This seems like a slippery slope. I can imagine malicious but careful predators who constantly test boundaries in a conscious effort to achieve a sexual goal. But I can also imagine a poor socially awkward guy who just has a severe crush, but is doing his damnedest not to say or do anything to act on it- and a woman who would be particularly sensitive to his unwanted romantic desire.

Both would be "incidents that don't cross the line but in aggregate make the woman feel uncomfortable", but the latter deserves understanding and _perhaps_ a calm discussion, but definitely not punishment.

I'm just saying, even the gray area has a spectrum- but any policies people come up with to handle this, would need to establish a threshold higher than just "a woman felt uncomfortable around a specific man", or perhaps a gentle grade of responses.

The point here was incidents that don't cross "the line", which means the location of the line is suddenly up for debate, so you don't even know if you did something wrong.

If the line is up for debate, you would know if you did something wrong - unless you're not following the debate. If you're not following the debate, you really don't have anyone to blame but yourself.

Women are already reluctant to come forward when subjected to overt sexual harassment, let alone "gray area" harassment. I don't think anyone has to fear any kind of slippery slope here.

It is describing a continued change of standards over time, with no clearly defined end-goal other than "nobody ever feels uncomfortable".

> Towards what?

Towards a point where a woman can punish a man for being socially awkward because he has a crush.

> Will women eventually begin to feel uncomfortable about situations that are clearly not sexual?

"Clearly" is a useless word here. And sexual? What about romantic? What about platonic, but more than is welcome?

They already do feel uncomfortable as a result of unwanted attention. I've seen it happen. The person I was replying to was suggesting a world where that is actionable.

> Women are already reluctant to come forward when subjected to overt sexual harassment, let alone "gray area" harassment.

Some are reluctant, which is regrettable and we should support them. Some are not reluctant. And some are eager, in hope of a payday. All of those exist.

> I don't think anyone has to fear any kind of slippery slope here.

When a person is discussing a world where even the nebulously defined gray area is legally actionable, and the only standard is "a woman felt uncomfortable" - yes.

It seems like you're replying viscerally to the idea that sexual harassment is not real, or should not be punished? I never suggested such a thing. I just think that if we're going to try and un-blur the gray area, then we need objectively defined standards.

Repeated unwelcome advances are not OK even if the person is single.

Definitely agree with you there. I added the extra "made clear they had a significant other" since it would help to push the line even further into unacceptable territory. I don't mean to imply that the relationship status is a necessary condition for unacceptability. The fact that women have learned to use the existence of an SO as an escape rather than outright saying no reflects poorly on the men that caused the learned behavior.

Last weekend she received an unsolicited, nearly naked photo from the same male co-worker. Needless to say, he is no longer at the company.

This is sad on two counts. First, it's sad that my relative felt she couldn't report because she thought it would harm her career. It sickens me to say this, but maybe she was right. Maybe it would have harmed her career.

Second, and I've seen this before, she had to endure further harassment until he really escalated so she could report something significant enough that she felt it wouldn't harm her credibility.

Though we're discussing this through the lens of the tech industry, the most horrifying thing of all is that this isn't even a problem that's unique to tech.

It's pervasive. Still.

What prompts this kind of mentality?

Stalking seems to be some form of obsessive behavior, and I suspect that sending pictures is an early stage of such behavior. It also describe a cure for it, ie similar cures we have when obsessive behavior makes someone a criminal.

Maladjusted chuds being maladjusted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/republicans-emergin...

That's not what they said at all.

> > That seems like a reasonable distinction to make, though both can have the same moral fault and/or commit the same crime; motivation is important when we look towards someone's character.

Stop rounding people to stereotypes.

"And I'm not saying X, but X." where "X" = "it's her fault".

Just because you deny what you're about to say in the same sentence just before you say it, doesn't mean you didn't say it.

So what is your motivation for defending someone who's trying to shift the blame to the victim of sexual harassment, and how does that speak to your character?

Ignorance of the law is not a defence against it. That's right and proper.

If I believe you are happy with me taking money from your wallet, and so take some. Can you see that would be a different category morally to if I believed you would condemn such action and yet still took the money. Both situations might be theft, both might be judged morally wrong. But to me the moral character of the person in the two situations is different. And, that differences is worthy of note.

"her silence [...] causing him to escalate to naked pictures"

Don't blame the victim's silence for "causing" an "escalation" to sending naked pictures. He decided to do it of his own free will, she did not "cause" him to do that by being silent.

based upon your post I can understand why you find it difficult identifying such a thing, but there it is.

You're so blinded by your beliefs you've lost all sense of fairness and balance and mistake moderates as the being of the opposing faction.

