Tag: Sexual harassment

Quote of the Day: Staring at women's bodies

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Should women take it as a compliment when men catcall them or stare at them? No!

In response to this comment, SRSister Kelderwick replied:

Not sure if “subjugate” is actual transcribed word or a totally clueless yet perfect mis-remembered “objectify”. (Despite shitthatneverhappened.txt)

But okay really dudes. Thought experiment thing time yeah? You are at the gym, running, and your workout clothes are somewhat showy and fairly form-fitting. In the mirror you notice Jane Random Runner inspecting you – awesome, says you. Okay sure, whatever. What if JRR is still staring at you ten minutes later – are you still fine? That’s not intrusive at all? Now pretend her expression isn’t neutral – she’s obviously interested. Doesn’t say a word, just stares at you or takes long glances. The whole time. You are still not affected at all by this? She keeps watching you.

Sure. Now, it isn’t just JRR anymore. Now she has 10 peers all using machines behind you. Some of them don’t look, one of them stares like JRR, some of them take the odd glance. One of them wrinkles her nose in disapproval because she doesn’t find you attractive, or so she whispers to her friend beside her. Thinks she’s being quiet, probably, but maybe not? Wait, was that a camera her friend just slipped away? Hmmm. Oh well.

But now it’s not just JRR and her peers, it’s your female co-workers. Most of them are decent enough folks and don’t bother you. But Gwen does. She leans in too close when you talk, she watches you a bit too long when you wear shorts. Whenever you go to office parties Gwen always corners you and tries to make conversation. She doesn’t take well to rejection. But she’s nice enough most of them time, right? And she’s never, you know, said anything – she is married, after all. Definitely hasn’t done anything either. Well okay there was that one time she put her hand… It doesn’t matter, she was a bit upset that day (home stuff and all that). Besides, you talked to Stephanie and she figures you just over-analyzed the whole thing.

Okay. But now it’s not just JRR and her peers and your female co-workers and Stephanie. Now it’s women on the street. Some of them whistle at you. Some are rather more lewd. Usually you’re too tired or too determined and just ignore them. But if you flip them off and reject them, sometimes they get mad.

They get real mad.

And their friends get mad too.

Now listen, you bunch of shitlord smugfucks who’ve never experienced fucking anything like this, who have no comprehension of the experiences of women who are subjected to this very predominantly male behaviour, get a fuckin’ clue: they are people out there. They have to fuckin’ live a whole life in this context. You, you who felt so stung about getting called out, or vicariously felt so, or were so morally stoked by the thought of such happening that you made it up to circlejerk with your like-minded shitlord friends like a bunch of fucking leeches writhing in a pool of liquid fucking manure, fuck off. Your little sting, that was nothing – one hair pulled out from the arse of an elephant. There is no thing, no habit from women or overbearing cultural narrative and tropes, there is no thing that gives you any fucking perspective on this.

P.S. You, shitlord, do not think this means that gender-flipping situations will be a good tool for analyzing every situation. It is not.

This is actually a very common complaint from men and a prime example of how male privilege works. For us that we have never experienced anything like this in our day-to-day lives, it’s impossible to intuitively comprehend why staring/leering/creeping at random women is not flattering to them. The thought process above is exactly what is meant when one asks us to “Check our Privilege”.

/inb4biotruths

Their Fault, They're Female

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A new variant of FML has just popped up which is called “My Fault, I’m Female”. It’s worth subscribing to.

I think I just found out my new favourite blog. This new kid on the block just popped up in the internetubes and in their own words:

This is a space to share stories of gender discrimination, pay gap disparity, denial of rights, and inequality. It can be in the workplace or outside it, but keep it short, include as much detail as you can, and when commenting let’s remember that solidarity is the key. If someone made you feel like it’s your fault you’re female, this is the place to fight back.

Long live the women who refuse to shut up.

Fuck Yea I say to that!

I went through their initial stories and some of them truly made me RRRRAGE, especially the kind of blatant harassment and sexism that goes on in the workplace.

This is definitely a nice addition to the blogosphere, lets hope they stick around. Now y’all go subscribe to it.

How to make Right-Libertarians bite the bullet.

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Making Libertarians put their foot in their mouth has never been easier.

This image is of economist Walter Block teachi...
Image via Wikipedia

The funny thing about WalterBlock’s quote defending sexual harassment in the workplace is that the nature of the argument and its unfortunate compatibility with right-libertarian principles can serve as a very easy way to make those espousing said principles get in a very tight ethical conundrum. When this quote is presented to someone (something especially effective when someone is a Block disciple) they either have to find a way to distance themselves from this argument (much like Walter Block himself has done) and thus risk cognitive dissonance, or they must bite the bullet and admit that Block was right.

It’s amazing, not only how often you’ll find them defending sexual harassment in the workplace in the name of liberty but also how often and easily they will trip on their own argumentation and put their foot firmly in their mouth.Oh, they won’t call it “harassment” of course, they’ll dance around the words until it can sound like some kind of normal human relationship, but functionally they will be defending the exact same situation and the right of the employer to make sexual advances to his secretaries under the guise of voluntarism.

