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I don't typically post primary level comments in CW threads but I was having a conversation with my wife last night that prompted me. It's not particularly explosive and treads much of the same ground as many more nuanced posts before it.
Last night I'm in the middle of sorting out a chicken lasagna among other things and I get this text from my wife: Something shocking happened at work today.
I checked the clock. I sleep very early most nights and I calculated roughly what time she'd be getting home, added how much time she'd need to decelerate and actually sit down for dinner, how long after that she'd get the story tellable in her mind, then how long it would take to hear it, factoring in my own responses, if any, her reactions to those, and keeping in mind the obvious unknown variable that maybe the story would, indeed, be shocking. I knew I'd be sleeping later than usual.
Because none of the trivialities of my day mean anything to anyone here I'll get to the point. A temp worker at her company under her tutelage has made noises that she may be leveling some sort of harassment
suit(edit: complaint) (power probably). Not against my wife, but against her direct supervisor. The reason? This temp worker has three complaints that I can tell:She was said to resemble a well-known (by other people, not me) celebrity chef on her first day. It may be relevant that I do not know what this chef looks like or whether being compared to her might be taken as an insult or compliment. This, to me, seems to matter, but maybe it doesn't, as simply the acknowledgement that the temp worker has an observable appearance and that this appearance has made some impression may, in the end, be the sin at hand.
She was asked if she is on Facebook.
She was asked her birthday.
2 and 3 were asked because apparently the supervisor was prompted by Facebook to "friend" a person with the same name as the relevant temp worker. Unsure and with no profile photo to go on, but assuming it might be her as the kanji for her name is rare and matched that of the recommended person, he unwisely and perhaps naively made his inquiry. I assume he asked her birthday for the same reason (that seems to be the case.) All of the above was done in full earshot and view of my wife and others in the office. This suggests it was not a hamhanded prelude to some attempt at making contact for an out-of-office assignation.
All this has erupted in now a series of slightly delayed-reaction texts from this woman to her work group (of which my wife is a part.) Asking whether the company has any sort of guidelines on this (my wife used a different word than guidelines but I can't remember it) and prodding that her complaints be sent up the company chain-of-command. Presumably to the mainest of main offices. The first step of this is already occurring.
I sat there listening and kept thinking to myself how Japan always seems to import the worst of American culture. From shitty hiphop styles (I'm old) to self-entitled behavior when dealing with service personnel (many convenience stores now have a term: customer harassment [kasuhara] because people are such assholes to workers. And I mean assholes. Like getting the worker to dougeza because of some imagined infraction. It doesn't help that this is a country where people commit suicide over hurt feelings.) To now a willingess to go Defcon 4 over what, to me, seem the mildest of social grievances. The triumph of HR.
I've no idea if this woman has a legitimate legal case. Recently a Hyogo prefectural governor came under fire for the kind of inappropriate behavior one would expect from a Thai royal. Or is it? In some ways it's par-for-the-course in what has always been a very hierarchical society. Sempai lord their authority over kohai who grumble but then become sempai a year later and do the same thing to their underlings. But the Hyogo guy's vwry public scandal has put the term powaah hara in the public lexicon.
But then I don't necessarily expect much from the law here, which sometimes seems applied with such bizarre reasoning it makes me wonder if I should GTFO now.
The terms sekuhara, powaah hara, kasuhara and whatever else are all abbreviated forms of borrowed terms from English (sexual harassment, power harassment, customer harassment, etc.)
Anyway we'll see. My wife is upset because she wonders at the repercussions on her supervisor, whom she likes, and with whom she has a friendly working relationship. "If it becomes like this," she said, "how will anyone be able to work together at all?"
Possibilities: I'm hearing this at least once removed. Tone, language used, body language, eye contact, all are unknown to me (but will also be unknown to anyone who adjudicates this). Maybe this supervisor guy leers at the tempworker and my wife just isn't aware of it. Maybe the temp company assured her that at this work no one would ever ask her anything personal about anything and now that's happened. Maybe the temp worker is aware of some other infractions that have occurred in her sight and this is her way of bringing all into the harsh cleansing light. Maybe, as Jordan Peterson has suggested, men and women just may not be able to work together, despite common sense western (and eastern) assumptions.
I nodded. She was right: It was shocking. But I slept earlier than I had expected.
All I can think is if such American workplace norms actually take off in East Asia they will all disappear off the face of the planet in 1.5 generations max.
