Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings | Hacker News Reader

Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings

nytimes.com

45 pointsmudil37 comments

People not on the hard left have been saying this exact thing for years. I guess now that people like Franken are going down due to outrage, the NYT sees value in due process and treating women as responsible adults.

I don’t mean for that statement to be flame-bait, I think it’s the unvarnished truth and I’d be happy to hear opposing views.

If you don't want it to be flame bait I'd suggest you phrase it more politely.

Feminists didn't put a gun to the leadership of NYT and demand they do what they did. They reacted in the dumb ways that any corporation scared by the idea of bad PR would and do regularly, and have been appropriately chastised for it.

Both sides of this get it wrong: Women are cast as hapless victims way too often, and their opposition in turn over-simplify every case, ignoring power dynamics, social pressure, and the numerous other completely legitimate reasons women have to say yes when they want to say no.

This is going to be a long and painful process, but it's overdue, and necessary.

Well put. What I would like to see is a public discussion around what constitutes a power dynamic large enough to make sexual advances unacceptable. Any two people have some degree of power differential, after all.

That's a VERY hard question to answer. And of course there is going to be situations where a Manager legitimately is romantically interested in a subordinate. It's going to happen, it's not even that out there of a scenario.

I think the most logical step is to get this shit out of the news cycle entirely. Accuser and accused should be out of the public eye for as long as we can possibly manage. The problem is so many mechanisms in both private corps and even civic orgs are shit, which is why women are going to the media instead because it's the only way they get listened to.

A manager relationship is the most clear cut. Much harder are the "powerful people in the industry" relationships. Is the entire industry off limits to those at the top?

Again, all of this is extremely muddy by nature and will stay that way. There are innumerable variables in every single case: the intent of the accused, their credibility, their track record regarding these issues, the circumstances of the perceived attack, the credibility of the accuser, which of them is actually telling more of the truth, anything that was documented, on and on and on.

Right now there is a revulsion in the public space because of the real bad cases like Weinstein, who had a long and seemingly well known track record for abusing his station to get sexual favors from women in his industry, and use of his connections to keep it quiet from people who would've made it public. That needs to fade away before there's any realistic chance of a rational discussion. Yes, some people are going to get caught in the crossfire and that's unfortunate, but I don't see a way around it.

This piece is congruent with Megan McArdle's "Consider the consequences of #BelieveAllWomen: It won't turn out well for women." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-15/consider-...

> It won't turn out well for women

All these shows won't turn out well for anyone under senatorial property qualifications (SPQR style, I mean).

Alas.

I can see how a pithy hashtag could be misconstrued, and I doubt that is how the hashtag was intended.

It shouldn't mean assume the accused party is guilty, it should however mean don't dismiss the injured party. If someone came up to you and said "James broke my leg" the response shouldn't be "No he didn't", but it also shouldn't be "Let's beat him up". It should be "Hey lets help you get that leg fixed up, and help you get an investigation started". What people presently face with sexual assault, especially when bringing up cases against people in power is "No, not them, that didn't happen, you're making that up because you want something." It's not limited to just women, Terry Crews was sexually assaulted in an elevator and couldn't even use his massive muscles to pop them like an orange because of how that would appear. He didn't speak out because he didn't think anyone would believe him. So when people say believe the victim it doesn't mean assume the accused party is guilty, but rather it means don't just dismiss the victim when they say someone hurt them.

In this case, intent has no bearing on its utility.

What should guide the rhetoric of social movements is, to take it back to your college GE writing class, the consideration of "writer-based" vs. "reader-based" writing. In the former, you write what you feel based on how it makes sense to you; in the latter, the intent of the writing is to convey a message in the way that the audience can comprehend it.

That hashtag will and does imply "the accused is guilty." Something that would convey the intent you describe more directly would be along the lines of #DismissNoWomen or #TakeHerSeriously.

I'll be honest I'm don't really think the hashtag was written with that much thought in mind. It seems to be more a reaction to people being told "I don't believe you" when they claim someone has assaulted them. I agree it's unclear, and reading the responses is a mixed bag. #MeToo was more direct and obvious what it was about, however I don't think it's a huge mental jump to realize that "Assume the accused is guilty" isn't a nuanced conclusion and is frankly untenable as a policy.

You'd be surprised by the extent to which governments enact policies based on a tiny, very vocal minority of people with bones to pick.

> So when people say believe the victim it doesn't mean assume the accused party is guilty, but rather it means don't just dismiss the victim when they say someone hurt them.

It does mean that. That's what the word "believe" means. I understand you're trying to say that people's intentions are to instead support all women, but that's exactly the problem. That's not what "believe all women" means.

I think that this is a natural consequence of a world in which it's impossible to have a dialogue about some things. There are some topics in which it's essentially impossible to have a reasoned discussion about things that we disagree over.

