The problem, from what I can tell, is that many men only understand hard rules. It used to be that if you had good intentions, you could follow a clear set of (flawed) social rules and you were "safe". But there aren't clear rules to distinguish between flirting and minor harassment; the difference isn't based on exactly which words are said, but on understanding what another person is and isn't feeling. Navigating those lines requires emotional intelligence, and lots of men have underdeveloped emotional intelligence, and are used to relying on do's and don'ts in its place. In today's climate, those people are basically navigating a mine field without a metal detector. So it's understandable that they would just avoid the field altogether.

I think this is mostly a social problem - for a long time men simply weren't taught emotional intelligence while they were growing up. There's definitely been some progress made lately, but that doesn't help past generations. I don't know what the solution is for those people, but right now everyone's talking past each other and I think it's because this hasn't been articulated. Can emotional nuances even really scale to professional contexts? I don't know. Maybe. I sympathize with people who have had uncomfortable experiences within the existing set of social guidelines, but maybe what we need is a new set of rules for those settings. The fact is that there are men out there who want to do the right thing, but suddenly find its precise definition bewildering and hard to follow. If something can be done to alleviate that, it should be.

For the record: the above only covers men who find themselves under fire despite good intentions. There are absolutely others who consciously and systematically abuse women. Though Harvey Weinstein hasn't been officially convicted yet, the evidence is strong that he's one of the latter. The problem, though, is that the public conversation lumps the two categories together.