It's not fainting couch feminism, it's pragmatic feminism. These interactions happen in a context where peoples' livelihoods, their hopes and dreams, are on the line. Are you going to expect them to jeopardize that by overtly calling someone out?

There is a reason we put the onus on men to not make unwanted advances instead of putting it on women to clearly reject them. It's costless to refrain from hitting on your coworkers/underlings/potential hires. In contrast, there is potentially a very high cost to a woman overtly rejecting an advance. At best, it results in hurt feelings and embarrassment in a superior/potential boss/potential investor. At worst, it can result in negative repercussions (a coworker badmouthing you as "a bitch," a hiring manager passing on your application, an investor passing on your idea).

If you consider yourself a decent person, why would you put someone else between a rock and a hard place like that? There are literally billions of women on the planet, and 99.99% don't work with you/for you.

To stcredzero, he's innocuously asking a woman colleague of equal rank, who he has rapport with, out to a movie. He sees it as an opportunity to develop a relationship that could lead to a happy marriage. He doesn't get that many opportunities due to various reasons, so he's taking the chance he has.

She sees it as yet another colleague asking her out, when it's likely another male colleague asked her on a date that very morning, along with the dude on BART and one on the street as she walked to work.

The workplace should be focused on work, not another place where a woman has to be on guard.

People do form romantic relationships from working relationships. This should be approached with the utmost of care, because the workplace isn't the appropriate place.

The appropriate place is social events, with mutual friends; a Tinder date; a friendship struck at your local Linux Users Group meetup (you never know), etc.

I don't think there is consensus on that view. Work wouldn't be my first choice for finding a suitable partner. But that doesn't mean that individuals that spend a lot of time together in a non-social context are magically excluded from behaving in a certain way for the sole benefit of female comfort. There is a clear difference between consensual actions here, and we mustn't infantilize women by making such blanket statements that essentially amount to us saying that women need an incredibly sterile and "safe" (from proposition) environment to work in.

I will help you with your reading comprehension:

> People do form romantic relationships from working relationships. This should be approached with the utmost of care, because the workplace isn't the appropriate place.

Since you strawman-ized my argument, I'll do the same to yours:

"When people tell me I can't hit on women at work, that's infantilizing them."

I am a bit amazed that simply expressing your preferences when overtly asked is to be thought of as "calling someone out." If a coworker was to always pretend to agree with you on all matters of taste, I'd think of that person as spineless. Yet, most matters of taste are far less important than preferences of companionship.

At worst, it can result in negative repercussions

Nowadays, the phrase, "I don't feel comfortable with..." has negative repercussions in the same league.

If you consider yourself a decent person, why would you put someone else between a rock and a hard place like that? There are literally billions of women on the planet, and 99.99% don't work with you/for you.

If you read the thread, you will discover that no one was working for anyone, and this was for a volunteer organization outside of work.

You're blaming women for not being "adult" enough in their response to juvenile male behavior. It is these men who should start acting like adults.

And how do you know the women didn't say no? The article notes that some of the women faced retribution after rebuffing men.

> Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.

It sounds like you need to work on reading other peoples' comfort level with your behavior. In a professional setting the standard is very high for ensuring you are not making someone uncomfortable. Consider how a customer would feel if they walked in a store and, out of the blue, got hit on by staff that they had zero chemistry with. Who then the blames the customer for not being "adult" enough.

That's a ridiculous false dichotomy. When people own their preference and viewpoint, people respect them more. Men who act like juveniles should clearly act more adult. Fully grown women who act like they're timid middle-schoolers should also act more adult. It's the workplace where people communicate honestly and clearly that produces results when breaking new ground and dealing with subtle and complex trade-offs. (Again, this isn't a discussion of people or events in the article, but rather a general one.)

The problem here is you're not reading signals correctly. If someone says any variation of "I don't think..." that means they are not interested. If they are interested but just legitimately busy or whatever they will 100% suggest a time that will work or at least give you some kind of an in. Granted, there can be mixed signals and it's not always the easiest thing to figure out, but you have to just accept it for what it is. The truth is asking people out is hard, rejecting people is hard, and we have these little dances to save face.

