First, let me say that your comment is thoughtful and makes many good points, and it lacks so many of the strawman arguments that some others have laid out.
Thank you for that.
That said…
> Do you think that men were going around in the 80s accusing professors of sexual harassment?
Yes.
I will be sure to tell my roommate from college that you don’t think he exists.
> So who was misusing this? Basically no one. Who was benefiting from it? Women. So this is not priggish in any sense.
I’ve been involved directly or indirectly with the academic world since the 80s.
The best I can tell, you weren’t alive then. I’m not sure who you got your information from, but it seems to be selective. There have been more than a few abusers of the “expanded definition”.
First, some real articles:
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2018/12/17/harvard-zealots-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_rape_hoax
These provide some well-documented examples of questionable title ix implementation. There are many more examples if you look for them.
> I have had quite literally dozens of friends tell me their experiences where professors dehumanized, belittled them
I’m a straight, white male (allegedly a privileged class in these situations), and this has happened to me more than a few times, usually from professors (usually older) who were known to have a bad attitude.
I imagine that a lot of these cases are not related to being a woman — it’s just general shithead behavior from the professor that should probably be addressed by the administration, but not under the umbrella of title ix or sexual harassment.
Of course, crossing the line of asking for sexual favors does fall under that umbrella.
As for anecdata, I know of:
- a professor who was investigated for sexual harassment and inappropriate touching for… wait for it… tapping students on the shoulder to get their attention in a silent way. I was the observer. I saw what he did. When I asked the accuser if this was the behavior she was referring to, she said yes. It was a total nothingburger, but it put a massive stress on his life unnecessarily. An appropriate complaint/suggestion would have been to ask him to speak softly from a distance, which is what he did moving forward. There was no reason to put this under the umbrella of sexual harassment.
- a k-12 teacher who was accused of sexual harassment for engaging in standard classroom safety procedures. Lost his job. Later found not guilty on the criminal side, and won a civil lawsuit for wrongful termination (and other things). In this case, it was the administration weaponizing title ix against a teacher while putting minors (the students) into the middle of it.
- a professor was accused of sexual harassment for… again… wait for it… sliding a handout across the table to a student in a small graduate seminar… after the student decided to sit as far as possible from everyone else in the seminar. This was her statement, and it was corroborated by other students, and the action was not seen as sexual or aggressive by anyone else. This student had accused every professor she had taken a class from with some sort of abuse, so the investigation was cursory. Again, why should someone like this be able to weaponize some of the powerful systems of title ix so frivolously?
Lest you believe that this is only a teacher/professor thing, similar examples exist in administration as well as the private sector. Often they aren’t spoken about publicly in order to avoid giving other bad actors ideas that they can work with.
I could go on, but I will spare you.
Let me be clear, I do believe that something needed to be done in the 80s to address callous behavior (both by educators and by the population at large), but I think that too many actions started to be categorized as sexual harassment that were probably better addressed in a different way (probably much lower key) and under a different label. Sexual harassment accusations end up being a scorched-earth approach to conflict resolution, and sometimes the best way to affect change of minor issues is with a deft touch.
Getting back to the original point, when I read pg’s essay, my experiences jibed with his interpretation of events during that time frame. It’s fine to disagree with him, but I hope that folks will at least take a charitable read of his interpretation of the zeitgeist of that time — at a minimum, it passes the sniff test for me.