When Testosterone Attacks

[ChuckF]

Why don't people just raise their children not to be members of protected classes at all? Problem solved, am I right?!

[seebs]

If people are harassing you, there are a couple of possibilities.

1. You feel like you are the victim of harassment.
2. You are delusional.

So your plan is to raise your daughter not to acknowledge reality, if she's ever a victim?

[ZEZOZE]

oooohhhh...protected classes? please clarify for me!!

oh wait...is this about putting police in the classroom to protect from bullying?

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by seebs

If people are harassing you, there are a couple of possibilities.

1. You feel like you are the victim of harassment.
2. You are delusional.

So your plan is to raise your daughter not to acknowledge reality, if she's ever a victim?

my plan is to raise my daughter to determine on her own when or when she is not being victimized.

i think harassment has made some of you delusional.

[ChuckF]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

oooohhhh...protected classes? please clarify for me!!

No.

oh wait...is this about putting police in the classroom to protect from bullying?

No, that sounds like something you made up.

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by ChuckF

No, that sounds like something you made up.

sigh. it's true.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I do think it would be unfortunate if he lost his job over this but I have to keep reminding myself that it isn't my fault if he does, it's his fault. In fact all my stress and discomfort over how I've handled this situation are his fault too. He's been in the corporate world (not to mention the human race) long enough to know that he can't treat a co-worker like that, yet he made the decision to do it and to drag me into it.

I've had misgivings before about potentially getting someone fired for something they did, but for me, it helped to remember that there are plenty of other people out there who would love to have their job, and who could probably do it without causing as many disruptions to others who are just trying to do their jobs.

One point I forgot to make in my original post was that he told me after the fact that he had called her to the room because he had mentioned the "support lady" to his students and one of them had asked if she's cute--so he called her in for them to judge for themselves. Just as he finished telling me this she walked up and he says to her "they approved". Just in case anyone thinks I'm reading something into the event that wasn't there.

Wow. So a student asked a completely inappropriate question, and instead of calling him out, he encouraged it and took some kind of straw poll on an employee's attractiveness. So he's not just making things worse personally, but he's training future sexual harassers too? Don't feel bad for a second about calling this guy out. It sounds like it's long overdue.

If this guy had mentioned a black employee, and a student asked if he could rap or something, do you think this guy would have brought the black guy in for show and tell, too?

I worked at a company where, in the 1990s*, the CEO would call up random minorities in meetings and company presentations regularly to tell racist/sexist/ableist jokes about them; then, later, to get them to come stand up on the podium with him as he used them to illustrate what a diverse workforce he had. So the black guy thing used to happen, too, and not all that long ago.

* I have realized that if I don't point this out, people sometimes assume I'm literally like 90 years old and am talking about something that happened in the 50s or so.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

my plan is to raise my daughter to determine on her own when or when she is not being victimized.

What you said was that you would raise her not to see herself as a victim.

So if she were actually a victim, either your training didn't take, or she doesn't believe it.

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

and i told you what she should do if she's harassed.

i would raise her not to see herself as a victim.

So daughter who has been sexually harassed = not a victim, man who loses job for sexually harassing daughter = victim. How could anyone not see that you are the real champion of womankind here?

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by seebs

What you said was that you would raise her not to see herself as a victim.

So if she were actually a victim, either your training didn't take, or she doesn't believe it.

i mean a real victim. this women is just being annoyed by a jerk. he's just being a man with no self-control. men just want to fuck or have you forgotten that? we learn to control ourselves, some better than others. you totally forget that we are animals and at the base of everything you build upon it is that ugly fact. it's one you embrace, for God's sake- in the name of Science!

if my daughter was raped, she'd be a victim. if she asked somebody to stop and they didn't, she'd be a victim. if i taught her correctly, she will have told somebody like the man in vm's story to go fuck himself she's got work to do and he would be wise to listen. he'd know better because she'd know better.

you don't make the world better by becoming tattlers and turning people in to the 'state' where their lives could be ruined by the actions of one man who just might not have the tolerance that seems to be expressed by a stronger woman. what if SHE is the one setting the better example.

i think you are wrong for not at least suggesting to her that she go to management or that if she didn't you were going to do it anyhow.

i think you and an awful lot of the people on this forum are rather...militant.

i'm just a free pixie spirit.

now y'all go on and hit me with your tl;dr's and pompously dissected replies. i cherish and miss them

[ZEZOZE]

i mean...

