A recent Newsweek article reports that restaurant chain The Cheesecake Factory settled a sexual harassment claim in November. This would hardly be news, except for the fact that both of the alleged victims and the alleged abusers were male.
As I skimmed the article, I prepared to dust off a link to my favorite essay on homo/hetero male relations, “Why I Treat Straight Men Like Married Women.” I’ve seen a lot of homos actually harass straight guys in the workplace—especially in restaurants and bars and in retail, where the two groups are most likely to…brush against each other. The lass-lover usually has the choice of either getting fired for clobbering the butt pirate, or simply shrugging it off. In especially PC joints, he also runs the risk of being considered a “homophobe” if he gets miffed.
But, at least according to the information given, there was no homo/hetero dynamic in this suit. All of the parties involved, we’re told, were heterosexual.
Huh.
I dug around, but couldn’t find many specifics. And specifics would be useful here, because depending on who was being harassed and who was doing the harassing, there could be a number of different male-male conflicts involved. I’ll throw out a few possibilities, and would welcome more information.
Routine Male Socialization
Men harass each other. It’s what they do. They mock each other, goof around, call each other names, enjoy crude humor, test each other and push each other around. The guys who don’t cry about it—or better, give as good as they get—end up being included in the social group. The guys who don’t know how to handle it are harassed and pushed out of the group. They have rejected The Form; they’re Omegas.
Also, when men share close quarters, they sometimes play a game I call “homo gross out.”
There’s something innately comedic to most men about two men having sex, so in addition to testing your pal’s boundaries and making light of male-to-male physical proximity, the real point of it is to get a laugh.
On one of the first days I was packed into a truck beside a pal of mine, he put his hand on my knee…just to see if I’d say something. He thinks it’s hilarious. And it is. The look on his face when he does it cracks me up.
Then there’s the sneak attack nipple tweak, and the occasional dry hump. A familiar and much discussed variation is the famous football ass pat. The majority of men who do this stuff are completely straight; they’re not repressed homos looking for an acceptable outlet for their forbidden desires. There’s rarely anything to it.
Women and omegas rarely understand this. Some guys of a reserved sort are uncomfortable with almost all physical expressions of fraternity between men, and they demand a little more personal space. They don’t find this kind of goofing around funny, either. But they usually handle it and set their boundaries in their own way.
This kind of crude male socializing is one of the problems I foresee with open homosexuality in the military. Our society is going to have to be honest about certain aspects of male fraternization and be careful that the mixed messages men send when they’re goofing around aren’t regarded, in one way or the other, as “actionable.” And the experts (see below) aren’t properly equipped to really understand or be honest about male behavior. Not by a long shot.
Mixed messages could be the case here. Or routine fraternization could have escalated into “hazing the outcast”…which can admittedly get out of hand.
Class or Race Issues
It was difficult to tell from the information provided, but I have to wonder if there weren’t some class or race issues involved as well. It’s Arizona, in the kitchen of a chain restaurant. In the American southwest, restaurant kitchens tend to be dominated by Hispanics—good and bad alike. Kitchen jobs also tend to be places where ex-cons find employment after prison. I can imagine a situation where a bunch of suburban (post culinary school?) crackers with last names like “Fitzpatrick,” end up being bullied. Prison or ghetto humor could be a bit much for a guy from the other side of the tracks. There could have been a real effort to “drive out” the unwanted outsider through bullying.
When you’re being bullied, a good revenge tactic would be to imply that your bullies are homos. In court. It’s also a great way to extort money from a former employer.
However it came down, I have trouble feeling bad for the “victim” unless he was truly humiliated in some tremendously lurid way or full-on butt-raped in cold storage.
But if you can’t handle a little name calling and crude horseplay, you deserve to be ostracized. You’re part of the problem.
Playing into the whole litigious victim culture is in most cases dishonorable, and at the very least, distasteful and unmanly. If you don’t like the way the men around you are treating you, you settle it with them like a man or you decide they are assholes and you get out. If your co-workers are physically assaulting you or making legitimate threats, fine. Otherwise, get over it and stop feeding a phenomenon that eats manhood and freedom.
A Feminist Phenomenon?
A final note that struck me about the article was that all of the so-called experts on male-to-male sexual harassment were women. And as women who specialize in sexual harassment, they’re pretty clearly projecting their own ideology and experiences onto a scenario in which a variety of different dynamics could be at work. The female reporter repeated the catch-all feminist, Marxist “truth” that, “sexual harassment of both genders has more to do with issues of control and abuses of power for the purpose of humiliation than with sexual attraction.”
But, for cultural Marxists, isn’t everything about power imbalances between the oppressors and the oppressed?
