Peer sexual harassment is sexual harassment which occurs happens between people who know each other. Sexual harassment is any non-consensual touching or comment that is of a sexual nature. This may seem to be a subjective definition, but for the inclusion of the word “non-consensual”. Consent is a very important idea when you’re talking about any sexual matter--from actual sex, to flirting and playful banter. When you’re attempting to engage someone, whether it’s a conversation or a hug, you should get that person’s consent before continuing. That doesn’t mean you need to explicitly ask everyone every time you want to talk to them; consent includes watching for non-verbal indicators that the other party is okay with your engaging them. As an example, I’ve had numerous people engage me in both harmless and sexual conversation on public transportation--the most memorable, to me, was the one guy who kept trying to talk to me even though I kept going back to my book and answering him (if I did) monosyllabically. It’s easy to say “You should have just told the guy to go away”--I wonder myself what kept me from doing so. Social situations are a two-party system, though, and to any reasonable viewer, I was not consenting to that guy’s attempt to engage me.
I would consider any form of unwanted touching to be sexual harassment. If someone doesn’t want it, they aren’t consenting to it. It is, of course, difficult to know what other people are thinking, but that’s why you have to be proactive in determining whether or not someone is okay with your actions. Don’t assume that if they aren’t speaking up, that they’re okay with it. Don’t be an accidental harasser--even good, well intentioned people can accidentally overstep boundaries. People are human, they make mistakes. That’s not the problem. The problem is when you don’t care enough to establish personal boundaries with other people. It’s hard; I know how hard it is, as someone who’s had to speak up countless times to establish my own boundaries, which seem to be more restricted than is common (I’m not a hugger, for instance, and am uncomfortable with hugging people I’m not in an established friendship with, but this seems to be uncommon in my peers, and I’ve had to have the “please ask before hugging me” conversation a lot). But it’s important to know what other people are comfortable with, especially if you’re trying to improve your communication with them. Having a five minute conversation about what the other person is comfortable with (“Hey, I know I’m a real touchy kind of person, are you okay with that? y/n”) can greatly improve a relationship--it tells the other person that you care about them; and if you respect their boundaries, it shows them that they can trust you.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
Gender Communication in the Workplace
This post is in response to this video.
The first issue that jumped out at me was the way in which the project manager, Terry, seemed to demand things from her employees. Regardless of the cultural and gender differences between her and her employees, it’s a generally bad idea to be demanding of the people you’re working with. It’s good to expect things from your employees, but to expect that the people you’re working with are responsible for everything that goes wrong is going to breed in your co-workers an inability to trust you. They won’t want to come to you for help because they’ll expect that you’re going to just blame them for the problems, instead of supporting and empowering them to find the solution themselves.
Terry also seemed uninterested in the actual reasons there were problems. She asked what the problems were, but didn’t allow her employees room to explain the issues. Had Carlos been allowed to explain the system of compadres that were in place, the problem with the equipment would have been avoided. Instead, Terry ignored the advice that Carlos gave--clearly not caring about his opinion or experience. There is nothing so demoralizing as thinking that the person you’re working for doesn’t respect your opinions--they don’t have to agree with you, but they should at least be interested and explore what issues come up.
In a gender communications context, women and men are often socialized to communicate differently; when Miguel spoke about how his culture uses a lot of body language and other nonverbal communication, I was reminded of the section in our text which went over how men and women often utilize different communication styles. Obviously, if two people are “speaking two different languages” (communicating differently), there will be roadblocks to effective communication. If one party is unable or unwilling to adapt to the communication style of the person they’re engaging in communication with, communication will break down, and problems like what we saw in the video will occur.
I'm including my response to a student's response to the video here because it's so short:
I agree that the video focuses primarily on cultural differences, but I think if you think of men and women as coming from different cultures, this video becomes applicable to gender communications. Of course, the analogy isn't airtight, as men and women from the same culture tend to share more in common with each other than they do with men and women from other cultures. However, as we've read about in our textbook, men and women often approach problems in communication as though they have been raised in separate cultures--much like cross-cultural communication, cross-gender is possible. I would argue that cross-gender communication is easier than cross-cultural communication; as I said, men and women from the same culture tend to have shared experiences that they can build on. When we speak to someone else, we are very much aware of their gender (gender is one of the first things we notice about someone, in fact), and as such we adapt our communication style to match what we think they expect and what we expect they will best respond to. How you communicate with people changes depending on context, and context includes things like what gender you perceive the other party to be. Men and women from the same culture will know, if only intuitively, how to communicate in a gendered context. Problems arise when these communication patterns are based on stereotypes, rather than being responsive to the individual you're communicating with--much as we saw in the cross-cultural video.
The first issue that jumped out at me was the way in which the project manager, Terry, seemed to demand things from her employees. Regardless of the cultural and gender differences between her and her employees, it’s a generally bad idea to be demanding of the people you’re working with. It’s good to expect things from your employees, but to expect that the people you’re working with are responsible for everything that goes wrong is going to breed in your co-workers an inability to trust you. They won’t want to come to you for help because they’ll expect that you’re going to just blame them for the problems, instead of supporting and empowering them to find the solution themselves.
