Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment

This is silly. Don't reduce me to some risk averse weakling because I'm not willing to put my neck out for strangers for little to no reward. If you're like that, and you regularly go to Africa to help people, more power to you. I'm not. Most people are not.

It's pretty easy to tell if someone is interested in you. It's when you ask them on a date, and they say yes.

If they say no, the respectful thing is to drop it.

Do the respectful thing. This is really uncomplicated. There aren't any "ifs" or "buts" after that. The notion that this is the time to start wooing is absurdly wrong. That's the time to know you've been rejected, and move on.

Accepting rejection, incidentally, seems like something many of these VCs have trained themselves to be terrible at professionally.

I'm not trying to say they're equal problems. I'm trying to say that the one problem contributes to the other. In your example, the one man who dated up creates that possibility in the mind of the groper in those other 1,000 incidents. It's like the 1 super lotto winner among the millions who bought tickets. The event doesn't have to be likely for people to think that they might get lucky...people generally suck at estimating risk/reward. If there are zero winners, no one buys tickets, but since someone wins, millions play.

In the same way, if those advances were never successful, these men would quickly get the message and stop playing. But that doesn't seem to be the case since it's still happening way too frequently. If we want to stop this problem, we need to figure out how to get the message through that even in the cases where the advances were welcomed, they still did something wrong. And that requires more than just laying into those unfortunate few that are unlucky enough to do this kind of thing to women brave enough to come forward. It will require calling out those instances where the advances were welcomed.

Simple counter-question: How do you define "sexual harassment"? Because that's the actual issue these days. Behavior that used to be "normal" and lead to people getting to know each other is considered "harassment" these days.

Yesterday I read an article about Tinder in the German Cosmopolitan: http://www.cosmopolitan.de/dating-app-tinder-tinder-im-test-...

One of it's points being that a big draw for many women is how they like being "admired" by so many men on Tinder in the same way they used to appreciate being catcalled: "Es ist dieses dauerhafte Umgarntwerden, das den Reiz ausmacht. Wie früher das Hinterherpfeifen oder Zuzwinkern.

So what's the message here? What is a single male supposed to do in such an enviornment? Some women like the catcalling, others consider it harassment. Meaning: The saver option is not to catcall, but that also results in vastly reduced chances of getting to know any woman at all. Especially when the "competition" does not bother at all and just keeps on catcalling and thus actually ends up getting to know new people, while you sit in your misery alone thinking "Well, at least I didn't harass anybody.." hell of a good time!

Then there is online dating, which has it's own slew of massive issues as a single male. Competition is extra fierce because on these platforms quite often men outnumber women 2:1 or worse. There you might not be called out for harassing that quickly, but there you need a harassing like behavior to be actually successful. You need to be somewhat dishonest about yourself in your presentation, you need to approach/contact as many women as possible (while disregarding their plight of getting spammed), to increase your chances for a successful reply and meeting.

All these are things "we" are supposed not to do, yet they seem like the only viable tactic to any measurable "success". Nobody is gonna start a relationship with me because I'm just such a nice guy who didn't come on to her, those are exactly the kind of signals that keep you in the notorious "friend zone" for all eternity, but those are the kind of signals that are seemingly expected from males in any and all situations or else you might be considered a "creep" or a "harasser".

This get's even worse when culture actually adapts. Not too long ago a common complaint would be how "Men always feign romantic interest to get sex", true enough. Now increasingly men (and some women) have become more pragmatic about this and state their intentions in quite a blunt way and guess what? That can quite easily also be interpreted as "sexual harassment" when somebody comes on to you with "I'd like to have sex with you".

So what's a single guy to do? Especially when you are also lucky enough to be on the spectrum and have a hard enough time parsing social situations already, this constant ambiguity makes it an impossibility to improve my understanding about social interactions and dynamics, literally paralyzing me.

I'm in my mid-30's and I've given up any intend to actively look for a partner because I don't want to inconvenience anybody with my failed approaches or end up being seen as some kind of "creep" who "harasses" people and makes them feel uncomfortable, when that's actually the exact opposite of my intensions.

This is only the tip of the iceberg from what I've heard. He's rather well known in circles around Twitter for his harassment and there are several texts I've seen firsthand showing far worse harassment. He preemptively posted this not knowing what they'd disclose in the paper and I'll bet he's breathing easy now that it's "only" this face touch.