Harassment in the Workplace

 

The original "liberated woman": the Cosmo Girl.

Xerxes, further left as always than Attila the Hun—who was on the left, not the right, in contemporary terms—laments sexual harassment in the workplace. 

He does not blame Mario Cuomo, exactly, for sexual harassment. That would not do. Instead, he lumps him in with Donald Trump and blames “imbalance of power” that puts too many men in authority over women.

Imbalance of power is, of course, inevitable: no organization can exist without organization, and that means levels of authority and chains of command. Imbalance of power between sexes is equally inevitable so long as both sexes are in the workplace.

Is the problem, then, men? Men are more likely to sexually harass than women. Xerxes seems to note this, but does not elaborate. 

This is the result of simple biology. In the state of nature, men’s ideal strategy for spreading their genes is to have sex with as many women as possible. Women’s ideal strategy for spreading their genes is to get one man to commit to them. For men, a sex act is a few minutes. For women at least nine months, probably at least a dozen years. So men are programmed by nature to initiate any sexual encounter: it is up to the woman to say no. Accordingly, men are going to be the ones accused of sexual harassment.

If this is unfair to women in the workplace, it is also unfair to men.

And, of course, the sex game works both ways: a superior can use their power to gain sexual favours. An unscrupulous underling, equally, can use their sexual favours to gain power.

One hopes that good men and good women are above all this, above mixing sex with power. But, aside from the obvious chances of mixed messages and honest misunderstandings, no sane person can simply count on everybody being good.

Can the problem be fixed by having only women in positions of authority? 

It is perfectly naïve to think, or disingenuous to claim, that women are more moral than men; their sexual urges are only expressed in different ways. A female boss is as likely to promote or favour an underling because she finds him attractive, or indeed because they are having a sexual relationship. She will just not initiate it; and will stick to her favourite over the longer term. And, of course, she may penalize other women who are more attractive. 

If we are going to have both men and women in the workplace, there is no way to avoid this problem. If we did not see it coming, when we advocated women in the workplace, we are idiots. In fact, we did foresee it. In the early sixties, when we spoke of “liberated women,” the fundamental premise was “liberated for casual sex.” Getting into the workplace was merely to enable this.

We got what we demanded, and now we pretend to be shocked, shocked!

Weinstein and Trump

Anti-semitic Nazi cartoon: the Jewish doctor and the defenseless Aryan woman..

Why, I see some are asking, is Harvey Weinstein being given such a bad time over the sexual exploitation of women, but Donald Trump seems to be given a pass?

But any suggestion that the charges against Weinstein are politically motivated is absurd. Many right-wing figures have only recently been felled by similar accusations: Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly at Fox News; Bill Cosby. Until Weinstein it was looking as though it was left-wing figures who were being protected, and only those on the right taken to task.

We do not know, in fact, whether the charges against Weinstein are true. None have been tested in court. Nevertheless, the sheer volume and the many claims by others to have “always known” make it look convincing.

We do not have anything like this for Donald Trump. For Trump, according to the linked article, we have three women who are prepared to speak out; and perhaps a total of ten overall. One charges him only with kissing her. Another says he “aggressively propositioned her.” These charges themselves do not seem to meet the bar for a charge of assault. Another’s claims are refuted by a third party who claims to have been present.

Leaving aside prejudice against Trump, it doesn’t give us much to go on.

Hillary Clinton called Trump an “admitted sexual assaulter.” That is probably libelous, or would be in Canada or the UK. Presumably she is referring to the famous tape of him talking to Billy Bush. I read the transcript. The most he admits to is kissing women, and nothing implies this is clearly without consent. In the real world, of course, it is always difficult, when a man kisses a woman, to know whether she is fully in consent or not. But it is considered his obligation to make this first move. Ther is no way around this.

By contrast, it would not be libel to call Clinton’s husband a “known sexual predator.”

What Trump said to Bush on the secretly—and surely illegally—recorded conversation was boorish and crude. But there is no law against saying boorish things. Such matters are properly dealt with by social stigma. In Trump’s case, he faced a jury of 300 million of his peers. One may disagree with the verdict, but the matter has been dealt as such matters ought to be dealt with. He was exposed, and we have the result.

Anti-black cartoon, US, 1954.

There is an obvious problem here: first, any such accusations of sexual impropriety are almost inevitably the word of one person against another. Such things are done in private. So how can we tell who is speaking the truth? Second, if a man has a lot of money, or has an important public reputation, let alone both, there is a huge motive for just about anyone to bring a false charge. There might well be money in it, or fame. Third, because they can be so easily made, charges of sexual assault and rape have been the traditional weapon to use against prejudiced groups: Jews in Nazi Germany were commonly held to rape and seduce good Aryan girls; blacks in the US South were usually lynched on the same charge.

Accordingly, we should assume such charges are false unless there is some corroboration. Like Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress.

I see one comment a lot: about how all men are to blame for allowing such things to go on. In the Guardian piece, the woman whose charges have been contradicted by another witness says “men needed to make it clear that Trump’s brand of ‘locker-room talk’ is unacceptable. It would be nice at this point if we started hearing from men on this issue, because it’s not one-sided.”

This is a statement of just such prejudice as is traditionally supported by the rape or sexual assault charge. I am guilty of what someone else did, because he is a man, and I am a man? That there is such obvious prejudice against men abroad in the land is a further important reason why we should doubt any such accusations.

From the Nazi press.

