Excellent NYT compilation on workplace harrassment, this one is a favorite:

[flamingdem]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/magazine/the-reckoning-women-and-power-in-the-workplace.html?smid=tw-nytmag&smtyp=cur

Know Your Power

By Zoe Heller

I’m disappointed that the story has remained focused so squarely on the villainous doings of the metropolitan elites. I was never under any illusion that this was the beginning of the end of the patriarchy, but I had hopes that there would be more of a ripple effect, that we would begin hearing about sexual harassment and abuse in the farm industry, in fast food, in retail, in hotel housekeeping. It’s delightful that the chickens are coming home to roost for powerful old guys in the entertainment industry, and yet for large sections of the country, I suspect, the toppling of Harvey Weinstein and others has played less as a “Matrix moment” — a sudden unmasking of the country’s sexist power structures — than as an old-fashioned morality tale about debauched big-city snoots finally getting their comeuppance.

Instead of moving outward, much of the conversation among women on social media has been taken up with identifying and decrying lesser forms of male misconduct — dirty jokes, unsolicited shoulder massages, compliments on physical appearance. It is inevitable that in the great outpouring of female wrath, minor grievances, as well as major ones, should have emerged. And hostile work environments aren’t built on violent sexual assault alone. Nevertheless, we seem to have wound up spending an inordinate amount of time parsing the injurious effects of low-level lechery on relatively advantaged women. Part of the problem with these conversations is that the injuries sustained by a creepy comment or a lewd remark are largely subjective. It’s fine to demand that men stop being brutes, but it helps if there is some consensus on what qualifies as brutishness. As it turns out, my unexceptionable office banter is your horrifying insult, and your innocuous flirtation is another’s undermining insinuation. (I remember thinking guiltily during the Anita Hill hearings that a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can didn’t sound that awful to me.) It seems neither likely nor desirable that we will succeed in banishing all sexual frisson from the workplace. And we know that many happy romances and marriages have originated on factory lines and in conference rooms. Given that the burden of making the first move traditionally lies with men, and given that it’s not always possible to gauge whether an advance is unwanted until someone makes it, there is good reason to question whether everything that is now being deemed misconduct has come from the same well of dastardly male entitlement.

‘There is good reason to question whether everything that is now being deemed misconduct has come from the same well of dastardly male entitlement.’

An argument that has kept cropping up in recent weeks, one that will be familiar to those who have followed the debates about campus rape, is that even in the absence of force or explicit threat, the suggestive comments or sexual advances of a male colleague are implicitly coercive. A woman’s ability to register her opprobrium, or to say “No, thank you,” is always compromised by her fear of repercussions, or by her youth, or simply by her female impulse to placate. The danger with this a priori assumption of women’s diminished agency is that it ends up exaggerating female vulnerability. It casts women as fundamentally fragile beings, whose sexual assent, like that of minors, cannot be trusted to indicate true consent. It presents female passivity as natural. There’s no doubt that women, particularly younger ones, have a tendency to go along with things they don’t want to — to say yes when they really mean no — but that propitiatory tendency is not some incorrigible feature of the female character, any more than predation is the incorrigible inclination of men. And we do women a disservice by treating it as if it is. This is not about blaming the victim; it’s about pointing out to the potential victim that she has more power than she knows.

Several times in recent weeks, I’ve read and heard people asserting that older women like me, women who came of age before the Anita Hill hearings in 1991, are generally more accepting of sexual harassment and less sympathetic to women who complain about it. (This, it’s claimed, is because we grew up with lower expectations of male behavior and feel that the young should endure as stoically as we did.) I would characterize the generational divide differently. I think older women are, by and large, more reluctant to squander women’s hard-won right to sexual autonomy by characterizing themselves as helpless and in need of special protection. I think they are more likely to see “power dynamics” between individuals as complicated, fluid and not necessarily reducible to age and status differentials. I think they are also — although this is less a generational difference than a function of age — much better at telling men where to get off.

YES

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. I came of age before Anita Hill.

And I'd say we were very tolerant of a lot of bad behavior on the part of men in the workplace because it was always there. We had little to no power. Our jobs often depended on the good will of the men. Language and behavior that is currently completely unacceptable was commonplace back in the 1960's and 1970's. Probably in the decades earlier, but I wasn't working then.

I cannot speak for younger women.