371–380 of 402 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Making someone feel like a rapist for believing what is said or failing to correctly second guess is just weird and oppressive in itself. It is unfortunate and I sympathise with your hurt feelings, but I think this is just something you should take on the chin.
Double standards and requiring second guessing based on gender is as harmful now as it was in the 50's.
For a woman, giving the wrong response to an obsessed creeper can cause harm to her career, her body, or her life. (Yes, I am quite aware that women can be creepy and violent. No, it is not a frequent power dynamic in the office.)
It would certainly be nice if we could be honest all the time, but you are demanding far too much in this bargain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it is pretty safe for a man to socialize with men and women at work, but you have to recognize signals that a person doesn't want to talk to you and find a gracious way to deal with that. Really? Recognize the signals in the single most ambiguous pursuit in human nature? Unless you're Brad Pitt, some women will find advances unwanted. Others will welcome them. One cannot differentiate that until after havin…
Is socializing the same as making advances for you? I agree, making advances is risky, and you probably shouldn't do it at work, or at the workplace of the person you're making advances towards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, over again, yet again, one more time, once again, this time just for you, I clearly, clearly, clearly, more than once, clearly, very clearly, fully unambiguously, said, fully clearly, right there, "... honey, and I say this out of 100% affection, caring, and respect" And I said "honey" with "100% affection, caring, and respect". 100%. Clearly. > Please tell me this post is performance art and not the way you a…
My response was fully appropriate for and corresponding to the content of the OP -- fully. I realize you are certain of this, but I'm equally certain that a vast majority of those who would write the original post would consider your suggestions to be "part of the problem". Perhaps they are wrong, but from their viewpoint your response is indistinguishable from parody. And I said "honey" with "100% affection, caring,…
I grew up in the Old South: Addressing a US Black, "boy" is always an insult. Since growing up, I've seen a lot of the US: Addressing a woman in distress, e.g., "constant nightmares", affectionately, "honey" is quite appropriate with nothing wrong at all.
For your
> It's not extrapolating to actions beyond your post,
clearly my
> You are extrapolating for no good reason.
was in response to the ksenzee
> Please tell me this post is performance art and not the way you actually talk to women in your real life.
So, the ksenzee "extrapolation" was
> the way you actually talk to women in your real life.
Of course not. Again, yet again, once again, over again, one more time, the OP was not 'the way the women in the OP would talk to people in an office in real life' but was, as I said, over and over, intimate and my post was in that context and similar and also not as in "real life". That is permissible without being too personal due to the OP and the anonymity -- I was not addressing any particular woman.
> this doesn't make it an attack
Some women are suffering in their attempts at professional careers, and I gave them quite a lot of advice to help them in their careers, fairly carefully written, with good information, not easy to discover, e.g., can be attacked and sabotaged from jealousy and competitiveness from doing the work well, and, net, the attacks cost me five points at HN. I was attacked.
The attacks were personal, against my person, and not against the content of my post. That is, the attacks were essentially "for thinking and writing the way you did, you are a bad person". In particular, for my advice to the women, there were no responses at all. So, the attacks were aimed not at my advice but at me, personally.
A strong suspicion is that the attacks were because the attackers believed that I was violating some of the norms of politically correct gender equality. On that issue, I will note that, as I explained, I, too, was sexually harassed in a professional, office, academic, employment setting. But, of course, as a man, I didn't get "nightmares". And I will quote E. Fromm, The Art of Loving: "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same." Right, they are "not the same" -- women "deserve" equality of respect but are not "the same", that is, not 'equal' in all things. E.g., we don't have women playing in the NFL. So, 'gender equality' can't claim that the genders are equal in all respect, e.g., we don't have women playing in the NFL. And, as we can clearly see from the OP, the women are complaining about being sexually harassed while men also get sexually harassed by women and don't complain, that is, there is sexual harassment going in both directions, but the women complain and the men don't -- men and women are not being treated "the same"; full 'gender equality' doesn't hold.