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I don't see how any of this is surprising in any way. She has the opportunity to introduce a status hierarchy that benefits her (women are morally superior and intrinsically more valuable and worthy of protection and provision than men) to counteract one that doesn't (he's the boss, she's a temp). So she does it.
Principal-agent problem. This might be bad for the company, but it's good for a specific kind of woman that is most apt and most willing to manipulate the rules so that they favour her and her kind. Individual men have much to lose and little to win by opposing this. So we do it.
The history of modern sex relations is that of men finding new ways to acquire resources to impress women and women finding new ways to siphon those resources. This is good and just because the survival of the species depends on her. There's just one little problem.
Or restated, at a population level:
When the men have an easier time finding those resources, insulation from women's desires thus increases, and society enters a golden age as parasitism/corruption is less viable. Men marry and create families earlier, women make homes, TFR exceeds replacement.
The last time this happened was the mid-20th century in the US and the West more broadly.
When that becomes harder, or technology makes siphoning those resources easier (or obviates their gathering altogether), that insulation disappears, and society enters a dark age, where parasitism/corruption is more viable. Men marry later and create families later, women focus on other things, TFR drops.
The last time this happened in the US was the early-20th century (rural birthrates are hiding precipitous urban birthrate decline in TFR)- the largest jump in women's rights happened at that time.
Certain populations are affected by those shifts faster or slower than others.
When the latter conditions occur, men turn inward. And men can remain turned inward/lying flat much longer than women can remain fertile, especially since modern distractions are far better than they were in 1920. Usually the antidote for this is that war comes, a bunch of men suicide-by-enemy-action, and if they win the survivors have less competition for women -> social conditions improve... but there's a lot of knock-on effects such that this isn't a silver bullet.
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It's surprising because it's uncommon here, or, at least, has been in the 20 something years I've been here. Notably my wife (also female, for verification here) has never made such claims against any of her work supervisors, the vast majority of whom have been men, and with one exception straight men, and this through her prime years of attractiveness, as it were, suggesting that the kind of dynamic you imply is to-be-expected among women is possibly not as universal as you propose. None of her female colleagues have made such strategic moves either. (I might point out that my wife was a temp for a year and was hired full-time, poached from the temp agency, based on her unusual level of competence, so she has been in the shoes, as it were, of a temp worker herself.)
Oh by those standards it's quite rare even in the wokest of woke institutions in the West. But even if it's just 1 out of 100 female employees making that move, that is going to have a noticable impact. Mainly because it changes the behaviour of male bosses who seek to protect themselves from it.
I don't disagree. I do think your earlier characterization ("She has the opportunity to introduce a status hierarchy that benefits her [women are morally superior and intrinsically more valuable and worthy of protection and provision than men] to counteract one that doesn't [he's the boss, she's a temp]. So she does it.") is overgeneralizing. My defense here (Not all women) has the potential to become caricature, so I'll leave that there.
I also would be firmly in this woman's corner if
a) My wife were in her corner, as I trust her instincts to be pretty exactly the same as mine in these regards or
b) if the details were different, i e. he asked not just her birthday but the year of her birth, plus her number, or her cup size, or anything that is obviously past the zone of friendly (even partially flirty) office chat.
In other words claims of harassment have their place even in my world of tolerance for men being manny and a general relaxed atmosphere the preference.
As I thumb this out the high school kid on the 5:03 am train across the car from me has his head lolling back in contented slumber with his right hand unconsciously down in his pants, presumably cupping his balls. To my immediate left a guy I used to see every morning in a blue jumpsuit and a red flashlight baton tucked in his bag (i.e. not necessarily Einstein on his way to the library) has reappeared and is muttering sweet nothings to himself absent-mindedly. Two dudes are unconsciously (?) manspreading so that the aged woman who gets on halfway to my stop (we just passed that halfway point) cannot politely sit down. All this neither here nor there but I felt the need to give an account.
I think psychologically this is easily explained.
He was awkward. He did something that was slightly out of the ordinary and that felt weird, which made her uncomfortable. If it made her uncomfortable, he made her uncomfortable, which means he is a [bad person]. "Creep" is the closest thing that pattern-matches to [bad person] in this situation, therefore it must have been sexual harassment.
You can argue until you're red in the face that this isn't logical or doesn't pass the reasonable man (sic!) test. The fact remains that she felt uncomfortable. And then we reason backwards from there.
