To handle tangible sexual/other harassment than this polite expectation that one should pretend not to find a PanOpticon built by people like these innately creepy:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Andy_Rubin,_Google,_and_Sexual_Harassment_in_Tech
My experiences with actual male scientists and doctors was largely pretty decent even in fields like Physics that skew male. But these creepy types unsurprisingly cluster in fields with a high background of snooping, manipulation and social engineering.
Google and Facebook sound like such unhealthy and creepy workplaces. I never felt creeped out in purely academic workplaces, especially as there is way more gender balance closer to the biological and medical sciences. But even physics and engineering can be okay.
The last 20 years of generalisations online imo inadequately identify the precise dynamics that lead to sexist, creepy and hostile workplaces. More research of this type (but focused on sexual harassment) is needed:
I don’t care I realized that it is an uncomfortable topic. But where I get hung up sometimes is when some generalisation or other strikes me as inaccurate due to a statistically significant enough number of counterexamples or where some dynamics are attributed less weight than others while totally being important etc.
I have lately become better at untangling skeins of thought inside my head.
I thought such topics make me uncomfortable. But now I realize it is just that I glitch anytime something is too imprecise. These are topics that are notoriously difficult to parse. But still by now we should be doing a better job than the stuff that passes for discourse.
I liked Allison Taylor’s work on corruption very much and found it comforting and useful over the years:
https://acgc.cipe.org/business-of-integrity-blog/the-characteristics-of-corrupt-corporate-cultures/
Something similar is needed to dissect the dynamics of sexual harassment beyond the truisms we are familiar with. Like how profit driven by building a creepy surveillance capitalist PanOpticon is essentially stealthily laying to waste any common sense understanding of sexual harassment laws as they used to be where so much widespread creepiness and snooping would automatically have been called out as voyeuristic and harassing.
But when forced at scale, crickets..
Who would trust those Google and Facebook creeps.
I read this cynically and contemptuously and rolled my eyes:
https://observer.co.uk/news/international/article/the-academics-who-stuck-by-disgraced-epstein-to-the-end-and-those-who-didnt
I am shocked at the number of women in there. This is an elite disease. You really don’t see these many women lower down actively consorting with such disgusting men in routine life imo.
I am extra scorched earth about these creep types. Which oddly makes me reflexively ingratiating to random men so I don’t get accused of promoting witch hunts. I never make shit up. And it’s not like I just go around randomly attacking men or something. But you cannot go around making spaces hostile and creepy and normalizing that and gaslighting women like me as paranoid.
I try to be all “Hey! I am cool! I don’t just randomly go around demanding that men be rounded up or something! I make jokes! I watch Sunny in Philadelphia! But yeah if you are creep, you have no business accessing stuff with what this creep parade up top deems adequate oversight.”
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