I'm sure that as a heterosexual man, regardless of my financial circumstances, no one could coerce me into giving blowjobs under the threat of losing my job. I'd quit and take my chances. What am I missing here?
From one heterosexual man to another, surely we can see that we're in a different situation than this woman was. Also,
> Young associate worked for this partner
I don't know how the legal profession works. But:
1. It's quite likely that leaving firm as a young associate carries a huge negative connotation. In other words, her choices might not have been "give a blowjob" or "quit and find another job." It might have been more like "give a blowjob" or "quit and find another job, and maybe not find another job because there's this huge negative on her resume."
2. The law profession has a reputation for being quite chummy. If she had quit over this harassment, even if she filed no charges then it's quite possible that this partner would have gone on the offensive to discredit her character to other influential people.
In the US, if she was at Biglaw, then my impression is that leaving is basically unheard of. You're intended to work for a firm for 2-4 years and move on, or stay at the firm on a partner track.
Once you're out, it's very hard to get back in. So in practice firms have quite a bit of leverage to demand things like work 100 hours in a week, staying until 2am, cancel plans with family on short notice, etc.
Edit: I mean unheard of to leave with no new job and try to get another one in Biglaw.
From one heterosexual man to another, surely we can see that we're in a different situation than this woman was.
I am genuinely curious about this point. Why are men in a different situation? Couldn't a homosexual boss want to coerce blowjobs from male subordinates?
> I am genuinely curious about this point. Why are men
> in a different situation? Couldn't a homosexual boss
> want to coerce blowjobs from male subordinates?
Absolutely, and of course that would also be quite wrong. And I am sure that's a thing that happens sometimes, unfortunately.
I only mentioned it because the poster I responded to had said, "I'm sure that as a heterosexual man, regardless of my financial circumstances, no one could coerce me into giving blowjobs" and I thought it important to say that there are different dynamics involved there.
If a male boss tried to coerce a male employee into sex, the male victim would be much more likely to respond with physical force, so it's less likely to happen in the first place. The male victim would also be more likely to be viewed as unambiguously victimized, whereas in a male-on-female situation there's likely to be a lot of well, she probably wanted it type speculation and/or congratulation of the male aggressor.
In some senses it might even be more difficult for a male victim. A male victim might be viewed as "weak" for letting it happen in the first place. Whatever the case I'm sure we can agree that it's quite a different dynamic, so the original poster's well, as a man, I'd never let this happen to meeee is not really a useful road to travel down.
As another poster pointed out, your own link includes retribution as a form of duress, and it doesn't limit it to physical retribution. Section 261 b. It applies to all of section 261.
Did you make a new account just to post a misinterpretation of this link twice?
Edit: I changed the text. I had cited the wrong section. But that doesn't change what the document says: section b says retribution is a form of duress, not necessarily violent.
The "duress" you refer to is only relevant when someone is using "the authority of a public official" in lieu of force. I.e., the police/IRS can't threaten to arrest you/hit you with tax penalties unless you sex them up.
Please read all of 261.7.
[edit: I misunderstood the scoping rules of law. Ignore.]
It's a common question men have about harassment or abuse of women, especially sexual. Why not just say no? Why not fight back harder? I'm no expert in the subject, but this is my undertanding:
For one thing, generally men are raised to be aggressive -- never let anyone push you around. Women are raised to be inoffensive, pleasing, agreeable. Aggression is unfeminine; it scares off or alienates males; our culture models being the kidnapped princess awaiting rescue (still true in most movies, games, etc.), not the hero on the horse. EDIT: It might be as hard for a woman to respond aggressively as for you to smile sweetly when someone is abusing you.
For another, they are physically overmatched. Probably their life-long experience and realistic assessment is that fighting males is dangerous.
Also, these things don't happen out of the blue. People are 'groomed'; attackers establish their authority and push for more and more. They wait for the right moment, when victims' defenses are weak. The attacker may have experience with these situations.
Lots of people are intimidated into doing things they don't want to do, often when they are young and little green, especially by authority figures and especially when believing something valuable is on the line, such as their career. What if you had kids and a mortgage? A sick spouse or parent and needed the health insurance?
Finally, I don't know you at all, but I know that far more people say these tough things than rise to the moment when faced with danger, with anxiety and fear soaring and everything on the line. I think panic is a more common response.
