>you can form your own judgement about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on
Therein lies the danger. An outsider with little knowledge cannot make a good judgement. Their judgement will be based on intangibles, such as "something similar happened to somebody I know, so I tend to believe X's account over Y's account".
But that's not proof, or evidence, or anything really. It's just naked bias from a different situation applied to an unrelated one. Saying "history is replete with examples" is exactly that. If that is going to be used as a metric, then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women carries with it a high degree of risk. No matter how you behave, a single accusation from somebody willing to lie or exaggerate--for whatever reason--will be supported and amplified using this same historical rationale.
I do not accept that this is "naked bias".
If the accusations are true, then this is yet another example of a pattern of behaviour played out so regularly, across cultures, centuries and communities, that it is boringly predictable: "Senior community member, almost always a man, sexually exploits vulnerable women seeking acceptance into that community."
When a possible situation arises you should investigate it and, if there is reasonable evidence that it is true, do what you can to stamp it out and ensure it stops happening.
In Jon Pretty's case, if his account is true, it wasn't investigated. It was simply decided in a court of public opinion, quite possibly because of the historical metric you brought up.
The only way you can ensure that it stops happening is strict segregation by sex, but I don't think that's what you'd want.
If this was done bayesian style we could say the priors are man taking advantage of woman. 9 cases out of 10 if there is a rape case you can assume the perp is male and if you don't you are like a born yesterday idiot. And if you're a woman it's super important to keep it in mind, like you think of getting into elevator (or airbnb like in this case) alone with a random man you should not be like "let's not pre judge people".
With wrong cancellation it's different because it's not an urgent situation and people should not ruin someone's life randomly. It would be stupid to force us to think "really there's a 50/50 chance if the rapist is that man or that woman" but if you say "there's a 50/50 chance if the guy is a creep or that woman is scheming something" then it can be not that wrong (depending on country)
But in this case we still don't know who is wrong. This is the original letter https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara... and it was not shown false. All that the courts said was "no evidence was provided". And the guy didn't clearly deny it in the letter as I understand it
> But in this case we still don't know who is wrong. This is the original letter https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara... and it was not shown false. All that the courts said was "no evidence was provided". And the guy didn't clearly deny it in the letter as I understand it
Just as a reminder, it's: "Innocent until proven guilty."
The accuser has to provide proof that what they say is right and until that happened the person is considered innocent.
You are quoting law concepts. If there was proof enough for legal action then "cancellation" would be not necessary right? Just go to jail for rape.
Often problem behavior is not criminal enough OR there is no proof to make it criminal enough.
If you were the victim what proof do you imagine your will have in this case? There would be no incriminating text messages. Everything is fine until he gets your college ass drunk in the privacy of own airbnb. The cards are stacked. A mature perp picks situation when there is no proof and no witnesses. And it is statistics that 9 out of 10 times it is a man.
Maybe the only proof if any after this would be STDs. Do you want to announce to the world you have some incurable virus that you will spread to new partner who you would want to have kids with? etc
Yea it sucks that fixing this mess makes men uncomfortable. If you are scared about getting drive by cancelled, you know who to blame. Other men.
> You are quoting law concepts
It's a concept based on the historic lesson that pushing innocent people is worse than not punishing guilty people. You seem to disagree though.
> Yea it sucks that fixing
This is shuffling which innocent gets to suffer, but is not fixing anything.
The historic lesson is that men and especially men in power commonly abuse their position ranging from harassment to rape and legal system will fall over itself to serve them. That lesson led to metoo and stuff. Look it up.
> This is shuffling which innocent gets to suffer, but is not fixing anything.
Bro I really really hope you are not trying to compare wrongful cancellation and rape.
It's not as easy as some people make it out to be to create a believable story about abusive behavior.
> then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women
You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees. If you do, then yeah maybe you need to think twice about that, and maybe that's not such a bad thing?
>You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees.
"He exhibited problematic behavior. He touched me inappropriately. He cornered me in an elevator. He used demeaning language and made me feel unworthy."
Zero sex involved, and these accusations can be completely true or untrue, depending on undefinable intangibles and individual interpretations.
I know someone who was written up at work for what (after the investigation) amounted to "brief, unwanted eye contact" with a co-worker. It's kind of a minefield and casual, innocent behavior can easily be misinterpreted.
If you read the blog posts of at least one of the women it's very clear that in her story sex was involved. And I doubt he's contesting that part of the story.
Point I was trying to make is it's not actually that hard to be outside of the risk zone for being cancelled.
If you're mentoring a young woman, don't suggest to share Airbnb together, don't drink alone and then initiate sex. Not doing those things makes it extremely unlikely to ever be accused of taking advantage of someone.
There's plenty of sex mentioned in https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...
All of those things are far worse than having (consensual) sex with your mentees.
What if "he cornered me in the elevator" was actually "he talked to me while we were alone together in the elevator, but I have background trauma that made this extremely uncomfortable for me".
That's the point I was trying to make. One person's interpretation can be wildly different than another's interpretation of the same event. If we are going to assign preference to the interpretation that is the most damaging to both parties involved--she is traumatized, he is fired--then perhaps it is better to completely separate the sexes.
But has this ever in the history of time happened? In the "elevatorgate" scandal you're referencing here:
* The guy _followed_ her onto the elevator.
* The guy explicitly invited her to his room for a 4 AM coffee.
* She didn't identify the guy at all, just mentioned this as an offhand example of something it would be nice for men to avoid doing.