I suspect there is indeed a lot of real sexual exploitation going on. Sometimes it may be a matter of a man exploiting his power over women. Sometimes it may be a matter of a woman exploiting her power over men: an attractive woman, for example, offering her sexual favours to a boss for special preferment. Hard to guess, even if there is evidence of a sexual encounter, where the rights and wrongs fall. Avoiding such stuff is no doubt why, in many more traditional societies, and in ours until fairly recently, men and women were generally kept apart in the public square.

If some group is ultimately to blame for all this, then, it is surely those who have ended this segregation: the feminists. There was a reason for it all along. Surely they knew this?

The Empress Has No Clothes

There has been a lot of coverage of this video of a woman walking the streets of New York City over the past few days.

However, while all the headlines I see are declaring it evidence of the terrible problem of harassment faced by women, virtually all of the comments by readers, male and female, are saying it shows no such thing. This amounts to a graphic example of how the “legacy media” have lost touch with, and lost the confidence of, their audience.

I have to agree with the commentators. With the exception of one guy who walks beside the woman for an alleged five minutes, nothing else here seems to come anywhere near harassment. It is mostly a matter of men saying “good morning” or “God bless you,” or at worst, something along the lines of “you're beautiful.” How can this woman possibly take offence? If this is harassment, wouldn't we all like to be a bit more harassed?

Okay, conceivably, for a beautiful woman, this might end up being too much of a good thing. Might it get draining after a while?

Perhaps; the video makers, a feminist advocacy group, do their best to make this look to be the case. But it is worth remembering that this is, by their own admission, a condensation of ten hours of walking. At one point, someone says "good morning," and in the very next shot, it is night. Although the makers claim the woman was harassed “108” times, the video actually shows only twenty incidents of any kind, benevolent or not. Given that they are an advocacy group and not a neutral party, one assumes that, had they anything else that looked even remotely like harassment, we would be looking at it.

So we are left with twenty unsolicited comments over ten hours. That's two random greetings per hous. I think most of us could live with that. If we have ever lived in a small town, we have lived with that, and more. In terms of time, she was obliged to recognize the existence of other people for two minutes (seven, perhaps, if you count the guy who allegedly walks with her for five minutes) out of ten hours. This does not seem like an unsupportable burden. If you think this is tough, try, as a European-looking person, walking the streets of China or Korea. Indeed, some commentators have wondered why all but one of the alleged "harassers" turn out to be non-white, and accuse the video, illogically, of "racism" as a result. Might it be that in Harlem or Spanish Harlem, a young European woman walking alone has a bit of novelty value?

Two unsolicited greetinga an hour certainly does not seem enough to excuse the rudeness of the woman's own behaviour in refusing to acknowledge or make eye contact with anyone. Indeed, I suspect this posture of being itself provocative. It is like a challenge to atttract her attention in some way. I imagine she would have gotten more peace and quiet without it.

But let's suppose this sort of thing really is a problem. How do we solve it? By trying to have the ppolice arrest any man who tries to talk to a stsange woman? Completely impractical, in the first place. In the second, it would mean the extinction of the species, which does seem a bit like overkill.

On the other hand, if any woman does find this kind of thing objectionable in any way, there is a simple and readily available solution: the abaya. This is no doubt why the abaya is growing in popularity among Muslim women everywhere. No fuss, no bother--just slip it on before you go out, and you become invisible. The moment you are in the mood for attention, slip it off and fold in into your purse. If you do not want to look specifically Muslim, a traditional Amish-style dress and a mantilla would probably work just as well. Do you imagine that nuns get harassed in this way? I doubt it.

There is a reason for such traditions as the abaya, or the old Korean one of women staying inside during the day, and men staying inside at night. It is feminism which has insisted and still insists on abolishing all of them. If feminist do not like the result, they have only themselves to blame. It is perverse to blame men.

The men would, of course, harass nuns as well, if they truly had any conceivable sort of ill intention. They do not. It is simply a matter of their being unable to read a woman's mind. Consider: you are a young woman walking alone down the street. Unless your dress says clearly something different, this implies that you are single and eligible. It is the obligation of the man to make the first approach . In those cases when they are not simply being friendly, and with the single exception of the creey stalker guy, that is all these men are doing.

Of course, the reason why most American women do not wear an abaya or its equivalent is that they do in fact want to be approached by men, and indeed at any time. The problem is that they want to be approached only by men whom they find attractive and desirable. 

Unfortunately, however, as noted, men cannot read minds, any more than women can. These guys do not know in advance whether this woman will find them attractive. 

Some--essentially, the people in the legacy media--seem to have become so blinded by ideology that they cannot see any innocent explanation for the events in the video. All men must be presumed to be monsters, and anything they do must be sinister. They are all rapists and pedophiles. No doubt some women who have survived the sexual revolution have been damaged by sexual traumas, and have extrapolated this into a hatred of all men. That may, it occurs to me, be a major element of the feminist world-view. Sure sounds like what happened to Andrea Dworkin. But if so, they are completely unjustified. Feminists were in the forefront of the sexual revolution as much as anyone, and they refuse as much as anyone to withdraw their endorsement of it now. They have kicked down all the old channels of communication and of goodwill between men and women, and need not now be surprised if confusion and mixed messages are the result. 

It may be, too, that the media folks are as aware as their readers and viewers that there is nothing to see here. But they dare not say it, for fear of being accused of being sexist, not to mention losing their job or worse.

 But the ordinary readers, who have the option generally of remaining anonymous in their comments, or at least have less invested in being part of the establishment, have no such qualms.

The whispering has begun in the back rows: the Empress actually has no clothes.






I am beginning to get the definite feeling that feminism is finally on the way out.