Sexual Harassment

[BoSoxGal]

I kept waiting for someone else to post about this, but nobody has so here we go:

In the wake of the Weinstein sexual harassment/rape allegations and the #metoo campaign, victims are coming out of the shadows to tell their stories.

Mark Halperin has been suspended by MSNBC after 5 women came forward to tell of his harassment of them when he was NBC political division chief.

President George H. W. Bush (!) has been accused by 2 women thus far, and Bush's office released a statement saying that he "patted women's rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner." (WTF?!)

Are we going to see this issue staying in the headlines considering our current predator President and with more high profile harassers being revealed - or will it soon retreat to the back page so we ladies can continue to be victims of normalized harassment for another few thousand years?

[Long Run]

One view (Megan McArdle):

In this case, they almost all knew a long time ago, and they did nothing.

We sure do seem to be having an awful lot of these sorts of sexual harassment and rape scandals right now, don't we? Bill Cosby. Fox News (x 6). Weinstein.

* * *

Perhaps Americans are finally fed up. Sociologist Ari Adut notes that societies can tolerate something they think is wrong for a long time, before suddenly deciding to act.

* * *

The first is that simply publicizing transgressions of society’s code does not necessarily stop them. Knowing, Adut suggests, is not what creates the scandal. What creates the scandal is when a charge is so widely disseminated, by a credible source, that people can no longer pretend that they don’t know. At that point, society has to act.

* * *

No, what you see in the allegations against Weinstein is not ignorance of right or wrong, but a man who seems to have enjoyed doing wrong things. Teaching such a man that something is not merely wrong, but really, really, really wrong may only increase his enjoyment.

Social norms can, and do, shift the penalties for that wrongness, especially when they foster legal change. Most companies these days are unwilling to keep most proven harassers around, because the law now opens up the company to huge liability if it does. But in industries that work on a star system -- like media and sports -- there are employees who bring in so much money that it would still be cheaper to pay off the victims than to lose the star.

* **

We’ll know we’ve made progress when women are willing to accuse men at the height of their powers, men who can hurt them for years to come -- or benefit them in exchange for their silence. And when the people around those men move swiftly and without hesitation to deprive them of the power they’ve abused, even though they’ll be tainted by the scandal, even though they’ll suffer personal costs from the loss of an ally.

We are not in that world today. And despite the public outcry, I’m not really sure that we’re any closer to it than we were three weeks ago.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... harassment

[Joe Guy]

An interesting question was asked on a local talk radio show about George H Bush's 'pat on the butt' behavior. I didn't listen long enough to hear responses.

Do women still consider it to be sexual harassment when it is done by someone who is 93 and disabled?

As an aside, I thought is was funny that George said his favorite magician is "David Cop A Feel". But then I'm an insensitive misogynistic guy, so what other response would you expect from me?

[BoSoxGal]

Are you serious?

If an old man calls a black person nigger, is that still racism?

Why the fuck would someone get a pass on sexual assault because they’re old?! And yes, unwanted touching of a sexual nature - like fondling a woman’s ass - is criminal sexual assault.

Jesus fuck!

[Joe Guy]

Sexual harassment involves someone who is making a sexual advance against another person. Do you think that George's move was intended as foreplay and he was hoping the woman was going to have sex with him?

[RayThom]

Famed behavior sociologist Pat Matushy posits a hiney grab is only wrong if the receiver is a Catholic nun or grandmother over 65 years old. Anything else is merely an appreciation for the female anatomy provided it is accompanied by a Fozzy Bear "waka waka" sound.



A snake in the grass is an asp in the grass. But a goose is a grasp on the ass.

[Bicycle Bill]

And yes, unwanted touching of a sexual nature - like fondling a woman’s ass - is criminal sexual assault.

Jesus fuck!

You must have been a real pleasure to take out on a date ... "I had a wonderful time tonight, Poindexter; you may touch me here, here, and there."