With full 'gender equality', the women in the OP have nearly no grounds for complaint. But I believe that the women very much have very strong grounds for complaint so can't accept the politically correct gender equality fully. So, I am setting aside what is politically correct and being very sympathetic for the suffering women. So, for the way I am treating the women, 'gender equality' would be a big step down for the women. I don't want that big step down for women. So, I tried to help the women. And, in this goal, I was treating women with lots of extra compassion and caring, was being protective, e.g., called them "honey" and was attacked for that. In my post, my record on women was clear -- I was the prof who recommended hiring the woman who did so well. Also, elsewhere my record on women in professional careers is clear: My wife and I both got Ph.D. degrees, but she went to graduate school first, and financially I put her through and she didn't put me through. And during our marriage, until she died, essentially all the money money put into the family checkbook, which she carried, was from me, in particular, from my work, and not from work or anything else from her. So, for my wife, 'gender equality' would have been a big step down. Finally I will quote an expert on US society: "In the US, women are privileged characters." The expert was correct: In US society, in many ways, women are treated much more nicely and gently, with much more in sympathy, empathy, and compassion, than men are -- no small thing and no joke. And I believe that that is just as it should be. Why? Simple point -- men don't have babies.
I've been a prof: Academics is awash in non-objective pushing and shoving that, yes, affects careers. In academics, even high end universities, a lot of the nasty behavior of middle school is still alive and well. Added to that is grown up politics, professional jealousy, professional competition with sabotage, and, also, no doubt, sexual harassment as in the OP. I can't speak first hand about sexual harassment becau…
I think you intended for your writing to be punchy, but it ended up just being hard to follow. I'll pick a passage at random: > Then she kept saying she was "looking for sex". Gee, those women were trying to harass me sexually? No, I didn't have any "nightmares"! Is your second sentence actually a question? It sounds more like a statement that was accidentally punctuated with a question mark rather than a full stop o…
Basically, yes. It was a rhetorical question in the sense that the reader now gets to ask that question as I had to to myself at the time. And, of course, the answer is, "Yes, she was she was asking me to have sexual intercourse with her". So, one could say that I, in this case a man, in a professional, office setting, actually also an academic one, was being asked for sexual intercourse so was being 'sexually harassed'. So, as in the OP, I should have "nightmares"? Well, I didn't. So, I was sexually harassed in a professional, office, academic, employment setting and had no nightmares. So, by implication, we have: "Women, note that, in public, office, professional, academic, employment settings, men get 'sexually harassed', too".
> Your third sentence doesn't make sense. Who said anything about nightmares? And why is "nightmares" in quotation marks? Is it supposed to be a euphemism for something else?
The third sentence makes perfect sense: I was being sexually harassed, by a woman, but didn't have "nightmares". And the word 'nightmares' was in full, double quotes because it was being quoted from the OP, which was about having nightmares from sexual harassment.
> Try tightening it up
It sounds like the jump from my second to my third sentence was already to large, that is, my writing was already too 'tight'.
I must admit that I was genuinely surprised by this. I have worked in Astronomy (as a technologist) for over a decade, and I have never witnessed this sort of behaviour. Of course, I am male. There are, however, plenty of assholes in the world including in academia, and I have noticed that universities tend not to want to rock the boat, so I suppose that it is not entirely surprising that these things are occurring.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is pretty safe for a man to socialize with men and women at work, but you have to recognize signals that a person doesn't want to talk to you and find a gracious way to deal with that. If an adult is unable to recognize those basic signals, what training options are available to get up-to-speed?
I think that every person that I regularly interact with socially I have both offended and been offended by in some way. I suspect that that's just part of normal human interaction. But it seems like any offense from a man to a woman can be considered sexual harassment, which I would say makes those interactions dangerous. Also note that I wouldn't blame women for this issue. It's really the fault of (mostly) men who…
Have you considered that this is not in fact the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on the circumstances, asking someone out for a coffee is one thing. Asking them five times is almost certainly harassment.
> Asking them five times is almost certainly harassment. Yet this behavior is romanticised is popular culture, and has been from the dawn of time up to and including the present: Oddyseus and Helen of Troy, Shakespeare's "The taming of the shrew", tons of Fred Astaire movies, as well as modern movies like "Ghost", "Life is beautiful", "Chasing Amy", TV shows like "Sex and the city"... I could go on. Lucikly I don't n…
(Also "The Taming of the Shrew" is firmly in the "oh fuck no" category of 21st century society)
Yet people find it hard to understand why some people might be somewhat offended by a shirt with scantily clad women during a press conference. Things do not happen in a vacuum and pretending like nothing is wrong isn't going to help anyone get anywhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a civil law level. Wire tapping is a criminal offense.
At the same time, the DA that attempts to try that case would be crucified. Especially if the harassment was bad.