It's like telling someone "you would not have had sex with a hooker, if your wife was with you" - well of course! But the reason the wife wasn't with that person, was because they wanted to have sex with a hooker.

But the reason the wife wasn't with that person, was because they wanted to have sex with a hooker. — Agustino

Yeah, they set it up for themselves as they wanted to. If the organizer wouldn't agree, they'd find someone who would, and so on so forth. — Agustino

On the one hand it has been set up that way by people who want it that way, on the other hand most of the people who attended were probably not involved in the set up. Again you take a simplistic, absolutist position, when the reality is more complex. There is feedback and feedforward. Nobody brings a wife, because it is instituted as men only. It is instituted as men only to ensure that nobody brings their wife. There is thus no unified 'they'.
But it is not men only, because girls are provided. But not enough girls for even one each. So the set up also involves by plan, 'non harassing men' who are probably there for the charitable kudos, and certainly there to add to the legitimacy.

Anyway, I'm happy to report that the organisation is winding itself up, there has already been one resignation from a government committee, and the general outrage and disapproval is such that it will be difficult to repeat this in the immediate future. We might even get some legislation out of it.

I am becoming concerned there is nothing resembling "due process" in the #metoo movement.
I am also concerned there is no proportionality, where telling off color jokes or touching someone on the shoulder gets mixed in with requesting sexual favors for promotion or trapping someone in a hotel room and forcing them to have sex.

due process — prothero

proportionality — prothero

I doubt if there was ever a wish for due process by the #me2 phenomena. Due process is slow and might be quite public. The court doesn't reliably find all of the accused guilty. Cases may be thrown out. I doubt also that there was any wish for proportional claims. If there is proportionality, where does one draw the line among rude and/or tasteless behavior, sexual misconduct, and sexual assault? What happens to solidarity if women who have been raped outrank, in an aristocracy of suffering, those who have been subjected only to repeated requests to have sex?

Besides, if offending men get fired on the basis of reports alone, why bother with due process? Who cares about proportionality if one can get results by making accusations which are likely to result in a firing or costly resignation? It's an all women for every woman free for all.

Who cares about proportionality if one can get results by making accusations which are likely to result in a firing or costly resignation? It's an all women for every woman free for all. — Bitter Crank

Last I saw, the determining factor in winning cases of sexual harassment in the workplace was who made the first complaint, regardless of what happened. Not gender. Then again, things could have changed since then...

I just read an interesting article on Aeon that might make it clearer what I meant when I said this:

new social restrictions surrounding sex, an impoverishment of sexual interaction and a degradation of individual autonomy — jamalrob

How do we understand sexual pleasure in this age of ‘consent’?

Some quotes from the article:

Sometimes what we want is not fully known to us in advance. The details of desire and satisfaction are often discovered, and produced, in the sexual moment. Rather than a question of individual will, sexual autonomy can be expressed through the interaction of two (or more) partners. Sex can be a uniquely utopian experience, in that the act of sexually relating creates novel ways of being together socially.

Women’s sexual pleasure is often viewed as more complicated and less predictable than men’s. Historically, this assumption has contributed to the over-regulation of female sexual and reproductive capacities. Rather than the exception, ambiguity about exactly what is desired, and how that desire should be expressed, is the sexual norm. Women’s emancipatory projects should therefore focus on ways of incorporating this fact, rather than shunning it.

This is not to say that there are no limits in sex, but rather to propose that we devise limits that align with the erotic potential of the sexual encounter. Liminal trust is a space in which partners can explore the value of sexual experiences precisely because they directly engage the line between permissibility and impermissiblity. Both affirmative and enthusiastic consent cast this kind of sexuality as deviant and criminal. That is a mistake.

#MeToo explicitly relies on patriarchy as both cultural context and target. It sees women as objects of sexualised male domination. Men, we are told, have an interest in furthering, or at least maintaining, misogynistic forms of social control over women. They are assumed to want to go ‘as far’ as they can before being confronted with a woman’s expression of non-consent to sex. This picture provides, at best, an idiosyncratic and regressive picture of human sexuality. At worst, it encourages us to police sexuality in conservative ways.

And if you have no idea what she's talking about, well, you're doing it wrong. :wink:

No doubt she'll be cast as a rape apologist by the mob.

