There are a million reasons to dislike the “open concept” office, a grey Sahara in which everyone from intern to CFO is utterly exposed. You can’t pick your nose. You can’t pick a wedgie. You can’t eat a chopped liver sandwich without inciting questions from across the room such as “What in God’s name is that?” and “Can you please take it outside?” You can’t pass gas. You can’t even gossip. What can you do?

Well, if you’re a woman who works in one of these wide-open spaces, you can be leered at by your male colleagues and ranked on your looks. This is the takeaway from a recent study published in the journal of Gender, Work, and Organization. Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K. conducted long-term interviews with workers in an open concept office and determined that such spaces enable male employees to watch, and judge, and ultimately creep out their female colleagues.

From the study: “Visibility (in open concept spaces) enabled these men to judge and rank women according to their sexual attractiveness” like men on “nudist beaches.” The open concept setting “provided a space where it was much easier for men to exercise this kind of ‘male gaze.’ Conscious of this possibility, some women spoke of the anxiety they felt and the restrictions they placed on themselves to avoid being judged in this way. Several chose to manage their visibility by adjusting the way they dressed.”

The study, a perfect pairing with #MeToo media coverage, has gone viral. But it’s also attracted a predictable conservative backlash from critics who want to know: don’t feminist academics have anything better to do than tackle the “male gaze?” In the words of Dr. Debra Soh on Twitter, a sex researcher and frequent critic of the feminist status quo, “This is the tripe modern day feminism wants us to obsess over, comparing open offices with a nude beach.”

Unlike Soh, I don’t think the study itself is inherently silly for the same reason I don’t think any study is silly. Facts are friendly even if they are odd and seemingly useless. What I do think is silly, rather, and uncomfortably Victorian, is the online reaction to the study. From feminist thinkers to design geeks, the verdict appears to be that because they are conducive to a certain kind of sexism, open concept offices are bad news, and we should revert to a traditional closed office structure. Put another way, if men can’t help but leer at women in an open space and rank their breast size, let’s abandon this whole democratization of space thing. Let’s put some walls up. “Open offices are sexist as hell,” writer Sarah Seltzer tweeted this week. “But if you do have one, please design it so there are some private spaces — and for god sakes, at least have a hallway and bathrooms out of the centre of the office.”

The irony here is that in any other context, most feminists would probably agree that we shouldn’t restructure a space to crack down on sexually inappropriate behaviour. Take for example, a nightclub, or even a busy road. These are all open spaces where sexual harassment flourishes, but we don’t redesign them to erode harassment. We tell men who harass to cut it out.

Yet for some reason the voices that normally balk at practical measures to curb sexual assault (for example, police warnings to “be aware of your surroundings”) are suddenly gung-ho about building walls to protect women from the prying eyes of men.

The funny thing is that women don’t necessarily need or want that protection. Some of us actually like working in open concept spaces. Again, from the study: “Some women … spoke of new freedoms to be more fully themselves; they walked across and confronted people; and they accepted and enjoyed being visible.”

One woman in particular who might resent the idea of redesigning an office to curb sexism is Lauren T., an anonymous commenter who recently wrote into the website Fast Co. Design (which published an article about the study), relaying her own experience with harassment in an open concept workplace. In her case, a male colleague stared at her so hard and long, she began to “strategize alternate routes to the restroom” so she wouldn’t have to pass his desk. Despite this, she writes, “A woman designed our office, and I think she did a wonderful job. I don’t think this issue is a product of open office plans, I think it’s an issue of entitled, sexist men being unwilling to evaluate their own behaviour and companies not challenging this problem beyond just sticking a page in the HR manual about sexual harassment.”

Amen. There are a million good reasons to do away with the open concept office (the inability to pass gas in peace being the most prudent in my opinion). But sexism isn’t one of them. When men leer and rank their female colleagues like cuts of meat, women who enjoy working out in the open should not retreat behind an office door. They should take back the floor.