Hey, gang, I’ve been offline for a while — it’s a week for getting caught up with my grading (I’m still behind. I’m always behind). So I’ve been letting the commenters do the talking for a few days, and there are some good words in the thread about Geoff Marcy.
Here’s one.
I work in UC Berkeley’s astronomy department. On Friday, during my lab’s lunch, the professor I work for announced this to us. I was not at all surprised by Geoff being the one found guilty. What’s even worse is that the Title IX office concluded their investigation three months ago and just sat on it without telling anyone. I wasn’t aware of the full extent of Geoff’s behavior (I knew of women that were creeped out by him), and lots of people are furious about how both the university and the astronomy department handled this. The whole situation is just fucked, and it’s really shameful that no substantial punishment is being handed out for this.
Geoff’s wife said some awful things:
“The punishment Geoff is receiving here in the court of hysterical public opinion is far out of proportion to what he did and has taken responsibility for in his apology,” Dr. Kegley wrote.
There’s been no regard for the victims from the department or the university. The way this has been handled is a total shitshow.
It’s just sinking in how odd and simultaneously common this behavior is. Think of the Tim Hunt story: for some reason, a lot of people decided that being called out on poor behavior was far, far worse than the behavior itself. Some people are regarded as above the rules, and so their transgressions demand excuses, while others — imagine being black and poor — are punished for transgressions they didn’t commit.
It’s as if the universe is only statistically just. Everything averages out to being fair, if you just ignore the individuals and pretend that being a well-educated white man doesn’t mean you get handed saving throws every time you screw up.
CripDyke (and also quite a few people besides) pointed out the other big problem in this story: it’s the administration that has exhibited the greatest bias.
However, I’m going to use that to say something a little different: I find Marcy’s not-pology painfully disappointing, but not nearly as abhorrent as the department head’s call for everyone to hold a Marcy-Love-In.
Why?
Because assuming (arguendo – let’s not be too quick to dismiss the power of priors in our analysis) that this period WAS actually difficult for Marcy, that’s a good thing. It **is** fucking difficult for someone to actually admit that they’ve hurt people, and it’s even more difficult to change a long-standing pattern of behavior.
That doesn’t require one selfishly redirect attention to themselves, but in this case part of the problem is that the behavior was highly selfish and attention-seeking in the first place (sexual attention is still attention, even if it does happen one-on-one and not in the same very public manner as internet attention).Therefore, if someone actually has engaged in selfish behavior that hurt other people, what we should see as a first response is not a generous understanding of the harms one has caused and a cogent analysis of the full range of harmful behaviors and how they’re totes not okay and so going to stop now. That should make us suspicious not merely of selfish, callous, harassing behavior, but of thorough-going, premeditated evil. One doesn’t learn all that quickly, and if one has all that analysis at the ready when caught and called out, it means one very likely had that analysis at the ready **before** getting caught…and chose to ignore it.
No, this shows exactly the hallmarks of a selfish person moving marginally away from past hurtful behavior.
I am not in any way saying that one shouldn’t feel disappointed with the (not/a)pology, and I’m not saying that it’s really a much better apology that it actually is (it’s not). I’m just saying that humans being humans, the kind of jerks who engage in most of this behavior in the first place simply aren’t able to write an apology that centers victims and shows none of their past selfish tendencies.
I wonder if one of the reasons so many let this kind of behavior slide is that, deep down, we’re all selfish people, and we’re afraid we’ll slip up and get caught. Marcy is someone who, aside from the harassment hound-doggishness, is someone I could immediately identify with, so it’s easy for me to imagine being slammed publicly, feeling that squirmy discomfort, and leaping to his defense. It’s a tendency that has to be resisted. Except, of course, that we middle-class white people aren’t well-practiced in the art of accepting criticisms of our nature — we reserve that for other people.
There’s something else, too. We get trained from an early age to excuse bad behavior in boys. “Boys will be boys” is a terrible phrase — it says that awfulness is part of male nature, and that there’s no point in fighting our intrinsic selfishness, especially since if we do give in to it we’ll be exempted from punishment, because it’s not our fault that we are afflicted with a Y chromosome that makes us rude and violent and simultaneously awesome. Geoff Marcy was just being a typical boy, how dare we blame him for his behavior.
Then I read something else that chilled me, because I’d heard it myself as a child. A little boy punched a four year old girl in the face. While she was getting stitched up (that’s how hard he hit her), a hospital worker told her, “I bet he likes you.”
