Women wonder:
What happened to romantic gestures and seizing the moment?
Is romance dead?
Where is my Prince Charming?
Where is a man who will “sweep me off my feet”?
Well, he certainly isn’t employed at your workplace or attending your educational institution, and here’s why: what you call “sweeping you off your feet” or “making a romantic gesture” the law now calls “sexual harassment”, and people lose their jobs and get expelled from universities for it.
Does this sound incredible? Shouldn’t the kind of behavior qualifying as “sexual harassment” be completely outrageous, something that regular people would never do? Good guys just trying to be romantic shouldn’t be at risk of crossing over into that territory, right? Wrong.
There is no minimum level for harassing conduct under the law.
The United Nations General Recommendation 19 to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women defines sexual harassment of women to include:
“such unwelcome sexually determined behavior as physical contact and advances, sexually colored remarks, showing pornography and sexual demands, whether by words or actions. Such conduct can be humiliating and may constitute a health and safety problem; it is discriminatory when the woman has reasonable ground to believe that her objection would disadvantage her in connection with her employment, including recruitment or promotion, or when it creates a hostile working environment.”
In U.S. employment law, “hostile environment sexual harassment” refers to a situation where employees in a workplace are subject to a pattern of exposure to unwanted sexual behavior from persons other than an employee’s direct supervisor where supervisors or managers take no steps to discourage or discontinue such behavior.
Some situations that have been ruled to constitute such a hostile environment are:
- Consistently telling “dirty” jokes or stories where all employees in the work area can hear them
- Tolerating employees who make sexually suggestive remarks about other employees within earshot of others
- Allowing peer employees, clients, suppliers, delivery persons, or even customers (Lockard v. Pizza Hut) to persist in unwanted attention, such as asking for dates
- Allowing the use of derogatory terms with a sexual connotation (e.g., “pussy,” “girlie-man,” “player”) to be used to describe co-workers
- Allowing frequent physical contact, even when not sexual
As you can see, the legal definitions of sexual harassment include “unwanted attention”, “asking for dates”, “frequent physical contact, even when not sexual” – and any of this can cost a man his job.
For a man to do his job in an “equal” and “integrated” 50% female workplace without accidentally committing crimes during his workday, he must carefully avoid giving the people he is expected to collaborate with any “attention” that could be seen as “unwanted”, and he must also carefully avoid physical contact with the people who hand him printouts and squeeze past him in hallways, so as not to allow it to become “frequent”. Any behavior can, of course, be seen as “unwanted”, seeing as none of us are psychic and any behavior we do not predict before it happens is unexpected and thus by default “unwanted”.
You want spontaneous romantic gestures? Well, you know, “spontaneous” is just another word for “unwanted”, and that’s a crime.
Spending most of their waking hours living under rules like these, is it any wonder that men learn to cautiously avoid romantic actions? Do you expect men to spend 8 hours a day being taught that any “attention” or “physical contact”, by default “unwanted”, is a crime, and then magically switch off all that programming in the evening to become the romance novel hero who sweeps you off your feet?
Not so fast! The waters are hardly less dangerous outside places of work or study:
In the United Kingdom the Sexual Offences Act 2003 defines “sexual assault” as when a person (A)
- intentionally touches another person (B),
- the touching is sexual,
- B does not consent to the touching, and
- A does not reasonably believe that B consents.
In the United States the definition of sexual assault varies widely between the individual states. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network defines “sexual assault” as “unwanted sexual contact that stops short of rape or attempted rape. This includes sexual touching and fondling.”
There you go – any spontaneous romantic sweeping gesture that might be interpreted as “unwanted sexual touching” is an express ticket to prison.
These nebulous definitions of sex crimes make many normal ways in which people interact with their friends and colleagues every day into crimes if one party decides after the fact that the “touching” was “unwanted” and “sexual”. “Unwanted” is basically impossible to disprove, and “sexual” comes close – if a man is squeezing through a hallway and bumps into someone around a corner, is it his fault that her “front bumpers” are legally defined as “sexual” in nature? It’s a fact of life that people who crowd into elevators together are going to bump into each other, and this “unwanted physical contact” may even be “frequent”. It’s another fact of life that the parts that stick out in front of a person are the ones most likely to serve as the point of contact with whatever gets in the way, their “sexual” nature notwithstanding. When a man can’t do his job without accidentally engaging in illegal “unwanted sexual contact”, it becomes very difficult to prove after the fact whether a particular instance of such contact was intentional or not. Any of the two or three romantic gestures a man can still legally make will work as evidence of intent in all those unavoidable cases of “unwanted touching”, so he’d better avoid signaling any sort of romantic intent in any way, sexual, non-sexual, touching or no touching, wanted or unwanted.
Are you still wondering where you’ll find the men who would sweep you off your feet? Now that sweeping has been made illegal, they can likely only be found in prison or the parts of town where men with no respect for the law hang out. Would you like to go look for them there?
Delusion Damage specializes in exploring the hidden causes of everything and figuring out how to make a lifetime as a man in the modern world the best it can possibly be.
