Tag: Sexual harassment

  • You’re going to want to eat that porterhouse steak

    People have been saying for weeks it’s not just Hollywood and journalism and broadcasting, it’s also the less glam places where most people work. Like factories for instance; like automobile factories; like Ford.

    The jobs were the best they would ever have: collecting union wages while working at Ford, one of America’s most storied companies. But inside two Chicago plants, the women found menace.

    Bosses and fellow laborers treated them as property or prey. Men crudely commented on their breasts and buttocks; graffiti of penises was carved into tables, spray-painted onto floors and scribbled onto walls. They groped women, pressed against them, simulated sex acts or masturbated in front of them. Supervisors traded better assignments for sex and punished those who refused.

    That was a quarter-century ago. Today, women at those plants say they have been subjected to many of the same abuses. And like those who complained before them, they say they were mocked, dismissed, threatened and ostracized. One described being called “snitch bitch,” while another was accused of “raping the company.” Many of the men who they say hounded them kept their jobs.

    There were lawsuits and an EEOC investigation in the 1990s, there was a $22 million settlement and a promise by Ford to do better. In 2017…

    In August, the federal agency that combats workplace discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, reached a $10 million settlement with Ford for sexual and racial harassment at the two Chicago plants. A lawsuit is still making its way through the courts.

    Will there be more lawsuits and EEOC agreements in 2037? Will anything ever change?

    It certainly doesn’t seem as if the culture is up for changing right now, notwithstanding all the toppled gropers and rapists. Trump is in the White House and porn is on many workplace computers, so why would anything change?

    Men still stake their claims today, according to workers. Some women say they know how to shut down unwanted advances — “I don’t play,” they snap — while others say they have never encountered harassment. But James Jones, a union representative, said the problem should not be minimized, describing the attitude of many men at the factories: “You’re going to want to eat that porterhouse steak.”

    Sigh. That’s an attitude that’s been reinforced by popular culture for generations – women are this Tempting Alluring Thing and men have every right to do their best to consume them. What the women may want comes into it only as resistance to be overcome.

    As Ms. Wright settled in, she asked a co-worker to explain something: Why were men calling out “peanut butter legs” when she arrived in the morning? He demurred, but she insisted. “He said, ‘Well, peanut butter,’” Ms. Wright recalled. “‘Not only is it the color of your legs, but it’s the kind of legs you like to spread.’”

    You’re going to want to eat that porterhouse steak.

    As the affronts continued — lewd comments, repeated come-ons, men grabbing their crotches and moaning every time she bent over — Ms. Wright tried to ignore them.

    And what is that about? What is shouting “peanut butter legs” about, what is grabbing their crotches and moaning about? That’s hostility more than sex, or hostility entangled with sex, hostility because sex is not forthcoming plus hostility because hostility, aka misogyny. No gurlz allowed, get out of our factory, bitches are stealing our jobs, yadda yadda.

    The union didn’t help because the men are in the union too, of course, so it was all just “hey you should be flattered.”

    There’s a lot more. Well done the Times.

  • So that women are not silenced on the new streets of social media

    MP Yvette Cooper in the Guardian on social media harassment of women:

    The comedian Kate Smurthwaite received 2,000 abusive tweets for objecting when a men’s rights activist called her “darling” in a TV debate. Some called her “bitch”, “slut”, “harpy”; some were explicit threats of violence and rape.

    I remember that. It was The Big Question, and it was Milo Yiannopoulos who called her “darling” in a patronizingly insulting way.

    After going on Question Time, the historian Mary Beard received hundreds of messages attacking her appearance. And the scientist Emily Grossman received so many hostile, sexist tweets when she talked about sexism in science, she was forced to take a break from social media.

    I remember those, too. I’ve blogged about all this. A lot.

    But it’s not just public figures. I’ve heard stories of teenagers who have stopped going into college, women who have withdrawn from social media or been forced to change their work after being bombarded with online attacks.

    And, she points out, we shouldn’t stand for it. We all use social media, and abuse shouldn’t be the price we have to pay.

    [W]e can’t ignore this issue any more. A century ago, the suffragettes fought against the silencing of women in public and political life. In the 70s and 80s feminists began the campaign against the violence, threats or harassment that silenced women in the home or on the streets – founding the first refuges and organising marches to “reclaim the night”.

    Each time, campaigning women challenged and changed culture. We need to do the same again now so women are not silenced on the new streets of social media, so no one is drowned out by bullying and abuse.

    It’s time for women and men to stand together against sexist abuse, misogyny, racism and violent threats online – so the web can be the amazing democratic space we need it to be. It is time to reclaim the internet.

    Sign me up.

  • It all depends on when you start the clock

    Katy Murphy and Thomas Peele at Inside Bay Area ask if the “swift” departure of Geoff Marcy signals “a profound shift in how society reacts and responds to sexual harassment and abuse on campus and in corporate boardrooms?”

    No, it doesn’t, because it wasn’t “swift” at all. It took years. See astrokatey on Twitter:

    Katey the Astronomer ‏@astrokatey Oct 16
    @dalcantonjd 3 years to compile stories. 3 to find ppl willing to come forward. Hours of phone convos about strategy. It succeeded.

    Three stinkin’ years, and all that hard work. This is no swift departure.

    Back to Murphy and Peele:

    But in a flash last week, the white-hot glare of social media revealed the darker side of the UC Berkeley professor, a titan in the field who sexually harassed aspiring female scientists. And just as notably, it exposed how many of his colleagues and institutions appeared to know about his behavior — but were either too intimidated or indifferent to stop him.

    After years of inaction, it took just five days for an international firestorm to force Marcy to resign from his prestigious posts at UC Berkeley and the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project to study extraterrestrial intelligence.

    But that’s just it – there were years of inaction. It took years plus five days.

    The question many are asking now is: Is Marcy’s undoing simply a rare example of the stars aligning? Or does his swift departure signal a profound shift in how society reacts and responds to sexual harassment and abuse on campus and in corporate boardrooms?

    No. No, it doesn’t. Not at all, any more than Mark Oppenheimer’s reporting on Michael Shermer or the string of accusations against Bill Cosby did. All this tells us is that eventually, if enough people are willing to put in a lot of work and take a lot of risk, maybe one harasser will feel compelled to resign…at age 61, when most of his harassing days are in his past.

    What’s so extraordinary about Marcy’s case is that once it made headlines “so many people across the board were able to publicly say, ‘I know this guy is in the running to be a Nobel laureate, and I don’t think he should be in our field,’ ” said Robin Nelson, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York’s Skidmore College and who published a study last year on sexual harassment in academia.

    I don’t see anything extraordinary in that at all. Once it made headlines, it was dead easy to say that. Once it made headlines it was safe to say that. Once it made headlines it was even popular to say that.

    Nelson said she senses a groundswell of changing attitudes over sexual harassment behind the digital expressions of moral outrage over #GeoffMarcy. Ever-greater numbers of women in the workforce, growing activism against campus sexual assault and high-profile exposés of rape and harassment in the military have shined a bright light on similar issues, Nelson said.

    Meh. It’s not as if this is a new issue.

