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Professional Society to Astronomers: Stop dating each other! It’s not worth the risk!
The feminist reaction to sexual harassment has ended with this jaw-dropping statement from the American Astronomical Society’s executive officer. Effectively, he’s telling astronomers not to date each other. I’m not exaggerating much. He’s specifically and explicitly saying that the risk of sexual harassment is so great that you are not allowed to date anybody you meet at a conference, even if you scrupulously behave yourself:
Second, do not treat any AAS meeting or other event as a venue for finding a romantic partner. Yes, there are people at our events, and yes, people do make romantic connections, and yes, there may even be opportunities to make such connections at our events, but please, everyone, just shelve these inclinations for our conferences. Too much damage is being done. Just one negative interaction in the poster hall, at a session, in the bar during the meeting, or at a restaurant or offsite event may be all it takes to dissuade a bright young scientist from participating in our field. This is unacceptable, and it needs to stop.
And then,
Some of our members and other meeting attendees are likely going to be upset at this message, claiming that they act responsibly and with consent — why should they curtail their social activities at meetings just because a few bad actors are ruining things? I get that. I understand that. I enjoy the social aspects of being human, being at a conference in an interesting place, and being engaged in such an exciting field of research with people I find interesting and might even want to dance with, drink with, dine with, or whatever. But I am distraught over the damage that has been done and could be done in the future. Frankly, it is not worth the social happiness of a majority if just one of our attendees is made to feel uncomfortable, under pressure, or damaged enough to leave our profession or to attend future conferences in a fearful state.
So let’s recap: Out of the roughly 7,000 members of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and out of the 2,000-3,000 who attend our major meetings, he cites six cases of “sexual harassment.” (I only put the quotes because the details aren’t public, and the term has gotten awfully broad—much broader than most of us would accept. See the “If it’s unwanted, it’s harassment” sign on the page.) That 0.09% harassment rate (or 0.2%, if you only count meeting attendees) is so unbelievably high that we’re going to go nuclear and forbid dating between astronomers at the meeting. Or who met at the meeting. Or forbid meeting at the meeting before dating, or something.
Considering the radicals’ claims (admittedly debunked) that one-fifth or so of all college women will be sexually assaulted during college, one marvels at the remarkably low rates of professional sexual harassment under even the vague terms of the AAS. A comparable response would be to forbid dating between well behaved, consenting college students, because it’s just not worth the risk!
Dr. Marvel (great name for a superhero, but he’s got the crazy scheme of a comic book villain) has no real way to enforce this besides stigmatizing dating between astronomers. He’d be sure to say that he only means it to apply at meetings (our AAS president actually suggested we go pick up women in bars instead!), but is he suggesting that it would be better to date an astronomer you work with? Like that’s playing it safe with harassment issues? I’m not against it, but there’s long been a broad wariness of dating people at work.
The fact is that meetings are where we astronomers meet. We’re a relatively small profession—just a few thousand in the United States, and we’re often in small groups scattered across the country. I met both my wife and my previous two girlfriends at astronomy meetings. In each case, we lived hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. The growing panic at the AAS doesn’t merely seek to constrain human nature in productive ways. By pretending that even well-behaved interactions between men and women are too fraught with danger to permit, it is a very denial of that nature, and this can’t end well.
Published in Culture
Somebody should inform Dr. Marvel that zero population growth is apparently a thing. The AAS should consider promoting dating among the smart set. Otherwise there won’t be enough anthropos to morph the important stuff.
There have been and still are plenty of societies that utilize matchmakers and other kinds of arranged marriages. There are real social advantages to this.
I am glad you noted that astronomy has a pretty high fraction of women. In my discipline of photonics, women are at most a couple percent of conference attendees. However, because their percentage is so low they are treated like unicorns, and so are shown lots of respect.
This brouhaha is indicative of trends in larger society. It’s secular puritanism. I suspect that the executive officer who published this will not be running subsequent conferences, and the change will be done quietly.
His edict will also be mostly ignored. Frankly, I think the OP is too agitated over this. The memo is deserving of ridicule, not outrage.
How is he going to enforce this, anyway?
Blue shift, please!!
Speaking of extraterrestrials, doesn’t this sound like the sort of thing an alien disguised as a human and trying awkwardly to fit in would say?
At last our long national nightmare is ended thanks to the personal bravery of … Damn, I almost kept a straight face. Life is tough at the bottom of a gravity well.
A sound way to go for some. I just think it’d be better that the county clerk sign the marriage license and not assign them.
