About that 6-year-old boy accused of "sexual harassment" for kissing his schoolmate's hand.

I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about this yesterday, and I see this morning that Glenn Reynolds — calling the boy "the littlest casualty in the war on men"  — is linking to James Taranto — who's blaming Obama (because of a requirement that schools protect students from sexual harassment).

I agree that someone that young should not be labeled with an offense that contains the word "sexual." (The school district, barraged with criticism, has relabeled his offense "misconduct.") And I would locate the issue of suspending him within the larger problem of the "zero tolerance" approach.

But I do think that the school is right to forbid kissing. The boy's mother, who naturally wants to defend her child, tells us that the children were "boyfriend and girlfriend" and that the girl "was fine with it." That may make the misbehavior less severe, but it does not take it out of the range of what a school should forbid.

By the boy's report, it happened "during class, yeah": "We were doing reading group and I leaned over and kissed her on the hand." That isn't acceptable in-class behavior! The school should forbid that. I don't understand saying it's fine for boys and girls who like each other to freely express that affection with hand kissing during class. How about a little support for the school teachers who expect discipline during their lessons? You're not allowed to whisper back and forth or pass notes either. This is basic classroom respect. Have we all forgotten?

Supposedly, "The best comebacks to sexist comments."

In The Guardian, via Metafilter, where people seem way more impressed than makes any sense. It seems to me, if the "sexist comments" are actually harassment — especially on the street — any response functions as a reward. If you banter, you're downgrading it to banter, and as banter, this stuff just isn't funny enough.

Examples at The Guardian:

Managed to stop white van full of men mid-catcall by shoving a big powdery donut into my mouth then smiling with mouth full.

Guy on train after I asked him to move his bag off seat: "Why don't you grab my cock?" Me: "I didn't bring any tweezers."

A friend heard a guy shout 'Sit on my face!' at a girl who replied 'Why, is your nose bigger than your dick?' AMAZING!

In my view, the best response to anything involving a stranger on the street is to absolutely ignore it, and in most social situations it's a look of pity or a glance upward with the half shake of the head that means I'm going to pretend you didn't say that.

"Masters was a brilliant, obsessed and often cold and imperious surgeon determined to make his name by decoding the mysteries of sex."

"Johnson, who had a deft and invaluable human touch with the people they studied, was a sexually liberated woman who wanted a career."

Together they spent thousands of hours watching subjects masturbate and copulate while wired to monitors.

They also had sex with each other, lots of it, but Masters, who was married, insisted that they keep their couplings secret, scientific and impersonal. Late in life, Johnson said she didn’t desire him when they started, but couldn’t say no. “I didn’t want him,” she told Mr. Maier. “I had a job and I wanted it.”

Mr. Maier is Thomas Maier, author of
"Masters of Sex," and there's a new Showtime series based on it.

ADDED: Very nice graphic design here with the letters and image:

Stockings that make it look like you have really hairy legs.

"A caption below touts them as the perfect 'summertime anti-pervert' device and 'essential for young girls going out.'"

"Are women who want to join the military now more afraid of being raped by their brothers in arms than dying for their country?"

Asks Maureen Dowd, reacting to this quote from John McCain:

"Just last night a woman came to me and said her daughter wanted to join the military, and could I give my unqualified support for her doing so. I could not."

I don't think John McCain was talking about fear. I would presume that for McCain, the courage of those in the military is understood. The question is equal opportunity in one's career, and a capable, ambitious woman choosing a career path should take account of the obstacles ahead. If one line of work is notorious for hounding women for sex and even forcing it on them and that those in charge were failing to take the problem seriously, you might decide to do something else with your life.

The Dowd column goes on to discuss the legal question of how sexual assaults should be prosecuted — inside or outside the military:

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, told me the arguments of the brass “boiled down to an almost mystical notion of the commanders’ responsibility. Why can’t we cut the strings to the British system we inherited from George III? The British are baffled by us. They gave control over major crimes to professional prosecutors years ago. It’s an institutional structure that has outlived its utility and credibility.”

