your behavior? You. So that’s where the problem is correctly centered. This isn’t an issue of responsive vs. spontaneous, because nothing in your posts shows that those things affect the intensity of desire or self-control. You posit a weird world in which people are either not interested, or so interested that they cannot function in a professional environment and would need chemical castration if forced to work around anyone desirable.
@pocketjacks: Then there’s really nothing to discuss, is there? You’ve flat-out stated you do not trust La Lubu and anyone who agrees with her – in effect, that they are liars whose claims about their intent, and the effect of their proposals, are false, and you will not credit them until they meet some unspecified burden of proof, to be decreed by you, at which point they may regain your trust. I mean, sure, you have the right to believe or disbelieve whatever you like. I just don’t know why you would think anyone would assume that is a good-faith attempt to engage and that they should participate.
I’m a little confused by the use of the word “harsh” throughout this thread.
When I read about a “harsh” policy, I think of a policy with harsh consequences – i.e., “any employee found reading a Robert Heinlein novel will be fired.”
I’m totally open to the idea that harsh consequences can be a bad idea, even when dealing with important infractions. There’s a fairly well-established pattern, in criminology, that for deterring crime what matters most is not the harshness of the punishment, but that the punishment be certain; and, furthermore, because the people in the system are more hesitant to enforce harsh punishments, lesser punishments can actually do more to deter infractions.
So it’s a good idea for at least the first couple of infractions to be responded to with relatively minor punishments – rather than being “harsh,” meaning responding immediately with a major punishment of some kind. But that is, I think, what La Lubu is is calling for.
But as I read through this thread, I’m beginning to think that the word “harsh” is being used where I would use the word “strict.” In my mind, at least, a “strict” rule is one with very little wiggle room and few or no exceptions.
Anyway, I thought I’d post this, in case anyone else is having the same mix-up reading this thread. It seems to me that La Lubu’s proposed rules may be strict, but they’re not particularly harsh.
P.S. Comment number 100! Whoooo!