-"BB"-

[Guinevere]

And now you see why I didn't comment further on this issue here. Because I'm not in the mood, nor do I have the patience or time to educate the uneducated and those unable to become educated.

Luckily, I suspect neither of these ignorant old dinosaurs will get as close to a woman as even Pappy Bush did, before they become extinct.

As Sue said in the Weinstein/Ailes/Cosby thread:

What BigRR said, but I really don't think it's that hard: You're at the office/shop to work. Other employees are not there for your personal amusement or gratification. Is it really that difficult to be social and sociable without making lewd/offensive remarks or seeking sexual contact? Be polite, be friendly, don't be a creep. This really isn't rocket surgery.

But apparently even that simple, straightforward advice is too much for certain dinosaur brains to process.

[datsunaholic]

I guess the original question got partially answered- as long as you have people like Ray and Bill (yeah I'll name names) who seem to be completely unaware of what constitutes offensive behavior, then unfortunately women are going to have to endure said harassment. Doesn't matter if it was a "joke".

It's not right.

It's not funny.

It's not acceptable.

I also don't think it's that simple. There are certain behaviors that are acceptable in one situation that are totally unacceptable in another. It varies from person to person as well. But just because it's been tolerated doesn't make it right. Just because someone was silent didn't mean they wanted to be the recipient of said behavior.

Me, I can't read the signs so I just avoid any sort of interaction. I've made enough mistakes and gone too far on a couple occasions. Not in a physical way, but it was bad enough that I still haven't moved on. I still have those thoughts in my head that I'd rather not have.

[BoSoxGal]

Sexual harassment involves someone who is making a sexual advance against another person. Do you think that George's move was intended as foreplay and he was hoping the woman was going to have sex with him?

That’s fucking stupid.

Sexual harassment isn’t about sex. Seriously, educate yourself.

[BoSoxGal]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... andsy.html

[BoSoxGal]

And yes, unwanted touching of a sexual nature - like fondling a woman’s ass - is criminal sexual assault.

Jesus fuck!

You must have been a real pleasure to take out on a date ... "I had a wonderful time tonight, Poindexter; you may touch me here, here, and there."

-"BB"-

Another pig weighs in - except, of course, that’s an insult to pigs.

[Crackpot]

Compare and contrast:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18257

[Guinevere]

Great piece in the Post today:

The sound you hear is a million men shaking in their wingtips and cowboy boots — men who are experiencing, perhaps for the first time, the kind of enveloping unease and fear that they’ve triggered in women, to some degree, for years. The flip side of the #MeToo campaign, in which legions of women on social media have revealed their experience with abuse, is something like #YouToo?, in which every day another prominent man is frogmarched into the spotlight for his behavior.

On Wednesday night, as the capital was going to bed, CNN lobbed the latest #YouToo?: Five anonymous women saying that they were propositioned, harassed and assaulted by the prominent political journalist Mark Halperin when he worked at ABC News.

Halperin, now at MSNBC and best known for his 2008 campaign book, “Game Change,” acknowledged to CNN that “I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me,” adding, “I now understand from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain.”


Now he understands. Does the “now” merely arise from the fact that his actions are now public? Does “now” mean we’re watching an epoch of entitled masculinity finally end? Or is there something else going on “now”?

After the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, many women have come forward against a growing list of well-known male figures with similar stories of harassment and assault. (Erin Patrick O'Connor, Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)
It’s been nearly three years since Bill Cosby was first called out, in a high-profile manner, for his alleged serial predation. The sheer number of women who came forward put several dozen cracks in a dam against open secrets that has stood for generations in Hollywood, business and media world. Admitted groper Donald Trump’s election was, you might say, the ultimate exoneration — get caught on tape bragging about the abuse, and America will still hand you the nuclear codes.

But after his inauguration, the dam continued to crack.


Roger Ailes.

Bill O’Reilly.

Now, in the three weeks since the world learned of producer Harvey Weinstein’s side career of harassing and assaulting women, the dam now seems to have completely ruptured. Men have been swept away by the flood of allegations, which range from the creepy to the monstrous.

Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, resigned last week after a producer alleged that he incessantly propositioned and harassed her. (Amazon’s corporate founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) On Monday, the Los Angeles Times tallied 38 women, plus an additional 200 who later came forward, claiming that the writer-director James Toback lured them with professional promises into situations where he could sexually assault them.


Heads of state. Creators of entertainment. The publisher of ArtForum magazine. The co-founder of the electronic band Crystal Castles. Journalists — this week, Lockhart Steele, an editorial director for Vox Media, and Leon Wieseltier, a former bigwig at the New Republic — who are the gatekeepers of what we see and how we understand it.

“Ailes, O’Reilly, Weinstein, Halperin were some of our culture’s key storytellers, shaping our ideas of gender, authority, power & much more,” noted Jodi Kantor, the New York Times reporter who broke the Weinstein story on Twitter on Thursday morning.

Even George H.W. Bush and Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel! A writer named Jenny Listman came forward this week to say that the cherished author, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, had once, at an event, posed for a picture and let his hand drift down her back until her back was her butt.


“You are sad beyond measure because, you believe, there are no good people,” she wrote of learning her hero had wandering hands.

Elie Wiesel!

The slightly more benign hashtag to come out of this discussion might as well be #MeToo? — with the question mark representing the quiet self-interrogation currently happening with mostly decent men of a certain age (60-plus? 50-plus? What is the generational divide here?) as they realize that the behaviors they perceived as all-in-good-fun were, in fact, only half in good fun — their own half. For decades, the women on the receiving end weren’t having any fun at all.

Is this a moment of #MeToo? for George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States? An actor named Heather Lind said she was “sexually assaulted” by the jolly old fellow with the fun socks, who apparently touched her butt while posing for a photo.

“To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner,” said a spokesman for Bush on Wednesday, while noting that the former president’s wheelchair posture keeps his arms at butt-level.

Could that “same joke” be the one that he allegedly told another actress, Jordana Grolnick, while posing for a photo with her in August 2016? Grolnick told Deadspin that Bush and wife Barbara visited her backstage at a Maine theater, that the president asked her to guess his favorite magician, and then, as he squeezed her rear end, revealed that the answer was “David Cop-a-feel.”

David Cop-a-feel. Ugh. Gabby dad humor mixed with grabby sexual overtones: a cocktail whose taste many women would recognize but that many men would be shocked to learn they had been mixing and serving all along.

All along, these men were all wrong. Now, have we reached a point where these men are all evil? Allegations are coming by the bushel, and we are in a moment of figuring out how to sort them. In journalism, there’s a term called “notebook dump,” the process of throwing together all your reporting — every note taken, interview conducted, scene observed. Some stuff won’t make the ultimate story; the notebook dump is how you see what you’ve got, and figure out how to move forward.

The women of America are currently engaged in a notebook dump of epic proportions, releasing the anecdotes they’ve been carrying since puberty.

A colleague relates an anecdote from 1972: At the age of 16 she attended the Republican National Convention and met Sen. Strom Thurmond. He asked where she was from, told her she was “shapely” and, as she left, patted her butt.

“Sexual harassment” wasn’t in common parlance at the time, our colleague says.

“He’s just a dirty old man,” however, was.

It is possible for things to be wrong, and equally possible for some things to be more wrong than other things.

Put a different way: Some men need to be educated; some need to be imprisoned.

Around the time the Weinstein scandal broke, a spreadsheet circulated among women who work in media, sharing their intel about certain men who work in media. It sorts men by their “affiliation” and “alleged misconduct,” with those accused of physical violence highlighted in red. There are names you’d recognize and names you wouldn’t. The allegations are all over the place in terms of seriousness: “leering” and “flirting,” “gave a woman a black eye” and “drugged a woman and attempted to rape her.”

Take the attempted rapist. Put him in jail.

