John Searle, too?

Now the famous philosopher John Searle stands accused of harassment.

The lawsuit, which lists Searle and the Regents of the University of California as defendants, claims Searle groped Ong in his office after he told her “they were going to be lovers.” He also said he had an “emotional commitment to making her a public intellectual,” the complaint states, and that he was “going to love her for a long time.” Ong turned Searle down and reported him to other UC Berkeley employees, but they did nothing, the complaint states. Instead, Searle cut Ong’s salary and she was eventually fired, according to the complaint, which also claims Searle watched pornography at work and made sexist comments.

He’s one of many: 113 sexual harassment cases have been reported in the UC system in just 3 years. Personally, I find it incredible: I can’t imagine myself even wanting to treat students or colleagues that way, but the evidence is clear…there are a lot of rotten apples in the barrel.

I don’t think California is particularly terrible in this regard, either. It seems to be an issue all over the place. Part of the problem has to be a system that treats some individuals as “superstars”, giving them a bloated sense of entitlement, while simultaneously treating others as peons and dismissing their concerns. It’s everywhere. Hierarchies of privilege always seem to lead to evil.

If you’re somewhere low in one of those hierarchies, I recommend this checklist of warning signs of abuse — none of the behaviors listed there are at all appropriate. If you’re higher up in the hierarchy, you should check it too and make sure you’re not doing any of them. They’re behaviors that ought not to be hard to avoid, but it’s surprising how many prominent academics can’t.

That’s half the story

Jim Sterling has an excellent essay on the recent exposure of certain youtubers for their ugly remarks, which has led to quite a bit of furor as they gasp in shock that anyone would call them out on this, let alone cause them a loss of income, while a muddling mob roars in support or protest. He makes the very good point that if you’re making tens of thousands, or even millions of dollars, playing games on the internet, then you must be the focus of a lot of attention, and you should be aware that people will notice you and sometimes criticize you. I can assure you that being public and opinionated does not mean you get parades of flowers and that everyone loves you.

He points out that the naiveté of these youtubers is silly, and also that trying to defend them by arguing that it’s simply because people have different views does not work — it forgets that communication is a two-way street, and if Famous Rich Youtuber gets to say offensive things as their right, then their audience also gets to express their criticisms.

“Sometimes people are gonna say things you don’t like,” explained Boogie in his video. “People are gonna have ideas and opinions that you don’t enjoy.”

This is true and it works both ways. One opinion and idea that several big YouTubers don’t enjoy right now is that YouTubers are relevant enough to make headlines and become international controversies. One opinion and idea that several big YouTubers don’t enjoy right now is that, no, you can’t share your racist beliefs and expect nobody to argue back.

The Internet has warped the idea of “free speech” to mean “speech without consequence” and that’s simply not what it is.

But one thing Sterling does not get into, at least in this essay, is that these aren’t just “words”, they’re ideas, and ideas have meanings and most importantly, can be wrong. It would be lovely to pretend that they’re just lexical strings, and Person A has emitted a string that provokes a different string from Person B, but both A and B are actively translating those strings into meaning, and may also translate them further into actions. We too often excuse those meanings by saying “it’s just their opinion,” but sometimes those opinions can be looked up in the truth table of reality, and that function returns a value of FALSE (Or NaN, or ERROR, or SYSTEM FAILURE, or CODE RED: MISSILES HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED.)

One response is to wag our fingers and announce that they’ve lost our eyeballs and our revenue — a purely personal and singular punishment by neglect. But sometimes that isn’t enough. When someone declares that they think all gingers ought to be lined up and shot, yes, you should turn away and shun them. But what if they have a mob of thousands at their back who all agree about the ginger exterminations? You’ve left the group, but there are still all the others who are working together and coordinating and praising the initial head eliminationist. You aren’t going to slow them down a bit.

Here’s another problem: sometimes, maybe, in addition to being wrong and stupid on some things, the person is brilliant on others. We don’t have a way to chop up the mosaic of attributes of a person and dispose of the nasty bits and keep the good parts. Now what?

For example, I think Dave Chappelle is an amazing comedian — talented and revolutionary. I have loved the guy’s routines in the past, and you can see that he’s intelligent and insightful.

