MusicallyInspired wrote: ↑Sun Jun 10, 2018 1:37 am
adeyke wrote: ↑Sat Jun 09, 2018 1:06 pm
It means "quoted for truth", but it's not. If you really are unable to say hello in way that isn't sexual harassment, you should definitely stay away from other people.
This is pretty one-sided for a hard and fast rule. What's to stop anybody from claiming anything I say is "sexual harassment" whether it was intended as such or somehow unintentionally inappropriately stated as such or not? Or do you think this never happens?
I can't rule it out as being completely impossible, but it's not something to ever worry about. Just what sort of situation are you imagining here? "Sexual harassment" isn't a magic word to make someone disappear. If you mean that it's at a work situation and they're trying to get HR to intervene, or if they're actually trying to press criminal charges, that's a harrowing experience for the victim, and they're going to have to go into detail about what happened to them; it's not something that can be done on a whim. Even if it just means they're going to try to avoid the person who did it, that's still something they'd only do if they genuinely felt uncomfortable (which here means things like degraded, objectified, threatened, etc.).
There's zero incentive for people to have a social interaction they actually didn't mind and then yell "sexual harassment".
My quote there boils down to saying that you shouldn't sexually harass people, and I really don't think that should be a controversial position.
adeyke wrote: ↑Sat Jun 09, 2018 4:10 pm
You say you equally hold the door open for everyone, and I'll take your word for it. However, many men
don't that. For them, it's not "if one person in a group holds the door open, it makes it easier for the group overall" and more a "gentlemen hold doors open for ladies" chivalry thing. They might hold the door only for women, go out of their way to hold the door open (either rushing ahead to do so or holding it even when there's a big gap between them),...
What's wrong with that?
Treating women differently from men in cases where it shouldn't actually make a difference is sexist.
If someone rushes ahead to open to door, that can get awkward and actually slow down the pace. And if there's a big gap, holding the door open puts pressure on the other person; either they feel like a jerk for making the person at the door wait so long, or they pick up their pace and walk more quickly than they would otherwise have wanted to. In either case, it's not about making things easier or more pleasant.
...and get upset if the woman doesn't show gratitude or if a woman holds the door open for them.
Ah.
A couple things here. Are you inferring that there's nothing wrong whatsoever with someone holding the door open for somebody and not getting a "thank you" or even an acknowledgement back for the kind gesture? How about if someone drops their sunglasses by accident and someone goes and picks it up for them (for the sake of detail let's say a woman dropped the sunglasses and a man picks them up for her)? Are you saying that this lack of returned politeness by the woman is ok and the disappointment of the man for not receiving it is not only unjustified but born of some other nefarious intent and/or exaggerated expectation on their part and
not simply because their politeness wasn't returned? I can only assume that's where you're going with this...
How they express their anger/disappointment afterward is another matter of politeness and respect entirely, but I think they have every right to feel slighted for sure.
It depends. If you're just doing something to be nice, then you've succeeded even if the person doesn't acknowledge it. If you're doing it in order to receive verbal gratitude, then you aren't just doing it to be nice.
Also, the amount of gratitude you can reasonably expect would be dependent on just how much your actions helped them. Holding the door open for an able-bodied person who's not carrying anything does practically nothing for them. They could have just opened the door themselves and would have thought nothing of it. And in the case of rushing ahead or holding with too big a gap, the supposed benefit might actually be negative.
With the sunglasses, it also depends. If the person dropping the sunglasses is aware of it happening and is able to to just bend down and pick them up without any pain or nuisance, then leaping in and picking them up first doesn't really help them, so it does instead look like an attempt to score politeness points (or, at worst, like they were trying to steal them and only gave them back because they were noticed). On the other hand, if the sunglasses were dropped a while ago, and the person would have had to walk quite a way to get them, or maybe was unaware that they were dropped and could have lost them forever, a "thank you" does seem warranted.
As far as a man getting upset at a woman holding doors open for them part....yeah, that's silly. Do most men not agree?
If they're viewing door-holding in gendered terms (i.e. it's only something men do for women), then that sort of thought follows. The man is then both cheated out of the politeness points they could have gotten by holding the door and is being treated like a woman.
And if a woman keeps getting that kind of door-holding, it's easy to understand how it might color her perception of door-holding in general.
I'm less than convinced this is as commonplace as you're/they're making it out to be. At least not in the way you're describing it. If it is, I agree with you. But just because people get a little miffed because somebody didn't say "thank you" to them for doing something nice that they went out of their way to do doesn't mean that they're the bad guy.
If that thing they went out of their way to do wasn't actually wanted, then it wasn't nice. And if they do then scowl at the lack of gratitude or make a rude remark, then that's also not nice.
But yes, if someone takes an action they reasonably thought would be appreciated and would warrant gratitude but didn't receive it, and they are then internally disappointed at this, that doesn't make them a bad person.
Politeness is there to make things easier and more pleasant for people. If your politeness actually ended up making someone uncomfortable, it wasn't really polite.
When my brother and I were young, a mutual acquaintance of our family (an older lady) came to my brother privately (who had bad acne at the time) and offered some special expensive product that would clear up his acne paid out of her own pocket. He said to her "no thanks, I probably wouldn't use it". I believe he reasoned he was being fairly polite about it. She later approached him and said "if you had any manners, I didn't detect any" and walked away. This made my brother thoroughly uncomfortable as he related when he told us the story afterward.
Who was the impolite person in this story? And who was at fault for my brother's discomfort?
The older lady was impolite. What she said was intended specifically to make your brother feel bad. However, even the offer of that product was already impolite, since it apparently included an obligation to accept it. This put your brother in a no-win situation: apparently the refusal of the offer wasn't appreciated, but taking it and then not using it also would have been rude. So it may be that your brother was impolite, but putting him into the situation where there are no polite responses was more impolite.
