If you look at the percentage of people who are married or otherwise in a relationship, that has gone down. So it's not just people shifting from one form of meeting to another. You are correct though that it's not just work that declined, and Caplan is wrong per the chart in saying that "At work" is the most common way people met 25 years ago. I think he actually needs to go back even further for the peak of couples meeting at work.
Regardless, the dynamic has changed completely. There isn’t anything even remotely like flirting going on, and people (even pre-pandemic) have drastically reduced going out after work for drinks with their colleagues. The change was sudden and alarming.
He’s right about work being a natural and healthy place for people to meet each other, and I feel bad for people who aren’t already settled down. They’ve had what was probably their only readily available dating community rendered off limits for no good reason.
Brian, could you create a poll asking men if they've been dissuaded from asking out a colleague for fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit, or employer policies implemented to avoid lawsuits? I suspect the problem (less wanted attention) is less severe then you imply. Are people really so paranoid?
I’d be interested in those results. My instinct is the opposite - that a supermajority of single men feel that asking someone out at work isn’t worth the risk.
Either way I'd like to know, I'm not confident one way or another!
I've been with my wife since college so I don't have any personal experience with this. But at my job for a large woke megacorp I wouldn't worry about asking out a female coworker (once, politely, no dick pics) because of a fear of sexual harassment accusations (just a fear of rejection and awkwardness).
I would be more nervous about making a joke that could be construed as sexual.
I've asked out someone at work before and although we didn't get married or anything, there were no negative consequences to it.
I've also been accused of workplace harassment and only narrowly avoided _severe_ consequences because some lower-level staff were offended I told a few PG-13 stories and jokes at after hours gatherings. I'm still kind of reeling from it because it wasn't on my radar at all that anyone could be upset by such minor stuff. Why is sex such a taboo topic?
The fact that the decline in meeting "at work" looks almost *identical* to the decline in meeting "through friends, "school/college," and "through family" should have made you rethink this entire post. Instead of asking if workplace sexual harassment laws have some unique, unwanted impact, you could have asked what those 4 categories have in common.
Playing devil’s advocate here: Say you’re a woman who prefers to meet men via online dating apps, friends, or anything other than work. In that case, a strong presumption against workplace dating and strong laws against sexual harassment will help you avoid embarrassing and tricky workplace issues. You don’t have to ask men to back off all day long since the law will keep them at bay and they won’t be bothering you in the first place.
If you’re a woman who does prefer to meet men at work, now it will happen on your terms and not his, since men won’t be the ones to initiate (unless they’re the kind that are willing to risk a lawsuit, and some women like that bravado but others don’t).
Would you suggest that the law explicitly treat women who initiate at work differently from men who initiate at work? Or will such women also be risking harassment accusations by initiating? This is not meant as a gotcha; I am curious (and I see you preface this as a devil's advocate argument).
I would not condone explicitly treating men and women differently in the eyes of the law. That's not a good line to cross.
On the other hand, we already live in this equilibrium de-facto. All else equal, if/when the woman chooses to initiate, even if it is not reciprocated, she won't be treated nearly as harshly by the law or by society. But the law is not written this way explicitly.
The law doesn't have to differentiate. Men are already far more likely to appreciate the ego-boost from attention, even from women they'd have no desire to be in a relationship with, and therefore not complain. And everyone basically knows this.
Actually, I've always been confused about some women's loud complaining about excess attention. I consider myself an attractive woman (well, when I was young, not now) and I always got my mood elevated by any polite male attention. (Impolite attention, e.g. "hey slut, come here" of course made me angry, but I'm talking about nice and honest attention here.) Was it because I lived in a society (Northern Europe) where men tend to be shy and attention was rare? But no, when I visited Southern parts, where they were not shy at all and where I got a lot of attention, I was even happier!
So I've always suspected these girls who complain about attention, thinking, maybe they are reaching for high status, making themselves sound blindingly beautiful by pretending to have so much attention by men that it gets annoying (while secretly enjoying it like I did). However, I know that trying to guess other people's motivations usually leads to wrong and uncharitable conclusions.
Then again, the other day, I heared my over-40 female friend bragging about how she always gets hit on by much younger guys when dancing at nightclubs, and has to fend them off, making it sound tedious. And I wander, why then does she always wear her sexiest clothes to the clubs (a practice that I absolutely support; she looks good)? I find it very hard to believe that she doesn't want male attention. Tell me, other girls, what's going on? Why do you complain? Are you all pretending?