He’s also…problematic, a word that is also problematically over-used. Here’s a story of Chapelle in a comedy club that praises his skills but also highlights his difficulties.

But the truth is that Chappelle’s set was riddled with transphobia, homophobia, and a bit about the Ray Rice incident that changed the energy in the room in a tangible way. He talked about seeing a drunk “transvestite” at a party, mocked her, and complained about having his pronouns corrected when he referred to her as “he”. He maintained that he should be able to use whatever pronouns he wanted. He called her a man in a dress. This bit was not really a joke, just a strange, awkward story, but people laughed. It was pure, absolute, unabashed transphobia, and it broke my fucking heart.

He then started talking about “the gays”, essentially saying that he doesn’t understand why they need a whole parade because everybody has freaky sex. He compared his foot fetish and the negative reactions and judgment he’s gotten from people for it to being gay. Don’t get me wrong – the personal stuff about his foot fucking was VERY funny. But comparing his sexual proclivities to the experience of gay people was also, ultimately, problematic and misguided. I was sitting there in the front row, laughing at his jokes but simultaneously confused and upset by where some of them were coming from, and why he felt the need to talk about being mugged by a man who he “knew” was gay from the way he walked. It was the most conflicted I’ve ever felt about comedy.

That was written in 2014.

Now he has a new comedy special on Netflix, and I have been strongly tempted to watch it — it’ll probably make me laugh throughout — but I’ve also heard that it is problematic in exactly the same way as that comedy set from 2½ years ago. There will be hilarious bits, and there will be parts that are just plain wrong and that hurt people. People are murdered for being gay or transgender, and since Chapelle is neither, he comes across as trivializing the pain of others. It kinda rips the humor out of the routine.

So I’m doing the minimal response. I’m choosing not to watch it. The ratings for his show will decline by a few thousandths of a percent.

But I also wonder if there isn’t something more that should be done. If Chappelle had been strongly chastised in 2014, maybe his 2017 special would be better. Maybe we’re doing harm to Chappelle by not loudly correcting him when he is so terribly wrong.

Because let’s make no bones about it, Chappelle is just as wrong and damaging about gay and transgender people as those youtubers are wrong and damaging about race. It’s also more than just insensitivity — these are views that do real harm to human beings.

Beware the sex police

A group of people is sinking a bunch of money and time into this bus tour.

sexbus

An orange bus rolled onto the streets of Manhattan Wednesday to make its first stop on an East Coast tour, during which a load of activist passengers will evangelize that transgender people don’t exist and citizens must rise up to complain about their growing acceptance.

Another version was even worse.

bluesexbus

For a change, I’m not going to say a word about their superficial perception of biology. Instead, I want to ask…

WHY?

I don’t understand at all why putting all people into two, and only two, categories is so important. I’ve met many people in my life, and the least interesting way to categorize them is by sex — I’m not ace, but still, I have no plans or interest in having sex with any of them, so no, I don’t care what chromosomes they have (and the funny thing is, most of these people have no idea what their chromosome complement is, anyway), I don’t care what kind of genitals they have (and honestly, most of us don’t see the genitals of 99.9% of the people we interact with), and I definitely don’t want to know what kind of gametes they produce.

The organizers of this bus tour aren’t at all helpful. There seems to be a vague dislike of any kind of diversity in sexual behavior, but they don’t articulate why.

On Wednesday, they parked outside the United Nations headquarters, where ambassadors are considering a sex education resolution that a spokesperson for the bus argued promotes an ideology that gender is fluid.

We are trying to strike back against that, said Joseph Grabowski, a spokesperson for the National Organization for Marriage, one of the three conservative groups behind the project. They hope parading the bus through major cities will unleash a silent majority that they believe is frustrated by shifting norms about gender and families.

OK, but why are they unhappy and frustrated by someone with a different sexuality than they have? Why do they need to “strike back”? I mean, I might personally think that brussels sprouts are icky, but if you like ’em, go ahead. I’m not going to lease a big bus and put a giant decal on it that says “I HATE BRUSSELS SPROUTS” and drive around the country, trying to spark a mass uprising.

