This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The people pushing MeToo didn't really understand the situation.
The first sexual harassment was in 1974. By the 90s lawsuits we common enough that Michael Crichton's Disclosure (1994) featured a fake sexual harassment complaint as part of a conspiracy.
Business men protected themselves through a mix of better behaviour, legal strategies, and other techniques to avoid trouble.
However since the lawyers involved were strongly left wing, liberal strongholds like Hollywood and the Media were given a pass and ignored. This was compounded by the fact that those industries attract a lot of pretty girls, have powerful men at the top, and look down on traditional sexual rules.
This wasn't well understood on the left, and they all insisted on believing that Republican businessmen are the worst people ever and much worse about things that MeToo covers.
So activists pushed MeToo hard. Then they noticed that all the big fish going down were on their side. So they sort of stopped talking about the whole thing.
The administration of the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis is currently suffering from a MeToo witch hunt: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2024/09/10/everything-to-know-about-hogsett-administration-sexual-harassment-crisis/75148395007/
The mayor himself has not been implicated, but Republicans are calling on Democrats to call for his resignation. "Your rules applied fairly."
I think there is something to the idea that Democrats assumed Republicans would be the hotbed of sexual exploitation and that they would come out of MeToo relatively unscathed. I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."
Biden was metooed in 2020. It made no difference.
Kamala even said she believed the accuser, but that didn’t stop her from becoming his VP
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't it strange that #MeToo took down Al Franken, but not Biden? Is it really just as simple as "Biden had the potential to be an effective opponent to Trump, Franken didn't, ergo Biden's accuser was smeared and discredited while Franken's career was destroyed"?
It's not even special-case usefulness.
Shot, Chaser.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The first era of sexual harassment lawsuits was often about (a) complaints from married women, who started returning to white collar workplaces after marriage (as secretaries, clerks and then increasingly in actual professional roles) from the mid-70s in ways they hadn’t before, and (b) was often about financial compensation and protection (for the women) from being fired for reporting these things to management. It practically never resulted in criminal charges being brought (or any police involvement at all) against accused men, since mostly it was considered bad workplace behavior (like being racist to an employee or firing a woman for getting pregnant were at the time) rather than a crime, often even in the most egregious cases of violent sexual assault.
This explains why MeToo didn’t happen in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s. Firstly because the legal employer relationship between a producer and an actress is completely different to that between a boss and an an employee on Wall Street (where many leading early claims were brought), and secondly because this first era of sexual harassment complaints almost never dealt with the implicit quid pro quo of the casting couch variety. Legally, there was widely considered to be a difference between “Mr Smith groped, stuck his tongue down the throat of, and slapped Mrs Wilkinson (devoted mother of two, longstanding accounts receivable clerk at Walker and Company) at a company party and three people saw and watched her walk away and cry after trying to push him away” and “Miss 21-year-old Hollywood starlet got drunk with producer and went up to his hotel room, and two months later got casted in a major role (WITH a smutty sex scene btw) and only four years later did she say he groped her and then told her to suck his dick for the part”.
If a lot of the MeToo actresses had gone to police they’d have said there was no case and no evidence, and if they had gone (and many did) to lawyers who deal in civil sexual harassment suits, they’d have said that the case had little chance of victory. In addition, most actresses want to be famous and the award in a civil suit would likely be quite small, coupled with a complete blacklisting in Hollywood. By contrast if you were a young female trader on Wall Street in 1987 and you won a sexual harassment lawsuit against your boss at Morgan Stanley, you were likely making enough money to retire. So again, the dynamics were very different.
More options
Context Copy link
What legal strategies protect a boss from sexually assaulting employees?
I was trying to find the right words to capture a bunch of different things. I was thinking of having the lawyers explain to the bosses that making passes at subordinates endangers the company and they will be fired, while also making sure that they are aware that there are a lot of ways to use money and status to get sex outside of the office.
More options
Context Copy link
The Graham/Pence rules, glass doors to conference rooms, that sort of thing.
More options
Context Copy link
Until very recently, someone who felt that they had been sexually assaulted by a prominent person could not just go online and instantly broadcast it to millions of people. And it is very hard to definitively prove that such a sexual assault has happened, given that bosses who commit sexual assaults are usually smart enough to do it when no-one else is around. Before modern social media that has made it relatively easy for anyone to do one-to-many broadcasting, and before the modern political culture in which it is pretty easy to find people who sympathize with your claim of sexual assault, I think it was probably a very different story. It was less likely that a boss who got accused of sexual assault, but without there being any concrete proof of it, would get forced out of his position by the force of public opinion and bad PR. In some ways, maybe Monica Lewinsky / Bill Clinton was the first major sign of the shifting attitudes about such things, and ironically the Republicans were the ones supporting a sort of MeToo in that case. Or maybe that's just the first one that I remember, I am not sure.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link