Yes, and even if the person being rejected poses no risk it's nice to spare their feelings with what amounts to a little white lie. It helps everybody save face and ideally allows the conversation to move on to other things.

This is where professionalism and propriety come in. One's behavior should simply be well outside the gray area and straying into it should, itself, be grounds for confrontation.

That doesn't actually fix anything, you're just defining the gray area to be further to one side. If people actually did that then expectations would change and more innocuous behavior would fall into the gray area, requiring you to move the line again.

The gray area exists because not everybody agrees where the line is.

In some cultures it is illegal for a man and a woman who are not married to even be alone in a room together. In some cultures physical contact between acquaintances is normal behavior. In a multicultural society, whose culture should have the force of law?

This gray area exists because the law needs to operate under the presumption of innocence, defining crimes unambiguously and prosecuting them with due regard for reasonable doubt -- it is deliberately narrow and permissive, because the state is very powerful and if not held to strict limits it becomes very dangerous. However, those of us who wish to have a good social and professional reputation shouldn't expect to maintain it while doing things that are "barely legal"; and those who witness us doing so should not feel that those kinds of things are not to be mentioned or corrected merely because they are not illegal.

That is the theory everyone refers to when they're trying to justify imposing harsh penalties.

Have you read the laws that Congress actually passes? It would be nice if they actually lived up to that standard.

And you can't get out of the problem by appealing to a reputational shadow enforcement system. If reputational harm wasn't real or powerful then no one would be interested in imposing it. Imposing real penalties with a weak standard of proof on marginal behavior is equally problematic regardless of whether the penalties are formally imposed by the state. And today's attitudes become tomorrow's laws.

Gray areas are gray because they contain both baby and bathwater.

If something is clearly wrong it's easy to make it illegal (and it almost always already is), and if it isn't clearly wrong then we don't have any special knowledge the state lacks that allows us to mete out penalties in borderline cases without punishing good people.

There is a grey area like that but that is not the grey area I am talking about.

To a consider an example you mentioned previously: it's fine to just not ever touch your coworkers. Another example is ethnic jokes: these are not illegal but do you need to do this at work? Staying out of the gray area is not a matter of harsh punishment but rather on insisting on professionalism and decorum.

It is only when people have strayed so far from that -- normalising deviance for themselves -- that you find yourself in a place where harsh punishment is even thinkable. One would not need or apply harsh punishments for matters of decorum.

You're assuming the benefit of staying away from the line is greater than the cost of losing every net-positive thing that isn't entirely white.

It's possible for a workplace to be a sterile environment where one turns one's wrench in silence without human connection, but that isn't how people should have to spend the majority of their waking hours.

And again, that policy is a ratchet. What people take offense to is calibrated by expectations and past experience. If you succeed in exerting social pressure to keep everyone away from the line, you move the Overton window and create a new gray area in what used to be accepted professional behavior. Continue to apply the same line-avoiding policy and you have a ratchet that leads to the imposition of radically Puritanical positions.

For example, tipping -- I honestly can not remember the last time I saw anyone not do it. That doesn't mean tips keep going up and up and up...

How do you explain that?

> Nonetheless, the standard percentage to tip waitstaff has risen over the decades. According to a PayScale study, the median tip is now 19.5%. In recent years, some waiters and restaurants have suggested that 25% or even 30% is the proper gratuity level, and that a 20% tip, once considered generous, is just average today. As recently as 2008, though, an Esquire tipping guide stated "15 percent for good service is still the norm" at American restaurants. An American Demographics study from 2001 found that three-quarters of Americans tipped an average of 17% on restaurant bills, while 22% tipped a flat amount no matter what the bill, and the gratuity left averaged $4.67. Meanwhile, in 1922, Emily Post wrote, "You will not get good service unless you tip generously," and "the rule is ten per cent."

Presumably as a result of most people not wanting to leave a below average tip, which clips the low side of average from the distribution and thereby raises the average over time.

Why should that even be a factor? Unwanted is unwanted, whether they're in a committed relationship or not is not relevant at all.

Parent post included that because these threads are full of arseholes who say things like "he didn't know, why didn't she just tell him?"

It's very common.

While I don't know the details of what happened here, there's nothing wrong or illegal about approaching someone and I'm more than a little miffed that anyone would consider it necessary (or good) to make "unwelcome advances" illegal. Yes, even unwelcome advances to married women.

Bosses, professors, doctors, interviewers and every other situation I can think of have a bright line where it's not okay to try and romantically or sexually engage someone when you're in a context that you have power over them, even if it is ephemeral. VCs are no different.

I'm not even going to try and address groping or other forms of harassment, which are wrong even when a power dynamic doesn't exist.

human sexuality isn't that cut and dried.

