Weakness is a mighty weapon for fragile feminist crybaby girls: The Sexual Harassment Industry

Sexual harassment started with quid pro quo harassment, (="sexual shakedown", extended to all relationships with power imbalance, added peer harassment (which "sets the stage for campus rape" ),, contrapower harassment”   and closed the circle with grooming and electronic harassment, Thus Title IX, an anti discrimination law, went full circle to selectively discriminate against males and heterosexuality. MacKinnon: sexual harassment ‘ is done by men to women regardless of’ relative position on the formal hierarchy.". 

All quotes from Daphne Patai: Heterophobia

Sandler also displays her gift for concept-stretching by declaring that  rape is "the most extreme form of peer harassment" (p. 51). Could it  not equally well be said that murder is the most extreme form of conflict resolution, and that it has the same effect." 

 

 

Men can not resist female weakness & fragility. Women’s weakness wins!

Harassment-feminists dis-empower women

The SHI (sexual harassment industry) trains women to become more and more un-empowered, vulnerable and sensitive. So ridiculously weak, that for a "reasonable woman", innuendo, objectifying gaze , becomes a "devastating, life changing experience".

Weakness as a weapon

SHI never teaches women to become empowered. On the opposite, women get trained to be weak crybabies. It seems that chivalrous men instantly come to save a damsel in distress.

Shoop’s bland words conceal the reality of what is being attempted here, which is a modification of public behavior in accordance with the patronizing assumption that women always need protection from aggressive males. This agenda of social transformation is fundamental to all that the SHI undertakes to do. It explains why there has never (to my knowledge) been a workshop on, say, how to keep oneself from taking offense at trivial slights or innuendos, or how to respond to an unwanted sexual overture in a spirited way that ends the problem. Instead, the suggested (and, increasingly, mandatory) workshops and training sessions are designed to bring an ever greater range of behavior within the purview of sexual harassment regulations.   Daphne Patai: Heterophobia

Sleights as small as touching a student’s hair or praising (or criticizing) a student’s paper are dramatized as "devastating experience" that "is life  changing".  Creation of a hostile environment by claiming, in class, that false rape accusations are a frequent and common occurrence was grounds for a harassment suit against a professor.

All quotes from Daphne Patai: Sexual Harassment

Female fragility:
cause to rescind constitutional rights & academic freedom

"We can’t lose track of the wider goal in order to defend some narrow definition of academic freedom." . And the predicament of young women caught in [harassments] relentlessly sexist system makes it a "false conflict" to set constitutional guarantees [of free speech] in opposition to harassment policies.

Such concepts as "merit, rigor, standards, and excellence" are viewed as code words to promote " discriminatorv self-interest" on the part of the powerful (p. 311). "Academic freedom" is it slogan touted by "white male faculty" but, she gleefully affirms, one now increasingly challenged by "nonacademic" folk. "To many," Hippensteele writes, "academic freedom is currently being used as it license to speak and behave irresponsibly" (p. 311). 

Explicit "sensitivity training" creates "victims" to demand redress

Institutions must "encourage" the reporting of "sexual harassment activity"", so that "reluctant complainants", "victims" who fail to complain will become aware of their victim status and file complaints.

 

in the discourse of sexual harassment, I have argued, training in victimhood plays a distinctive role. I can think of no other areas in life in which putative sufferers require so much help in order to recognize the damage supposedly inflicted on them and have come to depend on such careful instruction in how to script the accounts of their victimhood. Article after article produced by SHI writers insists-and this in itself should arouse our suspicion-that people need to learn how to identify the injuries they suffer.