Don't let me put words in your mouth, but I think that while what you are implying (her, whoever her is, discomfort level should not be the sole falconer guiding our flight) is reasonable, there are in fact circumstances that exist where she would be be justified in feeling discomfort. And thus justified in making a complaint. True?
Depends on what we mean by justified (are there gettier cases for emotions?), but I would even say that she is justified to feel discomfort in the case you presented. The question is what everybody else should do about it. My suggestion would be: nothing.
And it's not even like nothing happened! He put her in a slightly uncomfortable situation. Whether that should be punished by bringing in the big gun of sexual harassment allegations is the matter, really.
But to answer my interpretation of your question: there is a level of discomfort that warrants intervention by third parties. The most effective would probably be another man taking him aside and giving him the good ol' "dude, not cool".
Alas, melady hath suffered a slight. Her honour must be avenged. Which is to say, men and women working together will produce these kind of situations. The West has recently undertaken the experiment to solve it by giving women a metaphorical gun and the licence to kill. Let's see how it'll work out.
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You're a gaijin married to a sinic. By her very nature, she will be more exposed and receptive to western cultural norms than her peers. She bears your children without her parents screeching in shame at the poisoning of their bloodline, but she can consume and repeat the worst of the western world as well. Thems the breaks.
An accusation of sekuhara sticking normally reflects the relative power distance within the organizational context, as opposed to any real incidence of sexual harassment. @100ProofTollBooth mentions the attractiveness meme, which is accurate enough and usually translates to 'know your place, trash' when it comes to ugly/weak men daring to talk to women, but within sinic cultures his point about male/female workplace dynamics has more relevance.
Power is an exercise in personal will in sinic companies, compared with western companies where power is the hand on the organizations internal levers. Sinic companies value the illusion of consensus, whereby decisions from on high are supported by the staff, in a 'together we die' manner. Lower ranks breaking this consensus publicly reflects either the weakness of their target, or failure of the superior to exercise his will. Breaking this illusion for personal benefit - even for legitimate reasons such as protecting oneself from harassment - is not just an attack on the infractor, but on the management style of the leader as a whole. The obvious solution would be to Human Resource the organization and put in place clear boundaries of rules responsibilities obligations and punishments to keep everyone strictly in their lane.
For sinic workplaces, this is a terrible outcome. Frictional administrative costs to organizational cohesion and rapidity of decision making accumulate extremely quickly in a Human Resourced environment, with flexibility of interdepartmental backscratching or team crunch torture being blocked off by policy diktats. Teams stick with managers or peers teams because there exists an expectation that push comes to shove these people will step up as well, allowing decisions and actions to be made quickly. Following a leader is easy because the leader tanks all the responsibility for fuckups, regardless of what the actual cause of the fuckup is.
This is obviously a highly imperfect system. There exists little means to hold nonperforming managers accountable, and people who are less willing to stand up for themselves will get bullied more easily. However, as we can see in the current example, entertaining witchhunts does more than burn the accused (maybe legitimately), it creates a flame. Those in the village will wonder if the witchhunter requires more fuel for the pyre, and those outside the village will wonder if the village is burning.
“Sinic?” As in “Chinese? Is this some racialist term of art, or is it a conflation of categories, like Moldbug’s “demotism” sleight-of-hand?
I observe that all your explanations also apply to small American businesses. But any one which scales up has to develop a managerial hierarchy. That opens the door for abuses of power, and in turn, an HR department evolves to prey on the excesses.
This is correlated with the loss of agility and the frictional costs, but I don’t believe it causes them. They are two sides of the same coin: managing risk. Larger businesses with more market share have more to lose. The main sequence is to ossify and appeal to policy. There’s also the Musk route: damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. This gambles on results but soaks a lot more hits along the way.
Under this model, Japan has scaled up businesses but is only now developing the HR immune system. Why now, and not in the 90s like the U.S.? A weak economy makes firms less risk-tolerant. The U.S. has been broadcasting its solution extra hard lately. But above all, I think, the Japanese workforce has only recently started to include more women. They cleared our level of female workforce participation in 2012. I think this is just how the switch to a service economy works.
Sinic as in northeast Asian as a catchall. China, Japan, Korea. Extends to legacy diaspora that maintained their cultural continuity too, like the overseas Chinese in southeast asia and the old holdouts in Flushing, Queens (the foreign Chinese are entirely bleached otherwise).