EDIT: But how sad that HN seems so male-dominated that we have to speculate about the female pespective. Wow.
Reduce the barrier. Make your boss an attractive woman, who over the course of months goes from asking you to rub her shoulders to release stress to holding her breasts. And now consider that perhaps you are in a committed relationship with someone else.
At some point you crossed the line of acceptable intimacy (probably rather early) and it escalated from there as you were uncertain how to deal with the relationships.
Is it cold hard rape? No. Is it an unacceptable and illegal exploitation of power and psychological torment by the boss? Yes.
Wait a minute.... do people actually do that? Do co-workers ask each other for massages and/or rub their shoulders?! I've never heard of that, ever. Inform me please. How often does this happen? I've always though the "unspoken rule" of the office is nobody touch anyone else, ever. I've never seen that rule violated except for people who've known each other for a good while, and it's usually 2 heterosexual guys punching each other in the arm.
Has anyone on HN seen a coworker give another coworker a massage?
I'm even a bit hesitant to give people high-fives. And those emotional goodbyes where you hug employees on their last day in the office? Those are very awkward for me, but everyone else is doing it... so... I just go along. =/
According to a random google search, 39 percent of workers have engaged in some sort of office romance. So you can bet there's quite a lot of touching going on - hopefully most of it consensual, almost certainly some of it not, and with plenty of grey areas in between.
There is a concerted attempt now to characterize sexual harassment as rape. The person we are replying to did it in an off-hand manner and it is wrong - not just as a point of law but as a strategy for social change.
This may be correct, legally, in some jurisdictions. I'm not a lawyer.
However, I think it kind of misses the point to adjudicate sexual harassment vs. rape in these cases. Saying it's merely sexual harassment implies that it's somehow not an issue. The point is that it's clearly a malicious act, not a well-intentioned boundary-crossing misunderstanding.
As a heterosexual woman, I agree with the sentiment. No one could coerce me into giving blow jobs by threatening to fire me, either. In fact, MOST women would HEARTILY agree with that! I'd quit a job like that. You'd quit a job like that. Most people would quit a job like that.
It's not being a man or woman, being straight or gay, being compatible or not with an abuser, that makes the difference here. Unwanted sex is soul-destroying for everyone. Routine sexual abuse is a horrible, unbearable prospect. For everyone.
It's the implication of the "most" that you're missing.
Most people would walk away from that job. Most people would run!
But that's most. Who else is left?
Who wouldn't run from a situation like that?
I don't know why the particular lady described above didn't run sooner. But I can think of some people who wouldn't.
Someone for whom that job represented their one and only opportunity to break into their chosen field. Someone for whom what was at stake was not just one source of a paycheck, but their entire livelihood. Their entire chosen career. It might be worth it, then, to endure the abuse until you could safely move on.
Someone who was too young or inexperienced to understand their options. Who didn't know this isn't just the way the world works. Who didn't know what resources society offers to fight back with, who didn't think the community would help or back them if they left. Someone who literally sees no way to fight back, for whom leaving represents a public humiliation they see as even more painful than the private humiliation. It might be worth it then.
Someone living paycheck to paycheck, who can't afford to miss even one without seeing their family plunged into immediate misery.
Someone for whom the job represented access to health insurance that was keeping their daughter alive, that they couldn't afford another way.
Someone suffering depression, with such a low sense of self-worth that no abuse feels undeserved, without the will to fight anything in any way.
In short, someone vulnerable.
Yeah, most people don't need a job badly enough to be worth selling their soul and dignity for. Those people aren't raped under the threat of losing their job. It's everyone else who has to worry about that problem.
It is a cruel truth that the people who can leave, the people who can fight back, the people who have the will and resources and personality to retaliate . . . are the ones who are left alone.
This isn't a situation you could find yourself in now. It's not a situation you probably ever could find yourself in. Maybe, though. Life is crazy. Imagine yourself five years of hell from now. Imagine you're diagnosed with cancer, put your life on hold for a grueling year or two, lose all your health, all your savings, and the currency of your skills. Imagine an overzealous state prosecutor comes after you for a crime you didn't commit, and after two years of stressful court battles, you're convicted and serve some time in prison. Imagine you forget what financial security ever felt like. Imagine the stress results in crippling depression, and thoughts of suicide prompt you to seek medical help. Imagine the medication you're given comes with side effects, and you experience severe mood swings, alienating everyone but your closest family and friends. Imagine as you start to recover from all of that, you move two states away from anyone you know to get a new job and start over.
