Diggs Almost Right on Sexual Harassment, But Still Blaming Women

My northeasterly neighbor Lawrence Diggs almost gets the issue of American misogyny right. Almost.

In the Friday Aberdeen American News, Roslyn’s best columnist tackles sexual harassment. Diggs says our image-oriented culture objectifies women. He says the “persistence in the face of resistance” we drill into males spills over harmfully into an attitude of not taking no for an answer from females uninterested in our (ahem) companionship. Diggs notes the complicity of those who “vote for people who brag about being sexual predators for the highest positions of power.”

But then, framed between an introduction that asks, “Are we all accomplices in the sexual harassment of women?” and a conclusion that refers to “threads of sexual harassment… so deeply woven into our culture that we have become unwitting accomplices,” Diggs tangles victims of harassment into the threads of complicity:

Men can’t hear what women don’t say. Women who don’t complain become part of the problem. There are big risks in doing so, but there are bigger certain consequences in not complaining. Men won’t likely change unless women complain. Not complaining sends mixed messages to men. Complaining lets men know a woman’s barriers and how to relate to her [Lawrence Diggs, “The Enabling of Harassment,” Aberdeen American News, 2017.12.01].

Here we go again.

Diggs falls into the false equivalence, the “oh, everybody does bad things” soothing that at best reflects the persistent, timorous urge of local columnists to avoid ruffling feathers and at worst reflects the “don’t judge” moral relativism that tyrants co-opt to render us unable to distinguish victims from criminals, innocence from guilt, and good from evil.

Women don’t need men to tell them to speak up. Women who have experienced sexual harassment don’t need men to tell them about weighing the consequences of reporting harassment versus the consequences of not challenging their harassers. Women who have suffered abuse by powerful men are already doing that calculus and deciding what more risk and insult and harm they can bear in their lives.

Men have the primary and unique role in ending sexual harassment. Women who have been sexually harassed do not need any patronizing “By the way” finger-wagging from mostly safe men that incorrectly suggests their personal choice on how to deal with harm done to them subjects them to the same moral blame that we ought to reserve for the predators committing the actual harm.

As I said in an earlier discussion, we can keep in perspective the moral responsibility for stopping sexual harassment by considering what would happen if women and men each did the right thing:

1. If every woman immediately reported any instance of sexual harassment, some men would still abuse their power, denigrate whistleblowers, rally enough support to escape the allegations, and continue to harass vulnerable women.
2. If every man immediately stopped behaving like a jerk, sexual harassment would disappear.

Women cannot solve this problem. Men can. Men thus bear the primary and unique responsibility that we must teach, preach, and practice every day.