From: rdh@Veritas.COM (Robert Hartman)
Newsgroups: soc.men
Subject: Re: individual men vs. "patriarchy" and individual women vs. "feminism"
Date: 16 Oct 92 18:16:41 GMT
Organization: VERITAS Software

In article <1992Oct15.160552.13361@lmpsbbs.comm.mot.com> bhv@areaplg2.corp.mot.com (Bronis Vidugiris) writes:
>In article <1992Oct13.210729.16966@Veritas.COM> rdh@Veritas.COM (Robert Hartman) writes:
>
>Re: sexual harassment
>
>)Her view on this is that the man is indeed entitled to that, but that
>)he should not expect to get either the explanations or the emotional
>)support from the particular woman raising the issue.  First, since the
>)woman is already upset, she might not be able to give it.  Second,
>)that's not typically in her job description.  His HR representative
>)should be the one to provide that for him.
>
>My view on the topic is that the law is very unclear, and that this tends
>to lead to unfair and biased enforcement practices (because of the extreme
>vagueness of the term 'hostile, intimidating, or offensive environment'.)
>This leads to the 'unfairly jumped on' scenario you describe.

Yes.  And this seems to me to be the main _legitimate_ objection to the
current laws and regulations against sexual harrassment.

>[I assume Mara still is not interested in a debate or discussion on soc.men
>and that you are seeking to clarify your own thoughts wrt sexual harassment,
>BTW, and that Mara is 'out of the loop' at this point.  If I'm off the mark
>here, it'd be nice if whomever would let me know.]

No, you're right.

>I agree with you that a man has a right to fair treatment, and not to be
>'jumped on' for things that he didn't intend to be harmful.  The solution
>as I see it is to make the law clearer, and, among other reforms, to get rid
>of the notion that 'good intentions are no defense' when it is not
>appropriate.

I agree that this last would be a big help.

>According to Black's Law Dictionary:
>
>	"A person committs a petty misdemeanor if, with purpose to
>harass another, he:  1) makes a telephone call without purpose of
>legitimate communications 2) insults, taunts or challenges another in
>a manner likely to provoke violent or disorderly response  3) makes
>repeated communications anonymously or at extremely inconvenient
>hours, or in offensively coarse language  4) subjects another to an
>offensive touching 5) engages in any other course of alarming conduct
>serving no legitimate purpose of the actor."

Funny, I see a good deal of the stuff about "hostile environment" as
falling within the bounds of item 5.  Unless one works in a strip club,
what possible legitimate purpose could there be for putting up a pin-up
in the workplace?  

>BTW - as sort of an aside - it is rather humorous, in a black way, that
>people against 'patriarchy' would support such meddlesome,authoritarian
>and intolerant interference by 'the system' in individuals life to the
>extent that what sort of posters a person chooses to display in their
>workplace becomes an issue for the federal Supreme Court!  If the 'Supreme
>Court' isn't "patriarchial", what is?

Hmmm.  This relates back to the other part of Mara's posting, which was her
main point as I understood it--the tendency of men to see the "feminism" and
not the individual woman expressing an opinion, and the tendency of men to
hold an individual woman responsible for the ills they find in feminism in
general.  Just as I don't want to be tarred with the brush of the Patriarchy
(except when I'm stupidly following the program without intending to), 
Mara doesn't want individual women to be tarred with the brush of 
Dworkin/McKinnon/man-hating/misandry/so-called-feminism.

I was the one who mentioned Patriarchy as an example of the wrong some
women do when they confuse individual men with the system, or blame the
system on individual men.  By the same token, it's just as foolish and
counterproductive to blame whatever ills of feminism we see on
individual women who identify themselves as feminists.  We need to make
a distinction between feminism, and the women who espouse it.
Otherwise, all conversations with thinking women will needlessly
degenerate into shouting matches.  Of course, if a man's primary
motivation is to retain his position, and a useless shouting match will
do that, then I suppose that's what he'll resort to if need be.  And
that may not always be a conscious motivation.  But conscious or not--
personally, I'm just not interested in that.

In the quoted context, Mara said nothing about the court system.  We
merely said that the individual woman making the complaint is not
necessarily the one who should explain it to the individual man who's
behavior is the subject of her complaint.

You know, it's really too bad that the presumed sexual prerogatives of
the male are such a charged issue.  To me, the worst part of this is
the way in which men's emotional lives are so thoroughly constrained by
the culture that the only acceptable way for a man to express
vulnerability or obtain emotional nurturance is through sex.  In all of
the heated discussion about the risks of ruination via unwanted
children or charges of sexual harrassment, we men really need to look
at why the issue of sex is so damned urgent.  Sex is important.  No
doubt about that.  It's also risky.  For something to be so compelling
and so risky at the same time is crazymaking!  It's no wonder we're all
so torqued up about it!  

But maybe there are less risky ways for men to get some of their
emotional needs met, ways that our culture and our expectations of
ourselves as men have blinded us to.  But maybe, if we can find other
ways to get our emotional needs met, we could then afford to relax
somewhat more about sex--if only so that we might have the luxury of
checking out our partners a little better.  No woman could get herself
knocked up at a man's expense if that man wasn't desperate for
something.  No man would compromise his dignity by engaging in "sexual
harrassment" if he was thinking clearly about what he was doing.  And
while the something that men are desperate for is certainly associated
with sex, I'm not completely sure that sex is it exactly.

Are you?

-r
Newsgroups: soc.men