re: Jeffrey Toobin stuff, one of the issues I've been having with the discourse around it is the idea that people have to "feel victimized" for something to be sexual harassment. like something can be inappropriate and demonstrate entitlement and not be necessarily victimizing

we really have to stop looking at sexual violence in this binary way of traumatic vs not traumatic, especially bc a lot of sexual harassment is just kind of annoying and sort of accumulates over a person's lifetime rather than necessarily traumatic events

and then obviously with something like this, where showing your dick on Zoom becomes an easy way to make fun of the man, it's easy to then turn around and be like: the person who is being humiliated is Toobin. cos when you hear it, it *sounds* silly.

and then bc everyone is laughing at the absurdity of what happened, people can be like, well it didn't hurt anyone. but the point is that it demonstrates entitlement, lack of professionalism and the possibility of escalation at some point.

and this is where protection of other workers, regardless of "trauma" or "no trauma", should come in! like imagine if i punched you in the face at work and my boss was like, "oh it's fine because it didn't bruise." I still enacted violence on you, and shown im capable of it.

anyway this is something I was reading about this yesterday and it articulates A LOT of what I think about it: https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/metoobin-workplace-harassment-failures

I also want to add that the Weinstein cases essentially broke through the media specifically because they were so horrific and so explicitly violent. I want to say that a lot of sexual harassment is not this explicit and many, many people find normative ways to dismiss it.