Kind of fun to see so far, men commenting here! In my first marriage, I married a co worker. We divorced. His second wife was an administrative assistant, so was his third and fourth. This bit of history was all before 2010. Not sure if he has a fifth, lost track. I can’t imagine the dating scene today, I feel for you! I happily married again. We met online!
I agree that sexual harassment law, as written and perceived now, has the effect of reducing both wanted and unwanted attention.
Could the law be made more nuanced and/or precisely targeted so as to actually affect only (or primarily) unwanted attention? I could imagine rules along the lines of the following, albeit with lots of ornamentation:
*Complemeting a coworker's appearance, on its own, is not harassment. If the coworker does not want such complements, they should say so.
*Asking a coworker on a date is not harassment. If the coworker is not interested, they should say so.
*If a coworker has previously made clear that they are not interested in romance with the asker, then *continued* asking for a date or romance is harassment.
Is there hope that such a code could distinguish well enough between wanted and unwated attention to squelch most of the latter while having a tolerably limited effect on the former? Or is this a doomed Quixotic quest from the start due to the natural ambiguity in human communication, particular around romance?
I would love to find a solution that dignified both parties in a workplace situation: allow an asker to make an offer to someone they are attracted to; allow a receiver of attention to freely accept or decline such invitations and to make clear when they aren't interested. Maybe satisfying both sides is impossible.
Half of the attraction of the sexes is risk and ambiguity. The very acting of taming attraction kills attraction. There is no way to make all this SFW.
What you describe is, in fact, what the law is supposed to say. But edge cases, combined with employers' desire to stay well away from the edges, have led to a very different reality. The law actually specifies that behavior has to be repeated or pervasive, or a single incident so severe as to interfere with a reasonable person's ability to do their job (or words to that effect). But since the implications for employers are severe, employers established a "no go zone" around romance, which then redefined what "severe" meant in a vicious/virtuous cycle.
Good point that the penalty for harassment falls on *employers*, not just the harassers themselves, which changes the incentives a lot. Assuming that both men and women benefit from successful romance (leading to marriage), they both would have an incentive to not squelch wanted romantic attention.
But the *company* doesn't benefit from successful romances, whereas under the current law the company will suffer if a harassment suit is brought, so the company's incentives are entirely on one side.
Right, when I got accused of workplace harassment, my employer concluded that maybe 8 slightly off-color jokes and stories over a year-long period, most of which occurred at after-hours work events, constituted pervasive behavior that interfered with employees' ability to do their job. It completely fails a neutral reasonableness test but my employer had zero incentive to take a stand for me; it just wanted to eliminate risk of being sued.
I don't really think unwanted attention is that big a deal, EXCEPT in a situation where it's your boss, because men tend to react very badly to being turned down, because they get defensive and upset so their next reaction is often "screw you bitch". If that's a random person on the street or in a bar, no big deal. But if that's your boss, it's a big problem, and he is probably even MORE offended because he already views himself as above you, and thinks you liked him back because you had to smile and be nice to him and laugh at his jokes just like everyone else. So now he's offended and embarrassed and will try to avoid you or treat you worse than if he hadn't hit on you at all.
Sexual harassment laws also help prevent it being unfair to EVERYONE ELSE when the boss takes a liking to someone who either reciprocates or plays into it, and then gets special favors.
So really, what sexual harassment laws are doing is:
1. Not allowing bosses to retaliate after being rejected. Instead they just get to go along thinking to themselves, well, she would totally want me if not for this policy, and everyone can just act as usual; and
2. Preventing unfairness to everyone else who the boss isn't attracted to.
I suppose they could target the laws better, so that rather than making it an offense to make "unwelcome" advances in the first place, the actual offense is unfair treatment (either positive or negative) to employees based on whether you want to bang them or not.
"The law goes to every workplace and turns everyone over a 5 into a 5. Which virtually no one claims to want." - nitpicky but: they claim to want to be highly attractive *given* current legal norms. It's possible that under "laissez faire", unwanted attention could become so much more common that many more people (especially women) would prefer to be average. You might ask "what would you prefer your appearance to be out of 10, conditional on a blanket repeal of all sexual harassment (but not assault) laws, and the uptick in unwanted attention you believe would ensue."
The issue with your logic is that sexual harassment laws don't need to stop wanted and unwanted attention proportionally. Stopping 100% of unwanted attention will require stopping 100% of wanted attention. But I could easily imagine a narrower, precisely-defined law which stops 90% of serious unwanted attention (no dick picks, no asking someone out 20+ times, etc.) while only stopping a tiny amount of wanted attention.
