CrosstimbersOkie wrote:"Rapo?" Incredible. People would actually poop at their own breakfast table in order to play sex games? I've been working in mixed sex environments for 21 years and I've never experienced those types of games and never been accused of sexual harassment. What kinds of environments do these take place in? Obviously, some people don't have enough work to do or enough discipline to do it.
Perhaps the managers I work for deserve more credit than I give them. They don't tolerate a junior high atmosphere.
Then you've been more fortunate than some. I've learned to never compliment a woman unless I know them well and even then, to be pretty cautious about it. It comes with the territory of appearing different.
Personally, I've never understood why people play those kind of games; doesn't seem to be any point to them.
CrosstimbersOkie wrote:What kinds of environments do these take place in?
All environments. At age 23 or so, I was at a highly competitive Fortune 100 company. There was a woman who, when she deposited the data sheets outside our office, would stick her ass out and wiggle it back and forth. One day my Boomer boss was with me in the office and he said, pssst, what do you think of that? I said I see you're interested in the GBL. He said what's the GBL? I said it's the gap between the legs. My boss was married and he was having an affair with another married manager who was a good friend of this woman who was wiggling her ass. So apparently while he was in bed with this other manager, he mentioned what I had said and this got back to the woman who was wiggling her ass. About a year later I was working in another department far removed and a guy came up to me and said, did you say something to "Dave" about the gap between "Kathy's" legs? I said, huh? He said, well, "Dave" is having an affair with "Janet" and he told her what you said and she told "Kathy". I said, really, I had no idea he was having an affair. But he had his story straight right down to the last detail.
I got a lot smarter very quickly. Instead of deflecting these comments by the Boomers in a manner that left me open, I would start to do things like, instead of making any sort of comment about the woman at all, to lean my head out the door and say something like, yeah, that wall does need to be painted.
Luckily, back in those days, the work environments weren't vicious like they are today. These were just stupid bored people trying to entertain themselves at my expense or, as John likes to say, buffoons.
I could recount dozens, if not hundreds, of similar incidents.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.
I think it's worth remembering the enormous hostility in the workplace
in the 1990s, following the Anita Hill / Clarence Thomas debacle.
Hill had worked for Thomas ten years earlier, at a time when
neither of them was married. Thomas asked her out a couple of
times and told her some off-color jokes, but all the while promoting
her and giving more responsibility and more money. She was
brought forward by feminists to defeat Thomas's appointment to
the Supreme Court. Apparently a lot of this was pure racism,
since Thomas is a black man married to a white woman, something
that white women feminists apparently find racially repulsive.
The feminists were defeated, Thomas is still on the Supreme Court, and
a disgraced Anita Hill is still teaching man-bashing at Brandeis
University.
But following the 1991 debacle, the workplace became enormously
hostile. Here's some material that I wrote in 2000:
_"As women and as lawyers, we must never again shy from raising our
voices against sexual harassment. All women who care about equality
of opportunity -- about integrity and morality in the workplace -- are
in Prof. Anita Hill's debt."_ -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, during the
1992 presidential campaign.
_"Most people are getting sick and tired of women coming out of
nowhere and making unsupported sexual charges."_ -- VP Al Gore,
speaking of Paula Jones, on the _Today Show_, May 6, 1994.
The country's largest feminist organization, NOW (The National
Organization of Women), began the 90s by vocally and defiantly
screaming harassment at a black man who allegedly told a woman a few
dirty jokes, and ended up the decade by defending, condoning and
carrying water for a white man who allegedly and credibly is a serial
rapist, a man who gropes, flashes, uses and abuses every woman in his
life.
If the great, all-powerful male patriarchy had wanted to hatch a plot
to cause as much damage and destruction as possible to women and
feminists, they could never have done anything so destructive as NOW
did to women during the 90s. NOW has damaged men, women, and society
so much that it will take years, perhaps decades for the country to
recover from it. The only good thing about what happened is that
they've totally discredited themselves by carrying water for Clinton,
arguably the country's most abusive politician.