How often has that trope been invoked? We are taught early on that the attention of boys is a precious, wonderful thing, and even if it is expressed as violent abuse, it is a sign that they like you. After all, it would be so much worse if a boy ignored you, or left you alone. Look at the priceless gift Geoff Marcy was giving his women students! He was spending time with them, appreciating them, being nice to them. I bet he liked them all.
We should be generous in our understanding of Marcy, because he at least left no visible scars.
I heard “boys will be boys” and “I bet he likes you” all the time while growing up. It’s a standard TV trope, for one thing, and it’s been around for ages. The boy dipping the little girl’s pigtails in the ink well? It’s 19th century funny! The “girls always want the bad boy” story line? It’s pervasive in the 20th — it’s even part of the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” canon, a story that is normally regarded as empowering for women, but for some reason she keeps falling for violent vampire bad boys.
I got a taste of it myself. Throughout grade school, there was a gay boy who teased and mocked me incessantly — lots of innuendo, leaning close and whispering in my ear, touching, etc. I was not bothered by the gayness, but by the regular taunting. I told myself that he must really like me, that I should be flattered by his attentions, but…you know, that stuff just isn’t right. If you like someone, shouldn’t you also respect them?
I suspect that a lot of men have been acculturated into not only thinking that respect is unnecessary, but that the “liking” part is also optional.
Many good points made in that discussion, but this is my personal favorite: “Except, of course, that we middle-class white people aren’t well-practiced in the art of accepting criticisms of our nature — we reserve that for other people.” Well said, CripDyke.
The rabbit hole runs all the way down, to the very beginning of patriarchy, and it’s in all of our heads.
For me, the biggest face-palm moment came when he claimed to be unaware that the nature of his position of authority made for “unforeseen contexts” and such. Fuck off, it is incumbent on any staff to know that shit. Failure to understand in no way exonerates him; even if we assume that he genuinely didn’t know this, he has failed in that responsibility all the same.
#3 / Holms: Yeah, in the last comment thread I was going to say something about how delusional and egocentric people can be, so it’s possible he had no clue what he was doing. Until I read the example of him at a dinner putting his hand on a colleague’s knee under the table and proceeding to grope her crotch.
Holms @ 3:
In the previous thread, I wrote (in response to a half assed defense of this behaviour):
It’s beyond the pale for anyone to buy into the notion that these men, and others like them, simply find the complexities of a professional relationship too confusing, leading to these…stumbles. It’s infuriating to see them and others push this as a defense.
Caine #5
Part of the blame I put onto the UC system. Where I worked, we had a SOP on sexual harassment, and we were required to have have training every three years on it, and the training was documented with your signature. If UC had such a system, they could have pointed to his signature on the training record, and said “you know better, you’re fired”.
One exception to this is the women who are actually targeted. We are raised to accept criticism, and just “smile and take it”. We accept criticism for behaviors that are not ones that should be criticized “manliness” “bossiness” (for just standing up for yourself) “ugliness” and as pertains to this case, leading men on and causing them to act like jerks. Yes, we accept so much criticism for that last one that many of us (I include myself in that us) fail to report many of the transgressions and instead spend countless hours picking over our own behavior to see how we caused it so we can keep it from happening again.
Nerd @ 6:
I’m willing to agree that they have an obligation to draw a clear, bright line, and make sure everyone knows where it is, but even without that, why do such highly educated, intelligent men need a line drawn in order to conduct themselves professionally?
Indeed. It’s not that they don’t understand, it’s that they’ve learned that those rules don’t really apply to them. They have understood that they can ignore those rules and nobody will do anything about it. They know it’s wrong, they just also know that they can get away with it.
If we make excuses for them, we’re only reinforcing this idea. The proper response, instead, is to start actually enforcing these rules. You put one professor into the unemployment line and I bet the others will suddenly have no trouble understanding what’s appropriate and what’s not.
A long time ago I tried my hand at writing some science fiction. One of the books I read about writing fiction made an obvious statement: “The villain in a story never sees himself/herself as a villain.”
Same applies here. I think people know (usually) when they’re doing something wrong, and if they do it anyway it is done in non-public areas because they know it. But despite this knowledge, they justify it to ourselves so that it’s not really that wrong. “She really wants it, I’m sure”. “Just some harmless fun!” They lie to themselves, so that they are not a villain.
It is the lies we tell ourselves that are the hardest to own up to, because if we wanted to believe them we wouldn’t have lied to ourselves in the first place.
It’s misogynists all the way down.
Following up on this, and the incident PZ cited of a 4 year old girl being told she got punched in the face because “he likes you”. Here’s her mother’s statement on Facebork: (FB link) Be warned that it starts with a full profile photo of the girl and the bleeding bruise under her right eye.
