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Fear Not, Congressional Lechers — Help Is on the Way!
According to this article in the Washington Post, the House is beginning “important steps” to require members and staff to undergo mandatory training to prevent sexual harassment and discrimination. The Senate is expected to follow suit (paradoxically, in an effort to forestall suits, I suppose).
Both Republicans and Democrats are getting behind (can I say behind?) efforts to stop these boobs from embarrassing themselves and their once-respected and hallowed halls and institutions any more than they already have.
Yes, indeed. A training session a few hours long, imposed upon the likes of John Conyers and Al Franken, reminding them that it is not ok to hold meetings with their staffers while wearing only their underwear, or that any sort of photograph where they appear to be about to grab the breasts of a sleeping woman is in spectacularly bad taste, will fix them right up. All the morals, ethics, common sense and wisdom that they either weren’t born with, or that they’ve failed to acquire during their succeeding 88 and 66 years (respectively) on this earth, will suddenly burst into their heads fully-formed, like Minerva in reverse.
Here’s hoping they don’t grab her butt as she flies by.
Published in Humor
We’ve all heard of plausible deniability. This is something less than that: implausible deniability.
No sane person believes that a lecherous middle-aged man in a position to pursue his fancy will suddenly have a change of heart — will be enlightened by a brief video and reborn as a gentleman. It’s nonsensical.
But, however implausible, the convention is that such a process grants one free pass. Tabula rasa.
I wonder: if President Trump sat in on a session, do you think he could remove the left-approved label of “misogynist” from his resume?
There is no “heh” to it. Before I retired my organization had perfected computer-based mandatory training that was timed such that you did not get a “certificate” unless you spent the required amount of time in the training. You couldn’t just click through rapidly. So you would leave the training on the screen while you did something else for a few minutes and then click through. So there was an irreducible minimum waste of time.
Mine, too, and that was how I did it- but I wasn’t telecommuting from home.
I agree — this is the best explanation for the actions of the management with lawyers in advisory roles. Lawyers want to minimize the damage not win the argument.
Trump could end this decades-long corporate Sex Harrassment Training mania in one fell swoop. He should schedule a Sexual State of the Union to be broadcast on all networks. In attendance will be himself, Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, Roy Moore and Charlie Rose. At the end it of it he will declare that it was the best training and that he and his friends are now cured. No self-respecting liberal will be able to recommend a similar course with a straight face ever again.
Great idea. However, there is a flaw. I’ve bolded it for you.
Maybe one of the Ricochetti can flesh this idea out for me. Recently I’ve been struck with a nebulous feeling (no jokes please about the striking power of a nebulous feeling) that we’ve entered the chickens-come-home-to-roost phase of sexual liberation.
The fleshing out would hopefully include an explanation of how it is we “empower” young HR weanies to teach mature adults about good manners.
EDIT. It might also include speculation that mature adults are the ones who never really took wholeheartedly or permanently to the complex of liberations that includes sexual liberation.
Ah, etiquette courses as part of the HR curriculum at every university from now on? (I’m old enough that my degree was in “personnel management and labor relations.” We didn’t have to have etiquette courses back in my day. ;^D )
Ha ha. But you can’t call them courses in either good manners or etiquette. Those terms are too restrictive. You need a course title much more liberating and inspiring so that the young graduates can go out into the world imbued with a sense of mission.
Sense of mission…
As with the Puritans of old.
Liberation has brought the new missionaries full circle back to a new Puritanism.
So many of our universities were founded to send missionaries out into the world. Even after throwing of the shackles of their forefathers, though, the mission remains the same: to reform the world. And the shackles remain as tight as they have ever been, even if couched in terms of liberation.
True.
That is in the unlabeled “parenting” section of the report card. Woe be unto you if you are found lacking in that which you should have learned at home.
Yes, but that was elementary school, not college or university.
Not my fault that college kids are lacking these days.
Much truth in this, methinks.
The problem with the new Puritanism is that it is as untethered and rudderless as the sexual revolution itself. If the motto of the sexual revolution was “If it feels good, do it,” then the motto of the New Puritanism is “If someone else feels bad, don’t do it.” The only basis is feelings. One can’t point to a higher moral order or established truth to give it any foundation.