Take the gross flirter. Teach him how to read signals from women. Figure out how each offense should be categorized. Begin the emotionally laborious process of reeducating millions of males, even despite the valid criticism that women experiencing harassment don’t particularly want to also be in charge of educating harassers.

“What we need to start talking about is the crisis in masculinity,” the actor Emma Thompson told the BBC.

Emma Thompson is right. (Emma Thompson is always right.) We do. And we are. And we have been, actually, for a really long time. It just used to be in private, between women alone, or behind closed doors between a woman and the man who was making her life miserable. Now it’s in public. Which might be what Halperin meant in his use of “now”: The discussion has gotten really loud. It’s pretty hard to ignore.

[RayThom]

I guess the original question got partially answered- as long as you have people like Ray and Bill (yeah I'll name names) who seem to be completely unaware of what constitutes offensive behavior, then unfortunately women are going to have to endure said harassment. Doesn't matter if it was a "joke".
It's not right.
It's not funny.
It's not acceptable.

Wha...what? I thought my post was rather benign -- yet funny. I have a 27 year old daughter so I'd never condone any unfamiliar touching from anyone. My "Fozzy Bear waka waka" reference was to a silly grab ass ritual she and I would perform on our way up the basement steps when we left the garage. We both agreed to stop when she turn around twelve or thirteen, although we still sneak a 'waka' in on occasion... and we laugh and laugh.

My daughter (on the staff of HUP) "knows the score" and is physically and mentally healthy in every way. I make no apology for the way we interact as family.

[Burning Petard]

I went through some kind of re-thinking on this topic when I had my first exposure to official company policy about this stuff from the DuPont Corp many many hears ago. It was presented by the legal department as a change and it was a positive announcement that YOU can be fired, if you are a man, if a woman employee makes a charge that SHE perceives she is in a hostile work environment and the hostility is based on the fact that she is a woman. It was emphasized that it was HER perception that counted. You white, male, college educated professionals think that is unfair. Tough. Suck it up. DuPont never promised a 'fair' work environment. If you have the slightest hint that it might be improper--Don't Do IT!.

The girly calendars in the maintenance shop came down.

Later I was walking my dog in a city park in the evening and met there a female research supervisor who had retired a couple of years earlier. This park was used mostly by single-track off road bikers and a place to let dogs run off leash because there was seldom anybody around. I talked to her for a bit and she told me she lived right next door but seldom came there because it felt so remote and isolated, even though it was a good place for her dog , just like mine. Chase squirrels and play in the shallow stream. I talked about this later with my adult daughter. She told me she had similar reservations about running in a public park near where she lived. It brought me to a new understanding about the 'ordinary activities of life' that required a different mind set if one did not have the 'white male privilege' that was so ubiquitous I did not even perceive it.

snailgate

[Sue U]

Emma Thompson is right. (Emma Thompson is always right.)

Well, there's no disputing that, and it makes for a pretty good rule: When in doubt, ask, "What would Emma Thompson do?"

[Joe Guy]

Sexual harassment isn’t about sex. Seriously, educate yourself.

It's not?

I've always thought sexual assault isn't about sex but sexual harassment is about sex and applies in a work environment.

What George did was rude and inappropriate but apparently you think what he did should have legal consequences.

Lock him up!

[rubato]

If the prevailing sentiment is that a pat on the butt is excessively intimate or sexual then you shouldn't do it. But it must be said that opinions differ. I seem to recall watching old film of baseball games of managers patting a player on the butt of his way to the field as a gesture of "'go get 'em son". And I don't believe there was any excessive intimacy and certainly nothing sexual intended nor perceived in the act. I just checked and apparently there is still a lot of butt-slapping going on:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1677 ... -in-sports
http://mentalfloss.com/article/51141/wh ... 0%99-butts





yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

I think I'd give GHW Bush a pass on this one. When he was told that it was unwelcome he apologized. If no one had said it was unwelcome before then he was getting feedback that it was ok.

yrs,
rubato