I know that gender identity is a far bigger concern than a food preference, which means that I’m even less likely to try to force my perspective on someone else. These guys apparently realize that it’s a major issue in someone’s life, too, yet that motivates them to try to spread misery even more.

One of the purposes of the bus tour is to have people speak up if they feel uncomfortable and let the business owner know, Grabowski said. This can’t be considered transphobic or bigoted.

Joe. Really. Feeling free to express bigotry doesn’t change the fact that it’s still bigotry. You are definitely transphobic. Why? Can you please try to examine your feelings and explain why you’re bothered by other people’s perception of themselves?

They are a small segment of the population, with a disorder, that has quite a big megaphone for the demographic it represents, he said. This is not about live-and-let-live, he added, saying transgender people pose an threat to norms of sex and procreation. This is about what is best for the common welfare of society.

It’s not a disorder, and even if it were classified that way, it wouldn’t change the fact that you are talking about people. I could argue that being so obsessed with other people’s sexuality that you sink a significant sum of money into a bus, and then drive around in what is essentially a giant orange megaphone, is also a disorder — it’s certainly damaging your life.

I’m also troubled by This is not about live-and-let-live. Do you think transgender people should not be allowed to live?

Saying that they are a threat to norms of sex and procreation is actually a little bit revealing. Do you feel threatened if your preferred sexuality is not regarded as normal? Does it bother you when you think other people might disapprove of your preferences? Is it very important to you that other members of society do not try to police your sexuality? I can sympathize with that, and even agree that other people do not get to monitor my sexual behavior and pressure me in any way to control what I do in private with another consenting adult.

Now if only Joe could empathize enough to realize that transgender people have exactly the same views.

Gender essentialism is not scientific

A reader let me know that I was mentioned on the March for Science Seattle page.

An excellent example of the perils of ideology trumping science.... from the left. Yes, we love talking about how the Right is so anti-science and ideologically based and praise the Left for being so much better. But they aren't. They just have different ideologies and therefore reject different science. We laugh at those dumb Republicans for denying climate science while our own "tribe" screams about the (false) perils of nuclear power, the (false) dangers of GMOs, and now, with the Regressive Left (of which PZ Myers is as deeply dogmatic as the worst Evangelical) the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis - false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.Men and women ARE different. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be different. Yes there is a lot of variation and there is more in group heterogeneity than between group heterogeneity (meaning that there will be a lot of overlap where on just about any characteristic there will be men that are less "manly" than some women and so on), but that doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate differences based purely in our biology and contingent evolutionary history.But as Steven Pinker points out, it is ALWAYS a mistake to tie your *ethics* to your *science*. Different =/= better or worse. It CAN be, but usually isn't. Acknowledging that men and women are biologically different is not the same as as saying one is "better" than the other. But in a bizarre and ironic twist the Left (particularly the regressives) have fetishized science to the point where they can't make an argument that they see as valid without referencing science, and so they twist and deny scientific facts to fit into their ideology, bastardizing it just as much as their counterparts on the right.

An excellent example of the perils of ideology trumping science…. from the left. Yes, we love talking about how the Right is so anti-science and ideologically based and praise the Left for being so much better. But they aren’t. They just have different ideologies and therefore reject different science. We laugh at those dumb Republicans for denying climate science while our own “tribe” screams about the (false) perils of nuclear power, the (false) dangers of GMOs, and now, with the Regressive Left (of which PZ Myers is as deeply dogmatic as the worst Evangelical) the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis – false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.

Men and women ARE different. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be different. Yes there is a lot of variation and there is more in group heterogeneity than between group heterogeneity (meaning that there will be a lot of overlap where on just about any characteristic there will be men that are less “manly” than some women and so on), but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate differences based purely in our biology and contingent evolutionary history.

But as Steven Pinker points out, it is ALWAYS a mistake to tie your *ethics* to your *science*. Different =/= better or worse. It CAN be, but usually isn’t. Acknowledging that men and women are biologically different is not the same as as saying one is “better” than the other. But in a bizarre and ironic twist the Left (particularly the regressives) have fetishized science to the point where they can’t make an argument that they see as valid without referencing science, and so they twist and deny scientific facts to fit into their ideology, bastardizing it just as much as their counterparts on the right.