    Two women said in interviews last week with this newspaper they tried to report Marcy for similar behavior when he taught at San Francisco State University in the mid-1990s. Both were sickened to see that he was found to have harmed other students at Berkeley — yet allowed to keep his position.

    Preet Dalziel, who now lives in Walnut Creek and teaches at a Bay Area high school, said she worked for Marcy as a graduate student; he was also her master’s thesis adviser. At first, Dalziel said, she tried to ignore off-color comments and back rubs he would give to other students. But one day, as they were looking at code on his office computer, she said, he touched her breast.

    So she tried to report him – and was shut down. A classmate made the same attempt and got the same response. Dalziel had wanted to work at NASA, but after that experience she felt discouraged, and pessimistic about getting a reference from Marcy, so she left the field. Geoff Marcy stomped out her dream because he wanted to grab her tit. Nice guy.

    She said she hopes the outcry over UC Berkeley’s response forces universities to take their students’ complaints more seriously.

    “It just kind of hurts me because it’s not right,” she said. “I don’t want professors to feel that they can get away with this stuff because they have tenure or they did something great.”

    Yes but you see that’s exactly it – the stars can get away with it because nobody wants to lose the stars. Nobody wants to alienate the Bill Cosby, the Michael Shermer, the Geoff Marcy.

    At the UC Santa Cruz Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics’ “Evening with the Stars,” celebrating the university’s 50th anniversary in August, Marcy was “the star,” lecturing on behalf of his alma mater at the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. As for the brilliant professor’s darker side?

    “We didn’t know,” said Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, chair of UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

    Yet others, like Harvard astronomy professor John Asher Johnson, who was one of Marcy’s key assistants at Berkeley, revealed on a blog post last week that his “inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest ‘open secrets’ in astrophysics.”

    So, is it plausible that no one at UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics had a clue? No, it’s not.

    Maybe the department chair is relying on a lawyerly meaning of “know” – they didn’t know for sure; they knew of allegations but they didn’t know for sure they were true. That of course is entirely plausible…but since the lawyerly meaning is not the only one in play, it’s not altogether honest.

    Marcy enjoyed “considerable power” in the field, Johnson wrote. “Underground networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn’t, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims.”

    Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said when she attended UC Santa Cruz in 2005 she was told as she pursued her career to “stay away” from Marcy. She’s passed the same advice to others.

    So people at UC Santa Cruz warned her in 2005, but the chair in 2015 said they didn’t know. Didn’t know what? That Marcy was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Or that women were warned to stay away from Marcy if they didn’t want to be groped?

    Deniability can be so helpful to department chairs and studio executives.

    The “current academic hierarchical structure ensures that predators like him have significant safety once they enter the higher ranks,” said Prescod-Weinstein, the MIT postdoctoral fellow. “It is very easy for professors to get away with racist and sexist behavior — and they do — because junior researchers don’t have the power to push back.”

    Alex Zalkin, a San Diego lawyer representing three former Berkeley students suing the university over the way it handled sexual assault allegations they filed, said the light punishment Marcy received is indicative of campus culture that gives predators a pass.

    “There is an institutional problem,” he said, that is similar to what his clients faced in trying to force investigations. The women, he said, “aren’t surprised” about how Marcy was treated. “I am not optimistic anything will change.”

    I’m not either. I’d like to be, but I’m not. Universities aren’t going to become eager to get rid of their stars overnight.

    But Nelson, the Skidmore College professor, said Marcy’s remarkable downfall could send a bigger message to powerful men everywhere.

    “What this story kind of tells us,” she said, “is if you get caught and this catches up with you, your career will end in a week.”

    But only if you get caught, and the catching takes literally years – so your career will end “in a week” plus 30-odd years.

  • She said no

    The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us that astronomy colleagues have been trying hard to get Geoff Marcy to stop being a creep for a long time.

    Ruth Murray-Clay, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara who earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics on the system’s Berkeley campus in 2008, says it was in 2004 that she first decided to approach Mr. Marcy about what she saw as his inappropriate behavior with young women. Ms. Murray-Clay was the graduate-student representative to Berkeley’s astronomy faculty at the time and was meeting with students about putting together an annual holiday play in which they would poke fun at faculty members.

    “Someone suggested putting in a joke about Geoff chasing undergraduates, and the room got really quiet and uncomfortable,” says Ms. Murray-Clay. “I knew that if this was something that couldn’t even be joked about, I needed to go have a conversation with him.”

    She’d already heard several stories about him and his creepy touching (aka “inappropriate” touching, which is a nice way of saying creepy). So she talked to him – and he said the young students who told the stories had misinterpreted his creepy touching, but also that he would change and it wouldn’t happen again. (So he told himself: no more creepy touching, because they will misinterpret it.) (Or he told Murray-Clay he was telling himself that.)

    But it did happen again. Repeatedly. So much misinterpreting.

    Ms. Murray-Clay went back to talk to Mr. Marcy several times about his behavior before she left Berkeley, in 2008, she says, and so did other students. She also complained to the astronomy-department chairman, in 2005, and to Berkeley’s Title IX office, in 2006. But, she says, nothing happened.

    It so often is nothing that happens, isn’t it.

    Female faculty members and students have complained for decades of discrimination and harassment in male-dominated scientific fields. In astronomy a 2013 survey found that 29 percent of assistant professors, 21 percent of associates, and just 15 percent of full professors were female.

    Gender complaints are not limited to science. Female philosophers have also cited a hostile climate for women, and universities have recently removed or forced out several male philosophers following complaints of sexual harassment and assault.

    Well, if you get depressed about it, just have a chat with Christina Hoff Sommers, or watch some of her videos for the American Enterprise Institute; she’ll tell you it’s all exaggerated.

    Or you could check out Michael Shermer on Twitter – he’ll tell you you’re making victimhood your identity and you should quit it.

    Michael Shermer ‏@michaelshermer

    “In a victimhood subculture, the only way to achieve status is to either be a victim or defend victims.” @JonHaidt https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nation-wimps/201510/where-did-colleges-go-wrong …

    Take note SJWs: “When victimhood becomes your identity you will be weak for the rest of your life.” @JonHaidt https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/nation-wimps/201510/where-did-colleges-go-wrong …

    Back to the Chronicle:

    Joan T. Schmelz, who just completed her second term as chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, characterizes Berkeley’s treatment of Mr. Marcy as a “slap on the wrist.”

    In 2010, after learning of complaints about Mr. Marcy at a party following that year’s astronomical-society meeting, Ms. Schmelz quietly began working with women who felt he had harassed them. At that party, in Seattle, several people saw Mr. Marcy hanging out with one of his female undergraduates, buying her drinks, touching her, and then leaving the party with her in a taxi.

    “A small group of people decided this was really important, and we contacted the people who had been harassed,” says Ms. Schmelz, a professor in the department of physics and materials science at the University of Memphis. “We got more and more names, and finally four decided to file complaints after they had left Berkeley.”

    As she talked to all these people, she realized Marcy had a pattern, a “play book.”

    “I heard this so many times,” she says, “that I realized it was standard practice for him.”