I’ve decided that, after way too many years, I’m still very naive. I believed Lance Armstrong rode without chemical supplements until the evidence he didn’t was too over-whelming. When I first read about the Marcy debacle, I believed the UC administration would do the right thing and suspend or out-right fire him. Didn’t happen. He gets away with a not-pology and a slap on the wrist. Naughty, Geoff! Bad Professor! Down, boy, down! Next time, we swear, Pow! To the Moon!
Naive? Tell me about it.
Here’s my own personal (mostly indirect) experience with harassment of female STEM students: When I was a grad student there was a microbiology professor who would stare at the chests of female grad students while smiling, pretty much every time he was around them. Every female study knew of him. He was “that guy”. The one they felt uncomfortable going to his office hours alone, so they’d bring a friend. The one they warn the new students about (although it was pretty obvious to most of them fairly quickly). Nobody did anything, of course. The women that he regularly made feel uncomfortable certainly wouldn’t say anything if they valued their professional careers. The department didn’t seem to care, at least not enough to do anything about it. One time I got to ride an elevator with him and my (then) girlfriend, who was a student in his department. Needless to say, this was something she dreaded. There he was, smiling and staring. Even by the standards of “boys will be boys”, it was a raw power display directed at me as much as her. Yep, I’m staring at your girlfriend’s chest, making her feel uncomfortable and there’s not a thing you can do about it. 20 years later, he’s still there, probably still up to his old tricks.
I’m not really sure how relevant my own personal experience with harassment is. But if I wasn’t dating a micro student at the time, I probably would have been one of those that was shocked if he was actually called out on it. But, he and another piece of work I had the pleasure of being directly supervised by, are the reasons I believe accusations of harassment in STEM.
(#12 Pteryxx)
“Carousel” was named “the best musical of the 20th century” by Time Magazine, in 1999. (source) It’s won many awards, including five Tonys. The film version was gangbusters popular. Lest you think “oh, it’s outdated and so old”, Hugh Jackman was supposedly working on another film version of it a few years ago.
Why mention Carousel? The climactic scene at the end has a girl being frightened by and then slapped by her father (who is a ghost, but never mind), and then having this exchange with her mother, who had been beaten by said father when he was alive:
“Honest, Mother, I didn’t make it up. There was a strange man here, and he hit me, hard. But…I heard the sound of it, Mother, but it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all. It was just as if he’d kissed my hand.
“Go into the house, Louise.”
“Mother, what’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?”
“I believe you.” (strange, half-happy look into the distance)
“Then why don’t you tell me why you’re acting so funny?”
“It’s nothing, darling.”
“But is it possible Mother, for someone to hit you hard like that, real loud and hard, and not hurt you at all?” (Mother hugs Louise, they both stare into the distance with a sort of smile)
“It is possible dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all.”
(Louise beams, hugs her mother again, goes into house)
I mean, WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK.
@drken #14, you wrote “it was a raw power display directed at me as much as her. ”
Was he behaving exactly the same in your presence as he would in your absence, as it sounds from your description? If so, then nothing was being directed AT you, you were simply irrelevant. Just as your girlfriend’s consent was.
Oh, look, in 2014 somebody already worte about Marcey’s behaviour and warned studentsa bout what to look for
Numenmaster @ 16:
You’re wrong. It was a display of power, not only over her student, but over her boyfriend, who could not do or say anything which made disapproval plain, else it would affect his girlfriend, who was one of prof’s students. Young men often encounter this behaviour, witness it, or hear about it, and they are just as lost and floundering as the direct victims are, and that should not be forgotten or dismissed.
@Numenaster #16:
Well, by rendering me irrelevant, he was directing that part of the power trip at me. Of course, whatever my problems with his behavior, I understand my girlfriends were worse. I wasn’t trying to make it just about me. But, I wasn’t just another student, it was a small school and everybody knew we were dating. Even if he thought that nobody else cared what he did (because “boys will be boys”), he definitely knew I would have a problem with it. As far as making other people feel powerless at his expense, it was a 2-for-the-price-of-1 deal for him.
I can see how it COULD be a display also aimed at the boyfriend, but I read the same description as you did. If the prof behaves this way all the time, no matter who is present in the elevator (other than the department head I suppose), then it’s an overwhelming display of utterly oblivious entitlement. Blanket, uncaring entitlement. Not a specifically aimed insult at drken and his girlfriend, which would require the prof to have some idea who they are and to give a rat’s ass. I suppose it works to say it was directed “as much” at each of them, since it sounds to me like it was radiating in every direction indiscriminately.