Sensitive whiny un-empowered women need special legal protection

Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had already declared that offensive conduct should be judged not merely from the point of view of a "reasonable person" but from that of "a reasonable person in the position of the plain- tiff"-in short, a "reasonable woman." The Ninth Circuit conceded that the "reasonable person" perspective, as previously adopted by courts, may not do full justice to the particular ways in which women respond to harassing behavior directed against them. The court concluded that "a sex-blind reasonable person standard tends to be male-biased and tends to systematically ignore the experiences of women."2" Thus, a woman’s subjective judgment of men’s actions, regardless of their- intent, became the standard by which complaints could be judged.  Daphne Patai: Heterophobia

All quotes from Daphne Patai: Sexual Harassment

If a woman feels discomfort, a man needs to pay

A clear implication of the "reasonable woman" standard is that it is not so much the intent (the "purpose," in the language of the law) of the alleged offender that should count in interpreting the gravity of acts of sexual harassment as, rather, the way in which these acts are perceived by the complainant (the "effect"). Subjective factors thus operate at every level of the sexual harassment scene.

• When a woman’s personal experience of "discomfort" can be readily converted into evidence of a "hostile" and "offensive" environment, which in turn is taken as a sign of "discrimination on the basis of sex," the most trivial allegation made by a "victim" can be regarded as a grave matter.

Female instructors in Women’s Studies can not harass

Of course, as Heinz-Joachim Klatt observes, "It is unimaginable that complainants today would be taken seriously who feel sexually harassed by the ways, for example, feminist instructors lecture in Women’s Studies courses."  Efforts are made not to apply sexual harassment charges to Gays and Lesbians, other protected classes.

This book will argue that the current judicial, quasi-judicial, extra-legal,   and administrative application of sexual harassment law, especially   as manifested in the "hostile environment" doctrine and as  practiced in colleges and universities, represents an unwelcome and  dangerous shift in both law and custom. Hostile-environment actions  are now based upon the subjective experience of "unwanted" or "offensive"   conduct (including speech), as perceived by the accuser and tested  by the "reasonable woman" standard, a concept I will discuss at length.  It is becoming increasingly clear that this development transfers the  burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, in violation of American   due process.

All quotes from Daphne Patai: Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (American Intellectual Culture)

Sexual Harassment Industry as precursor to Rape Hysteria

After all, according to MacKinnon, "economic power is to sexual harassment as physical force is to rape."’" The banning of "asymmetrical" relations shows what can happen when such pronouncements are taken seriously and when a movement explicitly committed to erasing the boundaries between the private and the public spheres is allowed to influence policy-makers.

Today’s feminist rape hysteria repeats  (in criminal law) a pattern trained with harassment (a civil law infraction so serious that it can destroy a life as if it were a criminal conviction). Conveniently, the burden of proof for life ruining harassment charges is "preponderance of evidence". Can you see a pattern? Title IX, meant to prevent sex discrimination has been, thanks to feminist skills for language manipulation, abused for blatant sex discrimination against heterosexual males with harassment charges, both administratively and in federal court.  Now Title IX is used for rape accusations, with the same burden of evidence.

The true power differential: Puny Men’s Rights fights a Billion fanatic feminists aided by Billion Dollar SHI.

There is an entire billion dollar Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI): every college in the US is obliged to have entire departments dealing with sexual harassments, in order to avoid million dollar law suits and loss of federal funds. Huge conferences about sexual harassment are held, entire junk science departments called "women’s studies" churn out supporting evidence. I was unaware that the objectifying gaze research opens another door to million dollar law suits and further repression of males. In comparison, men’s right’s celebration to have a yearly men’s rights conference is pathetic.

there is no awareness that the complaint process is itself it powerful weapon in the hands of-supposedly powerless-"complainants," regardless of the merits of their charges.
Nor do we hear of any warning that might be given to complainants concerning the consequences to them should their charges turn out to be worthless (or even patently false).

At these women’s conferences, sexual harassment is a given and not questioned at all. Any speaker clearly presupposes that a basic consensus exists: The experts are of  one mind that sexual harassment is invariably "a very serious issue" and  a "devastating" experience for those to whom it happens, "changed [her] life forever" and made her feel so "violated".

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A major underpinning of the legitimacy of these procedures is the "devastation" said to be sustained by victims of sexual harassment. Without this claim, it would be all too easy to notice the bizarre disproportion between the pettiness of most offenses and the official apparatus set in motion by complaints about them.
This should make one think again about the theme of complainants’ "powerlessness."