    Mr. Marcy, she says, would isolate a female student in his lab or find a way to talk to her privately on the campus, away from others. During the talk, he would make a slightly inappropriate comment, touch or kiss the student, and then apologize, according to what women told her. Depending on the reaction he got, she says, he would either back off or take another step forward. Students, she says, complained that he had given them rides home, taken them out to coffee, and told them he and his wife had an open relationship. The four women who complained, she says, are “just the tip of the iceberg.”

    He got away with it, she says, because “people don’t trust the system to protect them.”

    Of course they don’t. For one thing the system is stuffed with people who approach the subject the way Sommers and Shermer do. For another thing universities love their stars, and Marcy is a star.

    This summer, after Berkeley had concluded its investigation of the complaints against Mr. Marcy and found him responsible for violating its policy on sexual harassment, Ms. Murray-Clay says Mr. Marcy asked if he could meet with her. He drove five hours, she says, from Berkeley to Santa Barbara, where he asked her to contact Ms. Schmelz and other members of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy to say that his behavior toward women in the field had changed. But Ms. Murray-Clay doesn’t find him convincing anymore. She said no.

    Ten hours of driving, wasted. Of course there are also all those women who left astronomy, but oh well, they’re only women.

  • Social consciousness is part of his identity

    From a long piece on Geoff Marcy in the New York Times in May 2014:

    Dr. Marcy lives high in the Berkeley hills with Dr. Kegley, “wife, chemist, goddess,” as he puts it on his website — an environmental chemist and chief executive of the consulting firm Pesticide Research Institute. Their backyard is home to beehives decorated with astronomical symbols, and a flock of chickens, leading the son of one of his graduate students to call him “Chicken Geoff.”

    Social consciousness is part of his identity. At Santa Cruz he ran around plastering “Men Against Rape” stickers over nude pinups in the engineering and optics shops.

    Hmmm.

  • The Serial Harasser’s Playbook

    A former graduate student of Geoff Marcy’s has more details.

    Based on the stories I’ve heard from women who don’t know each other, but share eerily similar experiences, I put together a Serial Harasser’s Playbook. Most of the stories I heard before writing that post were related to one specific colleague: my former adviser Geoff Marcy. Thus, the Serial Harasser’s Playbook I posted is seemingly Geoff’s playbook. To be clear, many harassers employ such a strategy. But Geoff is the person most commonly named by targets with whom I’ve spoken.

    After [I published] the Playbook post, most of the people who contacted me with additional stories named a single person. That person was the target of a six-month Title IX investigation at UC Berkeley. That investigation report, which I have seen, concluded that, “The evidence gathered supports the conclusion that the totality of [Marcy]’s behavior violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies.” Violations of that university policy de facto are violations of the federal law on which the policy is based, as articulated by Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Berkeley Astronomy faculty were unaware of the conclusions of the report because their former and current chair declined to inform them.

    …

     

    After multiple complainants testified about Geoff’s behavior, he was given a warning. Until he was recently asked to step down, he was on the scientific organizing committee of the upcoming Extreme Solar Systems III meeting. He was recently the featured lecturer at UC Santa Cruz’s “Evening with the Stars” program. Following the findings of UC Berkeley’s Title IX investigation, he was free to continue to exert his considerable power within the community.

    Geoff recently posted an open letter that is, in my view, as vague as it is calculated. But what it does do is remove any doubt about his actions and guilt. This should be surprising to very few researchers in the exoplanets community, particularly those of my generation or younger. Geoff’s inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest “open secrets” at any exoplanets or AAS meeting. “Underground” networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn’t, and cognizant members of the community receive additional emails, phone calls and Facebook messages from new victims.

    It’s all so horribly familiar, isn’t it? The famous guy, the open secret, the networks of women warning each other. The long history of people in charge doing absolutely nothing about it.

    In 2013 I received tenure. Leading up to my tenure decision, I decided that I would use my position, voice and male privilege to finally do something about the open secret—Geoff’s long con of holding the community in fear to provide himself cover to continue harassing our junior female colleagues. Yes, I have greatly benefited from Geoff’s letters over the years. But his publication record shows that he has benefitted from my scientific productivity. In 2013 I figured we were square, and I effectively ended our 13-year collaboration.

    I’m ashamed that I didn’t speak out sooner. I hate that academia’s power structure, which allows a single phone call from a senior member to sink a person’s career, so often forces junior people into silence for fear of losing their jobs. For this reason I am in awe of the bravery of the women who spoke out all the more; they were far braver than I and other male astronomers have been over the years.

    With today’s news story, I hope Geoff’s long con of the astronomy community has finally come to an end.

    It certainly seems unlikely that it can continue as before, given all the discussion I’m seeing.

    That said, and if Geoff is finally brought to justice, it will only be a partial victory for our community. I sincerely hope that we recognize that Geoff wielded a highly effective weapon in his use of sexual harassment. His expertise in harassment, honed over the decades, ruined many promising careers; pushed women away from exoplanets in particular, and astronomy generally; and in so doing set progress in our subfield back in ways that we’ll still be grappling with in a decade hence. But it will be important to recognize that Geoff is just one of many serial harassers in our field of science, and that other fields are also widely infected (cf Clancy, Nelson, Rutherford & Hinde 2014). Plus, it’s not just the serial harassers. It’s also the “everyday” harassment that women face in their departmental hallways, astro-ph discussions, scientific conferences, and committee meetings. All of this is aided and abetted by a vacuum of leadership at universities like UC Berkeley, which is dealing with a class-action lawsuit as well as a civil lawsuit by many former students for mishandling their complaints.

    Sexual harassment is just one very powerful aspect of the systemic sexism that pervades our daily lives.

    It seems astonishing that any women at all go into the field.

  • “We meant you no harm”

    The CBC reports a student union leader at the University of Ottawa, Anne-Marie Roy, was anonymously sent screenshots of a Facebook conversation about her among five male students who are also student leaders. It was an unpleasant conversation from her point of view.

    The online conversation — a copy of which was obtained by The Canadian Press — included references to sexual activities some of the five individuals wrote they would like to engage in with Roy, including oral and anal sex, as well as suggestions that she suffered from sexually transmitted diseases.

    “Someone punish her with their shaft,” wrote one of the individuals at one point. “I do believe that with my reputation I would destroy her,” wrote another.

    After confronting a member of the conversation in person, Roy said she received an emailed apology from all five men which emphasized that their comments were never actual threats against her.

    “While it doesn’t change the inadmissible nature of our comments, we wish to assure you we meant you no harm,” the apology, written in French, read.

    Ohhhhh you know what? Fuck you. The comments are the harm. They’re in writing.

    Roy decided she would bring it up at a Feb. 23 meeting of the student federation’s Board of Administration, which oversees the affairs of the student union.

    Her plan was to distribute copies of the conversation to the board’s members while asking the board to move a motion to “condemn” those who engaged in the discussion, two of whom were board members. The other three were involved with organizing campus events.

    After learning of Roy’s plan, four of the five individuals sent her a letter warning her that the conversation was a private one and that sharing it with others would amount to a violation of their rights.

    A violation of their rights! They threatened her to make her shut up about their conversation about her – their conversation about her that degraded her. Their rights. Great godalmighty.

    The one participant in the conversation who is not threatening legal action said the entire incident has been a huge learning experience.