This article talks about one: it's impossible to have this discussion with most people (including friends and family) because as soon as someone questions the generally accepted opinion, they're put on the defensive (in this case: "OMG why would you defend a molester?"), and the entire discussion becomes one of trying to defend yourself, and not about what you're trying to discuss.

The same thing happened with the Googler who questioned the idea of whether the tactics used for trying to improve Google's male-vs-female pay discrepancies. Instead of anyone responding to points he made in any sort of rational way, the discussion was immediately turned into "how can you defend someone who says women are worse than men?" -- not at all the case, but a quick way to avoid a factual discussion by pigeon-holing a person who dares to deviate from the generally accepted opinion.

This has also spread to politics: it's impossible to have any sort of reasoned debate about "hey, maybe <insert your favorite politician here> isn't literally the devil across the board" -- the conversation immediately becomes one of trying to undermine the person ("OMG I can't believe you're defending Franken, a man who has assaulted women!").

It also happens when people try to debate things like whether the "Yes means yes" laws are useful, reasonable or effective; I've never seen a reasonable discussion about this (online or in real life), because if anyone questions it, they're immediately on the defensive, trying to argue that no, they're not defending rapists, and no they're not against a safe environment for women. Politically, it's brilliant marketing, because there is absolutely no way to argue against it without being immediately pigeonholed as a rape-defender, and then spending all of your time trying to dig out of a hole that you've been put into.

It's unhealthy, and I think leads to echo chambers -- no one dares to voice an opinion unless they know people will agree with them. And this ultimately makes the problem worse, I think, because without a reasonable dialogue about issues, and without being able to accept the fact that people may have logical reasons to disagree with you, I don't really understand how things will get any better.

Edited: Dialog -> dialogue

The reason we must be careful is beacuase women can suffer from mental illness just as easy as men. People with mental illness make things up.

Remember “mattress girl” or the Duke lacrosse team?

These cases ruined innocent lives, not something to be taken lightly.

No light will come from discussion of this article.

maybe so

I could not disagree more.

In a world where great injustice have happened, the solution is rarely to abandon the legal system in order to right the wrongs. Too much collateral damage.

The article encourage us to discuss how to right the wrongs without abandoning the legal system. That would be a nice discussion to have on HN.

I think most people who supported #MeToo or #BelieveAllWomen do not believe in abandoning the legal system, though they may be discussing adjusting the legal system such that we actually see more convictions of rapists, assaulters, etc where the evidence succeeds in proving the accused party guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.

If we agree to that then I think we can also agree that adjusting the legal system such that we actually see more convictions is also something which practically everyone would want. There is few crimes in any nation that has more than a single digit conviction rate. To give an example, Sweden has dedicated police units for sexual violence crime, dedicated unit of prosecutors for it, and a legal system where if there is evidence proving the accused party is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt then the accused will get jail time. It still only has 8% clearing rate, which to be fair is higher than in the US, but still where the wast wast majority fails because a lack of any evidence beyond the testimony of the accuser and accused. By a coincident, assault also has the exact same 8% clearing rate (but with a higher occurrence rate).

The question is how to get the clearing rate anything near in which people will start to feel that the guilty will be punished.

"the trickle-down effect to cases like those of Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Schwartz, Ryan Lizza and Al Franken, in which the accusations are scattered, anonymous or, as far as the public knows, very vague and unspecific, has been troubling."

This is a hot take, especially when Al Franken was literally photographed with his hands on a woman's chest. Sexual assault is bad, using your position to enable that should get you fired. Yes even if you are a democrat.

"What about the women who are the predators?" the author claims, though the #metoo was fundamentally about sexual assault, not specifically men assaulting women. I mean literally one of the heinous examples she provided was a man assaulting a man. This article is concerning, and I'm curious what their ulterior motive is.

Just to announce my bias, I'm a leftist, and I have a suspicion this is a democrat trying to gloss over the unacceptable behavior of Al Franken, who for the record I personally supported until I learned about the sexual assault.

> Al Franken was literally photographed with his hands on a woman's chest.

No, he wasn't.

Most news outlets did a really poor job being clear about what the picture was of. (Yes it was staged to look like he might have been touching; and at a glance in an airport on a muted TV many probably thought that's what he had done.)

Context and detail matter. Our TV culture is toxic in that it vastly over-simplifies and rapid fires everything.

Yes, I guess you're correct looking very closely it does appear he is merely making groping motions very close to her breasts. It changes it from sexual assault to sexual harassment which is still completely unacceptable. It still is not a behavior that any of our elected officials should be engaging in.

It's still not completely clear. I haven't been following this case specifically, so I don't know other details that may have come out, but there can easily be mitigating circumstances. Maybe they had a cat and mouse game going on all day, and she had been doing the same to him. Maybe he was merely reciprocating an inside joke. He wasn't her boss, so that sort of game wouldn't be a big deal.