Wow. Let me repeat that amazing accusation.

…the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis – false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.

I am a fairly conventional cis-het man, steeped in Western culture, married to a conventional cis-het woman. I have seen porn. I have had heterosexual intercourse. I’m entirely conscious of the biological differences between men and women.

I’m also a biologist. I know the difference between a testis and an ovary, between a Mullerian duct and a Wolffian duct, between testosterone and estrogen (which, in the latter case, isn’t much). I’m also fairly well acquainted with the literature in evolutionary biology, and even know a bit about neuroscience.

To say that I claim there are no biological differences between men and women is so patently absurd and totally divorced from reality that Mr Pavlov ought to be embarrassed about saying something so stupid while accusing me of saying something so stupid. He won’t be.

What he’s doing is a common rhetorical trick. It’s obvious that most men have a penis and most women have a vagina, therefore, with a bit of clumsy sleight of hand, he wants to claim that every bit of cultural bias about the relative abilities of men and women is equally valid. He wants to pretend that because ovaries exist, all his notions about femininity must be equally rooted in biological reality.

Similarly, he reveals his hand with that odious Pinkerism about blank slates — that’s exactly the same game! Argue that some element of human psychology is not fixed by genetics and that it arises in a social context, and you are castigated by Pinker fans who like to bring the discourse to a dead stop with the ludicrous accusation that you must believe everything is 100% socially determined without biological basis. It’s idiotic and dishonest, but right now it’s Pinker’s main claim to fame.

Some things are complex and culturally determined. Biological sex is strongly canalized to produce a bimodal distribution of physical properties, but intersexes do exist. The brain is a plastic organ that responds to its environment in sophisticated ways, and carries both predispositions and the potential to develop in new ways, and gender is less strongly specified by genes than is the reproductive tract. If anyone is anti-science, it’s these people who want to argue for a less responsive, less adaptive, less diverse pattern of possible behaviors from the human brain.

You don’t get to claim that you have a solid biological footing in arguing that women are more nurturing, are less capable of doing math, and prefer the color pink because estrogen unless you’ve done actual work to demonstrate that those differences are real. Breasts aren’t your shortcut for imposing a mass of narrow Victorian cultural prejudices on how people should be, and you don’t get to hide behind science on this one.

Also…hiding behind trivially exposed lies isn’t science, even if some of your scientific heroes who try to defend a regressive conventionality think so.

Cordelia Fine is doing the math

I’m reading Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society –it’s my airplane reading for today, as I travel east — and am getting increasingly enlightened. It addresses these terrible myths about men and manliness and sex that afflict us all, and most importantly, knocking down a lot of scientific fables that seem to be readily disseminated and accepted. Here’s an example from chapter two. She quotes a psychologist who describes a common hypothetical scenario, it’s even one that I think I’ve used in the past, the idea that the reproductive capacity of men is vastly greater than that of women, because we produce lots of cheap sperm, while they are limited by all that pregnancy and child-rearing stuff. Beat your chests in pride at your immense potential virility, men! She quotes a psychologist who makes this kind of facile quantitative argument.

Consider that a man can produces as many as 100 offspring by indiscriminately mating with 100 women in a given year, whereas a man who is monogamous will tend to have only one child with his partner during that same time period. In evolutionary currencies, this represents a strong selective pressure—and a potent adaptive problem—for men’t mating strategies to favor at least some desire for sexual variety.

Then — and this is what I love about this book — she takes it seriously and introduces all the factors involved in conception and does a simple calculation, assuming a man seriously goes on a crusade to impregnate 100 random women.