Does Fidell want us to copy the British or to stop copying the British? We're copying the old British approach and failing to change it to what the British do now. Imagine applying that legal argument across the board. Forget all the legal principles inherited from the British at the time of this country's founding and switch to what the British have devolved into over the years. I have no idea what the right answer is about prosecuting serious crimes, but I hate the general argument about giving up our legal inheritance from the British because the British themselves have tossed it out.

Dowd continues:

As Sarah Plummer, a beautiful ex-Marine who served in Iraq and says she was raped by a fellow Marine who was never prosecuted, explained to NBC News’s Jim Miklaszewski: “Having someone within your direct chain of command handling the case” is like “your brother raping you and having your dad decide the case.”

Why specify that she's "beautiful"? I get the impression it's supposed to boost her credibility. Or do you think it's a random detail? And dad deciding the case between sister and brother is a vivid and memorable analogy, but it's not completely apt. There's an issue here to be decided — how to deal with sex assaults and sexual harassment in the military — and it should be decided with sober rationality, not iffy analogies, deference to Brits, or emotional manipulation.

"The Lose the Lads' Mags campaign by UK Feminista and Object is calling on high-street retailers to immediately withdraw lads' mags..."

"... and papers featuring pornographic front covers from their stores. Each one of these stores is a workplace. Displaying these publications in workplaces, and/or requiring staff to handle them in the course of their jobs, may amount to sex discrimination and sexual harassment contrary to the Equality Act 2010. Similarly, exposing customers to these publications in the process of displaying them is capable of giving rise to breaches of the Equality Act."

More here:

"For too long supermarkets have got off the hook, stocking lads' mags in the face of widespread opposition, but this time we have the law on our side," said Kat Banyard, founder of UK Feminista. "Every shop that sells lads' mags – publications which are deeply harmful to women – are opening themselves up to legal action."...

"One woman said to us: 'Those magazines don't do women any favours, they are appalling and demeaning to women, but what can little old me do about it?' Well, employees need to know they don't need to put up with it any more."

"[T]he government is blurring the distinction between physical assaults and 'sexually themed' speech..."

"... in order to justify censoring and punishing the latter."

Most of academia’s leadership is too invertebrate and too soggy with political correctness to fight the OCR-DOJ mischief. But someone will. And it is so patently unconstitutional that it will be swiftly swatted down by the courts. Still, it is useful idiocy because, coming right now, it underscores today’s widespread government impulse for lawless coercion — the impulse that produced the Internal Revenue Service’s suppression of political speech that annoys the Obama administration.

"Women today operate" in "two worlds": "the system of beauty, and the system of power."

Asserts Garace Franke-Ruta, in an effort to explain "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."

Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded....

I thought there were 2 systems, beauty and power. But beauty is a system of power. Franke-Ruta stumbles over her own jargon. The word "system" was already too much. What makes beauty or power a "system"? Back in the 1960s, we were always complaining about "the system." It's the system, man. So it's a word that sets off my bullshit detector. What does it mean to say "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded"?

Beauty is beauty. We are human. We have eyes. Our eyes our rigged to our entire nervous system. That's a system, and I'd certainly agree that that system is deeply rooted and preceding all others. But I don't think Franke-Ruta is talking about the nervous system that tracks through our animal bodies and that we would never wish to eradicate or even numb. We are alive, sensual beings. The visual experience is real and vivid and fundamental.

But Franke-Ruta pictures an external system that "operates everywhere in the world" and consist of women as "a natural resource, a form of wealth that men can acquire." Beauty is valued and people want what they value. Is that a system? Those with the value can make an exchange, or as Franke-Ruta puts it "can choose the extent to which they wish to engage with this system of power." But women can also "choose to go to law or medical school or contend in any other way for standing and earning capacity in the world."

That is, they can enter the system of power. 

That is, the other system of power. Which is to say, women can trade only on their beauty or they can have a career. But then Franke-Ruta talks about women wanting or needing to be in both systems at the same time. And this is "why beautiful and extremely capable women are often valued above their less glamorous or less fit peers — they are triumphs in two systems of value, double-threats." But somehow everyone is supposed to know which "system" we're in on any given occasion. In this light, what Obama did wrong was to mix up which was the operable "system" as he spoke on a particular occasion.

