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Notes -
Nybbler expressed it in sneer-adjacent form, but I think he's right.
Why - from first principles, you're an alien looking down at the world - is it sexual harassment to make comments about the amount of clothing a woman is wearing? Especially if the clothing is deliberately designed to be sexually attractive.
"comments about the amount of clothing a woman is wearing" is a very broad category of statements, multiplied by a very broad range of contexts.
The vast majority of that space of events is definitely not sexual harassment.
If you precisely described the content and context of a specific comment in enough detail to determine which category it fell into, I think the 'why' would ussually be a lot easier to explain and most people would agree most of the time.
I think the biggest problem here is the part of that space where someone imagines that if they said a specific thing in a specific context, it would be considered sexual harassment by someone. I've never been accused of sexual harassment, but I share the experience of thinking carefully about the thing I say and holding back sometimes out of worry of giving offense, and can sympathize with people who are frustrated by it. But if you've also never crossed that line into actually being accused, consider the possibility that you're just wrong about where the line is, and the category of things that you think of as 'someone would accuse me of sexual harassment if I said this and that's absurd' are actually mostly things that no one would accuse you of sexual harassment for.
(In point of fact, I am involved in managing the ban list and safety complaints for a rather large social club with mostly young people, and I've never seen a complaint that didn't involve physical contact or explicit threats of violence lead to any disciplinary action. I really just think the situation on the ground isn't as dire as people imagine, as is true for most things in the modern world)
The second biggest problem is all the ambiguous parts of that space where the judgement isn't entirely clear-cut and some people may disagree, and how that space gets exploited by the typical culture-war driven mess of toxoplasma, ragebaiting listacles, 'engagement' reporting, inaccurate anecdotes, etc. etc. etc., same as every other topic we talk about. This has several parts to it:
-I don't think the laws against sexual harassment are actually dangerous in the way these comments imply, and in fact I think they're still heavily skewed towards defendants (as may be correct!). Not my area of expertise, but I definitely have the lived experience of, every time someone says that someone got sued for sexual harassment and lost and it was a crazy absurd thing that should have been fine, when you actually go to look at teh legal documents detailing the case they are much much worse and more justified than the anecdote that's being shared online (think the McDonalds coffee lady). Exacerbating this tenfold is the fact that many of these cases are settled in settlements where the victim signs a nondisclosure agreement that doesn't bind the defendant, ensuring that only one side of the story goes public (yes, even in states where those agreements are unenforceable, victims don't know that and are scared to push it)
-The online ecosphere has the usual incentives to lie, cheat, and steal on this topic. One side pushing absurd standards and stringency as a costly signal about how seriously they take this and how seriously you had better take it, the other side promoting absurd cherry-picked anecdotes to the forefront in an attempt to ragebait for clicks and to paint a skewed picture of the actual situation on the ground. People on tiny sights making outrageous claims in order to get attention, people on other tiny sights excoriating those claims out in order to get attention. Typical stuff.
-The actual idiots and bad actors, from young people with no perspective talking about things they don't understand, to manipulators and opportunists taking advantage of this range of charges for social or economic gain, to genuinely ill or disturbed people pushing their own distorted views or perceptions, to etc. etc. Again, the typical stuff.
I agree. As I said in reply to someone on the other side, I think these discussions would instantly 100x in usefulness and connecting-of-disagreeing-ideas if people simply chose specific, detailed examples of scenarios where they think the standard for sexual harassment is too low or whatever, and then analyzed those.
It can both be true that most instances that are actually prosecuted are egregious, and that the law on paper criminalizes a wide variety of benign behavior and thus significantly discourages it. I also am not sure how important it actually is though.
As far as I can tell, the letter of the law is this:
That doesn't sound like it is too broad or should have a chilling effect on benign behaviors, 'unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance' seems like a pretty high bar that's hard to do by accident, and you should have plenty of warning before meeting that bar if you're paying attention. In particular, I don't think any individual comment (especially a marginally-benign one) can meet that third standard alone, it would require a pattern of behavior to interfere with work performance that severely, so you should get warnings along the way.
Of course, IANAL, I don't know if there are other statutes that apply or how this one has been interpreted, but like I said my impression is that the actual in-trial application is even more stringent than this might imply, not less. Open to anyone with more info though.
I do think, again, that a lot of the problem here is another meta-layer removed; not what a clean reading of the statute says is sexual harassment, but what people imagine the statute might refer to based on popular media discussions of the topic (or, perhaps more perniciously, discussions by corporate lawyers trying to avoid any possible liability, or discussions by for-profit 'educators' on this topic trying to create business for themselves).
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