Touching someone's butt or invading personal space without permission is wrong.
I never dated a girl from work, but if I was interested in someone, I'll wait for the girl to initiate the encounter. Why?
Now it seems that even trying to flirt could be interpreted as harassing.
I wonder if it will end up like that eventually. Women will be the ones to pursue the encounter because males will be too afraid of crossing a line
No there will always be men willing to tread the line; some will fail and other will succeed. Food for thought from Zizek:
>A tension between rights and prohibitions determines heterosexual seduction in our politically correct times. Or, to put it differently, there is no seduction which cannot at some point be construed as intrusion or harassment because there will always be a point when one has to expose oneself and ‘make a pass’. But, of course, seduction doesn’t involve incorrect harassment throughout. When you make a pass, you expose yourself to the Other (the potential partner), and her reaction will determine whether what you just did was harassment or a successful act of seduction. There is no way to tell in advance what her response will be (which is why assertive women often despise ‘weak’ men, who fear to take the necessary risk). This holds even more in our pc times: the pc prohibitions are rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process. Isn’t the seducer’s art to accomplish the violation in such a way that, afterwards, by its acceptance, any suggestion of harassment has disappeared?
In a different situation, where you and this person have been chatting, bantering about silly things, etc., they might be open to casual flirtation, since it's now not just coming out of left field... and you could still be wrong about how it will be received.
Been there, done that, apologized immediately and we both moved on from it to stay friends.
But that's the difference: realizing that you did something unwelcome and genuinely apologizing for it. Most reasonable people will be accepting of that behavior.
Go to a bar. Or a reading group. Or Tinder. Far less likely for something bad to happen.
Work seems like a far better place to meet a partner, you get to know who they are without the haste of the other mediums you mentioned.
I've seen highly male environments redefine the bar of acceptable behavior on the fly before and its not pretty, the female targets have no way of getting it recognized let alone shutdown.
its a culture problem. The team needs to have that culture drummed in from the beginning, its one reason why enforced quota's actually do help a large amount. when its not an unnaturally large number of males its a hell of a lot harder for the culture to "reset" its bar of acceptable behavior.
The problems with making advances in the workplace are that it’s really not the place for it and if you’re going to do it you better be certain it’s in an appropriate way and that they feel comfortable rejecting your advances. Since those are hard things to be certain about it’s probably better to avoid it entirely at work.
I don’t see how that changes what I said.
Taking some statistic about where people met doesn’t invalidate what I’ve said.
Does it tell you if the 1/4 actually began by asking the other out during a meeting?
I’ve dated someone at work, but our relationship started outside of work and we didn’t work in the same department.
It can be true that’s it not a great idea to ask someone out at work in many circumstances and that many people first meet their partner at work.
It always HAS been harassing.
It is only after 40 years of victims' complaints being minimized, mocked, and dismissed is it finally starting to barely take hold that this is not OK.
Flirting is literally sexualizing the work environment. Joking with someone is not sexualizing, but joking with them as an attempt to gain favor to date and subsequently fuck them is.