The point about agility being traded off against personnel excesses when implementing HR practices and the presented modal sinic organization being identical to all small enterprises holds, but I still maintain that sinic management companies are unique in ways I have to take time to articulate. I am myself Chinese, I have worked in large and small organizations white and Chinese and Japanese and Indian, lead and followed and strayed. There exists a unique quality of dictatorial fiat extant and expected of higher management, most analogous to an normally absent but overwhelming if present paternalistic military hierarchy.
Specifics on work style and internal strategy are secondary to the issue at hand, which is women speaking out against harassment. The non-HR system was obviously prone to abuses, with unworthy men exploiting their position to the detriment of junior female hires. However, I suspect that the HRfication of companies allows unworthy men to be deemed so by their failure to exercise the now-female hidden levers of power. In the older system, the unworthy men were exploiting a relationship arbitrage: their power distance to the overlord was shorter than the underlings, so suffer they must. In the HR world, the power distance is relative to the org tools each party can exploit. This levels/upends the playing field significantly, and lets juniors have a means of undermining superiors when it was impossible before.
Why would women complain about this? I will risk the ire of many here, but I am 100% sure it is a case of 'know your place, trash'. How dare this man, no matter his station, dare sully my environment with his unwanted affection. If the woman could, she would reserve her energy only for the most deserving of chads that are in her orbit, whether colleagues or clients.
Why do I posit this with such certainty? Because the greatest pushback against fraternization punishments in professional partnerships here is from women. Specifically, powerful senior women who boosted their early careers by dating and eventually marrying senior partners or clients. The entertainer gets to determine who is worthy to be entertained, and these women judge the game to be fair now as it was then.
No one wants to be sexually harassed. But once they have a taste of power, women have also found themselves indulging in its trappings and seeking means to perpetuate it for themselves.
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These things are always hard to tell when you're hearing about it second-hand, since so much depends on the precise body language, tone, and wording. Adding in a foreign language and culture just makes things even more confusing. From what you said it certainly sounds suspiciously like he was trying to hit on her and take advantage of the work heirarchy, but there's reasonable doubt.
What do you think should have happened here? Should the temp worker just smile and accept the sexual harassment, shouwa-era style? Should she "take the law into her own hands" and scream at the guy or punch him? Just quietly quit her job and go someplace else? Sic a big mob on him on the internet? What she did (complaining to the corporate heirarchy) sounds pretty reasonable.
Well, she is a temp. She could say just say “thank you but no.” The stakes of retaliation are low because she well is a temp.
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A problem that also extends to whoever is responsible for managing this dispute in the end unfortunately.
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Do you see any of this as sexual harassment? I certainly don't. What's your birthday? That seems incredibly benign.
Im imagining him doing all three of those things together, in a tone that implies he wants to look at facebook pics of a much younger woman, and maybe buy her gifts for her birthday. I dont know, maybe its nothing, but it could be sexual harassment. I just feel like its hard to judge without being there. I dont know why you dont believe your wife about this case.
? I'm honestly perplexed. My wife thinks the man is totally innocent. Her point was that the woman is overreacting and she is questioning whether this type oversensitivity is possible if normal work is to progress
Ah, OK, I missed that. I thought your wife was agreeing with the other office women. In that case, yeah, that changes my interpretation a lot. Basically in this sort of murky situation I would just trust whichever witness I knew the best, so in this case your wife.
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Why would you imagine him doing those things in a maximally negative light without reason to believe he did them in a maximally negative light?
It's one thing to update one's understanding of a situation in light of new evidence, but it's another to introduce imagination as a reason for framing a situation as worse than it's even claimed to be. What, in the description, warrants a framing of 'shouwa-era style' sexual harassment? Is this (unlikely) intended to characterize shouwa-era style sexual harassment as tepid of what was actually claimed, or is this instead trying to characterize what was described with extremely pejorative framing to make it seem worse?
a large group of women all agreed that this was sexually harassment, which they witnessed first-hand, including his own wife. Do you think they're all just lying? I'm not "imagining him doing those things in a maximally negative light," I'm just trusting the eye-witnesses. Why do you feel compelled to fight for the innocense of some random guy you've never met?
Basic human decency seems compelling enough.
You say that a large group of women all agreed that this was sexual harassment... but what has actually been described is not sexual harassment absent evidence that has not been provided. Even you acknowledged the criticality of body language, tone and context... information that you do not have. If you do not have critical information to justify a judgement of guilt, particularly when that information could establish innocence, you should not presume guilt.