As such, it’ll never last. We’re already seeing that while the New Puritans have been quick to send a few sacrificial rams to the slaughter, they seem reluctant to follow through with people like Franken or Conyers. We made frowny noises about Weinstein and Clinton! Wasn’t that enough?
Good one, @drewinwisconsin! Did a web search and I find no earlier use of this phrase.
The beauty of it is that it conveys clearly a meaning even though the constituent elements are in opposition: a frown is seen but not heard.
Someone should come up with a pinned post collecting Ricochisms.
How about another take?
This business with Weinstein, Rose, Franken, et.al. are yet another arrow shot at the idea of powerful men. The neat thing is that they are cads and worse so the man-haters of the world can feel self-righteous.
As usual, the proposers of such a program are skipping over the primary cause – power. As we have seen in numerous examples over the past several weeks, rarely is the real cause an overactive sexual appetite. It’s almost always a power trip. So, “training” in not-sexually-harassing people isn’t really going to solve the problem. As @rodin notes, such training is to give legal cover to the institution.
So many problems with politicians (sexual harassment, personal abuse, bribery, corruption, etc.) would be lessened if lessened their power.
First I have to say the whole concept is offensive to me.
But I have also worked with some older males (and a couple of females) for whom the phrase “mature adults” is totally inappropriate.
Could not agree with both of you more. I don’t think of men in their eighties who run around in front of their staff in their underwear as “mature.” (“Senile” is the word that first springs to mind, as it does, sadly, with George H. W. Bush and his bum-pinching escapades. Absent convincing evidence that Conyers and Bush have a long history of this sort of thing, extending well back to the time when they had all their marbles, that’s where my mind goes first.)
Nor do I think of men who publicly bury their faces in women’s breasts and make rude noises, or men who ejaculate into potted plants in front of a captive audience, or men who mug for the camera while appearing to grope a sleeping woman’s chest as “mature.” Rude and indecent, definitely. Drunk, very likely. Sophomoric, yep. And a part of me, in some (not all) of these instances, is wondering, “what on earth was she thinking??” as well.
But I’ve sat through innumerable HR sessions on sexual harassment with mature, decent, conscientious men who certainly didn’t need a young flibbertigibbet scarcely dry behind the ears with a feminist or social justice ax to grind, lecturing them on how to behave around women or how to treat them professionally. What a monumental waste of time. And as many have pointed out in this thread, such things exist merely to protect the employer, as a box that can be checked off in the never-ending quest for absolute “compliance.”
I think, in over three decades of working in almost exclusively male-dominated professions, I’ve run into exactly two men I’d rather not have known. One wrote a letter, in 1985, to the president of the company accusing me of sleeping with the boss in order scarf up the most lucrative accounts, which was the only way he could explain how I, as a newbie, was the top sales rep in the district selling, in that year alone, over $2 million-worth of computers. (I fixed his wagon right quick, and, a couple of decades later, was interested to find out that he’s now a registered sex-offender). The other one was a legend with women in his own mind at least, and when I complained about his poor repair work for one of our customers, accused me of trying to get into his pants, saying that my complaints were made only because he’d rejected my advances (you’d have to know the guy to understand how ridiculous that is). That didn’t go so well for him, either, in the long run.
In the meantime, I’ve worked with, for, and managed, hundreds and hundreds of decent, honorable men, and adjudicated my fair share of workplace grievances. So I don’t entirely buy the argument that it’s always about power. I do buy the argument that it’s always, always, about indecency and dishonor, not always where you might expect to find it. And a short seminar, no matter who delivers it, and no matter who sits through it, won’t fix that.
C-Span, “After-Dark”…
I just have to laugh.
Once upon a time, ( Pre about 1968)
Alcohol was pretty restricted on college campuses, yeah you could find beer, but getting totally plowed every weekend just didn’t happen.
Other drugs were limited to a small number and very underground.
College dorms were strictly segregated by sex, and opposite sex was not permitted to enter, period.
Girls knew that getting drunk, and or going to a secluded place with a guy was frowned on, and were held somewhat responsible for the consequences. “Good girls” didn’t.
And on and on.
Common sense developed over generations on how to regulate and control the raging hormones of youth. Discarded.