Terry also seemed uninterested in the actual reasons there were problems. She asked what the problems were, but didn’t allow her employees room to explain the issues. Had Carlos been allowed to explain the system of compadres that were in place, the problem with the equipment would have been avoided. Instead, Terry ignored the advice that Carlos gave--clearly not caring about his opinion or experience. There is nothing so demoralizing as thinking that the person you’re working for doesn’t respect your opinions--they don’t have to agree with you, but they should at least be interested and explore what issues come up.
In a gender communications context, women and men are often socialized to communicate differently; when Miguel spoke about how his culture uses a lot of body language and other nonverbal communication, I was reminded of the section in our text which went over how men and women often utilize different communication styles. Obviously, if two people are “speaking two different languages” (communicating differently), there will be roadblocks to effective communication. If one party is unable or unwilling to adapt to the communication style of the person they’re engaging in communication with, communication will break down, and problems like what we saw in the video will occur.
__________________
I agree that the video focuses primarily on cultural differences, but I think if you think of men and women as coming from different cultures, this video becomes applicable to gender communications. Of course, the analogy isn't airtight, as men and women from the same culture tend to share more in common with each other than they do with men and women from other cultures. However, as we've read about in our textbook, men and women often approach problems in communication as though they have been raised in separate cultures--much like cross-cultural communication, cross-gender is possible. I would argue that cross-gender communication is easier than cross-cultural communication; as I said, men and women from the same culture tend to have shared experiences that they can build on. When we speak to someone else, we are very much aware of their gender (gender is one of the first things we notice about someone, in fact), and as such we adapt our communication style to match what we think they expect and what we expect they will best respond to. How you communicate with people changes depending on context, and context includes things like what gender you perceive the other party to be. Men and women from the same culture will know, if only intuitively, how to communicate in a gendered context. Problems arise when these communication patterns are based on stereotypes, rather than being responsive to the individual you're communicating with--much as we saw in the cross-cultural video.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Ways to Hurt in a Close Relationship
I really can’t generalize from my own experiences to speak to both genders in this regard, but going on what I have observed in my own relationships, and the relationships in those around me, it seems as though men are more likely to use physical violence to hurt their partners. Women are more likely to use emotional violence, or psychological violence, against their partners. Female-on-male physical violence is probably less rare than people tend to think, and it’s usually shrugged off because women tend to be the less physically strong partner. Physical violence, though, often comes packaged with psychological violence, because the receiver of the violence will often feel self-doubt as a result of their partner’s attack--they’ll question what they did to provoke the attack, they’ll convince themselves that it wasn’t that big of a deal. If it’s woman-on-man violence, I can imagine that most men would feel too ashamed to speak up about the violence, given the ridicule the idea of a woman battering a man often garners; men aren’t supposed to be physically inferior to women, so getting “bested” in a physical fight with your female partner is bound to create all kind of self-shame and feel emasculating. Men’s identities are often tied up in how physically strong they are, so having that questioned is going to cause them distress. Domestic violence is often framed as something that only women have to deal with, as well, and that creates a sort of vacuum in which men don’t feel they can speak up in.
I also think that emotional abuse is brushed off as some sort of unserious problem. I’ve had friends who have been in manipulative and emotionally difficult relationships, where their partner made them feel as though my friends were at fault for whatever problems were happening. I’ve seen what that sort of abuse can do to someone, and don’t feel like it gets talked about often enough. It usually involves making the victim feel as though they can’t trust their own feelings, that the victim is just ‘over-reacting’ to something, or just ‘crazy’ and making up stuff. While over-reactions and misinterpretations happen (humans are flawed beings, and mistakes get made), often abusers will deflect any responsibility for the problems that come up. I noticed that in the text, in the sections regarding the two ways abuse affects the abused, and why they stay (Ivy 295-297)--the Blaming Oneself and Blaming External Factors sections didn’t explicitly say it, but what happens in these situations is that the victim isn’t able to attach responsibility to the abuser; from what I’ve seen and experienced, the abuser is complicit in this thinking, refusing to accept that their actions have actually caused harm or refusing to engage their partner in discussion about how they’re harming their partner. It’s easy to point to a bruise and tell someone, “You’ve really hurt me,” but it’s another thing to point to a feeling and tell someone, “You’re why I’m feeling this [sadness, guilt, anger].”
I also think that emotional abuse is brushed off as some sort of unserious problem. I’ve had friends who have been in manipulative and emotionally difficult relationships, where their partner made them feel as though my friends were at fault for whatever problems were happening. I’ve seen what that sort of abuse can do to someone, and don’t feel like it gets talked about often enough. It usually involves making the victim feel as though they can’t trust their own feelings, that the victim is just ‘over-reacting’ to something, or just ‘crazy’ and making up stuff. While over-reactions and misinterpretations happen (humans are flawed beings, and mistakes get made), often abusers will deflect any responsibility for the problems that come up. I noticed that in the text, in the sections regarding the two ways abuse affects the abused, and why they stay (Ivy 295-297)--the Blaming Oneself and Blaming External Factors sections didn’t explicitly say it, but what happens in these situations is that the victim isn’t able to attach responsibility to the abuser; from what I’ve seen and experienced, the abuser is complicit in this thinking, refusing to accept that their actions have actually caused harm or refusing to engage their partner in discussion about how they’re harming their partner. It’s easy to point to a bruise and tell someone, “You’ve really hurt me,” but it’s another thing to point to a feeling and tell someone, “You’re why I’m feeling this [sadness, guilt, anger].”
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