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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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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.

The Graham/Pence rules, glass doors to conference rooms, that sort of thing.

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.