Long before the Clinton sex scandals, the policies advocated by NOW
and other feminist groups, the relationship between men and women in
the marketplace became enormously hostile, and this hostility ended up
hurting women.
For example, one man is a friend of mine who runs a professional
office with his wife. They had had the practice since the 70s of
hiring a married woman college graduate each year to serve as an
intern for a year. Many of these women went on to become
professionals in their own right. However, following Anita Hill's
testimony, this man changed his policy, and decided he would never
hire another woman intern. Since that time, he's only hired male
interns.
Another example: Another friend of mine ran an office where he
normally had about a dozen women social workers working for him. He
told me, "I don't dare even tell an employee, 'You look nice today,'
because I'm afraid she'll bring sexual harassment charges. The only
exception is my secretary -- she's worked for me for ten years, and I
can trust her." In other words, this man could not trust the other
women working for him.
"These Women are Crazy"
_Our great Mikado, virtuous man,
When he to rule our land began,
Resolved to try a plan whereby
Young men might best be steadied.
So he decreed, in words succinct,
That all who flirted, leered or winked
(Unless connubially linked),
Should forthwith be beheaded._
-- Gilbert and Sullivan, from _The Mikado_,
which opened at the Savoy on 3/14/1885
Almost every man I spoke to had some story. One man told he that he'd
seen a condom machine in a men's room, and he mentioned briefly to a
woman associate how shocked he was to see it; she brought a sexual
harassment complaint. He told me, "There's something wrong with women
today. They're crazy."
In fact, I've tended to call these stories "crazy women stories,"
because every man I asked always seemed to have some story, and always
seemed to add to it some words like, "These women are crazy."
One man after another told me they didn't want to have anything to do
with women in the workplace. By extrapolating the examples I heard, I
would estimate that literally millions of jobs nationwide suddenly
became unavailable to women. And women in the workplace were viewed
by men as being unstable, unreliable, or "crazy." Frankly, I think
that in many cases the only reason that women got jobs at all is
because they were willing to take lower pay than men.
It's easy enough to blame men about all this, and I'm sure any
feminist reading this automatically does so, but this catastrophe was
brought about by NOW and other feminist organizations encouraging
women to act this way. That's why, throughout the decade, more and
more women refused to identify themselves as feminists. Women knew in
their hearts that what NOW was doing was wrong.
Marc wrote:In an earlier posting, I made brief mention of X'ers and bullying. As an early-wave X'er, I think something that really set much of the tone of the formative years of X'ers is just how much school bullying (and other bullying) was dished out by loads of X'ers...
After graduating high school, I went to college out of state and never went back to my home city except briefly to visit family, then my parents retired early and moved. Two years ago, I got back in contact with several of my former classmates for the first time.
First, some background. My home city was booming back in those high school days. There were large industrial businesses built by previous generations that had worldwide monopolies (not the auto companies but similar and even better). Looking back on it the arrogance was incredible. My home city has taken a hard fall economically and some of these businesses are close to bankrupcty.
Anyway, your post brings up an important point I hadn't fully understood - thinking back on these contacts, the theme of bullying came up over and over in different ways. One of the girls who is now a teacher wrote me, I don't ever remember bullying anyone and I pray that I didn't (we know everyone bullied or at least condoned it, as you say). A guy who bullied me made obvious amends. A second guy who bullied me steered completely clear (those were the only two I saw). I made amends with a gay classmate I had been friends with in junior high, then bullied later. One girl became the school board president. I told her how impressed I was with her accomplishments, then related a story that I thought was cute and funny, but that she apparently construed as implying that she had bullied me (not the case at all). She vehemently denied that such a thing happened; after all, we don't want to admit that our school board president could have ever been within 500 yards of a possible bullying incident.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.
Another game the Boomers loved to play with the young Xers went as follows. When the young Xer entered an unfamiliar work environment, a Boomer would point to a woman who looked much older than her actual age and ask the Xer how old he thought she was.
