Swetha Kannan and Priya Krishnakumar tally the list of powerful men accused of sexual harassment since October 5 for the Los Angeles Times:
Fifty-one people accused of sexual harassment, assault or misconduct work in arts and entertainment.
Eighteen work in politics.
Twenty-one work in media.
Four work from the hospitality industry, including the restaurant and hotel business.
Four work in technology, sports, venture capitalism or other industries.
What conclusions can be drawn from that tally? Maybe there’s a pathology at work among American men but I don’t think you can draw that conclusion based on that evidence. The media and politics constitute a tiny fraction of American men—almost undoubtedly fewer than 1%. The conclusion that can be drawn is that there’s a pathology at work in the tiny insular worlds of the media and in American politics.
Dave, I think you forgot to copy the largest category:
“Fifty-one people accused of sexual harassment, assault or misconduct work in arts and entertainment.”
Thanks. I’ve corrected the quote to add that sentence.
Arts and entertainment is an extremely small segment of the economy and our society. And, importantly, it is and always has been seen as divergent. How valid are conclusions about the society at large based on observation of that segment?
In other words “Other”, the subgroup with four accused, is most of the society.
The tally is interesting. I keep reading that corporations have these problems too, but I don’t see any support. I wouldn’t claim any moral superiority to a given business organization, and no doubt it has and will continue to happen. But this outbreak appears to be in unconventional occupations, not necessarily involving people with an employment relationship. Corporations have long been under scrutiny to police workplace environments.
That’s very much my point. The sort of thing that is being complained about was severely punished by the companies I’ve worked for going back 40 years. Politics has largely exempted itself from scrutiny.
Too many of the people complaining about the corporate environment have never worked within it. I think that Carly Fiorina’s remarks on the subject are relevant:
Two points:
In my entire professional career I have personally witnessed exactly one instance of sexual harassment (one of my work associates groped a woman fellow-worker). I took the guy aside and gave him a warning. I wasn’t his manager. My warning was of a more personal nature. That was 40 years ago.
We had a doc who was touching people and tried to kiss a few people. Went on for a year or two and the nurses never said a thing until he tried to kiss one out in the open in front of a bunch of people. My sense is that women (some at least) actually tolerate a fair bit of this before they decide to report it. In this case they thought he was a good doc and they liked him and didn’t want to ruin his career.
Steve
“The conclusion that can be drawn is that there’s a pathology at work in the tiny insular worlds of the media and in American politics.”
That’s the obvious conclusion, and in my opinion correct. The question of course is why. (And we can skip one-off anecdotes. The question is one of systemic issues.) I think it was touched upon in the thread. Corporate America, an obvious potential population for this type of behavior, has been under scrutiny for quite some time. Politicians, and favored industries…………..not so much.
I don’t hear many women who work in professional environments disputing the overall claim: which is that if you are a woman you expect to be harassed, or worse. There were not many women pushing back and saying Uber was an anomaly in the business world. Things have changed everywhere, in that very few men are selecting secretaries as if they were sex workers. But what does that mean?
Lack of evidence is lack of evidence, MM. We go back to a point I made earlier in another post—the difference between an issue and a risk. There is a risk that a pathology is at work in the society at large; that there is a pathology at work in entertainment is an issue. Risks and issues require difference approaches in dealing with them.
You have buried the lead. The great majority of these reprobates are Jews. That might merely reflect Jewish domination of the entertainment and news media, but it is a salient fact nonetheless.
I don’t think that the only harassers are Jews and by my count not even a majority are so I don’t think it’s relevant. Remediation strategies need to apply to either Jewish or Gentile abusers.
I do think that traditional Jewish and Muslim cultures with their extreme separation of the sexes and traditional Muslim cultures’ treatment of women create some problems.