Responding to Weinstein

In the wake of the Weinstein story, I have seen two basic proposals for social change. They can be pretty well summed up by these tweets:

More formal workplace environments with less after-hours socializing and much less alcohol would be good for us. https://t.co/CiB962vSyY

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 10, 2017

Or men could just not be predatory dicks https://t.co/40G2mJbmQt

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) October 10, 2017

I won't pretend to be neutral here—I think Barro has the better side of this argument—but I'll try to present both sides fairly.

Barro's approach might be called "architectural." He wants patterns of social behavior to be designed to make it more difficult for people like Weinstein to harass people. By analogy, you can imagine a city responding to assaults in a city park by installing lights, or even by closing the park at night. It is hard at first to see what could be objectionable about that. You can't imagine a city resident responding, "Oh sure, we could install better lighting, or men could just not be predatory dicks."

[Updated to add: Maybe an even better example is instituting policies like body cams or civilian review boards meant to reduce police brutality. You can't imagine Jeffery opposing those policies on the grounds that police officers should "just not be predatory dicks."]

To understand where Jeffery is coming from, consider this idiotic tweet:

THINK:

If Weinstein had obeyed @VP Pence's rules for meeting with the opposite sex, none of those poor women would ever have been abused. pic.twitter.com/Kgl9FF7nam

— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) October 11, 2017

Pence's rules are, if memory serves, that he never eats a meal or drinks alcohol one-on-one with a woman unless his wife is present. What this means, of course, is that the men he works with probably have much better access to him than the women do, and it's hard to imagine this doesn't put women at a disadvantage when it comes to career advancement.

So what I think concerns Jeffery is how the burden of reducing sexual harassment gets allocated. The Upshot (part of the New York Times) ran a good piece on this, noting that men sometimes respond to sexual harassment scandals by reducing their contact with women in the workplace. You can see why this is morally outrageous, since it requires women to pay twice: first by being harassed and assaulted, and second by being cut off from professional advancement. Men should just not be predatory dicks!

Now in fairness to Barro, he specifically cited the New York Times piece and argued that it would be unfortunate for men to respond in such a way. Barro's suggestion is to clear away the vast gray area that currently allows sexual harassment to proliferate in the workplace. He wants to draw bright lines that eliminate ambiguity, which often serves as a hiding place for harassers. He also wants to purge professional spaces of activities that lend themselves to bad behavior, like excessive drinking with coworkers.

And as I indicated earlier, I think that's basically right. Men will try to harass women in any social context, and some will get away with it. But by defining acceptable behavior in such a way that harassers can't make plausible denials or claim ignorance, we can make it harder to harass and easier to punish harassment when it happens. This isn't moral abdication or Gorka-style stupidity, it's a responsible way to address a real problem.