>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,
What? Tentative speculations that the world moves on? That maybe what was once symptomatic and systematic is now residual and explicitly illegitimate in white collar western workplaces? That maybe other theories (I favoured more of a discipline-of-the-self/commodification/alienating competition on imposed criteria complex of theories on PEN-L only last week) explain what's going on better than boilerplate structuralism? That the tyranny of harassment might be lessening because the tyrannical 'network' that sanctions and reinforces such episodes might be dissipating? That the sad fellow in question might just be an unwitting product of a passing time? That someone mebbe should mention this to him?
>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.
Harassment *is* important - but a coherent system of such oppression requires one set of political responses, and a pathetic chap unwittingly throwing pain and embarrassment about requires another. I was speculating we might be at a stage where we have more of the second than the first.
>There is always some intellectual maneuver to explain why
>women have no basis for feeling degraded,
I never said there was no basis for feeling degraded. I just asked how this one bloke's staring and gratuitous comments to students was so devastating. What I'd forgotten was that, while the world I see about me doesn't evince very much of this any more (I don't think 20-year-old grad students cop the systematic treatment Kel copped when she started), it might look very different to a woman who started her career in another time (and in another place from me) - in terms of her life experience it would feel very much like a systematic debasing, because it looks and feels like a contunuum of oppression. I didn't know Kel's whole story when I first posed the question, so I quickly apologised for my insensitivity in an instance where my mistake vis Kel was really quite foreseeable. So I learned something there.
>why men who take the issue
>seriously are themselves screwed up in some way,
No. Just you. Why you make vicious accusations on zilch evidence about people you don't know, who live in a cultural setting of which you have little experience, on a list you've been on for two weeks. I never threw what you were catching, and you have to be very sure of your ground before you start installing vicious characterisations like that on public archives.
>And then his behavior gets worse over time.
You only know about my behaviour what I have told you. I do not behave as you say I behave, and you are inexcusably wrong to go on saying I do.
>Usually the target gets on his high horse,
>accusing the flamers of orchestrating a "feeding frenzy",
Which is what you're effectively doing.
>and various people
>come to his defense, condemning the flamers for intemperate language,
It was intemperate and it was slanderously wrong.
>and branding the flamers as prudes,
I don't know enough about you top know whether you're a prude or not. So I don't say you are. We all have things to learn; you could start with learning from that.
Cheers, Rob.