Despite all the jargon and the many nods toward feminism, Franke-Ruta calls what Obama did a "gaffe." A little oopsie. Would a feminist unbound by Democratic Party partisanship let him off so easily?

ADDED: I can't help but be reminded of how easily all the supposed feminists let Bill Clinton evade serious criticism.

"Who of a certain age could forget when a bookish black woman named Anita Hill addressed a Senate committee of 14 white men..."

"... and candidly spoke of graphic sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas? The explosive, race-tinged hearings in 1991 had all of America, especially black America, captivated. Sexual politics became part of the lexicon, and Hill became a divisive figure. We know what became of Thomas — now we get a rare glimpse into Hill's private life with friends and family, who stood by her through it all."

From "14 Films That Matter at Sundance" at The Root.

"I think the businesses that bring these men in should also be accountable for not providing opportunities that keep them busy outside of work."

"They should check their employees before hiring (if they don't already) and get rid of those who commit ANY kind of aggression toward women or men. Their social responsibility goes beyond the gate or the door. Maybe the answer is for the towns like Williston to heavily tax the companies so that they can afford to police the men the companies employ. If business doesn't see itself more broadly as a player in the overall health of our society, government needs to step in."

That's a reader comment at the NYT article about all the single men working out in the oil fields of North Dakota, which we've been talking about over in this earlier thread. Please go to that thread to talk about the article more generally. I'm opening up this new thread for discussion of the proposition that business should be responsible for the after-work activities of their employers, that the tendency of men to go out after work looking for female companionship calls for the heavy taxation of business, that individuals looking for sexual relationships in their own free time ought to be conceptualized as an issue of collective "health," that overall societal health requires big "players," and that if businesses don't want to see themselves as the players, they leave a gap that government must fill.

Where the unmarried guys are.

Ladies, they are not on the east coast. Here's a map to guide you, but of course, you won't go there. That's why the imbalance exists. You won't go there.

But you guys, in New York and Massachusetts (and #1, my home state, Delaware), you have rich pickings in the female-heavy disproportion, where you can continue to behave in ways that women will angst over in the pages of the New York Times, which the guys in North Dakota and Alaska and Wyoming probably don't read, but if they did, would they shed a tear for you?

Of course not. They're out in the fracking oil fields being sweaty and manly.... Oh, the sexy married life you could have together!

But the NYT would have you believe the men out there are a bunch of sexist louts.

Christina Knapp and a friend were drinking shots at a bar in a nearby town several weeks ago when a table of about five men called them over and made an offer.

They would pay the women $3,000 to strip naked and serve them beer at their house while they watched mixed martial arts fights on television. Ms. Knapp, 22, declined, but the men kept raising the offer, reaching $7,000.

“I said I make more money doing my job than degrading myself to do that,” said Ms. Knapp, a tattoo artist with dark streaks in her light brown hair, a bird tattoo on her chest and piercings above her lip and left cheekbone.

Stay in New York City, ladies. It's really low class out there in the hinterlands. It's not for you.

Many [women in North Dakota] said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

“So many people look at you like you’re a piece of meat,” said Megan Dye, 28, a nearly lifelong Williston resident. “It’s disgusting. It’s gross.”

All the young, highly sexed single men are out there in North Dakota, but stay away! They're disgusting. It's gross!

"'It’s wrong to stop girls from going out' of the house... but there’s little choice because the city is so unsafe for women."

"Revulsion and anger over the rape have galvanized India, where women regularly face sexual harassment and assault, and where neither the police nor the judicial system is seen as adequately protecting them."

Firing a woman because you find her "irresistably attractive" is not sex discrimination.

Said the Iowa Supreme Court (unanimously).

An attorney for Fort Dodge dentist James Knight said the decision, the first of its kind in Iowa, is a victory for family values because Knight fired Melissa Nelson in the interest of saving his marriage, not because she was a woman....

Nelson, 32, worked for Knight for 10 years, and he considered her a stellar worker. But in the final months of her employment, he complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion....

Nelson filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, arguing she would not have been terminated if she was male. She did not allege sexual harassment because Knight's conduct may not have risen to that level and didn't particularly offend her, Fiedler said.