I don't recall ever hearing so many sexual misconduct stories breaking out all over the place: politicians, entertainers/movie moguls, most recently, long-term Today anchor Matt Lauer. Let me be clear: I'm not in a state of denial that sexual harassment and more serious sexual misconduct happens, but I know in some cases false charges have been made, can be almost impossible to refute (disproving a negative), and the PC police will almost always presume even totally undocumented, no evidence allegations, that somehow the alleged victim is always presumed to be truthful. Never mind the indisputable cases of men convicted of rape, later overturned on DNA evidence.Yet these same women, who made knowingly false charges, are held up as "courageous" for stepping forward with little, if any evidence. In fact, the politically correct would have you think those of us who dare question dubious charges are "victimizing" alleged victims a second time. Actually, no--there is the old story of a boy who cries wolf one too many times. There are notorious cases, like the McMartin scandal in the 80s where we saw a similar mushrooming of alleged improprieties at the expense of young school children. In many cases, we see the reverse of the presumption of innocence. You have people whose lives have been ruined, financially, careers, reputations, over circumstances of fabricated charges. Others will not accept exoneration of failed judgments or dismissed charges, that somehow the judge or jury was bought off or similar excuses.
Why do people make false accusations against other people? Try to explain evil in the world. It's like trying to argue the Texas church mass murderer somehow was justified in executing children with up-close shots to their heads. There could be 101 reasons, e.g., somebody exacts revenge against someone because he or she feels wronged by them, or maybe they don't like their opinions on things, they're looking for a convenient scapegoat, they are reading too much into circumstances, etc.
Let me explain with a couple of simple personal examples (I've never engaged in misconduct, but I'm trying to explain how others can misread a situation. Early in my IT career, I was working as a programmer/analyst at a well-known insurance company in south-central Texas. My senior colleague had his married couple friends visiting him for lunch; he may have briefly introduced them to me in passing. He came back from lunch, chuckling at me. He said that when he briefly mentioned me at lunch, and the wife called me "eyes", i.e., she felt that I had been leering at her, undressing her with my eyes. I was horrified. To be honest, I couldn't have picked that woman out of a lineup if my life depended on it. And I wasn't interested at all, even if she were single. I have no idea how her fertile imagination worked, but it was a departure from reality. Not to be cruel, but I remember some woman who once made it clear over the grapevine she would never go out with me. I have no idea where that came from; I had never even mentioned her in my prior conversations, and to be brutally honest, I found her physically unattractive and never even considered asking her out. Getting rejected by women you like is bad enough--but getting rejected by someone you would have never asked out in the first place takes sheer chutzpah on their part.
Then there was my first job in Houston. I knew there was a nepotism policy; our receptionist had just married one of my programmer colleagues before my start. (My other colleagues were relentlessly teasing her for being the "little" sister; her younger sister, from her own admission, was 6 feet tall and had a curvier figure. She wasn't that little at 5'9" and went around insisting she was the "big" sister. She lost her job a few weeks later; receptionists are easier to hire than talented programmers.) One of my colleagues was a single woman (let's call her Jackie); she was working on one of our big accounts, an Exxon catalog application. Her Exxon contact was typically a rising star among Exxon's younger executives who normally stayed only a short while, so Jackie knew the system probably better than the clients themselves. But Jackie, unlike me, couldn't handle stress very well, and was as close to a coffee addict as I've ever seen--her hands would literally shake without her fix of morning joe. I'm basically pointing out that Jackie was kind of a mess and not really that attractive to me, but I thought why not get to know her better; we're both single. I knew one of her favorite childhood memories was going to performances of the Nutcracker Suite--and in a big city like Houston, there's bound to be a performance somewhere. So I asked if she was interested in going with me to one of them.
Now I'm not really sure what happened. I suspect maybe in her she took it as an implicit marriage proposal and began worrying for her job under Peter's nepotism policy. But 2 things I remember: she converted the proposed date into a company social event, and then my manager Peter had a talk with me. "It's come to my attention that you're dating Jackie. And I just need to let you know if this goes anywhere, I'm going to have to let one of you go."
One thing was certain. I had only asked Jackie personally and never discussed it with anyone else. So Peter must have found out from Jackie herself. Second, I wasn't dating Jackie; the performance was an attempt at a first date, and I apparently naively believed that a first date is an introductory date, with no further obligation from either party. I had never even gone with Jackie to buy a cup of coffee outside the building, let alone hold her hand or try to kiss her. I thought the world had gone mad, presumptuous on steroids.
As to Peter's termination threat, I was easily the most talented programmer on staff, but I realized the Exxon catalog business was a big piece of our business, and the decision might go against me (although I'm sure Peter knew Jackie was very high maintenance and probably should have been transitioned to other projects). Needless to say, whatever fleeting interest I had in Jackie wasn't worth the risk, and I really didn't like she wasn't discreet about the situation. All she had to do was say "no". God knows a number of other girls and ladies didn't have a problem turning down a date with me.