all i have thought about the entire thread is that woman's point of view. i've also wondered about her looks and if she has big boobs, but i've actually admired her the most in the story. if a woman did to me what that man did to her, i would just roll with it and let it be. if it stayed within the bounds of what i could tolerate, i would just be nice and let it slide off me. being a man, if she pushed it too far i'd probably just roll with that too, but let's say i was raised with female sensibility and i asked the woman to stop and she didn't. well i would then do something to have it stopped. i would warn them first, too. i would be wise enough to not be a victim.

see...i guess the difference in perspective is tolerance vs acceptance. i will tolerate just about anything that doesn't harm me or anybody else, or at least stays within a shared mutual tolerance. i don't have to accept what they do, but i can live with it. kind of a nation of united states.

acceptance = force

it's persuasion.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

i mean a real victim. this women is just being annoyed by a jerk. he's just being a man with no self-control.

Yes, you tell us when women are or aren't victims, you know better than the womans!

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

men just want to fuck or have you forgotten that? we learn to control ourselves, some better than others.

Absolute and total bullshit! and is not an excuse.
Unfortunately people believe it cause no one calls them on it.

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

if a woman did to me what that man did to her, i would just roll with it and let it be

Ah yes, "If" because it's a hypothetical situation to you, and it can be mused on in the same way an alien invasion or rabid bunny attack can be mused on. I hear women have to actually go through it.

Originally Posted by ITSOZAZ

i will tolerate just about anything that doesn't harm me or anybody else

There are other types of harm than physical.

[ZEZOZE]

ah. she was being mentally abused.

well thank god you got the law behind you. nobody will have any choice but to go along with it.

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by Ari

Absolute and total bullshit! and is not an excuse.
Unfortunately people believe it cause no one calls them on it.

you are being dishonest. of course it is an excuse. it's an excuse for humanity to rise above that baseness. humanity is a learned experience that separates us from other animals. but then science says we are animals. that means that we behave based on wants and needs and the instinct to know how to fulfil them. there are actually few things that motivate us beneath the gazillion words used to explain them.

and the question of spirit is why do we need to know?

[Qingdai]

Whatever, if VM says coworker is making his job hard, then fuck whatever Itsozoz is going on about.

[Vivisectus]

And besides, she was kind of inviting that kind of behaviour by looking the way she does anyway. I mean everybody knows men follow their dick around, so unless you wear cock-camouflage you can expect to get your leg humped, at least. She should hav erealized by now that all men are essentially rapists, only the really good ones like Zaz manage to barely restrain their inner rapist. If it wasn't for Zaz's self-control, he would have half the women who live on his street tied up in his basement right now. Hell, she probably enjoys the attention at some level. Why else has she not learned her lesson by now?

She should just refuse to be a victim and risk rocking the boat. Everybody else has to do that when they just join a new company. I personally had to pick a fight with several senior female staff-members when they tried to make me walk up and and down an aisle between them as they held up cards with numbers from one to ten, in the first week of my employment. It is the choice I make by joining the female-dominated world of bluechip companies. The idea that there should be some kind of policy against this is absolutely ridiculous. It is just boys being boys, men displaying their natural behaviour the way God intended them to.

[ZEZOZE]

^ so that's the rebuttal?

I WIN!

[ImGod]

It sounds like it's been going on long enough and is known by enough people, that she could have tasered him in the parking lot for creeping on her and then filed a complaint.

[viscousmemories]

I pulled my co-worker aside this morning and told her that I had gone to our director with my concerns. She seemed to be totally at ease with it and particularly relieved that I wasn't pulling her aside to tell her she had done something wrong. At lunch time she took it upon herself to pull Capt. Horndog aside and tell him that 'someone' had commented about the amount of attention he was giving her and maybe he should tone it down. Later my director called me to let me know that she was documenting everything and planning to talk to Capt. Horndog but that she doesn't plan to take any other action at this time, which I think is fair. I told her that I had spoken with my co-worker and that she had spoken with Horndog, so now everyone knows what everyone knows.

Later in the day she made a joke about me not wanting anyone else to talk to her so I made sure to reiterate that it isn't the 'talking' that bothered me, it's the disruption to our work and the disrespectful manner. I said if he's gonna go out of his way to talk to you and pretend he's really interested in who you are as a person the least he could do is show you some respect and share some of his vast knowledge about the work we do.