I don’t think a ban on all workplace sexual attention is anything like setting people to a 5. Many of the things people want out of attractiveness have nothing to do with people approaching them sexually - I bet you would get the same result id you asked people to imagine a world where no one else ever sees you and you get to pick how attractive you are. Self-appreciation is relevant, as is the general positive feeling people have for attractive people regardless of whether they ever interact in a romantic or sexual way.
I do think that blanket bans on workplace romance are problematic but I don’t think this thought experiment does much to show that.
(Also, note that bar/restaurant is the only category other than online that is rising - I think a lot of social ills would be improved if we had better “third places” for people to socialize outside of work and home - especially as work moves online for many.)
It is so damn easy for a well-off white male to dismiss the concerns of women in the workplace. "Why can't men in power use that power to prey on women? I can't be expected to use an app. The world has gone mad!"
I think he does. He seems to be saying that it is impossible for workplace harassment law to distinguish wanted and unwanted attention. Or at least, that any such law is too far from current practice to be something worth considering in this thought experiment.
I think this article makes its argument less well than it could, and I'm not sure I buy even the well-made version of the argument. It seems to assume a lot of things that are not necessarily true. For instance, do very attractive people actually receive more romantic/sexual attention in workplace than only moderately attractive people? Also being more attractive probably results in advantages other than just more romantic/sexual attention (if it does result in the latter), meaning people's preference for it might not relate to a preference for more attention.
I don't necessarily think your conclusion is wrong, but I don't think you've justified it very well.
Disclaimer, I am heterosexual cisgender man, so take what I say with a pinch of salt. Would appreciate if women commented on this.
I suspect a large part of women wanting to look attractive is not them wanting to look attractive to men, but to other women; it's a case of intra-female status signalling. Conversely, the "unwanted attention" thing is a bit of a red herring, since this tends to arise when men perceive that a woman is vulnerable or "easy", or it's otherwise about disrespect as much as it is about sexual attraction.
If you exclude "on-line" from both columns and recalculate to 100%, Work doesnt change that much, it goes from 18% to 15%.
The only takeaway from that chart is that on-line has become a big thing.
If you look at the percentage of people who are married or otherwise in a relationship, that has gone down. So it's not just people shifting from one form of meeting to another. You are correct though that it's not just work that declined, and Caplan is wrong per the chart in saying that "At work" is the most common way people met 25 years ago. I think he actually needs to go back even further for the peak of couples meeting at work.
Caplan said that it was *a* usual answer, not *the* usual answer.
Regardless, the dynamic has changed completely. There isn’t anything even remotely like flirting going on, and people (even pre-pandemic) have drastically reduced going out after work for drinks with their colleagues. The change was sudden and alarming.
He’s right about work being a natural and healthy place for people to meet each other, and I feel bad for people who aren’t already settled down. They’ve had what was probably their only readily available dating community rendered off limits for no good reason.
That 2017 poll is probably pre-MeToo though.
Brian, could you create a poll asking men if they've been dissuaded from asking out a colleague for fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit, or employer policies implemented to avoid lawsuits? I suspect the problem (less wanted attention) is less severe then you imply. Are people really so paranoid?
I’d be interested in those results. My instinct is the opposite - that a supermajority of single men feel that asking someone out at work isn’t worth the risk.
Either way I'd like to know, I'm not confident one way or another!
I've been with my wife since college so I don't have any personal experience with this. But at my job for a large woke megacorp I wouldn't worry about asking out a female coworker (once, politely, no dick pics) because of a fear of sexual harassment accusations (just a fear of rejection and awkwardness).
I would be more nervous about making a joke that could be construed as sexual.
I've asked out someone at work before and although we didn't get married or anything, there were no negative consequences to it.
I've also been accused of workplace harassment and only narrowly avoided _severe_ consequences because some lower-level staff were offended I told a few PG-13 stories and jokes at after hours gatherings. I'm still kind of reeling from it because it wasn't on my radar at all that anyone could be upset by such minor stuff. Why is sex such a taboo topic?
Such a poll would help clarify matters, but it should also include volunteer organizations and schools.
As the old saying goes: " you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you..."
The fact that the decline in meeting "at work" looks almost *identical* to the decline in meeting "through friends, "school/college," and "through family" should have made you rethink this entire post. Instead of asking if workplace sexual harassment laws have some unique, unwanted impact, you could have asked what those 4 categories have in common.
Well, people still have to meet somewhere: and this is measurin % of meetings, not totals. But yes, it does negate some of his points
Playing devil’s advocate here: Say you’re a woman who prefers to meet men via online dating apps, friends, or anything other than work. In that case, a strong presumption against workplace dating and strong laws against sexual harassment will help you avoid embarrassing and tricky workplace issues. You don’t have to ask men to back off all day long since the law will keep them at bay and they won’t be bothering you in the first place.