"Sexual harassment" started with a valid observation: a few women had trouble, were driven out of jobs, because the bosses demanded sexual favors as part of their employment. An injustice. It is called quid pro quo ("something for something", "tit for tat"). 

How did we get from clear examples of sexual discrimination in school and workplace to a preoccupation with "comfort" levels, dirty jokes, and passing innuendos? How did sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and just plain sex get entangled to such an extent that today a bit of overheard banter or a clumsy sexual overture in the office or school is considered as unacceptable, and potentially as actionable,

How much quid pro quo harassment actually exists? How often are serious offenses against women committed-offenses that ought to be, and indeed have long been, considered violations of law? The Sandler and Shoop book admits that there is, in fact, very little harassment of this sort. On the other hand, how much harassment occurs that is of the "soft" kind, the kind that lies largely in the eye of the beholder and depends for its disclosure upon the prior cultivation of a heightened state of sensitivity in those at the receiving end of it? A great deal, it appears,

More quotes from

Daphne Patai: Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism

 

• Along with the slant or spin of claims goes their steady enlargement.  In the case of the SHI, the most far-reaching example of such "domain  expansion" is the extension of sexual harassment from quid pro quo to  hostile-environment harassment, that nebulous and endlessly negotiable   category of unwelcome looks, comments, gestures, and even opinions   (whether positive or negative), into which virtually all workplace  and academic interactions can be made to fit.
  
• The list-typical of similar ones found  in virtually all the SHI literature-extends from "sexual innuendos,  comments, or bantering" and "humor or jokes about sex or females in  general" to "asking for sexual behavior," "touching a person," "giving a  neck or shoulder massage," "leering or ogling, such as `elevator eyes,"’  calling women names like "hot stuff" or "cutie pie," "sexual graffiti,"  "sexual mail, notes, e-mail," or phone calls, and "laughing at or not  taking seriously someone who experiences sexual harassment" right up  to stalking, threats, and "attempted or actual sexual assault or abuse"  (pp. 6-7). It is the indiscriminate nature of this list (here only partially  quoted) that gives away the SHI’s eagerness to extend its reach.

 

• If it genuinely sought to protect women from the proclaimed harm  of sexual harassment, the SHI would first of all strive to separate serious  front► trivial offenses. It would not set out to frighten women into believing   that all public-sphere environments are "hostile" to them. nor  Would it wish to see precious resources squandered on investigating  flimsy allegations. But the SHI appears unwilling to make such distinctions,   or to give up its tendency to conflate all cases of "uncomfortable"  reactions relating to sex and gender." Shoop speaks of the "right to be  free from sexual harassment" (p. 42), and this seems a laudable principle   until one rewrites his phrase as "the right to be free from feeling  uncomfortable." That this rewriting is in fact warranted, and that it  represents Shoop’s real intent, can be taken from the following statement: "Although conduct that is merely offensive, such as the mere  utterance of an epithet which engenders offensive [sic] feelings in an  employee, is not actionable sexual harassment, according to Harris, no  one single factor must be present to find actionable abusive or hostile  environment workplace sexual harassment" (p. 42).

 

• It is not difficult to see what such sleight of hand is  meant to accomplish: It makes one embarrassing word or gesture, perhaps   a single incident in four years of university attendance, count as  much as a serious case of quid pro quo sexual extortion or actual assault.   Each of these, without distinction, is "some form of sexual harassment."14
  
• Women’s "authority of experience" (a subject to which I will return  in chapter 7 below) is relied on throughout the book. Sandler and  Shoop tell us that "[w]omen seem less confused about sexual harassment,   whether or not they use the term, than men. They know when  they are uncomfortable" (p. 6). Here, again, the characteristic slippage  of ideologically charged language occurs, from "sexual harassment" to  "uncomfortable," the latter becoming the standard by which the former  is measured. Women "know the difference between a witty comment  and a sexual joke" (p. 6).