It's not the responsibility of the person being pursued to protect the pursuer. It's pretty straight forward: if you ask someone out several times, and they keep making up excuses, they're not interested. Stop asking.

Very much this. People who've been rejected (male or female) can definitely be vindictive, nasty, and just plain evil. :(

I'm guessing it comes from their feelings of hurt inside from the rejection given. Which (personally) indicates how badly I sucked with interpersonal skills when rejecting people in my younger years. eg I'm pretty direct with people, but had literally no tact when younger. Bad combo. Ugh.

Did you ask multiple times? This sounds like what could easily happen when someone won't take the initial "no," implicit or not, for an answer. Based on the rest of your comment, I expect so.

A few important points:

1. Repeated asking has been held to be sexual harassment, if repeated for long enough.

2. Here's a simple rule: ask once, and only once. She knows where you work. If she's interested, she'll ask for a rain check and get back to you.

> I just don't think this is suitable verbal behavior for supposedly rational adults

3. Rational adults understand and respond to signalling. They don't demand that all communication happen explicitly and on their terms, because they know that such demands are ineffective for all purposes, will not be heeded, and might make them social pariahs.

Which is why people behave that way in airplane cockpits and the bridges of submarines. (Actually, such behavior has gotten people killed in those contexts.)

If someone is insisting on an implicit level of signalling, they can be just as guilty of insisting foolishly as someone insisting on the explicit level. When implicit communications are demanded for 1) a higher stakes situation on the basis of 2) the supposed potential victim status of one party -- something is way out of whack. Not only is the safety of clear communications being abrogated, the danger being borne is skewed to just one party.

Beyond the level of the social white lie, if you're advocating deniability to "be safe" you're probably doing something dishonest on some level. Extending the mechanism of the social white lie to a situation where more is at stake is just foolish.

Nobody is going to die if you can't date someone.

Again, I advocate a conservative approach to getting a date with a coworker. One request, declined for any reason, should be treated as a firm no absent explicit signals to the contrary (request for a rain check, some other sort of proactive, explicitly date-seeking behavior from the other party). Your odds of getting into trouble under this rule are so vanishingly small as to be nonexistent. If you choose some less conservative rule, including, apparently, whatever rule you've been following up to this point, your risks are higher.

Of course, there's also the issue of not wanting to make your woman coworkers uncomfortable. I would hope that would be something of intrinsic value to you, and that on this basis alone you might change your behavior after seeing its impact in the past. The fact that you're still arguing about this makes me doubt that you do value their comfort the way that I think you should. But I don't know how to tell you that you should care about other people in a way that's going to stick. :(

No, it doesn't; that description negates the agency and responsibility of the powerful.

Power (basically by definition) weakens external constraints, including constraints that inhibit expression of corrupt impulses.

Huh?

Power (basically by definition) weakens external constraints, including constraints that inhibit expression of corrupt impulses.

You just said the same thing!

We absolutely should encourage this, but let's not ignore that we need to build a culture that doesn't ostracize and attack people when they do this.

So far, we have HR departments that have an incentive to ignore, minimize or deflect these problems. We have a culture of employment that says that this is all part of dealing with a job in a tough industry. And we have internet trolls ready to harass people when they come out against this behavior.

The first part, of asserting yourself and claiming your agency, is extraordinarily important. But there's so much more to it. If someone is sexually harassed, and they hit a brick wall at every turn, the best case scenario is that they ditch the startup or tech industry and go to more established companies that actually have a solid culture and process in place. And that is an absolute loss for everyone, especially because the kind of person who can see everything weighed against them and still takes a stand is what the startup scene is supposed to be all about. We shouldn't punish or ignore those people.

If a particular organizational culture isn't full of people who would be the level of jerk to attack someone for saying "no thanks" then how is it at all positive to teach half the people there to behave as if they will probably do that? That sounds to me like you're just creating fear where there should be none.