If you’re a woman who does prefer to meet men at work, now it will happen on your terms and not his, since men won’t be the ones to initiate (unless they’re the kind that are willing to risk a lawsuit, and some women like that bravado but others don’t).
Would you suggest that the law explicitly treat women who initiate at work differently from men who initiate at work? Or will such women also be risking harassment accusations by initiating? This is not meant as a gotcha; I am curious (and I see you preface this as a devil's advocate argument).
I would not condone explicitly treating men and women differently in the eyes of the law. That's not a good line to cross.
On the other hand, we already live in this equilibrium de-facto. All else equal, if/when the woman chooses to initiate, even if it is not reciprocated, she won't be treated nearly as harshly by the law or by society. But the law is not written this way explicitly.
The law doesn't have to differentiate. Men are already far more likely to appreciate the ego-boost from attention, even from women they'd have no desire to be in a relationship with, and therefore not complain. And everyone basically knows this.
Actually, I've always been confused about some women's loud complaining about excess attention. I consider myself an attractive woman (well, when I was young, not now) and I always got my mood elevated by any polite male attention. (Impolite attention, e.g. "hey slut, come here" of course made me angry, but I'm talking about nice and honest attention here.) Was it because I lived in a society (Northern Europe) where men tend to be shy and attention was rare? But no, when I visited Southern parts, where they were not shy at all and where I got a lot of attention, I was even happier!
So I've always suspected these girls who complain about attention, thinking, maybe they are reaching for high status, making themselves sound blindingly beautiful by pretending to have so much attention by men that it gets annoying (while secretly enjoying it like I did). However, I know that trying to guess other people's motivations usually leads to wrong and uncharitable conclusions.
Then again, the other day, I heared my over-40 female friend bragging about how she always gets hit on by much younger guys when dancing at nightclubs, and has to fend them off, making it sound tedious. And I wander, why then does she always wear her sexiest clothes to the clubs (a practice that I absolutely support; she looks good)? I find it very hard to believe that she doesn't want male attention. Tell me, other girls, what's going on? Why do you complain? Are you all pretending?
Kind of fun to see so far, men commenting here! In my first marriage, I married a co worker. We divorced. His second wife was an administrative assistant, so was his third and fourth. This bit of history was all before 2010. Not sure if he has a fifth, lost track. I can’t imagine the dating scene today, I feel for you! I happily married again. We met online!
I agree that sexual harassment law, as written and perceived now, has the effect of reducing both wanted and unwanted attention.
Could the law be made more nuanced and/or precisely targeted so as to actually affect only (or primarily) unwanted attention? I could imagine rules along the lines of the following, albeit with lots of ornamentation:
*Complemeting a coworker's appearance, on its own, is not harassment. If the coworker does not want such complements, they should say so.
*Asking a coworker on a date is not harassment. If the coworker is not interested, they should say so.
*If a coworker has previously made clear that they are not interested in romance with the asker, then *continued* asking for a date or romance is harassment.
Is there hope that such a code could distinguish well enough between wanted and unwated attention to squelch most of the latter while having a tolerably limited effect on the former? Or is this a doomed Quixotic quest from the start due to the natural ambiguity in human communication, particular around romance?
I would love to find a solution that dignified both parties in a workplace situation: allow an asker to make an offer to someone they are attracted to; allow a receiver of attention to freely accept or decline such invitations and to make clear when they aren't interested. Maybe satisfying both sides is impossible.
Half of the attraction of the sexes is risk and ambiguity. The very acting of taming attraction kills attraction. There is no way to make all this SFW.
What you describe is, in fact, what the law is supposed to say. But edge cases, combined with employers' desire to stay well away from the edges, have led to a very different reality. The law actually specifies that behavior has to be repeated or pervasive, or a single incident so severe as to interfere with a reasonable person's ability to do their job (or words to that effect). But since the implications for employers are severe, employers established a "no go zone" around romance, which then redefined what "severe" meant in a vicious/virtuous cycle.
Good point that the penalty for harassment falls on *employers*, not just the harassers themselves, which changes the incentives a lot. Assuming that both men and women benefit from successful romance (leading to marriage), they both would have an incentive to not squelch wanted romantic attention.
But the *company* doesn't benefit from successful romances, whereas under the current law the company will suffer if a harassment suit is brought, so the company's incentives are entirely on one side.
Right, when I got accused of workplace harassment, my employer concluded that maybe 8 slightly off-color jokes and stories over a year-long period, most of which occurred at after-hours work events, constituted pervasive behavior that interfered with employees' ability to do their job. It completely fails a neutral reasonableness test but my employer had zero incentive to take a stand for me; it just wanted to eliminate risk of being sued.