 

• By now sexual harassment is generally construed to include not only  unwanted erotic attention but also any questionable behavior on the  basis of gender. Thus the SHI has succeeded in creating a situation in  which either merely expressing romantic interest or engaging in the  second kind of "soft" behavior-for example, commenting on someone’s   appearance, or making a general remark about women-arguably   constitutes an unwanted sexist intrusion,
  
• "Sexual harassment … eroticizes women’s subordination," MacKinnon has famously written. "It acts out and deepens the powerlessness of women as a gender, as women.""

 

• Contrapower harassment” is how she labels male students’  words and gestures toward female professors. Unlike in traditional  "power harassment," in the "contrapower" type the harasser apparently   has "less formal power" than the professor being harassed. Benson   points out that such harassment may occur "at a time when the  student does have some measure of power over the professor" (e.g.,  when filling out teaching evaluations).
• That was not enough: Grooming was added. Sexual harassment has not yet happened, but the vile man is preparing for it.
  • "grooming" had been added to  the standard vocabulary of the Sexual Harassment Industry, with the  result that professors’ words of praise or offers of help, even months  before any alleged overture took place, could retroactively be construed  as unacceptable behavior. The term "grooming" allows properly indoctrinated   women to find male behavior potentially dangerous long before   any untoward advances are actually made.
  • When giving her deposition in February 1995, Hippensteele was  asked by the examining attorney how one determined whether a professor’s   comment that an A-student was "doing a good job" should be  construed as part of a "grooming process."
• Actually, everything is harassment: MacKinnon reiterated the ultimate feminist   line on sexual harassment that her own prior work had done so  much to legitimize: ‘Basically, it is done by men to women regardless  of’ relative position on the formal hierarchy."-‘

 

• female undergraduate   who charged that it stale faculty member had "touched and  complimented complainant’s hair."

• Rarely is there any mention  of cases of women students pursuing professors, harassing male students,   or making the lives of other women unpleasant. The SHI’s commitment   to the idea of "power imbalances" inherent in "patriarchal"  society compels it to ignore that these things ever happen, or at least  that they have any significance. In such a perspective, an individual  woman’s "professional power" is always trumped by a male’s (including  a male student’s) "social power." Several essayists in the volume assure  us that this is so.

All quotes from Daphne Patai: Sexual Harassment

 

Civil Law, as potent as criminal law.

 

• In discussing standards of proof, Bernice Sandler is quick to remind  us that unlike in criminal cases, the criterion of guilt in administrative  procedures (as in civil suits) is not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but  merely "a preponderance of evidence." It is enough that "a reasonable  person would assume that the events did or did not occur given the  preponderance of evidence" (p. 113). One wonders who this reasonable  person might be. A critic like myself? Or Sandler and her coauthors?  In view of the assumptions embraced by the SHI, "reasonable persons"  can bring a lifelong career to an end in disgrace because (to use another  metaphor endorsed by Sandler and Shoop’s book) they decide that the  scales "tip" a bit on one side rather than on another.
  
• quid pro quo harassment-what Lin Farley, more simply, had  called "sexual shakedown"-was coming to be recognized as an impermissible   form of sex discrimination actionable under Title IX.
  

• It is not difficult to see what such sleight of hand is  meant to accomplish: It makes one embarrassing word or gesture, perhaps   a single incident in four years of university attendance, count as  much as a serious case of quid pro quo sexual extortion or actual assault.   Each of these, without distinction, is "some form of sexual harassment."14

 

• "Plaintiff may establish a violation of Title VII," the Court  concluded, "by proving that discrimination based on sex has created a  hostile or abusive working environment."
  