    “There was some conversation with some pretty violent, like, some pretty demeaning words,” said Pat Marquis. “I didn’t say much in that conversation, but I didn’t stop it either.”

    Marquis was a vice-president in the student union until he resigned this weekend, reportedly after receiving hate mail and threats related to the conversation. He said he planned to meet with Roy to “discuss ways to move forward.”

    “There’s a lot of boys’ talk and locker room talk that can seem pretty normal at the time, but then when you actually look back at it, it can be offensive,” he said.

    “I would never say that kind of thing out in the public but when it was a private conversation I guess it slipped my mind that that’s really not acceptable.”

    It’s good that he learned, at least.

    He gave himself a helpful clue: he would never say that kind of thing out in the public. Well why not? Think about that for a minute and it might become clearer why it’s not acceptable in private either.

    In a statement issued on Saturday, the University of Ottawa said it was “appalled” by the online conversation which it said demonstrated attitudes about women and sexual aggression that had “no place on campus, or anywhere else.” It said it was working with Roy to develop “an appropriate response.”

    The entire incident has at least one observer saying it’s clear universities need to have a more open discussion about how students talk about each other, even in private.

    “I do think it’s a form of cyberbullying even though she wasn’t a direct recipient of those messages on Facebook,” said Wanda Cassidy, associate professor at Simon Fraser University who researches cyberbullying in schools and universities.

    “There needs to be a lot more conversation around those kinds of behaviour and comments that are made demeaning towards women.”

    The footprint that such comments can leave on the Internet should also make individuals think twice before sending demeaning or hurtful messages, she said.

    “Whereas 20 years ago those guys might have been out sitting around having a beer and talking in that way, it is quite different when you’re putting in print, because it’s there as a record.”

    Yes it is, and yes it is.

    Update:

    Another report says the students dropped their legal threats and resigned their posts as student representatives.

    Marquis, Larochelle, Giroux and Fournier-Simard were all elected student representatives who resigned from their posts over the weekend after a mounting outcry from their peers. Tremblay volunteered on occasion with the university’s Faculty of Arts student association but was not an elected member.

    …

    The University of Ottawa said it was “appalled” at the conversation and is working with Roy on “an appropriate response.”

    After a brief conversation with the university’s president on Monday, Roy said the institution was considering a campus audit on issues related to student safety.

    Good. This shit isn’t ok.

  • What is “toxic feminism”?

    Yesterday was happy new year, so it was a time for new beginnings and startings over. (But was it? Was it? Was it really? No, not really, but maybe starting a new calendar is enough to make it seem as if it is.) One starting over was that of Bora Zivkovic, who returned to Twitter for the first time since October 16. His first new beginning tweet heralded a blog post by Anton Zuiker, the co-founder (with Bora Z) of Science Online.

    Bora Zivkovic @BoraZ

    From @mistersugar, the best friend one can ever hope to have: Roots and bitters http://mistersugar.com/2014/01/01/roots-and-bitters … Happy New Year!

    Roots and bitters is a long (5500 words according to Zuiker) post about…Bora Zivkovic, mostly, with some heavily “literary” digressions.

    All very friendly, and thus…rather alarming to people who were horrified by the (undenied) revelations about Bora Z in October. Back then he said he was wrong. Yesterday it was just – “Hi I’m back!”

    He too did a New Year blog post. It was a year in review post. Here’s the part that covers October and after:

    I went to Belgrade in October, but did not yet have time to write much about it.

    Also in October I moved my blog from its spot at Scientific American back to its home here. For the three years that I was there – the best job with the best colleagues in the best magazine ever – I (as an author on several blogs there) accumulated 1,803,619 visits and 2,214,082 pageviews, which placed me at the all-time #2 spot right behind Katie Harmon (this probably still holds and will take a while for someone else to displace the two of us from the top two spots). If one looks at just my own, somewhat neglected A Blog Around The Clock, it collected 534,460 visits and 640,916 pageviews while it was on their site, if you want to do some mental calculation and add that to the Sitemeter numbers visible here on the sidebar.

    After two and a half months of hiatus, I will continue blogging here. What about? I don’t know, I’ll have to play by ear and see how it develops and where it goes. I expect to write about science, about media, and more. Personal stories? Perhaps. We’ll see. I recently had plenty of time to be offline and read actual, physical books, so I may write some book reviews.

    Hang in there, and let’s see in which new direction this blog goes over the next year. And thank you all for reading my stuff over the years – I promise, there will be more, and I hope it will get better.

    Until then, though, make sure to read this beautiful post by Anton Zuiker, a perfect start for the new year – Roots and bitters: What to do when a friend hands you gentian.

    Nothing about why he moved his blog from Scientific American. Nothing about why the hiatus. And then at the end, a link to a post in praise of himself, by the co-founder of Science Online, which he left because of the revelations of last October.

    And then, there was a later tweet yesterday, after people had had time to read Zuiker’s long post.

    Bora Zivkovic @BoraZ

    Happy to see so many people (with just a couple of exceptions) deeply moved by this morning’s @mistersugar‘s post: http://mistersugar.com/2014/01/01/roots-and-bitters …

    And the cherry on the cake –

    Amy Alkon @amyalkon

    .@mistersugar@BoraZ What happened was said to be sex harassment (despite not meeting standards) & assumed to be true. Toxic feminism ruled

    Toxic feminism. It’s “toxic feminism” for writers who are women to want it to be their writing that is getting them hired and encouraged, not the convenient slot between their legs.

    The same old battle, just another round.

  • One of 18 women

    It’s everywhere. There’s the mayor of San Diego, for another example.

    A San Diego parks employee who says Mayor Bob Filner put her in a headlock and rubbed against her breasts at a public event this year filed a $500,000 battery and sexual harassment claim against the city on Monday, her attorney said.

    Stacy McKenzie, one of 18 women who accuse Filner of making unwanted sexual advances, is the second in two months to initiate legal action against the embattled politician. Her claim is the precursor to a lawsuit.

    Filner, a former Democratic congressman who was elected mayor of California’s second-largest city last year, announced on Friday that he would step down effective August 30 as part of a settlement with the city over a lawsuit filed by his former press secretary, Irene McCormack Jackson.

    So that’s not actually a perk of the job? But but but – he’s a leader – an alpha male – a prominent man – aren’t they supposed to have guaranteed access to lots of nooky?

    McKenzie, a parks department district manager who has worked for the city for 32 years, alleged that the mayor touched her inappropriately during a public event in April.

    “Filner, who was attending the event as a dignitary, sexually battered Ms. McKenzie after asking her on a date when he pursued her across a city park where families were gathered, grabbed her from behind and put her into a headlock with his right arm rubbing across her breasts and his left arm rubbing her upper arm,” her attorney, Dan Gilleon, said in a statement.

    In her written claim, McKenzie accuses the city of failing to prevent sexual harassment by Filner or to warn of his “predatory nature.” The claim seeks $500,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.

    “Although the city attorney previously stated he ‘will not under any circumstance represent Bob Filner,’ he has now switched corners and is defending the mayor,” Gilleon said.