AAS should take the lead on this. Stop having face to face interactions. Just stop having the conferences (and collecting the fees). They can have the conferences and presentations online. Everything can be monitored by a SJW oversight board that can flag microaggressions on the fly. After 3 microaggressions, the presenter will be shut off. During the QA sessions, the board will ensure that a proper proportion of races/genders/orientations get to ask questions. After 7 lifetime microaggressions or 1 overt aggression, the presenter will be banned from the Society and all research will be expunged from the Group Consciousness. Of course, any knowledge delivered by a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe is automatically considered anti-scientific and expunged from the Sum of Knowledge. Only right thinking persons can do science correctly. If we consider Mengele’s medical experiments unethical, isn’t the same true of an ‘astronomer’ who wears insufficiently sensitive shirt?
What hath radical feminism wrought? Unbelievable. We could put the blame on Dr. Marvel’s shoulders, but…
A long time ago I said (and was quoted in an article) that the glass ceiling represents the last safety net for women. When all other excuses fail, there’s always that. Nowadays, women are well represented in boardrooms so what’s left to complain about – to bring attention to the ‘plight of women?’ Why, sexual harassment, of course. And the floodgates have been swung wide open on that one. This tactic is easier to pull off – better headlines and lots of attention. But so corrosive.
Those women who have bought into this ploy at the bidding of the radical fems are selfish idiots. (That’s two distinct categories.)
BTW, loved all the snarky remarks – great humor, given the subject.
Exactly! Bit of a conundrum for us science & political nerds though — might confuse spectrums.
Given that you met your wife at such a meeting, it seems the AAS is seeking to constrain human nature in reproductive ways as well.
Wow. Just Wow.
(I keep checking the date for April 1 )
But NOT at any AAS conferences or meetings.
I was thinking the same thing! It’s one of those things we’d have made a joke about Al Gore or Hillary Clinton saying.
I dunno…our AAS president suggested bars as a substitute. I don’t know if she meant during the meeting, or when.
The thing is, I can see a good half of these suggestions being made with a straight face by this crowd. I think I can deliver the “Let’s just meet by Skype” line with a serious enough look, that I’ll hold on to this one as my own comeback. For those who want to continue meeting in person, do you not take the risk of harassment seriously enough? Any place two people meet face-to-face is a place where one can harass or microagress the other. The social happiness of the majority is not worth it if even one person…
Of course, the environmentalist angle has already been floated as a reason for meeting online, rather than traveling.
I doubt associative mating would produce more astronomers anyway. Tycho Brahe and Isaac Newton were not the offspring of credentialed, tenured politically correct parents. And a third generation of kids all borne of parents with the same major would likely produce only fascistic department heads, suicides and guerrilla terrorists.
The new anti-dating policy will create a new Darwinian pressure to seek fertile partners outside the faculty rooms. Lady astronomers will of needs consort with unacademic lounge lizards indifferent to the imprecations of PC. The male star-gazers will in turn seek out buxom waitresses with certain skills combined with poor judgment… (Maybe I am getting a bit too invested in this
fantasypost..but it’s for science..) It will be the chaotic stuff of sitcoms and the biologically unexpected and any world where Darwin and Jerry Seinfeld both feel at home is bound to be interesting.Are there any serious studies about women who hold these sorts of views? What do we know about them and what really drives these fears?
And I thought Idiocracy was fiction.
Behold Mike Judge, our Nostradamus. Don’t blame the left side of the bell curve for our future just because you can’t see what isn’t there.
I’m actually curious how many astronomers are married to other astronomers. I can think of eight other couples I know personally, including our AAS president and my undergraduate advisor (who is a vocal feminist and the head of the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, but I don’t know her views on dating at meetings). Some of them met in grad school or at work, but I’m pretty sure there are others who met at conferences. It would be interesting to find out how often we marry within the field. Given that there are 2-3 times more men than women in the field, the in-field marriage rates are likely to be higher for women than men.
And tell them you always Skype in the nude. Less colors electronically reproduced, equals less energy, equals smaller carbon footprint.
Oh, wait…I just got your pun. Good one. I’m slow.
Oh, dear. My son has recently launched into a research career. How bad is it? Should I worry?
If true, Kevin Marvel is advocating a policy which disproportionately and adversely impacts women. What I now want to know is why is the AAS tolerates a misogynistic sexist as its Executive Director? Since they are, does that not make AAS an anti-woman organization no right-thinking scientist should be part of?
(Alinsky’s Rule #4: Make them live up to their own book of rules.)
Seawriter
“Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.” H.L. Mencken.
Remember when that one kid in your class abused some privilege and the teacher punished the whole class for it?
Yes, we are all children back in grade school again. At least I have Pokemon Go, so I don’t have to worry about dating.
Oh, I almost did a spit take! Thanks for that start to the day, Matt. ;)
But none that I am aware of (other than North Korean Prison Camps) that allow the government to do the arranging.