• MacKinnon has "nearly won the war to transform Title  VII from a law that bans sex discrimination to it law that bans sexual  expression."`"
  
• school math instructor known for his devotion to teaching. A female   student poked playfully at Bullock, in front of the class, commenting   on his corpulence by saying that his chest was big. He replied that  hers was small. This response led to his suspension from teaching.  While waiting to hear whether he was to be reprimanded or transferred  to an administrative job, Bullock killed himself […]
  • In the emotional confusion  that followed this event, a school spokeswoman defended the girl who  had made the charge, expressing concern-and this is the most telling  detail of the case-that the suicide would have the effect of discouraging   other students from filing complaints.
    
• This book will argue that the current judicial, quasi-judicial, extra-legal,   and administrative application of sexual harassment law, especially   as manifested in the "hostile environment" doctrine and as  practiced in colleges and universities, represents an unwelcome and  dangerous shift in both law and custom. Hostile-environment actions  are now based upon the subjective experience of "unwanted" or "offensive"   conduct (including speech), as perceived by the accuser and tested  by the "reasonable woman" standard, a concept I will discuss at length.  It is becoming increasingly clear that this development transfers the  burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, in violation of American   due process.
  
• "Sexual harassment," in my view, is a concept that has in a few short  decades exceeded its usefulness. For a brief time it did identify something   outrageous that needed to be stopped-what Lin Farley in her  1978 book called "sexual shakedown." By now, however, sexual harassment   has become so loosely defined as to be incapable of serving any  constructive purpose.

 

• No longer a well-intentioned   effort to gain justice for women, it has been turned into a  tool (powered by a legal apparatus and manipulated by a professional  cadre of trainers and enforcers) for implementing, and indeed normalizing,   what was once merely it marginal and bizarre feminist worldview.  That world-view has many tentacles, but at its core is the effort blatantly  named "couple busting" by the unapologetic tragicomic feminist Valerie   Solanas in her SCUM Manifesto thirty years ago.”
  

• MacKinnon reiterated the ultimate feminist   line on sexual harassment that her own prior work had done so  much to legitimize: ‘Basically, it is clone by men to women regardless  of’ relative position on the formal hierarchy."-‘

 

• In the same essay, and with the hyperbole for which she is famous,  MacKinnon asserts that sexual harassment turns women into "pornography."   And when they go to court to act against it, they are, she says,  turned into "pornography" yet again. "The first time it happens, it is  called freedom; the second time, it is called justice.""’

 

• "Sexual harassment  … eroticizes women’s subordination," MacKinnon has famously written.   "It acts out and deepens the powerlessness of women as a gender,  as women.""
  
• Along with the slant or spin of claims goes their steady enlargement. In the case of the SHI, the most far-reaching example of such "domain expansion" is the extension of sexual harassment from quid pro quo to hostile-environment harassment, that nebulous and endlessly negotiable category of unwelcome looks, comments, gestures, and even opinions (whether positive or negative), into which virtually all workplace and academic interactions can be made to fit.
  
• The list-typical of similar ones found in virtually all the SHI literature-extends from "sexual innuendos, comments, or bantering" and "humor or jokes about sex or females in general" to "asking for sexual behavior," "touching a person," "giving a neck or shoulder massage," "leering or ogling, such as `elevator eyes,"’ calling women names like "hot stuff" or "cutie pie," "sexual graffiti," "sexual mail, notes, e-mail," or phone calls, and "laughing at or not taking seriously someone who experiences sexual harassment" right up to stalking, threats, and "attempted or actual sexual assault or abuse" (pp. 6-7). It is the indiscriminate nature of this list (here only partially quoted) that gives away the SHI’s eagerness to extend its reach.

 

Reasonable Woman Standard

 

• Court of Appeals for  the Ninth Circuit had already declared that offensive conduct should  be judged not merely from the point of view of a "reasonable person"  but from that of "a reasonable person in the position of the plain-  tiff"-in short, a "reasonable woman." The Ninth Circuit conceded that  the "reasonable person" perspective, as previously adopted by courts,  may not do full justice to the particular ways in which women respond  to harassing behavior directed against them. The court concluded that  "a sex-blind reasonable person standard tends to be male-biased and  tends to systematically ignore the experiences of women."2" Thus, a  woman’s subjective judgment of men’s actions, regardless of their- intent,   became the standard by which complaints could be judged.
  