Whether this is a lie is irrelevant to what the facts at hand support. Whether this is all the facts that exist is irrelevant to what judgement you should make from the facts at hand. Whether this came from is a married woman or an unmarried woman or a group of women is irrelevant to the facts on hand. If you think the OP is lying about what the women provided, feel free to accuse them of not providing, and if you think the woman has not provided all the information she could, feel free to request, but either way would be an acknowledgement of the limitations of the information.
There are well established errors in logic and reasoning that derive from deferring to groups of people just because there is a group (bandwagoning), or basing trust off of the demographics of a group (prejudice), and particularly the gender of a group (sexism). This is even more true when dealing with the presentation of information to shape initial impressions, such as priming, the framing effect , anchoring bias, the women are wonderful effect, and so on.
Precisely because cultural and social norms and human psychology are so prone to failures of perception, these seem more than sufficient reason not to presume guilt solely on the basis of an accusation, let alone not invent context not claimed by the accusers to justify the accusation's grounding.
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I love hearing the trivialities, you tell them well and they provide a humanizing dimension to the rest of your post. And this particular post is all about the challenges people have in humanizing their professional interactions, so very apropos.
I see that HR gets little love here, so I will defend them. The purpose of HR is to protect the company from the heat of human friction (metaphorically speaking). That means defusing interpersonal conflict when it may get out of hand, not escalating it.
For the most part, employees deal with normal interpersonal conflicts themselves, as people do. But occasionally someone can't, and it helps to have a clear process an employee can turn to. That's what a complaint to HR does, it starts this process. Someone from HR then hears that employee out, then thanks the employee for bringing the matter to HR's attention and assures her that the matter is handled. (The manner of that handling is confidential, but they'll assure her it's appropriate and in line with the company policy.)
HR does not burn a valuable manager over one temp worker's complaint for what she sees as a deviation from professional behavior.
Yes that’s the benefit. But the question is of cost. The argument is that on net the costs outweigh the benefits.
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Thank you and thanks for the perspective. My own experiences with HR in various places (of course never in my wife's place of employment) are considerably less positive.
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At face value, she seems to be insane.
Asking someone their birthday is such utterly normal behavior that it devalues the rest.
The first, without additional evidence provided should also be dismissed as nothing. Resembling a celebrity chef is not an issue. And so is friending her on Facebook.
People causing trouble because the other party genuinely is treating them rather badly (not, this job by its nature is tough), is one thing. When the case appears frivolous it should be dismissed.
Ideally women spent more time as mothers in today's world with low fertility rates.
While there are issues that might arise from men and women working togethe, I find this a cope in this situation since the problem is unreasonable behavior. By their nature, women are probably more in line to be compatible with unreasonable complaint culture, if they are indulged to. For another example, Men are more likely to sexually harass in a genuine way and also to be targets of false accusations.
Both men and women should operate under rules to not cause unreasonable trouble to their coworkers, and where the job's rules, doesn't violate basic interaction or encourages social isolation. We want people to be able to even build friendships and even gasp families with coworkers.
As with all issues, there is no way to escape making a judgement and being resolute, and reasonable judgements that take a stand is how you avoid such behaviors. When those in charge fail to do their duties and shut down such behaviors, and judge the frivolous, as frivolous, you are going to get insane accusations over bullshit. So in this case, based on the facts as they appear now, higher ups should have a talk with her and explain how accusing someone of harassment is a serious issue and how her complaints do not constitute harassment, but her accusation does.
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From this moment, people, we're at DEFCON 4, if that's the highest DEFCON, and if high DEFCONS are worse than low ones.
Sorry it's too good a joke to let it go over anyone's head.
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Without knowing or understanding much of Japanese outside of the few items I've absorbed as a (disgusting) weeb, are any of the three behaviors listed outside of the norm in Japan? To me, friending a coworker on social media and asking for someone's birthday seems to be the norm (the latter especially, in order to plan team celebrations.) Acknowledging that there's a resemblance between a co-worker and a celebrity might be on shakier ground (if she resembled a porn star, for example,) but the person in question was a celebrity chef, so the comment seems as innocuous of a way of commenting on someone's looks as possible.
There may be a non-trivial age difference in the two, but I don't know. He didn't even ask to "friend" her as far as I know, just asked did she have a Facebook account and was this her? Possibly a senior asking a junior this is the issue? Not sure.