But of course I wasn’t there and I could have misread the comment.
Okay, that’s the piece I was missing (drken #19). Thanks for filling in what I missed.
Over a career that frequently involved working with MDs & PhDs, I encountered a few otherwise competent men who were utterly clueless about appropriate behavior toward female colleagues.Some of those men were highly accomplished, & it always baffled me that somebody so smart about other things could be so dumb about interacting with women. I’m NOT in any way making excuses for sexual harassment, but I find it plausible that some men might be telling the truth when they say “Duh… I didn’t know it wasn’t OK to do that.” I can only speculate that they might have a huge social/psychological blind spot that is deeply rooted in their personalities, or something was missing from their socialization. In a way, I think their mindset resembles that of of sociopath.
of a sociopath.
Georgia – are you sure that they were honestly that dumb about interacting with women? Or had they gotten away with claiming that for so long that it had become part of their personalities? People who have social interaction problems have trouble dealing with people, not just women. If they only seem to have all of these mixed-signal “oh no I can’t understand what’s happening” moments only with the opposite sex, then… probably not so much. They are able to act like boors and claim that they don’t know any better, thereby excusing them and getting people to allow them to continue to act that way.
’m NOT in any way making excuses for sexual harassment, but
Yes, you are. Stop, please.
UC Berkeley graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members have all released public statements condemning Geoff Marcy, as well as university administration and Title IX for their lack of transparency and refusal to hand down any disciplinary action. Undergraduates haven’t yet had much official communication with the department, however one undergrad has written a series of open letters on the situation.
GEorgia Sam
1. You know why I simply don’t believe this “I really didn’t know” bullshit? Because those men are obviously fine when it comes to their fellow guys. The only reason why you could think that it’s not ok to wrap your arm aroundy our male student’s waist but totally fine to do that with your female student is because you think that women basically exist for your personal pleasure. That’S called misogyny, not ignorance.
2. If they actually had no clue how to interact properly with female students, why the fuck didn’t they learn? If your job is “dealing with people”, your job is to know how to do that.
@22
Georgia, listen to yourself. These brilliant men just so happen to have a huge, total social handicap that only impacts their treatment of women in inferior social and professional positions? Nope!
As Giliell says, if they’re not stroking the thighs of their male students, or staring at their crotches, or calling them sweetheart, then they have no problem understanding what’s appropriate and what isn’t. They just think it’s ok to treat women like sexual toys they can fiddle with, because they think women exist for their entertainment.
Georgia Sam, #22
They wouldn’t do it to their female boss.
They know what they’re doing. It’s called feeling confident you’ll get away with it.
“They wouldn’t do it to their female boss.”
Exactly. Even if you want to say “they don’t act that way towards men because they aren’t attracted to men and aren’t trying to get dates with them”, you can’t ignore that men like this never act that way to female superiors. That shows that they understand, at the very, absolute least, that flirting between hierarchical levels is wrong.
[Raises white flag.] OK, points taken.
Georgia Sam @ 22:
Way up at #5, I wrote:
And here you are, at #22, proffering this defense. They know exactly what they are doing. They are arrogant. They are stuffed full of privilege, and highly aware of that fact. They have power, and they know exactly how to exercise it. These men don’t have any fucking problem whatsoever in acting professional when they are dealing with any woman who has the power to affect them in any way.
This sort of defense has to stop. It has to fucking stop. Every time this comes up, it’s another layer of cover and enablement for these men, who find it a very convenient cover to dive under, expressing their “pain” at being informed they were being…oh gosh, naughty. This is nothing more than the grown up version of boys will be boys, you know! It’s disgusting, and should not ever be given a pass.
One more sad thing about “boys will be boys” is that when the boy is not blamed, the girl is blamed instead.
Marcy has resigned from UC Berkeley. Hopefully, no other universities will line up to employee him. Babysitting astronomical equipment by himself on mountain tops seems like a good place for his “talents”.
I’ll just leave this here for future reference: But in her [Murray-Clay] capacity as student representative to the Berkeley astronomy faculty, she says, she spoke with him several times in December 2004, directly confronting him with complaints from undergrads and graduate students.
After speaking to her in person, he wrote her an email. “Thanks for all those thoughts and hopes,” he wrote. “I feel lucky that you’re helping me see myself better from the outside, and from the inside too.”
HE WAS TOLD ABOUT IT ELEVEN YEARS AGO. Even if you want to pull the “some men just don’t realize it” defense, he cannot be in that category. He was explicitly told what he was doing was wrong, and he explicitly acknowledged it.