 

• A clear implication  of the "reasonable woman" standard is that it is not so much the intent  (the "purpose," in the language of the law) of the alleged offender that  should count in interpreting the gravity of acts of sexual harassment as,  rather, the way in which these acts are perceived by the complainant  (the "effect"). Subjective factors thus operate at every level of the sexual  harassment scene.
• When a woman’s personal experience of "discomfort" can be readily  converted into evidence of a "hostile" and "offensive" environment,  which in turn is taken as a sign of "discrimination on the basis of sex,"  the most trivial allegation made by a "victim" can be regarded as a grave matter.
• Discrimination calls for the removal of impediments and the creation   of equal opportunity; a wrong is to be righted. "Discomfort"  demands a near total absence of unpleasantness, thus aiming, quixotically,   at perfection. This distinction does not trouble the SHI. The legal  framework now available to its functionaries, because it addresses both  issues together, occludes the crucial practical question: Is a casual continent   containing it sexual reference, or an unwanted invitation that is  (perhaps less than sensitively) repeated, a true species of discrimination~
  

 

• Flirtatious behavior or a casual touch  is recast as a potentially serious harm by the addition of the concept  "unwanted" or "unwelcome," with its clear premise that only what a  woman "wants" is permissible. Once this view becomes routinized, it  will be difficult to challenge such a privileging of one sex’s "wants" over  the other’s, for merely to raise a question about it invites the retort that  one is promoting oppressive behavior toward women (or is selling out  to the patriarchy).

 

Whine about women’s suffering and enhance it

Somehow men seem to have been cowed  into silence. None objected when MacKinnon, in her opening comments, declared, "Droit du seigneur is dead. Women are citizens."
Citizens, perhaps, but constantly traumatized, according to the Sexual   Harassment Industry, which portrays a social scene where women  who experience sexual harassment are "devastated," go through it  process of "grieving," and if they are lucky, emerge as "survivors." For  obvious reasons, SHI rhetoric maximizes the damage supposedly inflicted   on them: Sympathy will be garnered, counseling provided, male  wickedness confirmed, and women’s victimhood-today a prized commodity for which women are in passionate competition with other victim   groups-enshrined.

 

How did we get from clear examples of sexual  discrimination in school and workplace to a preoccupation with "comfort"   levels, dirty jokes, and passing innuendos? How did sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and just plain sex get entangled to  such an extent that today a bit of overheard banter or a clumsy sexual  overture in the office or school is considered as unacceptable, and potentially   as actionable,

 

• I trace a  number of stories of "devastating" experiences retailed by "survivors"  featured in the SHI’s current literature. Second, to these stories I counterpose   several lesser-known tales of faculty members (both male and  female) who have lost years of their lives, reputations, and sometimes  livelihoods as a result of false or frivolous charges directed against  them.
  
• The feminist literature on these matters assumes that sexual harassment   can never be accidental or trivial. It is always seen as part of a  concerted effort to keep women in their place as an inferior social  group. It is, so many serious commentators on it insist, an essential part  of patriarchy’s ongoing plot against women.

 

• Part III, "The Feminist Turn against Men," reveals what I have come  to recognize as the underlying agenda of the Sexual Harassment Industry,   namely, the restructuring of male-female relations to the point that  men will he put perpetually on the defensive. I trace the pursuit of a  "comfortable" environment for women-an important objective of sexual   harassment activists-to heterophobia.
  

 

• Indeed, it  has by now deeply pervaded male and female interactions in the public  sphere. It has succeeded in putting all men-and also some  women-on notice that their every word and gesture will be watched.  In part III I also explore the claims for women’s "authority of experience,"   on which feminist rhetoric about sexual harassment often relies.
  

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• And nowhere is it suggested that  their accusations should be made under oath. Such cautions, it seems,  are undesirable because they might be construed as "retaliation" and  could tend to "discourage" complainants, something the SHI is explicitly   committed to preventing.