Witness this latest example in reddit, where a commenter took the opportunity to defend Block’s argument and give us gems like this:

In a society of private property, there is no inherent reason whatsoever why a woman will be compelled to accept a job that contains sexual advances that she does not want. If a job does not specifically contract against it, then the employer can engage in that behavior. If it does, then he can’t.

(emphasis mine)

How about a woman that does not have enough money to feed herself and her family? A very rare scenario I know…

And this:

If I have $50,000 say, then I do not owe anyone that money. It’s mine. If I want to pay a woman to help me with my paperwork, then I can offer them that money. If they are so destitute that they are willing to accept my sexual advances, then I can follow the non-aggression principle and not once harass her. She is not obligated to stay with me. If she wants to quit and find money somewhere else (the number of potential jobs are numerous), then she can. If she stays, then that’s her choice that you must respect. If she stays because she accepts it, then how can you say that I am acting improperly? I am not doing anything she doesn’t want me to do. I will not harass her because that violates the NAP. If she accepts, then she must want it. That’s how relationships work.

This is the common fetishism of voluntarism that AnCaps do all the goddamn time. Here in all its ugly glory for all to see. A rich boss hiring a destitute girl and advancing sexually on her? No problem. She must want it or she would have left. You can easily see how much they need to assert that in a AnCap society there would be no unemployment which flies against all logic as this would make such a society immediately implode in a capitalist crisis. But as long as we can assume that no unemployment will exist, we can sweep all such contentions under the blanket.

But the best quote is this:

If you condemn this because she is only sleeping with me because she wants my money, then does not reflect poorly on me or her? It’s not me. I’m not the one sleeping with somebody else because I want their money. It’s her moral failure. Nobody is destitute enough in a private property society that they must resort to prostitution. Prostitution is a choice, just like every other occupation. You can’t change that.

I won’t even try to point out how disgusting this paragraph is on it face. How much it flies in the face of reality and women’s plight. I will only point out how one small Walter Block quote led this AnCap to say something like this.

Seriously, this thing is like an instant way to make right-libertarians say something so absurd or reprehensible that they will automatically lose all credibility and leverage in the eyes of those not already convinced of their ideology. Use it with abandon and make them face up the ugly consequences of their ideology.

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Oh hey look! More "Anarcho"-Capitalists defending the facilitation of sexual harassment on the grounds of liberty.

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Prominent “Anarcho”-Capitalist Stephen Kinsella weights in on Blocks faux-pas on sexual harassment and exemplifies all that’s wrong with this ideology.

I posted a while back explaining why the AnCap dismissals of Block’s support for sexual harassment where misguided and inconsistent with their own principles and why the question was not really about the act of aggression but how a capitalist system makes the act itself possible. Now, someone else is basically making the same argument as me only…he comes from the opposite side. I’ve just noticed that Stephen Kinsella left a comment on Brad Spangler’s blog making a similar case in support of such facilitiation…on the grounds of liberty of course.

In sum: no one is entitled to a job; employment is at-will: you can quit any time, or be fired any time. So you are not entitled to a job offer, so a conditional one does not violate your rights: I offer you a job IF you will consent to my lechery, fondling, whatever. The candidate can accept or turn it down. Note that this is true even AFTER they start work for you, usually–since employment is at-will. So you can just fire her one second, and re-offer the job, with strings, the next second. Etc.

So basically Kinsella is claiming that Block was absolutely in the right in his original case against sexual harassment laws. Maybe he considers that Block should have phrased it a bit differently to avoid drawing attention to the conclusions.

Really, this whole mindframe is the disease of right-libetarianism and the reason why I find it so difficult to take them seriously. If one can find nothing wrong with their espoused principles even when they theoretically lead to situations of people doing what they cleary do not wish to do or situations clearly appaling, then they’re well and gone in their fetishism of “voluntarism” and contracts.

The willfull ignorance of the social context in which such consent might be given is also stunning. “Nobody deserves work” says Kinsella. No, some people apparently just deserve to starve if they won’t accept sexual harassment or 16-hour workdays. It’s their fault for being born unprivileged and if they don’t like it they should just hole up in a corner and die. Compare that with Emma Goldman’s legendary quote to see the vast ideological difference between anarchism and “Anarcho”-Capitalism. The bankrupcty of putting rights to private property over rights to life.

“Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.” — Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)

But of course, this is nothing new. “Volunteering” to sexual harassment is exactly possible for the reason why people would “volunteer” to wage-slavery or “volunteer” to child labour. This is all a normal continuation of the same principles that see the hierarchical control of boss over worker and landlord over rentor as an expression of “freedom”. Consenting to be pinched is just that extra thing women might have to accept after they have consented to put aside their liberty during working hours. But hey, it’s all worth it for that cuchy office job isn’t it?

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Does private property facilitate sexual harassment?

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Walter Block’s defense of sexual harassment has made the rounds of the Anarcho-sphere and some have tried to exonerate private property from its part in this. This is not possible.