In academia, I was in a very precarious situation as a single male and never dated one of my colleagues or students (current or former). Not that there weren't opportunities; let's just say that many young women are attracted to authority figures (and a professor is one of those) and can be very aggressive. (You would not believe what some coeds would do; one lecture at UH I ended up spending the last 10 minutes of lecture talking to the floor in front of me. I was seriously pissed and showed up to next lecture waving a handful of drop slips I was prepared to use.) One young woman, while I was debugging her COBOL program (about the least sexy thing one can do in life), slipped out her bare foot from her shoe and slipped it up inside my left pant leg, stroking my shin up and down. And I'm thinking, "Damn, what do I do now? Nobody is going to believe what's happening. Or she'll turn the tables on me and then it's my word against hers and I'll lose. I don't need this getting in the way of the PhD." I just pretended it never happened. When she and her accompanying friend finally left the office, I heard Ms. Footsie laugh to her friend, "Did you see how I turned the teacher on?"
Probably the worst thing (beyond some coed telling me she would be willing to do anything for an A, and I responded she should study hard), and I've never told anyone until now, happened my third semester at UWM. This young woman was the leader of some malcontents who tried to extort me into an assignment extension literally 2 weeks before the due date. I usually had policies in place, like I would never see a coed in my office with the door closed. And I arranged my office furniture in a way I had to squeeze my way through a foot or so space between my desk and the wall or bookcase, thinking that a student would be isolated in the font of the office facing me. Yeah, right. So this obnoxious young woman (who I'm sure has been a well-deserved failure in life), without my knowledge, had followed me behind my desk and as I'm looking at my monitor facing the wall at a right angle from my desk, I can feel her press her genitalia against the left shoulder of my white dress shirt. Talk about an "oh, shit!" moment; I had never heard of something like this happening to anyone else. I pretended that it never happened and told her she needed to leave my desk area and go to the front of the desk. I probably should have filed a complaint, but the university administrators would not have been supportive and probably tried to make the [expletive deleted] a "victim".
I'll end up with the true story of a close friend of mine, a fellow socially-inept geek. This does show how absurd (and hypocritically doubly-standard) sexual harassment policies can be. For the first case, a young female (Asian) Indian junior system administrator was obsessed with a senior system admin colleague, also an Indian. I mean like "Fatal Attraction" obsessed, literally stalking him. I think he lived in Chicago, several Metra stops away from the southwest suburbs. One night she shadowed him (unknowing) all the way to his apartment and tried to argue her way into his apartment. The company mostly laughed off the reported incident.
My friend was attracted to a personable young, pretty blond account associate (maybe in her mid to late 20's). Maybe around mid-October, he tried to ask her out. She told him she was flattered, but she had been dating this guy a while, and while he hadn't made a commitment to her yet, she was hopeful in the near future. So my friend tells her, well, if she wasn't interested in him [my friend], he understand and wouldn't bother her again. She hesitated and said, "No, I would like to keep my options open."
Well, after Christmas break, my friend decided to try again. Over the prior 2 months, there had no been no contact beyond polite greetings in hallways, no personal conversations, phone calls, notes or mails, no contact outside the office building. Should he had given it more time, for her to make the first move? But he had no way of knowing how things were going in her relationship; besides, she's the one who left the door open; she could have said, "Sorry, I'm just not into you" from the get-go. She hadn't come back from vacation yet. He left a note at her desk, asking if she was interested in his buying her lunch at the building cafeteria. BIG MISTAKE! NEVER, NEVER PUT IT IN WRITING!
Unexpectedly, he got called into an immediate meeting with the executive VP, someone from HR and others. He was told, first of all, the woman had filed a sexual harassment claim (apparently being asked to lunch at a cafeteria by a geek made her feel "uncomfortable"), the company lawyers were in possession of the note, the complaint, etc., and if they found the company was liable, he would be summarily fired. He had to sweat out the next 2-3 hours, not understanding how offering to buy a lady lunch was a cause for possible termination. He had never touched her, described her physical appearance or used suggestive or inappropriate language, he always acted acted like a gentleman around her. When he got to his desk, he found a predated, fabricated letter warning that she was tired of his incessant pestering her over unwanted dates, she had told him no repeatedly, and if he asked her out one more time, she would lodge a complaint with the company.
The letter was a total lie, invented after the fact as the pretext for a complaint. What the hell had just happened? He's not a psychologist. Maybe she was hoping to be engaged over Christmas, it didn't happen, and this guy was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. She didn't want this loser; she wanted the guy who didn't want to commit to her. And now maybe my friend was beginning to understand why the other guy wasn't committing. He just didn't understand why she had done this to him; she was trying to get him fired. All she had to say was, "No, thanks. You're not my type." As a future girlfriend told him, "Stay away from this woman; she's evil."
Long story short, the company lawyers exonerated him, but just as a preventive measure had management move him in a different area in the building so they wouldn't run into each other. It also turned out that she sucked as an account associate and was terminated while my friend was on a business trip. Whereas if and when sexual harassment legitimately occurs. it should be addressed, but abuse of process creates other victims, like my friend. I myself have a mom, 4 sisters, and 9 nieces. I don't need a bunch of politically correct bastards telling me how they should be treated in the workplace. You can't regulate evil, but you shouldn't hire it either.