People are different and will have different reactions, so predicting how to properly be polite can be difficult. In this case, you misjudged, but that's on you, not them. If more people appreciate it than don't, maybe you can just keep doing what you're doing. Maybe some change in body language would help it be taken the right way. Or maybe you can try to judge who will appreciate the door being held and who wouldn't. Human social interactions are complicated.
Nonsense. Politeness and manners were made up to be an intermediary between people so that no matter the differences between them in a culture, the common manners and "game" of politeness would be there to connect them and identify when people meant others good will (or the opposite, if they acted differently). It was to connect people so that even if you didn't know them, you knew how to behave and get along with them and effectively express respect and friendliness. We used to call it common decency. Society and civilization was built upon us all playing the same "game" by the same rules so that we can all continue to coexist and get along. A person does not get to just change the rules of the game and make up their own common decencies and expect everyone to follow them. How are we all going to get along if we don't know everyone's rules? We can't. It involves personal sacrifice and risk but that's inevitable because that's what human interaction is all about. You put others before yourself even if it's sometimes uncomfortable. I hate talking to strangers, it makes me thoroughly uncomfortable and I just want to go away and be alone. But I sacrifice that and respond politely because I know that they're not trying to make me feel uncomfortable. They're trying to do the opposite. That was their intent.
Intent is what matters. You don't get to label someone's intent by making up your own rules and watching them inevitably break those rules. That's completely unfair. That is not on the person breaking an individual's unique set of rules, that's on them for having the unrealistic expectation of having everybody automatically understand what their rules are.
The rules do serve a useful starting point. However, people are still individuals, and their reactions to a person's actions are real (and not just arbitrarily chosen). If someone feels uncomfortable, then they feel uncomfortable. And if a person doesn't want others to feel uncomfortable, then they'll try to avoid things that cause that. And, on the other hand, if they
do have reason to suspect something would make a person uncomfortable, and they still insist on doing it "because it's polite", then both their actions
and their intent are wrong.
It would certainly be more convenient if you could predict in advance just how someone will react. But people are complicated, so the best you can do is make educated guesses and learn from missteps.
By analogy, suppose you meet someone called Sean, but you're not sure if it's pronounced "Shawn" or "Shane". You could ask them how it's pronounced. Or you could guess and then, if they correct you, apologize and start using the right pronunciation. However, if you find a "Shane" and insist that they're called "Shawn" because that's the common pronunciation and people aren't just allowed to have their own rules of pronunciation, you're a jerk.
adeyke wrote: ↑Sat Jun 09, 2018 9:30 pmAnd again, no.
There are ways to say hello in ways that could be sexual harassment. For example:
- Leering at or ogling the person
- Using a sleazy tone of voice
- Invading the person's personal space
- Implicitly or explicitly threatening the person
- Giving the person a demeaning address in the greeting
And even then, it would need to be either a severe or repeated violation to qualify as harassment. So even though saying hello may be involved, it's never "just" saying hello.
I hope I'm misunderstanding your meaning as nobody who says "hello" is ever
just saying "hello." Like, universally. Because that's utter nonsense.
All cases of saying hello do have context, but the particular context matters. If you meet a friend you haven't seen in a while and wave a cheerful hello, no one would consider that sexual harassment. Ditto for giving a brief and neutral hello to a supermarket cashier or someone you're passing on the street.
On the other hand, if a group of men surround a woman in an alley at night, and one of them says "Hey baby, nice tits", that would clearly be sexual harassment, even if it could be classified as "saying hello".
The original claim was this:
But then, these days - "sexually harassing"... could be just saying hello.
And that's utter nonsense. Saying hello in a normal and appropriate way isn't sexual harassment and there's essentially no risk of it being called sexual harassment. On the other hand, if someone does get accused of sexual harassment but defends it as "just saying hello", there's inevitably a lot more going on that they didn't mention.
Also, the concept of "innocent" is useless here. If someone feels uncomfortable as the result of an action, that's harm that action has done to them, and it's not innocent. The discomfort doesn't disappear just because the person didn't mean to cause it.
Why not? That seems to be the real issue here. If there's a misunderstanding and it's cleared up I don't see how anybody should feel uncomfortable anymore.
People aren't mind readers. The same action is going to feel the same, regardless of what intent was behind it. It's only if there's some further action afterwards, like an apology, that it can be mitigated.
Also, discomfort isn't a choice. It's not a matter of "should".
If you step on my toes, my toes are going to hurt, regardless of whether you weren't aware my toes were there, were callously indifferent to whether my toes were there, or were deliberately trying to step on my toes. And if I make you aware of the situation, and you just tell me that you didn't mean any harm but leave your foot there, it's going to keep hurting.
If they really didn't mean it, that just means they can apologize and avoid doing it in the future.
Assuming any misunderstanding and misconstrued or unintentional signals are cleared up (otherwise, I don't believe anyone but the one who misunderstood has any need to apologize), is the continued discomfort
afterward still other person's fault?
Also, not all discomfort is completely the fault of someone else in the first place. You feel discomfort when you do something wrong (assuming your conscience isn't seared enough to not let it bother you anymore). Not treating someone with respect who's treating you with respect is wrong. At least, that's how I was raised. That's another possibility.
How are those things being cleared up? It seems that would involve some kind of apology. "Sorry, I didn't mean any disrespect" can let both people just move on, but "I didn't mean any disrespect, and I maintain that I was completely correct in my actions" or "I didn't mean any disrespect, and you should apologize to me for thinking that I did" doesn't.
For instance, the major character in the BBC show Blackadder is reprehensible, scheming, greedy and self-serving. But so what? He still gets his comeuppance. 
