4 ms·
Reduce the barrier. Make your boss an attractive woman, who over the course of months goes from asking you to rub her shoulders to release stress to holding her
by tinco 12y ago
Reduce the barrier. Make your boss an attractive woman, who over the course of months goes from asking you to rub her shoulders to release stress to holding her breasts. And now consider that perhaps you are in a committed relationship with someone else.
At some point you crossed the line of acceptable intimacy (probably rather early) and it escalated from there as you were uncertain how to deal with the relationships.
Is it cold hard rape? No. Is it an unacceptable and illegal exploitation of power and psychological torment by the boss? Yes.
- golemotron 12y agoIt simply is not rape. It's sexual harassment. There is a concerted attempt now to characterize sexual harassment as rape. The person we are replying to did it in an off-hand manner and it is wrong - not just as a point of law but as a strategy for social change.
- lukeschlather 12y agoThis may be correct, legally, in some jurisdictions. I'm not a lawyer. However, I think it kind of misses the point to adjudicate sexual harassment vs. rape in these cases. Saying it's merely sexual harassment implies that it's somehow not an issue. The point is that it's clearly a malicious act, not a well-intentioned boundary-crossing misunderstanding.
- emj 12y agoBut it can become rape, pretty easily if you are a person in power which sadly often means a man even if he isn't the boss.
- smtddr 12y agoWait a minute.... do people actually do that? Do co-workers ask each other for massages and/or rub their shoulders?! I've never heard of that, ever. Inform me please. How often does this happen? I've always though the "unspoken rule" of the office is nobody touch anyone else, ever. I've never seen that rule violated except for people who've known each other for a good while, and it's usually 2 heterosexual guys punching each other in the arm. Has anyone on HN seen a coworker give another coworker a massage? I'm even a bit hesitant to give people high-fives. And those emotional goodbyes where you hug employees on their last day in the office? Those are very awkward for me, but everyone else is doing it... so... I just go along. =/
- stickfigure 12y agoAccording to a random google search, 39 percent of workers have engaged in some sort of office romance. So you can bet there's quite a lot of touching going on - hopefully most of it consensual, almost certainly some of it not, and with plenty of grey areas in between.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]