I don't know what it would take for you to become so vulnerable that someone thought they could take advantage of you to that degree. I do know that whatever it would take for you personally, life can be that cruel, and more. Rape is not a female problem, and it's not a male problem. It's a vulnerability problem. If someone ever does take a look at you, and think to themselves, "that guy is so completely under my power that I bet I could get him to blow me" . . . it won't matter a bit that you're a heterosexual man. Getting someone to put up with sexual abuse requires extreme vulnerability. If someone ever thinks they see it in you, for whatever reason, for whatever combination of circumstances is necessary to make that true, there's a good chance they'll be right.
It's true with most kinds of attacks -- the strong aren't the ones who have to worry. The powerful, even the merely self-sufficient, are left alone. The vulnerable people are the ones who are targeted. It's extra true with abuse in general, and sexual abuse in particular. The ones who are targeted are the ones who would need extraordinary outside help in order to stop it. For whatever reason.
That is why it is so important to intervene aggressively if you see a problem. The people who can help themselves are already not targets.
>Someone for whom the job represented access to health insurance that was keeping their daughter alive, that they couldn't afford another way.
At which point we have to consider they are being coerced to work where they do and thus it should be considered slavery.
Imagine you walked up to some one (of the gender you prefer) who had a dying child that needed a life saving operation and you had enough free income to pay for the procedure.
If you walked past them, would you be guilty of contributing to their death?
If you asked them to trade possessions for the money, would you be guilty of theft?
If you asked the individual to do some non-sexual tasks for the money, would you be guilty of slavery?
If the above are no, why would asking for sex in exchange make one guilty of rape?
The problem is that vulnerability is a feeling state. A different person in the same circumstances could feel more or less vulnerable or not vulnerable at all. When we add private (no witnesses) sexual relations to the mix and the halting conversation that happens between people who are starting to have them, it's possible that two parties may have wildly different views of what is happening.
That's a very dangerous place for law and social retribution to go. It would actually be better to outlaw sexual relations between people in reporting relationships in employment.
> heterosexual man, regardless of my financial
> circumstances, no one could coerce me into giving
> blowjobs under the threat of losing my job
What about the slightly older and attractive female manager asking you to give her a shoulder rub that gets progressively more sexual each time she asks you to do, and that you get progressively more uncomfortable doing? Would you quit the first time she told you she had a sore shoulder, and asked you to stick your elbow in it? What about the third time when she takes her shirt off, and another coworker has been joking to you about how she likes you, and how you're a lucky guy?
Yes as a hetro guy you're going to have trouble imagining a situation where you end up with a penis in your mouth, but I suspect with a bit of imagination you can think of how you might end up in a very uncomfortable situation with a female boss that you don't feel you can get out of.
Sure, at first. And who's to say that the young associate in the original story wasn't originally pretty flattered by the attention from the partner? Successful, powerful guy in the law firm, let's say he was also confident, good-looking, and well liked.
And one day, you're not in the mood - it's been a stressful day, or you've just had a difficult work appraisal with the person in question. And you get called in to the office, and the boss says "You know what, my shoulder hurts again. Get to it! You've gotta make a good impression after that shitty appraisal! (smiley face)". And it crosses a line to where it's no longer really consensual, but what can you do? And over the next few weeks, it becomes more and more sexualized, more and more about the power play, and you become increasingly distressed, unhappy, and don't know how to pull the plug, because this person holds significant commercial and social power over you...
And hey, you can't talk to your coworkers about it because "most guys would be down with it", and you know that Bob, your friend the dev-ops will laugh and say "You're pissed off that you're getting some ass off her?" and you certainly can't tell the girl you started dating three weeks ago, and who you'd really like to be faithful to...
> most attractive women can get sex easily. Unatractive women
> on the other hand
Nobody - male or female - 300lbs overweight or with a dripping facial sore - relying on male sexual discretion has any difficulty getting laid as long as they're not choosy.