    “We believe downplaying Filner’s conduct is not only legally wrong, it also sends the wrong message for a high profile, elected official to minimize the very type of sexual battery he has previously condemned,” Gilleon said.

    Yes, it does. This wrong message thing is also everywhere, and it’s a bad bad bad thing.

  • Passim

    It’s everywhere.

    It’s in the RCMP.

    A Mountie whose harassment complaints against the RCMP prompted legislation to modernize so-called bad apples within the force says her employer is moving to dismiss her.

    Cpl. Catherine Galliford says she received a letter saying the RCMP is seeking to discharge her because she’s unable to do her job.

    Galliford, who has filed a civil lawsuit against the RCMP alleging years of bullying and sexual abuse, has been on sick leave since 2006.

    Let’s follow the details. The CBC reports in November 2011.

    CBC News has learned that one of B.C.’s highest profile Mounties says she’s suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after years of sexual harassment.

    Cpl. Catherine Galliford was the face of the B.C. RCMP for years. During her tenure as the RCMP’s spokesperson, Galliford announced the arrest of Robert William Pickton and revealed charges had been laid in the Air India bombing.

    But in an internal RCMP complaint, Galliford makes serious allegations about misconduct inside the RCMP. She shared the complaint with CBC News and spoke with reporter Natalie Clancy about her claims.

    “Everything that came out of his [a supervisor’s] mouth was sexual,” Galliford said. “If I had a dime for every time one of my bosses asked me to sit on his knee, I’d be on a yacht in the Bahamas right now.”

    Galliford says she faced constant sexual advances from several senior officers from the moment she graduated from the RCMP Academy in 1991.

    But surely she just reported them and it was all taken care of, right? Because that’s what always happens, right?

    Galliford says the command and control structure at the RCMP means Mounties are instructed to do as they’re told, or risk getting reprimanded.

    “If they can’t screw you, they are going to screw you over. And that’s what it became like and so I started to normalize the harassment because I didn’t know what else to do,” she said.

    “It just got to the point that after I had about 16 years of service, I broke. I completely broke.”

    In 2007, Galliford joined the ranks of 225 B.C. Mounties who are currently off duty on sick leave.

    “I’ve been off work for four years now and I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia and chemical dependency on occasion,” Galliford said.

    Oh. Well…uh…it’s too late now! Yeah, that’s it. She waited too long.

    Mike Webster, a consulting police psychologist in private practice, believes Galliford’s deteriorating health has little to do with the murder files she worked on, and is directly linked to the harassment she faced from colleagues on the job.

    “I don’t think there’s a female in the outfit who hasn’t been approached sexually,” Webster said.

    “The way her employer handled it afterwards is likely to have had a greater effect on her present mental state than what she went through initially.”

    Oh. Uh…she shouldn’t have gone into police work in the first place?

    Webster says Galliford’s allegations come as no surprise.

    “Senior executives for decades have been accountable to no one and they’ve created a toxic work environment, high levels of employee stress and a culture of fear,” Webster said.

    “It’s causing a tremendous effect on the morale of the RCMP, so the grievance process doesn’t help them at all. What are they going to do? They turn to ODS, off duty sick … the RCMP membership calls it ‘off duty mad.’”

    Oh. Uh…I’m all out of excuses.

     

     

  • People do talk

    Russell Glasser was pointing out on Twitter a couple of days ago that it’s not the case that “People only go to the police. They never talk about their stories in blogs or articles.” He provided examples of the contrary: of the preliminary stage (which can last years) when people and groups do indeed make claims in public without/before going to the police.

    Like SNAP for instance. Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Just one item on their front page –

    Abuse victims and SNAP are being attacked by lawyers for KC Bishop Robert Finn and pedophile priests. We’re fighting hard to protect the confidentiality of victims, witnesses, whistleblowers, police, prosecutors, journalists and others who come to us for help. Details available here.

    Sound familiar?

    That doesn’t mean all accusations are always true, obviously. It does mean it’s not automatically the case that all accusations are false until they’re ruled true by a judge or jury. It also (if you do some thinking and/or reading) points to the fact that there are often impediments to reporting the kinds of crimes that powerful people perpetrate on less powerful people. Bishops and priests; popular entertainers like Jimmy Savile; famous people like Roman Polanski*; football coaches like Jerry Sandusky; high school football players, even, like the ones in Our Guys and the ones in Steubenville.

    It’s not simple. It’s not easy. Sometimes there are moral panics combined with pseudoscience like “recovered memory”; sometimes there are long histories of abuse by people who are shielded by colleagues or institutions or just general indifference. No one case is likely to be a slam-dunk either way. But it is not the case that there are only two choices: take it to the cops or stfu.

    *In Polanski’s case the impediment wasn’t to reporting but to extradition after he fled the country.

  • Not prepared for what happened

    A major problem with Massimo’s post, as commenters reminded me, is that it’s no good just looking around and saying X doesn’t have a particularly bad sexual harassment problem when we know that most sexual harassment is hidden. It’s a secret. It’s done when no one else is watching.

    That’s not a reason to go all Recovered Memory, devil-worship in the day care center, arrest all the people. But it is a reason not to take a look at the surface of things and decide that everything’s pretty much ok.

    Jennifer Saul made a point of saying that she was surprised by the stories of harassment that poured in when she started the What is it like to be a woman in philosophy blog.

    Back in 2010, I set out to gain a better understanding of why this is.  Inspired by discussions with other women philosophers who were worried about the gender  gap in our discipline, I set up a blog where philosophers (of any gender) could share anonymous stories — positive or negative — about what it is like to be a woman in philosophy. I was not prepared for what happened.

    Almost instantly, I was deluged with stories of sexual harassment.

    …

    I was shocked by these stories, and struggled to schedule them to appear, four a day, two weeks in advance.  It kept up this way for months.  There is still a steady stream of stories of this sort.

    She didn’t know it was that bad until people started telling her. Massimo shouldn’t be assuming he knows how bad it is.

     

  • The serial harassers who suffer no loss to their career

    Salon, very sensibly, decided to ask Jennifer Saul to explain about sexual harassment in philosophy. Saul is the philosopher who set up the blog “What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?”.

     Inspired by discussions with other women philosophers who were worried about the gender  gap in our discipline, I set up a blog where philosophers (of any gender) could share anonymous stories — positive or negative — about what it is like to be a woman in philosophy. I was not prepared for what happened.

    Almost instantly, I was deluged with stories of sexual harassment.  There was the job candidate who said she was sexually assaulted at the annual APA meeting where job interviews take place.  The undergraduate whose professor joked publicly about dripping hot wax on her nipples.  The persistent failure to understand that a woman of color might actually be a philosophy professor.  The lesbian who found herself suddenly invited, after she came out, to join in the sexualizing of her female colleagues.  Most of all, the repeated failure to actually respond to and deal with harassment: the serial harassers who suffer no loss to their career, despite widespread knowledge of their behavior and even of their sometimes vicious retaliation against complainants. The complicity of their institutions and their colleagues, who in many cases join in the retaliation as they close ranks.

    Does that sound familiar? Yes it does. It sounds familiar in every way – in being surprised by the deluge of stories of sexual harassment, in the repeated failure to actually respond to and deal with harassment, in the fact that the serial harassers suffer no loss to their career, despite widespread knowledge of their behavior, in the complicity of their institutions and their colleagues, who in many cases join in the retaliation as they close ranks.

