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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.
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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