So what’s the likely return on this exhausting investment? For healthy couples, the probability of a woman becoming pregnant from a single randomly timed act of intercourse is about 3 percent, ranging (depending on the time of the month) from a low of 0 to a high of nearly 9 percent. On average, then, a year of competitive courtship would result in only about three of the one hundred women becoming pregnant. (Although a man could increase his chances of conception by having sex with the same woman repeatedly, this would of course disrupt his very tight schedule.) This estimate, by the way, assumes that the man, in contradiction with the principle of “indiscriminately mating,” excludes women under twenty and over forty, who have a greater number of cycles in which no egg is released. It also doesn’t take into account that some women will be chronically infertile (Einon estimates about 8 percent), or that women who are mostly sexually abstinent have long menstrual cycles and ovulate less frequently, making it less likely that a single coital act will result in pregnancy. We’re also kindly overlooking sperm depletion, and discreetly turning a blind eye to the possibility that another man’s sperm might reach the egg first. In these unrealistically ideal condition, a man who sets himself the annual project of producing one hundred children from one hundred one-night stands has a chance of success of about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000363.

(Number of zeroes only approximate — I just estimated from the layout on the page, which is hard to do. If only she’d used exponential notation!)

Let’s make the math even simpler and more stark.

Indeed, a promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 percent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year.

Suddenly, my preferred reproductive strategy, monogamy and paternal investment in offspring, seems to be the best evolutionary strategy. It’s much less exhausting, too, and has given me time to do other things in my life.

Anyway, this is a delightful book that has made me question ‘facts’ I’ve long taken for granted multiple times so far, and I haven’t yet finished it. It really pays to think about one’s assumptions now and then, and it’s making me aware of how badly a lot of gender essentialism has poisoned our culture with lies.

She also takes a lot of swift, sharp pokes at evolutionary psychology, if you find that entertaining. I certainly do!

Sorry, guys, your penis is not a claw machine

claw-machine

I’m used to Redpillers/MGTOWs/MRAs/Incels saying stuff that reveals that they don’t understand how vaginas work, but Futrelle has found something unique: a guy who doesn’t understand how penises work. He has a fantasy of extracting ova during sex somehow and implanting them in other women…all with his penis.

Imagine advances in nano machines enable a delivery system of minuscule scale transferring an embryo through the vagina, cervix and into the womb. You are Chad Thundercock. You want to maximize your reproduction with high quality genetics. Problem is it’s too slow to go around looking for the top 20% of women. You have found one however, bred her, and you’ve gotten a lot of her eggs. Now you go around implanting unwitting low quality sluts with your preferred sperm & egg combo. Imagine the implantation process can be easily done during sex so there’s good reason to suspect, for the woman, that biologically it’s her child.

gumballmachine

I don’t think he understands female reproductive biology, either. So after you’ve “bred” a woman, you get a lot of eggs, like she’s some kind of gumball machine?

I begin to understand. I wonder if he learned about sex by wandering around his local Chuck E. Cheese? If so, he learned from the wrong toys. Everyone knows that sex is just like Skee-Ball.

skeeball

“Red Pill Libertarian”

Nathan Larson is a delusional fool. He’s running for congress in Virginia on a platform that can only be called raw misogyny, and it’s all under the banner of the “Red Pill”.

A red piller is someone who recognizes and is aware of (1) the way that feminism, feminists and their white knight enablers affect society; (2) the dark truths surrounding human sexuality; and (3) hypergamy, women’s AF/BB strategies, society’s feminine imperative, sexual differences in emotional attachment, and women’s attraction to DT traits and sexual dominance/violence. The red pill is extremely politically incorrect, and one may expect reflexive social ostracism for even mentioning the Red Pill in polite society.

You remember the Red Pill — it’s the choice Neo is given in that very silly movie, The Matrix. He can either take the blue pill and go back to living in a dream, or the red pill and wake up to a difficult reality. They’ve got it wrong, of course. “Red Pillers” immerse themselves in a fantasy world of evil women that explains why they are lonely and regarded as creepy, and they also get to learn a lot of bizarre jargon (look at that quote!) that makes them incomprehensible to people outside their little clubhouse. And look at that rationalization at the end — if people find their views repellent, then, well, that’s proof that they’re correct!

This sounds so much like an ugly mix of Scientology and radical Islam: the same isolating cult talk, the same elevation of their narrow group as True Heroes because their ideas are rejected as hateful by people who haven’t been soaking in their Kool-Aid.

It’s clear that it’s not just religion that rots people’s minds, though: a fair number, maybe a majority, of “Red Pillers” are atheists, and they are just as susceptible to cult-like thinking.