The first time this game was played on me, the Boomer pointed to a woman who was 25 and asked me how old I thought she was. I said 30, maybe more. He yelled out, did you say 34! He also told me about her husband and said she was a good piece of meat gone to waste. It wasn't too long, maybe a couple hours, the woman came over to me and said, hey, don't worry about it, I know I look a little older.
A few years later, when I had gotten sharper, a Boomer asked me how old I thought "Lisa" was. I thought "Lisa" was 38, so to be super duper safe I told him oh, I don't think she could possibly be more than 30. He said 32. I said not another word and moved on. Don't say she looks young for her age; don't say anything.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.
Higgenbotham wrote:Another game the Boomers loved to play with the young Xers went as follows. When the young Xer entered an unfamiliar work environment, a Boomer would point to a woman who looked much older than her actual age and ask the Xer how old he thought she was.
Some stories ring true, some don't. This story doesn't correspond
to anything in my experience.
Higgenbotham wrote:Another game the Boomers loved to play with the young Xers went as follows. When the young Xer entered an unfamiliar work environment, a Boomer would point to a woman who looked much older than her actual age and ask the Xer how old he thought she was.
Some stories ring true, some don't. This story doesn't correspond
to anything in my experience. Then again, I tended to avoid
gossip sessions that other people got involved with.
You can think of the above like hazing incidents if you prefer, similar to fraternity or sports team hazings. When did the horrific hazing incidents peak and which generation performed most of them? Truthfully, I don't know.
The incidents I related occurred in two different organizations 90 miles apart.
In the first organization, the Boomers performed another standard hazing procedure on the young Xers entering the company that went as follows. One of the maintenance guys would ask the young Xer to find the entrance to the basement in the facility. When I was asked, I replied that there was no basement because the facility was built on a slab and then smiled. Having successfully passed that hazing procedure, stories were related to me, accompanied by howels of laughter, about the stupidest Xers that had recently gone through training and how many hours it took before they realized there was no basement. The record was held by "Leo", the new personnel guy, who had run around the facility for 2 hours before somebody finally told him there was no basement.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.
I can see how some Boomers in work environments in the 1990s and 2000s could decide to be about as mean as X'ers. While I think that, collectively, Boomers are kinder and nicer than X'ers, I feel that what happens is that as the Third Turning picks up, the "spirit of individualism and mean" begins to pick up and permeate organizations (which is no doubt heavily fueled by more X'ers entering organizations and rising within them). Thus, for those minority Boomers who have the "jerk gene" in them, there can be the sick desire to "engage in a little fun" and bully people.
However, I think that we all agree here that no matter what someone's generational membership is, anyone who has to bully people, especially with the sort of bullying that might sabotage someone's career, is a pathetic person who just about deserves to be shot to the sun. Truly caring top managers will do their best to create bully-free workplaces, and let it be known that bullying anyone is very uncool and isn't tolerated here. —Best regards, Marc
Higgenbotham wrote:
You can think of the above like hazing incidents if you prefer, similar to fraternity or sports team hazings. When did the horrific hazing incidents peak and which generation performed most of them? Truthfully, I don't know.
When you re-frame it in the context of hazing, then it does ring true.
I've never seen any hazing in the computer industry, but I know that it
occurs in other industries. And of course whenever someone dies because
of hazing, it makes the news.
Also, alluding to what Higgenbotham just posted, I can also see how "tradition" by itself can act to fuel hazing-type behavior in organizations. I remember seeing a film called Fraternity Row in the 1980s. It took place in 1954 at what was regarded as the top fraternity at an elite college in the US Northeast. The sense of both brotherhood as well as insularity, as well as tradition (the latter including hazing, which ultimately led to the death of a fraternity pledge), was overwhelming. (There was also the incident in the film in where a legacy pledge was booted out due to US Senator Joe McCarthy fingering the pledge's Dad as somehow being linked to Communism.)
All of this, based upon a true story, was lustily carried out by members of what were our newest Artists of the time: the Silent Generation. —Best regards, Marc