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First, attractive young women are going to receive a lot of attention from men. I don't blame this young woman for being annoyed that her supervisor wanted her personal facebook after commenting on her appearance.
But, trying to facebook friend your coworkers is utterly normal behavior, or so it seems- I don't know very much about Japanese workplace boundaries. This woman actually filing a lawsuit is ridiculous behavior. I understand not wanting to raise the issue with her supervisor directly, but complaints within the company are still doable, no?
To be clear, I am not sure it's a lawsuit. It seems to be a machination within the company, but that could have dire results. And as far as I know he was not asking her to "friend" him, just asking for clarification based on the Facebook algorithm suggesting that profile--and then trying to confirm if it's her. (This could be a subtle way of him asking for a friending, I'm not sure, but at face value it's innocuous.)
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I don't know anything about Japanese culture, so I can't offer any comments of value. But I'll blast out a few unconnected thoughts that I think are pertinent here.
I have seen dozens of examples of new / first-time managers seemingly forget everything they ever learned about social behavior. I think the pressure of "being in charge" can do strange things to people (even if they are simply in charge of making sure everyone does what they're already doing). In the American The Office (which I despise) a major cornerstone of the plot and characters is how the "Boss", Michael Scott, is a cringe machine who cannot lead his employees effectively and cannot be-friend them socially. Power dynamics (which is a term I despise) complicate relationships. If it's hard for an individual to navigate social relationships already, being a boss can be a bridge too far.
Men and women can absolutely work together, but it won't be the equity-and-inclusion utopia that the HR bots believe in. This has nothing to do with sexual harassment or office romance, and everything to do with group decision making styles. Women seek to build complete group consensus, Men are more prone to making decisions and then getting the group behind them. Women will indirectly criticize and use covert tactics to challenge, Men are more direct and will "disagree and commit." The problem has become that the HR bots have deemed all of that male behavior verboten; toxic, hostile, etc. What has taken it's place is a laundering of classic male group dynamics to be more "acceptable" to female styles of communication. The HR bots collect their rent by commanding large salaries to rubber stamp these goofy interactions - and, of course, to defend the behavior of executives no matter how outrageous.
Sexual harassment is often a "know it when I see it" transgression. It's also, unfortunately, a very relative thing. There is a meme about this. We can culture war about that (and I'm sure we will). My specific question would be - what's the best way to deal with a delusion person who thinks that any social attention is sexual harassment? A given employee - male or female - simply believes that any passing kind comment is an overt indication of romantic intent. How do you deal with this? Can you imagine sitting Bob or Alice down and saying something like "Phil from accounting doesn't want to fuck you." That in and of itself would be sexual harassment. Try a different approach, "Bob/Alice, you've submitted 5 sexual harassment complaints this year. All were investigated and none were substantiated. Maybe take a step back?" Again - wouldn't this turn into some sort of complaint?
My weak submission is simply to keep at-will employment as strong as possible. If an employee is just causing problems (sexual harassment or otherwise), leadership should be permitted to fire them easily. But even that's not necessarily a clean end. I think there was a post on here about wrongful-termination suits being 90% fantastic bullshit and 10% "holy hell, fucking sue that company into oblivion." HR beyond the grave but in reverse.
Since you mentioned The Office, one of my favourite moments in the whole series is the episode where Toby leads the office in sexual harassment training. Michael's boorish friend Todd Packer visits the office and spends the episode making crude comments about everyone and everything. By the end of the episode when Packer is directly insulting Phyllis's appearance, Michael finally seems to grasp that Packer's behaviour is unacceptable and tells him so - and then, being Michael, he takes it too far and starts lavishing praise on how gorgeous Phyllis is, to the point of claiming to have an erection.
It's easy to imagine the high-concept writer's pitch for this episode: "Michael is so aggressively opposed to sexual harassment in the workplace that he inadvertently ends up committing an even more extreme kind of sexual harassment". But it does say something about how sweepingly these policies are written. Explicitly telling your colleague that you want to fuck them (or implying it) is sexual harassment; explicitly telling your colleague that you don't want to fuck them (or implying it) is also sexual harassment. Take it to its logical conclusion and it suggests that every employee should have zero opinion on their colleagues' attractiveness (or lack thereof) whatsoever - perhaps we could issue everyone burqas to expedite the process? From my understanding, the Anglosphere is something of an outlier in this regard - in Italy, jokes, banter and playful flirting are seen as an ordinary and desirable part of office culture. I know it can be taken too far and there are severe downsides to that approach, but the modern Anglosphere approach isn't costless either, and when you think about how deracinated, sexless (in the literal and figurative senses) and adversarial modern Anglosphere working culture is, it's hard not to think that something lovely was lost along the way. Not too long ago, playful banter between two colleagues which eventually escalates into a passionate kiss at the Christmas party was one of the predominant routes to nuptials - now it has largely fallen by the wayside, in favour of the "superior" option of the Tinder algorithm doing the legwork for us.
