I was interested enough to read the article, and then I was infuriated. It was a story about a single unwanted sexual advance at a party during the meeting. That was it.
The women this happened to and her defenders in the comments justified calling this sexual harassment because of the emotional suffering she claims it caused her. I call bullshit on all of them. I've seen genuine sexual harassment. I've seen the effect it has on women. It's insulting for someone to try to equate the experiences of those women to a single unwanted sexual invitation that was stopped by a "no".
I understand that women in STEM fields, just like women in a lot of fields, suffer from harassment. I understand that it can affect their lives and their careers. I understand that's something that everyone in America, man or woman, should work to stamp out. America should be a fair and civilized society.
But you can't fix a problem unless you properly assess it first. This is especially true in the case of sexual harassment, because redefining the term to mean essentially anything that makes a person uncomfortable makes the actual problem look ridiculous.
How you feel about an incident doesn't elevate the incident. Claiming that your feelings about something that happened makes you a victim is ridiculous. I have no sympathy for such claims. If your feelings and reactions aren't appropriate to a situation, then you have a problem with your feelings and reactions. The rest of us have no obligation to redefine reality to suit you. We have no obligation to respect a claim of victimhood when you weren't a victim.
"He took that moment to put his hand on my knee, and then he told me that he and his girlfriend were in an open relationship, and that she wouldn’t mind if I went back to his hotel room to have sex with him.Really? I've know women who were groped at work, who were told to have sex or lose their job, who were humiliated in meetings by having someone suggest that they were involved in porn. I've known women who put up with mistreatment for years because they had no options. How dare anyone suggest that a single case of a hand on a knee at a party is as equally traumatic as what those women went through?
I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to say. I suddenly felt very vulnerable and alone. I was burning with shame. My adviser was not at the party (that I knew of), and the man I had blindly trusted as his friendly colleague had just solicited me for sex. I was also keenly aware that in such a loud bar, there were no witnesses."
Is there a real problem with American men harassing women? Absolutely. In fact, there's a whole range of problems from put-out-or-get-out harassment to online harassment to simply being jerks. That's something women can't fix. American men are going to have to do that job by not being part of the problem to begin with and by not tolerating that kind of behavior in other men. We have pretty low standards for American manhood these days, and we could stand to raise the bar.
But it's going to be hard to convince men to do that if the bar for harassment is set so low that even normal human interactions are included.
That's what really infuriates me about stories like this. If you're one of those people who defines sexual harassment to include anything and everything that happens to you that you don't like, you're as much an obstacle to solving the problem as some of us men are.
Read that last line again, because it's important. The person who told this story, the person who put it in a blog, and everyone who supports it as an example of sexual harassment are part of the problem, because all you're doing is giving people an excuse to ignore the problem.
I left the Science on Google+ community today. If they're going to allow stories like this to be posted, then they're not as interested in establishing gender equity and combating harassment in the STEM fields as they claim.
The Full Harassment Story
No comments:
Post a Comment