In the same conversation she restated that had been working in male-dominated environments since she was 18 and that she really is used to how she's treated, and I just said that as much as I understand and appreciate her ability to tolerate it I think it's really unfair and unfortunate that she has to. Anyway I'm thinking of bringing in a spray bottle to shoot him with if it happens again.

[BrotherMan]

I have an Airzooka if you need it.

[ZEZOZE]

the spray bottle is honestly the best idea you've had yet about how to solve this problem.

[S.Vashti]

I have to say, I am with both vm and Itsozaz on this issue. I was raised with the maxim: It's not a problem unless I say it's a problem. This has applications in this instance. viscuousmemories is right to do what he did, because it was honestly a problem to him, not only was the apparent disrespect bothering him, but the intrusion on his working time. That is a real problem.

The woman only perceived a problem in the abstract-she expects men to disrespect her (pretty much all women expect this), and was not disappointed. In this, she did not think of herself as a victim of the jerk, but more likely just another distasteful hurdle to working at something she likes.

So I don't think she perceived herself as a victim as much as vm thought of victimhood, and that was mostly in conjunction with his own expectations at social behavior in the workforce. I think vm did the right thing. The lady's victimhood is moot in comparison to the issues facing viscousmemories.

[lisarea]

The 'victimhood' argument is just a silly semantic distraction, though. The rejection of the term 'victim' is some kind of self-help rhetoric or something that might be useful in certain circumstances for people who've lived through something to feel better, but it does have a fairly objective meaning in other contexts, including this one. Also, I suggest you search this thread for the word 'victim,' to see in what context that term was introduced in this thread.

If the situation consisted entirely of a weird interpersonal relationship between two employees, neither of whom had a problem with it, it would be moot, because nobody else would even notice it. It's only when one person mentions it as problematic, or someone else notices and is bothered by it that it even comes to light. And at that point, it is a workplace problem that goes beyond the two individuals.

So let's turn her into a black guy again because sometimes, it's easier to evaluate interactions like that if you switch up the demographics.

So she's now a black guy, and a white senior employee interacts with him differently than he does white guys. Whenever senior guy sees the black guy, he badly adopts some AAVE style dialect, calls him things like "G" or my n-word or whatever, gives him high fives or fist bumps instead of whatever his normal greeting is, and talks about rap and basketball instead of work. And let's say the black guy expects this and is OK with it personally. That's fine.

What's not fine is when the black guy expresses concern about it, when it's a systemic issue where he does that to all or most black guys at work, when it becomes bothersome to others in the workplace, or when the senior employee brings the black guy in for show and tell to model those behaviors for others. And it would be entirely appropriate for another senior employee to address that dynamic with the black guy in question, and with HR in order to address it as a systemic problem, which it what it becomes as soon as others start noticing it.

It's kind of a neat equation in that as long as it doesn't affect anyone negatively, it's not a problem; but as long as it's not affecting anyone negatively, nobody notices it anyway so it doesn't come up.

[Clutch Munny]

Originally Posted by lisarea

And let's say the black guy expects this and is OK with it personally. That's fine.

What's not fine is when ... it's a systemic issue where he does that to all or most black guys at work

My inclination is to say that the latter point undermines the former allowance, which I do understanding may have been for the sake of argument.

The way that someone is treated sets a precedent for acceptable behaviour in the future and in wider contexts, that is both socially and procedurally hard to reverse. That a woman (or a person of whatever skin tone or ethnicity) has made her peace with discriminatory treatment is not sufficient to make it fine for that treatment to occur. Because taking offense/grunching/feeling marginalized is at least a reasonable response to that treatment, and there will be other such people in that context sooner or later, who are entitled to that reasonable response. It's not okay to create and entrench conditions that will make things unfairly hard for those people.

In short, I think the equation needs to be modified to accommodate the fact that it is a problem now if someone will be affected negatively in the future. Leaving it until someone does perceive themselves to be harmed is leaving it too long, when the discriminatory nature of the behaviour is already clear to a reasonable person.

[lisarea]

Good point.

I was preemptively addressing a 'hipster racism' argument that usually seems to follow, where people excuse their behaviors because people who know them know they're saying or doing bigoted things ironically or something; and it's all in good fun and A-OK with Their Black Friends or whatever. (I do not think it's true as often as people think it is, though. I suspect a lot of people just tolerate it rather than making waves.)

My point, though, is that you can't excuse behaviors as inside jokes, because as soon as they come to the attention of someone who is bothered by them, they no longer have 'inside joke' status.