I'm sure this sounds to you like I'm reaching, but I can think of many, many similar circumstances where I've done something completely innocent in context that would get me skewered if taken as a sound bite or a picture. That's why I'm slow to take the man's career.

They were on a work trip together as colleagues. If you're on a work trip, or any work event you don't make advances on your colleagues and you definitely don't make sexual jokes. IANAL but unwanted advances in the workplace constitutes sexual harassment, feigned groping jokes also count as sexual harassment. If she was making butt grope jokes at him she could similarly lose her job. It's a very bad idea all around and you shouldn't do it. Just because someone doesn't press charges because they're having fun with it doesn't mean you're not walking on insanely thin ice.

> If you're on a work trip, or any work event you don't make advances on your colleagues and you definitely don't make sexual jokes.

Different cultures are different. Sex isn't inherently evil or even taboo. Military guys hit each other in the balls on a regular basis.

The only absolute here is that you shouldn't continue some behavior you know is unwelcome. It's entirely possible Franken was abiding by this rule.

It's law in the US, and he is a United States Senator. Just because people in the military don't report sexual assault for being whacked in the balls doesn't mean one couldn't, or shouldn't. Sex isn't evil, but sex is often used in the workplace to coerce, intimidate and violate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with sex, there is absolutely something wrong with violating consent. People have the right to their bodily autonomy, some people even have strict religious codes that they've been working all their life to follow. Some people commit suicide after a sexual assault. If you want to hit your own balls that's fine, if someone gives you express permission to hit their balls that's also fine (though you should probably get it in writing), but if you go up and down the streets hitting people in the balls you're going to get arrested.

This response is entirely irrelevant to the argument. No one is defending violating consent. I'll just bow out now.

Do you have any friends? Are you a robot? This kind of thinking is completely outside of any kind of consideration for camaraderie or connectedness with a team or group of people.

In terms of the Franken stuff specifically. The woman was known to make jokes similar to this. How can it be harassing if she wasn't even awake for it? Not to mention harassment is sustained, not a single instance. He didn't touch her, and she wasn't aware of what he was doing. The photograph is in no way showing her in a negative light. As far as I'm concerned, he did nothing wrong. It just seems like good natured humor that might be skirting along being inappropriate, but only for people with a stick up their ass.

> IANAL but unwanted advances in the workplace constitutes sexual harassment

No, it doesn’t.

Asking a colleague someone on a date may be an “unwanted advance” but that is not sexual harassment. Even asking someone on a date and having them decline multiple times is not sexual harassment, so long as the asker is polite and respectful about it.

Sexual harassment is a fairly high legal bar in the USA. You can sue for just about anything, but if you want to win you need evidence of truly bad behavior.

Which is as it should be; convicting based solely on the accuser’s testimony is not fair no matter the crime.

Source: recent all-hands corporate training session held by an employment attorney

edit: To clear the air, I completely agree regarding the statement. "convicting based solely on the accuser’s testimony is not fair no matter the crime."

it's not always so clear cut though, for example if they decide to quit as a result of the advances, then it could count as sexual harassment due to the adverse employment decision. Admittedly you're completely right about winning. You're not going to win a lawsuit because Sally politely asked you out once, but maybe if she "politely" badgered you every single time she spoke to the point where you were not willing to work with that person any more, and that caused you to get demoted.

Usually someone has to be a dirtbag, but some people think they're not dirtbags when they totally are dirtbags. That's when HR disasters happen and the accused weave some tale about how they were totally innocent when in reality they were shitty people creating a hostile workplace otherwise the jury would never have voted the way they did.

bob: "Oh but you said asking out was okay" HR: "yeah but uh your version of asking out was putting your balls on their desk and saying 'hey babe you know you want this'" bob:"Yeah but there was nothing rude about that, babe is a compliment"

bob@thePub: "I can't believe they fired me you ask a girl out and all the sudden it's sexual harassment"

you know who I'm talking about.

He had his hands hovering over a woman's chest, not touching it.

I had only seen the photo and not read the investigations around it. In the photo it was unclear as to whether he was or was not touching. I'll concede I may have been wrong about that but still stand by the premise that you should not be a US senator if you cannot avoid sexually harassing US citizens (joke or otherwise).

Quite right. Elected officials should conduct themselves in a manner which could never be construed as anything other than sheer professionalism.

I mean that seems a bit hyperbolic. I'm merely saying that it's reasonable to expected elected officials to not engage in criminal behavior.

True. He also forcibly kissed an unwilling woman, trying to force his tongue into her mouth.

Franken was creepy. We need to get rid of creeps on both sides of the political aisle.

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