    Many, many stories came in of women who had left philosophy due to harassment.

    This matters. As Saul says at the beginning, after citing the Colin McGinn story:

    Philosophy, the oldest of the humanities, is also the malest (and the whitest).  While other areas of the humanities are at or near gender parity, philosophy is actually more overwhelmingly male than even mathematics.  In the US, only 17 percent of philosophers employed full-time are women.

    And many, many stories came in of women who had left philosophy due to harassment. That matters. Philosophy is the malest of the humanities at least partly because many male philosophers have driven women out, almost as overtly as if they had beaten them up and told them to get out if they didn’t want more of the same.

    But now my role has shifted somewhat.  As my real name came out (I run the blog under a poorly thought-out pseudonym), I was increasingly contacted by women who were afraid to post their stories online.  These stories were worse than the ones I was posting.  The men involved were often famous, the harassment even more severe, the retaliation more vicious and persistent.  Because so many people hesitate (rightly, I suspect) to tell their stories even in personal emails, I found that some weeks I was spending more than half my nights having Skype conversations with victims of sexual harassment.

    Familiar, again? Women who are afraid to report; famous men; vicious retaliation.

    Of course, the next question is how to get rid of it.  Obviously, one key part of the picture will be good formal procedures for preventing and punishing sexual harassment that are applied fairly and taken seriously (all too often, this doesn’t happen).  But I’ve become increasingly convinced that this isn’t all.  To see this, think some more about the male philosopher joking about dripping hot wax on his undergraduate student’s nipples.  This was actually in front of a table full of faculty members.  What did they do?  They laughed.  This may well have been nervous laughter, but it made the student feel that the joke was acceptable and that she was oversensitive — and contributed strongly to her feelings of discomfort in the department.

    What should they have done instead?

    Although formal remedies would surely be possible, it would probably have been very effective to apply the informal social remedies at which humans are so talented — even just to look disapproving, or to not laugh.  When we leave everything up to formal remedies, we neglect our responsibilities as bystanders.  Being a bystander to someone else’s bad behavior is admittedly a very uncomfortable position to be in — but it comes with great power, and I am convinced we need to learn to use that power properly (along with, not instead of, formal measures).  As Lt. Gen. David Morrison put it so well, “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”
    Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And that applies to bystanders online, too. We know of quite a few of them – people who stand by, who laugh, who sometimes covertly join in. Some of those people are even philosophers.

  • “Maybe you misread him?”

    Update: Ok I knew this when I wrote the post but I refrained from saying so (for the time being), but PZ posted about it a little before I did and he got a ton of emails all saying is it ___? and saying the same name. The guy in this account is Ben Radford.

    ____________________________________________________________

    Oh gosh, sexual harassment again. Again? Yes, again. (Also, still.)

    Karen Stollznow reports on hers at the SciAm blog.

    “I was sexually harassed for four years,” I admitted to  a colleague recently. “That’s awful!” he bellowed in outrage and  genuine concern, before he promptly changed the subject. Sexual harassment  is an uncomfortable topic to discuss with colleagues, especially when you’re the victim.

    Well sure. You might start talking about a buddy of theirs.

    Sometimes we don’t even know how to identify sexual  harassment because its methods are changing. Today, sexual harassment  is not always as bold, brazen and blatant as the boss who slaps his  secretary’s ass. It doesn’t have to involve leering or groping. It happens in a virtual work environment as much as it happens around the water cooler. More people are telecommuting although physical distance doesn’t prevent staff from being targeted by a harasser. Harassment from afar can include sending unwanted communication of a sexual nature, including emails, texts, instant messages, mail, tweets, phone calls, images, Facebook “pokes”, and stalking on networking sites.

    Yes. Yes it can.

    Confronted with these stereotypes and influenced by  the various forces of social conditioning, we often don’t know how  to react to sexual harassment anymore. Here are some of the attitudes  and opinions expressed to me, both directly and indirectly, when I began speaking out about my situation.

    When they didn’t know the details, some people reacted with  concern that was tempered with cautiousness. “Could you be overreacting?”  or “Maybe you misread him?” There was suspicion over the delay in  reporting the incidents, “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”  and, “Why did you continue to work with him for so long?” Not observing  the harassment was a cause for doubt. “I couldn’t tell there was  anything wrong!” Some were prejudiced by their positive personal experiences  with the harasser, “I know him. He’s a good guy. He wouldn’t do  that!” My claims were also dismissed with the old adage that boys will  be boys. “It’s a guy thing,” and, “That’s just how men behave.”  One man offered a backhanded compliment, “Hey, what guy wouldn’t be interested in you!?”

    So what you’re saying is, people haven’t learned anything over the past thirty or forty years.

    As often happens in these situations, the blame is  shifted to the victim. Like the woman in The Drew Carey Show, the victim  may be labeled a prude or “uptight”. She lacks a sense of humor.  She’s crazy. She may be portrayed as a troublemaker by the accused  and his supporters. To undermine her claims, she might be branded a  serial complainer, where sexism and sexual harassment are often confused,  “You know, she’s accused other men of sexism before.” The case  may be demonized as a witch-hunt, and become a cautionary tale told  by those who fear that they too could be branded a “harasser” over  the slightest comment or glance. “Watch out, or she’ll accuse you  too!” I was held up to scrutiny in this way too. According to gossip  about me, I gave him mixed-signals, I led him on, I’m flirtatious,  and I’m a dirty little slut.

    Demonized as a witch-hunt? Surely no one would go that far!

    Alternatively, both the accused and accuser are blamed  for the situation. Those who didn’t know the extent of the harassment  reacted as though we simply don’t play well together in the sandbox.  “Why don’t you two just get over it and move on!” The matter was  misconstrued as a lover’s tiff, or that we were a couple in an on again, off again relationship. Others didn’t have time for my problems,  “I have my own worries.” One person was surprised that I confided  in him, saying, “It’s none of my business.” A number of people  commiserated but then moaned, “I’m sick of talking about sexual  harassment!”

    Some were sympathetic, but from a safe distance. They  chose to stay out of it, because they “hate drama.” I didn’t ask  to become involved in a real-life soap either. I feel stigmatized by those who feel too awkward to face the situation, or me. I had a mutual friend who barely contacts me anymore, as he is unable to take a “side”.

    All familiar.

    From late 2009 onwards I made repeated requests for his personal  communication to cease but these were ignored. He began manipulating the boundaries by contacting me on the pretext of it being work-related.  Then came the quid pro quo harassment. He would find opportunities for  me within the company and recommend me to television producers, but  only if I was nicer to him. One day the company offered me an honorary  position that I’d worked hard for, but he warned me that he had the power to thwart that offer. I threatened to complain to his employer,  but he bragged that another woman had accused him of sexual harassment  previously and her complaints were ignored. According to him, she had been declared “batshit crazy”.

    Uh huh. Aren’t they always.