Context is important.

yes, technically you could consider rape to be an 'unwanted advance', but no reasonable person would ever characterize it as so. The very fact that it's characterized as an unwanted advance tells you it's not sexual harassment, it's just someone chasing another person.

http://www.aauw.org/what-we-do/legal-resources/know-your-rig...

> Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Very generally, “sexual harassment” describes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature.

Federal law appears to disagree with you.

However, it seems to me, as a non-American, that the US is pretty hysterical on this topic. Humans make each other uncomfortable sometimes, some situations are inherently awkward, emotional anguish is inflicted on good people (I've had to fire a few... that's horrible on both sides of the desk)... there's no reason society should be ascribed the duty to guarantee that nobody ever finds themselves in situations they are not comfortable in.

As I mentioned, my partner pushed my boundaries a bit, but I'm doubleplusgood happy she did. In hindsight, my initial reticence was an error, and by persisting she allowed me the opportunity to correct that. Now our lives are significantly enhanced as a result. I don't see why such behaviour should be subject to censure. Did it make me uneasy? In a transitory way, yes. But it's part and parcel of existing in a social fabric.

Do you have any examples? (I'd prefer some with links, please).

There is no "low morality" in a woman accepting an invitation to go on a date even in the most hidebound parts of the United States. But that's not what you mean. You don't mean "interact". You mean "screw". That you're conflating the idea of "regular, not very confident or skilled people" interacting with women with its very small subset, screwing, is telling as to your worldview and how you regard the women under discussion.

You should stop digging.

How do you have brief experiences, btw?

IANAL, but legally it's not sexual harassment because they don't work at the same company.

Something is only sexual harassment in two cases: 1) a supervisor offers something to a subordinate in exchange for sexual favors 2) a company is found to have created a hostile work environment. In both cases it's the company that's liable, not the person or people doing the harassment. There may be some extra rules that exist in individual states, but this is the general idea.

Certainly it's bad behavior, but because there isn't any real power imbalance between entrepreneurs and VCs the problem can mostly be dealt with socially (as has happened here) rather than being a situation that requires some specific legal intervention. (Or at least that's the general legal theory.)

For example, catcalling on the street isn't illegal. It's still sexual harassment, it's still unethical, but it's not illegal.

Apparently in some instances and places it is. Follow the link.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/29/catca...

Unfortunately this isn't true, from a legal point of view; in many jurisdictions, the legal definition of SH is specifically tailored (and constrained) to "the workplace".

Mind you I'm not talking about what's "slimy", "invasive", or what infringes on one's natural rights as a human being or anything about that. But rather, the legal definition. Which doesn't always jibe with what people would or like it to be.

?? Sorry?

There is a huge power imbalance between entrepreneurs and VCs.

What I meant is that the EEOC decided to draw a line, and aside from the "in the context of a company" requirement, the behavior in the stories I've heard definitely crosses that line rather than just being an uncomfortable and sketchy situation.

I would argue however, that because VC's are holding the money and entrepreneurs are trying to raise, it might not be as bad as a boss/employee power dynamic, but the power is certainly held by the VC in the situation.

- The vast majority of highly successful companies don't raise venture. VCs need equity, entrepreneurs don't need money.

- The vast majority of companies that raise VC don't succeed.

- The vast majority of VC funds have lower than market returns.

I think the real situation is more that a lot of inexperienced founders glom onto VCs because they think that not having money is what's keeping them from succeeding.

There is also a common belief that the fact that VCs are predominantly male is creating a power imbalance that's keeping women from being more successful, despite the fact that the empirical evidence from other industries seemingly shows that there isn't much correlation between the sex of the gatekeepers and who they choose to back. E.g. LP is pretty gender balanced and most VCs are male, most literary agents and publishers are female but most published authors are male, etc. If there were more female VCs then it's possible that more women would get funded, but I think right now that theory is more of a truthclaim than anything else.

The power imbalance is pretty obvious in that kind of scenario. It's less of an imbalance if the entrepreneur is also wealthy and just raising money to share risk or build alliances.

Point is, if you have multiple millions of dollars, "do nothing" is always on the table, which isn't so for many founders.

I don't see any power imbalance that exists within the relationship here. Compare this with the laws that prevent a therapist from dating a client, which are in place because one party can take advantage of the other or blackmail them or have them involuntarily committed. That's a power imbalance.

I also think this is a very orientalist view of the industry. How many founders actually raise institutional money off just a deck each year, who don't otherwise have the skills to earn a lot of money consulting or whatever?

I'm not trying to defend the behavior here in any way, I just think that the reason why it's wrong for a VC to aggressively proposition a founder or whatever is different than, for example, what makes it wrong for an employer to have a relationship with an employee.