#MeToo explicitly relies on patriarchy as both cultural context and target. It sees women as objects of sexualised male domination. Men, we are told, have an interest in furthering, or at least maintaining, misogynistic forms of social control over women. They are assumed to want to go ‘as far’ as they can before being confronted with a woman’s expression of non-consent to sex. This picture provides, at best, an idiosyncratic and regressive picture of human sexuality. At worst, it encourages us to police sexuality in conservative ways.

Western society has only recently gone from banning of explicit sexual constants and practices to celebrating them. The practices that put Oscar Wilde in prison, are now celebrated in marriage. Society in the process of liberating sex, and its associated practices, has created a moral (& a legal) maze for all genders.

Van Badham in her Globe piece (2/1/2018) quotes an "eloquent truth":

“The only sexual rule today is ‘consent’, and men have been taught that women are potentially always sexually available because that is what ‘liberation’ means.”

Van Badham points to the generational issues surrounding various feminist claims. The freedom of agency that older feminists sought so long and hard to achieve, younger feminists now want to circumscribe. Lili Loofbourow cultural critic for The Week interestingly states:

The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I've long feared, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is is just how men are, and how sex is.

Perhaps it is "our instinct is to normalize", the control that society puts over agency, that is shaping what 'consent' entails, which is worrying from a feminist position because the Male view is dominant in Western Culture.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. As far as I am aware very few of those #MeToo has called out are under legal indictment and I wonder how it will pan out for those "monsters" who have been charged. Cosby's trail has gone on and on and picks up again next month. Remember OJ was exonerated of murder because of the force of his legal defense and I wonder if many public prosecutors or victims will be able to withstand the legal force that those 'monsters' will employ to defend themselves.

I agree with the article but I haven't read the following in the #MeToo movement, which probably explains my earlier inability of understanding the situations you were referring to:

The law, in other words, should be adapted to track the cultural shifts demanded by #MeToo. Proponents of affirmative consent argue that sexual partners should actively seek clear signs of consent throughout a sexual encounter. ‘Consent is sexy,’ we are told. When a woman alleges an assault, we should believe her. The burden should shift to the defendant to show that he took reasonable steps in the circumstances to ascertain her consent.

Of course, if you read the above in the #MeToo movement, we should worry about the fluidity and ambiguity surrounding sexual encounters, the danger and fun accompanying it. I never interpreted the movement like that though. I understood the #MeToo movement as a wake-up call to take seriously the social assumptions on a lot of sexual encounters; the reality that 40% of Dutch women have been sexually assaulted and 80% sexually harassed with no similar figures for men. A woman's fear of speaking out due to effects on their careers, social ostracization etc.

So when NicK and I got in the car I explained to him what had happened and he dismissed it as the guy just being a "huggy" kind of person. I called bullshit on NicK because I am a "huggy" person and I have never uttered such words to a man while embracing and NicK still, today, believes that I am over-reacting. Am I? I don't even want to be around him because knowing NicK doesn't have my back on this makes me nervous. Not because I don't know how to put an end to it but because of the ripples within our friendships it would cause if he were to do it again and still not hear me and make me call him out on it. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

disturbing update: NicK shared with me that he now in fact believes what I said about his friends brothers' actions and that it was not me that was "over-reacting". Shocked I turned to him and asked him what exactly changed his mind about what I SAID happened?

I am having trouble with his response as he said that when the group of guys went out to the range, the brother (offender) stayed behind at the house with another brothers wife. Apparently when the other brother got home, he got a earful from his wife about what had just happened to her. HE got pissed at his brother and is still not talking to him and THAT is what made NicK believe me. Pretty fucked up if you ask me. I expressed that to NicK and he once again said that "You are quite capable of taking care of yourself" and I informed him that I was well aware of that but a spousal backup didn't seem unreasonable and expressed that to him.

I wonder how extreme of a situation I would need to be in when he would consider backing me up. It is not a comforting wonder by any means but I do wonder... :worry:

That's F-ed up. NicK needs to pull his spousal socks up.

https://www.gocomics.com/ziggy/1973/05/28

Did Nick literally say he didn't believe you or did he say "you're overreacting" or something similar?

In any case, I'd go for entrapment. Next time you meet with this guy you tell Nick beforehand that if he touches you inappropriately again you will loudly say something about it and knee him in the groin if he doesn't listen and that you demand he's behind you 100% if and when that happens. Possibly involving him kicking the shit out of that guy to defend your honour.

Thank you dear friend for believing in defending my honor.
However, I was mistaken in looking for someone to defend my honor when I am the only one that can or will.
Once again it came down to my error of placing an "expectation" on someone other than myself.