>Lou said:
>>For the record, Rob, your attitude is quite reprehensible, although
probably
>>nothing can be done about it until some more intense time in the struggle
...
I repeat this here because some people seem to have had trouble parsing this sentence, and, indeed, my whole post. I said that (a) Rob's attitude was reprehensible, but that (b) probably nothing could be done about it now. Unfortunately I remain pessimistic. My experience is that once a guy get into a certain way of looking at women's stories about sexual harassment - denying their importance, denying the validity of their reactions, rationalizing them away - it is very hard to get him out of this stance with words alone. There is always some intellectual maneuver to explain why women have no basis for feeling degraded, why men who take the issue seriously are themselves screwed up in some way, and why his own stance of dispassionate dismissal is the proper attitude of the reasonable man. And then his behavior gets worse over time.
Thus, I wrote, quite sincerely,
>>If anyone has thought of a less extreme way to alter men's attitudes on
the
>>sexual harassment question, preferably some argument that works in
e-mails,
>>I would love to know about it. This is a real
>>being-determines-consciousness issue. Until the being gets a kick in the
>>arse, the consciousness does not improve :-(
Todd suggests:
>I doubt you'll find anything better than Kelley's description of her own
travails;
>it might not work for all men, though. A collective flaming followed by a
>"now, do you get it, Shit-fer-brains?" lecture might be apropos.
I've never seen it work. Usually the target gets on his high horse, accusing the flamers of orchestrating a "feeding frenzy", and various people come to his defense, condemning the flamers for intemperate language, and branding the flamers as prudes, anti-sex Dworkinites, enemies of free expression, psychologically fucked up themselves, and so on.
However, "probably" always implies "possibly not", so maybe my pessimism will prove unwarranted. One can hope, I guess.
lp