Aristotle would pick 5, the median!
I'd pick 8. Never be too rich. too famous, or too attractive!
I don't really think unwanted attention is that big a deal, EXCEPT in a situation where it's your boss, because men tend to react very badly to being turned down, because they get defensive and upset so their next reaction is often "screw you bitch". If that's a random person on the street or in a bar, no big deal. But if that's your boss, it's a big problem, and he is probably even MORE offended because he already views himself as above you, and thinks you liked him back because you had to smile and be nice to him and laugh at his jokes just like everyone else. So now he's offended and embarrassed and will try to avoid you or treat you worse than if he hadn't hit on you at all.
Sexual harassment laws also help prevent it being unfair to EVERYONE ELSE when the boss takes a liking to someone who either reciprocates or plays into it, and then gets special favors.
So really, what sexual harassment laws are doing is:
1. Not allowing bosses to retaliate after being rejected. Instead they just get to go along thinking to themselves, well, she would totally want me if not for this policy, and everyone can just act as usual; and
2. Preventing unfairness to everyone else who the boss isn't attracted to.
I suppose they could target the laws better, so that rather than making it an offense to make "unwelcome" advances in the first place, the actual offense is unfair treatment (either positive or negative) to employees based on whether you want to bang them or not.
"The law goes to every workplace and turns everyone over a 5 into a 5. Which virtually no one claims to want." - nitpicky but: they claim to want to be highly attractive *given* current legal norms. It's possible that under "laissez faire", unwanted attention could become so much more common that many more people (especially women) would prefer to be average. You might ask "what would you prefer your appearance to be out of 10, conditional on a blanket repeal of all sexual harassment (but not assault) laws, and the uptick in unwanted attention you believe would ensue."
The issue with your logic is that sexual harassment laws don't need to stop wanted and unwanted attention proportionally. Stopping 100% of unwanted attention will require stopping 100% of wanted attention. But I could easily imagine a narrower, precisely-defined law which stops 90% of serious unwanted attention (no dick picks, no asking someone out 20+ times, etc.) while only stopping a tiny amount of wanted attention.
That was where we started.
I think this is a very good avenue for exploration.
I don’t think a ban on all workplace sexual attention is anything like setting people to a 5. Many of the things people want out of attractiveness have nothing to do with people approaching them sexually - I bet you would get the same result id you asked people to imagine a world where no one else ever sees you and you get to pick how attractive you are. Self-appreciation is relevant, as is the general positive feeling people have for attractive people regardless of whether they ever interact in a romantic or sexual way.
I do think that blanket bans on workplace romance are problematic but I don’t think this thought experiment does much to show that.
(Also, note that bar/restaurant is the only category other than online that is rising - I think a lot of social ills would be improved if we had better “third places” for people to socialize outside of work and home - especially as work moves online for many.)
It is so damn easy for a well-off white male to dismiss the concerns of women in the workplace. "Why can't men in power use that power to prey on women? I can't be expected to use an app. The world has gone mad!"
I say this as an introvert.
Who said prey? Caplan does not argue that egregious harassment cannot be policed in the workplace on a case-by-case basis.
I think he does. He seems to be saying that it is impossible for workplace harassment law to distinguish wanted and unwanted attention. Or at least, that any such law is too far from current practice to be something worth considering in this thought experiment.
That would not prevent any firm from self-policing.
My counter to this is: harassment on the apps is off the charts ridiculous.
Who said anything about "in power"? Caplan seems to be focused on peers.
True! Also, When the breakdown of social dancing happened during the 70s the level of loneliness rise (look at Sweden).
I think this article makes its argument less well than it could, and I'm not sure I buy even the well-made version of the argument. It seems to assume a lot of things that are not necessarily true. For instance, do very attractive people actually receive more romantic/sexual attention in workplace than only moderately attractive people? Also being more attractive probably results in advantages other than just more romantic/sexual attention (if it does result in the latter), meaning people's preference for it might not relate to a preference for more attention.
I don't necessarily think your conclusion is wrong, but I don't think you've justified it very well.
Disclaimer, I am heterosexual cisgender man, so take what I say with a pinch of salt. Would appreciate if women commented on this.
I suspect a large part of women wanting to look attractive is not them wanting to look attractive to men, but to other women; it's a case of intra-female status signalling. Conversely, the "unwanted attention" thing is a bit of a red herring, since this tends to arise when men perceive that a woman is vulnerable or "easy", or it's otherwise about disrespect as much as it is about sexual attraction.