    Sometimes an organization under-reacts to the claims.  This was my experience. Following “Elevatorgate”, the company introduced  a “zero tolerance policy for hostile and harassing conduct”. When  I approached them with my accusations they appeared to be compassionate  initially. I spent many hours explaining my story over the phone and  days submitting evidence. Then they hired an attorney to collect the  facts and I had to repeat the process. I provided access to my email  account. I also devoted two days to face-to-face discussions about my  ordeal. This “fact collector” also collected a lot of hearsay from  my harasser, about how I’m a slut and “batshit crazy”. This tactic  of the accused is so common it’s known as the “nut and slut” strategy.  I soon learned that the attorney was there to protect them, not me.

    Five months after I lodged my complaint I received  a letter that was riddled with legalese but acknowledged the guilt of  this individual. They had found evidence of “inappropriate communications”  and “inappropriate” conduct at conferences. However, they greatly  reduced the severity of my claims. When I asked for clarification and  a copy of the report they treated me like a nuisance. In response to  my unanswered phone calls they sent a second letter that refused to  allow me to view the report because they couldn’t release it to “the  public”. They assured me they were disciplining the harasser but this  turned out to be a mere slap on the wrist. He was suspended, while he  was on vacation overseas. They offered no apology, that would be an  admission of guilt, but they thanked me for bringing this serious matter  to their attention. Then they asked me to not discuss this with anyone.  This confidentiality served me at first; I wanted to retain my dignity  and remain professional. Then I realized that they are trying to silence  me, and this silence only keeps up appearances for them and protects  the harasser.

    The situation has disadvantaged me greatly. I have  lost a project I once worked on, I have had to disclose highly personal  information to colleagues, and I don’t think that I’ll be offered  work anymore from this company. Perhaps that’s for the best considering  the way they have treated me. I have since discovered that this company  has a history of sexual harassment claims. They also have a track record  of disciplining these harassers lightly, and then closing ranks like  good ol’ boys. Another colleague assured me this was better than their  previous custom of simply ignoring claims of sexual harassment.

    Maybe in a century or so companies will do better than this…if they’re not all under water by then.

     

  • No “dialogue” to be had

    Rebecca has a post about the fetish for “dialogue” which starts with some great tweets by Jeff Sharlet pointing out how stupid the fetish is.

    What I keep saying. There is no “dialogue” to be had with people who just enjoy harassing people. They’re not confused or uninformed, they’re just people of that type, who have found a safe way to engage in harassy behavior without paying any social costs. That’s all. Normally adults have to give up that kind of thing, or displace it into more covert and disguised forms like office politics. They are very lucky to be alive now when it’s possible to go on acting like a pubescent shit for the rest of your life. Trying to have (let alone force) a “dialogue” with them is futile at best and yet more harassment at worst.

    The last Sharlet tweet Rebecca quotes is very apt.

    Well-intentioned liberals always ask how we can “educate” haters. Elite haters don’t need “education”; they need to be challenged.

    Bingo.

    Rebecca comments:

    Can I get an a-fucking-men?

    Sharlet’s points are relevant to the continued harassment of women in the skeptic and atheist communities and the attempts by some to build bridges with harassers. One prime example is Michael Nugent, whose heart was surely in the right place when he began engaging with MRA harassers and then escalated to organizing a formal dialogue between Stephanie Zvan and a few mostly pseudonymous people who have no apparent objection to representing the “side” that harasses women. This dialogue was at the outset insulting to many of the women who are being harassed and almost immediately became arduous and confusing as well: “This is a response by Stephanie Zvan to the response by Skep Sheik to the first response by Stephanie Zvan to the Strand 1 Opening Statement by Jack Smith.”

    If it had been someone like Stephanie herself organizing this “dialogue,” it would be bad enough, but the fact that it was organized by Nugent, a person who is completely unaffected by the actions of the harassers, and that he did it over the repeated objections of many of the women being harassed, is, as Sharlet says, the very definition of paternalistic.

    I’m one of the women who repeatedly objected, and whom Nugent ignored. I thought at least the insults on Nugent’s blog had stopped now that the arduous and confusing “dialogue” had begun – but silly me, they hadn’t stopped at all. I just looked at Nugent’s blog for the first time in weeks and the insults were still rolling in as late as May 6. I wouldn’t even call that paternalistic, actually, because it’s so obviously not in any way a good thing for the women being harassed. I don’t see any reason to think Nugent thinks it is a good thing for us; he thinks it’s a good thing for Atheist Ireland and the atheist movement, which are being torn asunder by the deep rifts. He’s trying to bridge the rifts and he’s doing it at our expense and without (ironically) engaging in “dialogue” with us.

  • Understanding understanding harassment

    Update March 27 – the tweet was a mistake, and does not reflect AAI’s views on harassment. See comment 33.

    Update 2 See also AAI’s post on the subject.*

    ______________

    Aaaaaaaaand there’s this.

    aai

    Atheist Alliance Int

    Understanding Harassment | Atheist Revolution

    And it links to the article at Atheist Revolution. There “vjack” explains what harassment is. Guess what!! It just so happens that it’s none of the things that the people I call harassers are doing to us! Is that a coincidence or what.

    No, it’s not. It’s the whole point. Understanding Harassment=harassment is not what I’m doing to you.

    How fucking convenient.

    vjack is worried about the word.

    The word “harassment” is being thrown around quite a bit these days in the online atheist community. I find this troubling for two reasons. First, accusations of harassment are highly inflammatory and typically lead to an abrupt end to any discussion in which they occur, followed by increased polarization by the parties involved in the discussion. When the accusations were truly warranted, this may be unavoidable; however, unwarranted accusations seem to be surprisingly common and can do real harm. Second, harassment has legal implications in that it is defined as a criminal offense in most jurisdictions. Because of this, we should exercise caution about using the term to describe all behavior we do not like and reserve it for the occasions where it is clearly appropriate (i.e., real harassment).

    Just as we should distinguish between real rape and the other kind, which is just a bit of fun with some drunk girl who shouldn’t have gone to that party in the first place because football.

    According to USLegal.com, legal definitions of harassment vary from state to state but it “is generally defined as a course of conduct which annoys, threatens intimidates, alarms, or puts a person in fear of their safety.” They go on to explain:

    Harassment is unwanted, unwelcomed and uninvited behavior that demeans, threatens or offends the victim and results in a hostile environment for the victim. Harassing behavior may include, but is not limited to, epithets, derogatory comments or slurs and lewd propositions, assault, impeding or blocking movement, offensive touching or any physical interference with normal work or movement, and visual insults, such as derogatory posters or cartoons.

    Huh. There are quite a few items in that list that match exactly what I’ve been calling harassment: epithets, derogatory comments or slurs, and visual insults, such as derogatory posters or cartoons.

    vjack adds some refinements.

    • Harassment involves repeated, unsolicited behavior in which the target is demeaned, threatened, or offended in such a manner that a hostile environment is created for the target.
    • Harassment can involve speech (e.g., threatening statements, derogatory cartoons) as well as observable behavior (e.g., touching, physical interference with someone’s movement).

    …

    If we put these pieces together, we’d end up with an understanding of harassment as a pattern of repeated, behavior in which the harasser intentionally acts in such a manner that a reasonable person would find threatening, annoying, intimidating, alarming, or offensive. The behavior would need to have no other purpose besides impacting the target in this manner, and typically, the behavior would be intrusive in some way. If the target has to go out of his or her way to discover the behavior, odds are pretty good that it is not even close to harassment.