Sexual harassment
Image via Wikipedia

It seems that the Walter Block quote on sexual harassment I posted a while back has been rediscovered by various libertarians online and  lots of criticism, analysis and defenses (of PP not Block) have been written about it. It appears as even Walter Block himself appeared on the scene to distance himself from his own words.

However, the issue here is not as simple as merely saying that Block made a flawed logical reasoning, or that it was all a mistake or anything as simple as that. The quote above is simply a pointed example of the intellectual dead-end one reaches when his whole ethical framework resolves around respect for Private Property and fetishism of  voluntarism.

The issue here is that what Block wrote, unfortunately is a logical conclusion of suggesting voluntarism and the non-aggression principle within a propertarian environment as the core of ethics. It is, unfortunately consistent with “Anarcho”-Capitalist principles.

Most defenses of Private property I’ve seen (for an example, see the No Third Solution argument) orbit around the concept that harassment is prevented by the Non-Aggression principle and the lack of an explicit contract to allow it to happen. In short they consider the problem to be simply one of a contractual nature. They miss the elephant in the room by looking at the murals.

You see, there’s basically two arguments put forth here. So lets look at them in turn

“The Problem is not that the boss is harassing the secretary, but that he is harassing her without having an explicit clause in their employment contract allowing him to do so.”

This argument in short suggests that there is nothing wrong with a boss who only hires secretaries as a personal semi-harem, as long as he makes that known from the start. It assumes then that any secretary which agrees to this contract cannot then consider the sexual advances she agreed to, to be harassment.

This argument, while on the surface seems legit, is not in fact any more different than Block’s. It simply moves the agreement of the secretary from the implicit to the explicit. Whereas block asserted that the secretary’s continuous acceptance of the sexual harassment (i.e. not quitting her job over it) was an implicit agreement to it and thus not “harassment”, the contractual argument simply desires to take the same exact situation and legitimize it via the legal stamp.

However this argument misses the point that in both cases, the implicit or explicit acceptance of the harassment from the secretary is not caused because she wants it but because of the lack of alternatives. Because the other choices that remain to her if she does not accept the harassment or sign the contract are worse (ex starvation of her and her family.) The same secretary which “volunteered” to be harassed without a contract in Block’s example will also “volunteer” to sign the contract. Does the nature of her harassment change because she signed a piece of paper? Does the moral condemnation the boss deserves for abusing his position disappear?

Of course not, because the moral condemnation does not spring from the “aggression” the boss performs against the secretary but from the fact that he is using his position of power, which stems from inequality of wealth, to passively coerce the secretary to accept behaviour she would not otherwise accept if she was on equal standing.

The second problem which logically follows from the propertarian system is this:

“The boss can initiate a sexual advance towards the secretary who is at all liberty to refuse. However the boss then is at all liberty to fire her and there is nothing at all wrong with this.”

I believe that this is even more tricky for propertarians to defend. If we assume that the boss would not go straight to pinching (which the right-“libertarians” can then jump to label as “aggression”) but would initially “test the waters” so to speak by starting with subtle advancement and then growing bolder the more such advancements are accepted we end up exactly in the original Blockean argument once more.

Let’s say that this Boss does a subtle sexual advancement which the Secretary refuses. The Boss then fires her (terminating their “voluntary contract”). Next secretary? Same thing. And so on until he finds one secretary which is in a desperate enough situation that she tolerates his initial advances. He then becomes bolder and bolder until we reach the phase of pinching. Can we call that “aggression”? No since the secretary did not show outright refusal to such an advance and for the boss it can look like a normal progression of human relationship (or some other similar phrasing of his excuse). After all, the secretary is free at any point to make it clear that she does not appreciate his advances…and get fired.

In fact, the prudent “libertarian” boss, would not offer a sexual contract upfront to his potential secretaries but would rather follow the above actions until he’s determined that she’s desperate enough, and before moving on to actual physical contact, he would simply request that his secretary sign a new job contract volunteering to his sexual advances so as to legally cover his arse…just in case, you know.

Is there any way for Voluntarism and the NAP to morally condemn the actions of the boss? I fear not. And this again points out the intellectual bankruptcy of this ideology which cannot be covered by shallow “I was wrong to say that” excuses. The problem is that Block was not inconsistent with his ideology. He simply took it to his natural conclusion as he’s done with his acceptance of slave contracts. It just so happened that his argument struck a chord in the feminist movement who saw through the bankruptcy of voluntarism and forced him to backtrack hurriedly, even if he can’t explain the reasoning behind this.

Unlike vulgar-libertarians, a boss firing a secretary because she would not accept such a debasement is immediately a cause for moral condemnation by egalitarians ((Of course I maintain that one cannot be a consistent libertarian without being egalitarian as well but that’s beside the point)) as we condemn all situations which passively coerce people to “volunteer” to such humiliation. It is the same reason why we condemn wage-slavery just as much as we condemn sexual harassment. The only difference between those two is that the latter has been taken out of the status of “normal” by the brave actions of the feminist movement while the former is still seen as something natural. But the underlying causes for one to “volunteer” to sexual harassment are exactly the same as what causes one to “volunteer” to wage slavery: Private Property.

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