It may be permanently damaging, too. Here’s an account of people who left the Red Pill subreddit, and by their own words, most of them still sound like awful, horrible, repulsive people. They left because they found some other get-laid-quick scheme that helps them sleep with women, or because their racist views awakened them to the need to get women pregnant, beyond just having sex with them.

Every man on the Red Pill has a different story. However, each of them do have striking similarities. The main one is anger. Like the name of the subreddit itself, it is blazing red. We must understand the psychology behind the philosophy not to condone it, but to better tackle the poisonous spider slowly infecting those across the web.

It’s actually rather impressive how thoroughly a wrong and hateful ideology can take over a generation of young men and warp their minds so effectively — the author is right. These are phenomena that demand a better understanding of human psychology.

Unless we want to see more Nathan Larsons running for congress.

Here we go again

It’s a too familiar story: man declares his dedication to feminism, man gets exposed for harassing women. The latest disappointment/betrayal comes from the comedian Jamie Kilstein, and his ex-partner Allison Kilkenny has the summary. He’s out of Citizen Radio.

This is heartbreaking because I like Jamie, I respect his talent, and in the past I’ve defended him. This is another familiar part of the story, that I’m too often the last to know, too loyal to my friends, and I end up being shaken by the regrets in the face of undeniable serious problems. Once again I’m caught gawping in disbelief that a friend would do this.

The only solution: I’ve decided to have no more friends forever, especially not male friends (secondarily, no female friends, because why should they trust yet another unreliable guy like me?). Heart of stone, people, soul of ice. It’s the only way to keep from disintegrating.

More details.

Gamergate privilege

It’s amazing what those guys get away with — it looks like the FBI was one gang of bros, while the gamergaters were a different gang of bros, and they mainly got together to high five one another and say “bitchez, amirite?” to each other. A set of heavily redacted documents from the “gamergate” file have been posted documenting how various cases. They brought in one guy for questioning about “dozens of rape, bomb, and death threats targeting women involved in the video game scene”, for instance.

The man, whose name was kept confidential by the FBI, confessed: He told the agents that he was a “tech guy,” a qualified A++ coder, who played video games a lot and lived with his parents, according to a set of documents the FBI released on its investigation into Gamergate.

He told the agents that he hung out on 4chan, the notorious online image-posting board that — according to the FBI documents — has a history of hosting child pornography. He admitted that he had mocked the women who were targets of Gamergate threats on 4chan, calling one of them “a professional victim who exaggerated the threats.”

Then the agents showed him one of those threatening emails. The man said he had created a new email account specifically for the purpose of sending threats to Gamergate targets. He “admitted to sending the threatening email,” the FBI wrote in its report, and he “understood the email ‘looked really bad.'” Crucially, he also confessed that he knew it was a crime: The man “understood that it was a federal crime to send a threatening communication to anyone and will never do it again,” the FBI wrote.

Yet despite all that — an email trail, a confession, and an admission from the suspect that he knew he was breaking the law — the FBI let him go after the suspect said it was a “joke”

It was a joke. And the FBI accepted that excuse. This is an indictment of not just the coward who was bombarding women with threats, but of our national organization for criminal investigations. The FBI has lately been doing a phenomenal job of exposing itself as corrupt and rotten.

Here’s an example of the kind of messages they were asked to address; the link contains lots more.

gamergateemail

It was just a joke…but the author left off the smiley face emoticon! If only he’d written I will write my manifesto in her spilled blood :), maybe I’d find that excuse plausible.

No, not even then. That’s a serious threat made with intent to disrupt an event with violence, and no amount of back-pedaling can soften it. Imagine if, at these various hateful Yiannopoulos talks around the country, leftists had written these kinds of email messages — would the FBI and the press been apologetic and let the angry letter-writer off the hook? Of course not.

If you already have a dislike of Uber…

Susan Fowler worked at Uber for a year. She wrote up the saga, and why she left.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Oh, that sounds familiar. Open relationships are fine, but some of the people in them seem to be using it more as an excuse to harass.

Take a guess what happened after that. Go on, try.

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