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I disagree with your final paragraph. We don't want the female worker in the OP to be able to easily get the other guy fired. American CEOs sided with BLM and started enforcing stronger antiwhite quotas. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-26/corporate-america-kept-its-promise-to-hire-more-people-of-color
It is easier for higher ups to be ideologically captured, and they cannot be trusted as a class with power to do whatever they want. Of course, the system is such that there are pressures in that direction, including from the goverment.
There should be all sorts of pressures to allow people to be fired for valid reasons, and not allow them to be fired for invalid reasons like those who have been fired for being insufficiently left wing. The concept of frivolous complaints and people being politically correct troublemakers should be sufficiently common and they will be less inclined to be that. Female coworkers claiming harassment over BS like this case, should count as bad behavior.
At the same time, it is fair for female workers not to be groped for example and to be able to make complaints about that. I dunno how common that is in Japanese corporations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chikan_(body_contact)
And in an environment of strict legal equality, women are granted this power.
It's only a solvable problem in a totalitarian system, where the computer actually knows what he-said and she-said (and where this is already the case, usually when the text message logs enter the court record, the case gets thrown out... and then the laws get changed to make text messages inadmissible), but if we had a totalitarian system equality wouldn't be a thing anyway.
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The fact that she's a temp may give them some room to just not renew her--but then she may consider this the reason (which it probably would be) and see that as actionable, i.e. "They didn't want me back because I pointed out their harassment" or similar. I am not actually sure how it will play out.
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This was interesting to read. I’m learning Japanese right now and recently have been practicing kenjougo and sonkeigo (forms for extra politeness).
One of the exercises was an extended dialogue of an employee and his boss talking and I had to convert the normal forms to the honorific ones.
It really surprised me when I was done how much of an asshole the boss seemed to me. My tutor had to repeatedly reassure me that he’s not being an asshole; its ok because he’s the boss.
I accepted it more or less but now what you’ve said has made me reconsider a bit if maybe there’s something to it.
I probably sound like a woman most of the time I speak Japanese. Except when I don't. But everything from how to say "I" (men say 俺 ore or 僕 boku, and only women really say 私 watashi, except of course when men decide to say watashi in certain circumstances for subtle reasons, or when a woman decides for funzies with her galpals to call herself ore) to question tags (yaro vs. dessho at least here in Kansai) to word choice can be marked masculine or feminine. This is not even getting into issues of power where the sempai will use words to the kohai that the kohai should not use back to the senpai. As a foreigner I am exempt from a lot of this, but this also means I am constantly perceived as linguistically limited (which I am) and therefore not fully part of the program.
When in doubt, listen to the view of the Japanese person, who will be getting all the subtleties. That said, I am of the belief that one person can't give the one right answer any more than any random American can tell you how to interpret a given social situation at the shopping mall in Columbus, Indiana.
Agreed.
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I seem to recall reading, probably either here or on Hacker News, that native Japanese speakers can identify those who mostly learned the language from their (opposite gender) significant other because they don't do well following the gender conventions. I don't know much Japanese --- I tried Duolingo on it for a few months --- but I appreciate the examples you've listed, even if I don't understand much of it at all.
There are many non-Japanese around me who are far more fluent than I, and I have tagged (in my motte dossier) more than one user with the phrase "Japanese is better than yours," but even I can pick up on this, in particular when hearing non Japanese women speak Japanese like males. It can be off-putting even for me, and it takes a bit of thinking to realize why.
Note: I also hear this in Japanese women who have learned English from hanging around a bunch of American/British/or Canadian dudes. One in particular, she notably swears a lot (in English) and often when it seems uncalled for (even when for me sometimes a swear word would be natural--I realize some here, some males even, eschew harsher forms of speech as a personal rule.)
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Heh, I participated in a previous discussion where "only women really say watashi" came up here (I still can't speak or read Japanese) https://www.themotte.org/post/149/friday-fun-thread-for-october-28/23892?context=8#context
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