4 ms·

> Another common theme I noticed is when the man in question stays in the gray area where individual incidents aren't clearly over the line and might not qualif

> Another common theme I noticed is when the man in question stays in the gray area where individual incidents aren't clearly over the line and might not qualify legally as sexual harassment, but in context and in aggregate it's clear why a woman would feel very uncomfortable. How do you confront something like that when they can just question your perception of reality? This is where professionalism and propriety come in. One's behavior should simply be well outside the gray area and straying into it should, itself, be grounds for confrontation.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago
> This is where professionalism and propriety come in. One's behavior should simply be well outside the gray area and straying into it should, itself, be grounds for confrontation. That doesn't actually fix anything, you're just defining the gray area to be further to one side. If people actually did that then expectations would change and more innocuous behavior would fall into the gray area, requiring you to move the line again. The gray area exists because not everybody agrees where the line is. In some cultures it is illegal for a man and a woman who are not married to even be alone in a room together. In some cultures physical contact between acquaintances is normal behavior. In a multicultural society, whose culture should have the force of law?
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
  I don't mean that we should change the laws, so that the former grey area becomes the new illegal area; but rather that we should have a stricter attitude about the grey area. Sometimes people's attitude about these things is that, they acknowledge they are wrong, but since nothing illegal happened, they won't say or do anything. That's the grey area I'm talking about -- where there is broad acknowledgement that something is fishy, although it is not technically illegal. This gray area exists because the law needs to operate under the presumption of innocence, defining crimes unambiguously and prosecuting them with due regard for reasonable doubt -- it is deliberately narrow and permissive, because the state is very powerful and if not held to strict limits it becomes very dangerous. However, those of us who wish to have a good social and professional reputation shouldn't expect to maintain it while doing things that are "barely legal"; and those who witness us doing so should not feel that those kinds of things are not to be mentioned or corrected merely because they are not illegal.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    > This gray area exists because the law needs to operate under the presumption of innocence, defining crimes unambiguously and prosecuting them with due regard for reasonable doubt -- it is deliberately narrow and permissive, because the state is very powerful and if not held to strict limits it becomes very dangerous. That is the theory everyone refers to when they're trying to justify imposing harsh penalties. Have you read the laws that Congress actually passes? It would be nice if they actually lived up to that standard. And you can't get out of the problem by appealing to a reputational shadow enforcement system. If reputational harm wasn't real or powerful then no one would be interested in imposing it. Imposing real penalties with a weak standard of proof on marginal behavior is equally problematic regardless of whether the penalties are formally imposed by the state. And today's attitudes become tomorrow's laws. Gray areas are gray because they contain both baby and bathwater. If something is clearly wrong it's easy to make it illegal (and it almost always already is), and if it isn't clearly wrong then we don't have any special knowledge the state lacks that allows us to mete out penalties in borderline cases without punishing good people.
    - solidsnack9000 9y ago
      > Gray areas are gray because they contain both and bathwater. There is a grey area like that but that is not the grey area I am talking about. To a consider an example you mentioned previously: it's fine to just not ever touch your coworkers. Another example is ethnic jokes: these are not illegal but do you need to do this at work? Staying out of the gray area is not a matter of harsh punishment but rather on insisting on professionalism and decorum. It is only when people have strayed so far from that -- normalising deviance for themselves -- that you find yourself in a place where harsh punishment is even thinkable. One would not need or apply harsh punishments for matters of decorum.
      - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
        There is value in camaraderie. You're assuming the benefit of staying away from the line is greater than the cost of losing every net-positive thing that isn't entirely white. It's possible for a workplace to be a sterile environment where one turns one's wrench in silence without human connection, but that isn't how people should have to spend the majority of their waking hours. And again, that policy is a ratchet. What people take offense to is calibrated by expectations and past experience. If you succeed in exerting social pressure to keep everyone away from the line, you move the Overton window and create a new gray area in what used to be accepted professional behavior. Continue to apply the same line-avoiding policy and you have a ratchet that leads to the imposition of radically Puritanical positions.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

> This is where professionalism and propriety come in. One's behavior should simply be well outside the gray area and straying into it should, itself, be grounds for confrontation. That doesn't actually fix anything, you're just defining the gray area to be further to one side. If people actually did that then expectations would change and more innocuous behavior would fall into the gray area, requiring you to move the line again. The gray area exists because not everybody agrees where the line is. In some cultures it is illegal for a man and a woman who are not married to even be alone in a room together. In some cultures physical contact between acquaintances is normal behavior. In a multicultural society, whose culture should have the force of law?

solidsnack9000 9y ago
I don't mean that we should change the laws, so that the former grey area becomes the new illegal area; but rather that we should have a stricter attitude about the grey area. Sometimes people's attitude about these things is that, they acknowledge they are wrong, but since nothing illegal happened, they won't say or do anything. That's the grey area I'm talking about -- where there is broad acknowledgement that something is fishy, although it is not technically illegal. This gray area exists because the law needs to operate under the presumption of innocence, defining crimes unambiguously and prosecuting them with due regard for reasonable doubt -- it is deliberately narrow and permissive, because the state is very powerful and if not held to strict limits it becomes very dangerous. However, those of us who wish to have a good social and professional reputation shouldn't expect to maintain it while doing things that are "barely legal"; and those who witness us doing so should not feel that those kinds of things are not to be mentioned or corrected merely because they are not illegal.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  > This gray area exists because the law needs to operate under the presumption of innocence, defining crimes unambiguously and prosecuting them with due regard for reasonable doubt -- it is deliberately narrow and permissive, because the state is very powerful and if not held to strict limits it becomes very dangerous. That is the theory everyone refers to when they're trying to justify imposing harsh penalties. Have you read the laws that Congress actually passes? It would be nice if they actually lived up to that standard. And you can't get out of the problem by appealing to a reputational shadow enforcement system. If reputational harm wasn't real or powerful then no one would be interested in imposing it. Imposing real penalties with a weak standard of proof on marginal behavior is equally problematic regardless of whether the penalties are formally imposed by the state. And today's attitudes become tomorrow's laws. Gray areas are gray because they contain both baby and bathwater. If something is clearly wrong it's easy to make it illegal (and it almost always already is), and if it isn't clearly wrong then we don't have any special knowledge the state lacks that allows us to mete out penalties in borderline cases without punishing good people.
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    > Gray areas are gray because they contain both and bathwater. There is a grey area like that but that is not the grey area I am talking about. To a consider an example you mentioned previously: it's fine to just not ever touch your coworkers. Another example is ethnic jokes: these are not illegal but do you need to do this at work? Staying out of the gray area is not a matter of harsh punishment but rather on insisting on professionalism and decorum. It is only when people have strayed so far from that -- normalising deviance for themselves -- that you find yourself in a place where harsh punishment is even thinkable. One would not need or apply harsh punishments for matters of decorum.
    - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      There is value in camaraderie. You're assuming the benefit of staying away from the line is greater than the cost of losing every net-positive thing that isn't entirely white. It's possible for a workplace to be a sterile environment where one turns one's wrench in silence without human connection, but that isn't how people should have to spend the majority of their waking hours. And again, that policy is a ratchet. What people take offense to is calibrated by expectations and past experience. If you succeed in exerting social pressure to keep everyone away from the line, you move the Overton window and create a new gray area in what used to be accepted professional behavior. Continue to apply the same line-avoiding policy and you have a ratchet that leads to the imposition of radically Puritanical positions.