The frontier between ‘low-level lechery’ and predation: Daily Bullshit, November 4, 2017

Sexual harassment

Cathy Young poses a question that really has a couple of layers: First, and most obviously, she asks how we decide what level of misbehavior deserves what consequences. But also, she’s questioning what she calls a “moral panic” in which 1) any “flirting in the workplace IS HARASSMENT,”[1]but where, she writes, “[e]xcept in college, nearly every man I have ever dated was either a co-worker or, once I switched entirely to free-lancing, someone I met through work,” and 2) “current discourse on sexual harassment not only conflates predation with ‘low-level lechery’ but generally reduces women to sexual innocents who must be shielded not only from sexual advances but from bawdy jokes.”[2]

Cathy Young, “Is ‘Weinsteining’ getting out of hand?” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-young-weinsteining-goes-too-far-20171101-story.html


  1. [1]Cine Sister [pseud.], quoted in Cathy Young, “Is ‘Weinsteining’ getting out of hand?” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-young-weinsteining-goes-too-far-20171101-story.html
  2. [2]Cathy Young, “Is ‘Weinsteining’ getting out of hand?” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-young-weinsteining-goes-too-far-20171101-story.html

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