    Ah what do you know – that link in “go out of his or her way” leads to a post by another nym, “unbelieve steve” this time, about…me. You can tell it’s about me because of the title. Ophelia Benson takes offense to parody accounts she scoured the interwebs to find.

    Ok before I read that post, I’ll say – yes, I keep track to some extent of what kind of shit people are saying about me on the interwebs. It’s a meme among the harassers – yes, the harassers – that this is me doing “vanity searches.” Vanity! Hardly. And there are reasons for trying to keep track of shit people say about you in public. I don’t think I’ll even bother explaining that, because it seems pretty obvious.

    [reads] Oh look, there it is already – “vanity search.”

    A truly amazing feat. Ophelia Benson makes it her god given right and duty to conduct vanity searches for any mention of her name in any form of digital conversation.

    She goes one step further and scours twitter feeds and monitors satirical accounts for the slightest WTF comments to be offended by.

    Two satirical twitter accounts engage in a comedic conversation completely unrelated to any direct reference to the real Ophelia Benson.

    I must say the back and forth by the two parody tweeters left me chuckling whilst enjoying my morning coffee.

    Ophelia took offense to the content of the conversation and decided this is something that needs to be documented on her blog as some sort of proof of harassment.

    “Two satirical twitter accounts engage in a comedic conversation completely unrelated to any direct reference to the real Ophelia Benson” except for the fact that both of them use my real name.

    The fantasy world these people live in, where a person’s real name is completely unrelated to the real person.

    Ophelia Benson is not a name exclusively owned by just one person. Census statistics show that in the United States alone, 17490 entries recorded for the use of “Ophelia” as a first name. “Benson” is not rare, showing 84233 instances recorded. Vital records show 31 entries for “Ophelia Benson” recorded in the United States. I feel ya O’Feel’ya, but a person is not identified by name alone. Impersonation is hardly the correct term to describe the parody accounts. One’s a pope and the other a parody Nazi nincompoop.

    TIP: Stop doing vanity searches. Stick to blogging, and if at all possible, try keep it on topic of “free thought”. Just sayin’.

    No harassment there! Nothing to see here folks, move along, keep the sidewalks clear.

    So vjack draws on this scholarly and thoughtful source to explain that harassment you keep track of is not even close to harassment.

    And then he moves on the the specifics.

    Behavior That is Clearly NOT Harassment
    Some of the behavior I have seen being labeled as harassment that does not appear to warrant the label, no matter how objectionable it may be, includes the following:

    1. Using the #FtBullies hashtag on Twitter.
    2. Expressing disagreement with someone’s position, no matter how cherished that opinion might be (e.g., one’s religious beliefs or one’s preferred brand of feminism).
    3. Wearing clothing with social or political messages, including those that are critical of a particular group, to a conference.
    4. Wearing “fake jewelry” to a conference.
    5. Inserting yourself into someone else’s conversation and making absurd accusations against them.
    6. Using mockery or satire in one’s work to lampoon public figures, call attention to relevant issues in the community, etc.
    7. Defending oneself against public criticism from others.
    8. Critiquing someone else’s public work (e.g., writing a book review).
    9. Calling someone a misogynist because they had the nerve to disagree with Rebecca Watson.
    10. Running a silly parody account on Twitter.
    11. Accurately quoting someone.
    12. Making silly images to mock someone.
    13. Belonging to an Internet forum.

    Item 7 is weirdly gratuitous, because the link is to Shermer’s eSkeptic piece that shouts at me. It’s gratuitous because no one ever called it harassment, that I know of.

    Some of the items are true enough if that’s all there is to it – but if it isn’t, they’re not. Others are highly dubious even if you don’t know they’re part of a pattern and practice of extended non-stop harassment. Making images to mock people? That’s just self-evidently not harassment? Certainly not.

    So the “dialogue” proceeds.

    *AAI’s post didn’t sit well with everyone.

    awfulmiranda2

     

  • Just stay home

    More from those fun-loving woman-haters in Egypt.

    Shura Council’s human rights committee members said on Monday that women taking part in protests bear the responsibility of being sexually harassed, describing what happens in some demonstrators’ tents as “prostitution.”

    Major General Adel Afify, member of the committee representing the Salafi Asala Party, criticized female protesters, saying that they “know they are among thugs. They should protect themselves before requesting that the Interior Ministry does so. By getting herself involved in such circumstances, the woman has 100 percent responsibility.”

    That’s right! By engaging in protest, women are formally requesting to be raped. If they don’t want to be raped, all they have to do is  stop participating in political life. What’s the problem with that?!

    Salah Abdel Salam, a member representing the Salafi Nour Party, said that as long as women protest in places full of thugs, they should take responsibility for the harassment they face.

    Mervat Ebeid, member representing Wafd party, said all societal categories are to be blamed for sexual harassment. She also said that knowing there are many thugs present at demonstrations, women should take responsibility when deciding whether to attend protests.

    Yes indeed. The solution to sexual harassment of women is for women to stay away from any place or event or activity where many thugs could be present. Simple! Easy! Quick!

     

  • No one to control them

    When in doubt, harass women.

    Shahira Amin has an article at Index on Censorship about the harassment of women in Tahrir Square.

    Egyptian Salafi preacher Ahmed Mahmoud Abdulla — known as Abou Islam — recently made remarks justifying sexual violence against female protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, claiming that women who join protests are asking “to get raped”…

    In a video posted online last Wednesday, Abdulla said that women who join the protests are “either crusaders who have no shame or widows who have no one to control them”. He also described them as “devils”, and added that “they talk like monsters”.

    Yes that’s right, just throw everything. It all sticks, so it’s all good to throw.

    It’s interesting how familiar and domestic the preacher sounds though. A mere two years ago I wouldn’t have had that thought, but now it jumps off the page at me. The Salafi preacher sounds exactly like our more local harassers.

    BBC World had a distressing – not surprising, but distressing – report on harassment of women in Tahrir Square yesterday, by Aleem Maqbool. He talks to some boys/young men in the square, who are frankly there to leer at and assault women, and who think rape is a joke.

    Back to Shahira Amin.

    While the increased violence against women has been cause for growing concern, the long-awaited new legislation, the increased willingness of women to speak out and the growing number of NGOs fighting harassment (either by spreading awareness about it, encouraging women to speak out or protecting women during protests) are all encouraging signs of positive change to come. Rights activists welcome the change but insist that more needs to be done to end gender-based discrimination.

    “Changing the attitudes of men and women can only take place through education and awareness campaigns, ” said activist Azza Kamel of Fouada Watch, an NGO that has established a round-the-clock hot line for victims to report incidents of sexual harassment, verbal abuse or assaults against women. Kamel also advocates training of the police, traditionally known to take harassment reports lightly . “But above all”she said, there must be zero tolerance for those who incite violence against women (referring to the recent comments by Salafi preacher Abou Islam.)

    “Such extremists must be silenced. Incitement is as big a crime as the assault itself”, Kamel added.

    Don’t get your hopes up.