So I think it’s pretty accepted that the discourse on harassment tends to conflate several things: stranger-on-the-street harassment, boss-underling harassment, and intimate partner abuse. This is unfortunate because the demographics, causes, and solutions to each of these is very different. For instance, stranger-on-the-street harassment has the demographics typical of petty crime, and could be controlled if we actually were allowed to control petty crime (spoiler: we aren’t). Consciousness-raising among upper-middle-class men, the heretofore preferred solution, is basically useless here.

@slatestarscratchpad‘s excellent piece points out that based on available statistics, woman-on-man harassment is not exactly negligible either, and that if we really cared about reducing harm, we wouldn’t be aggressively neglecting it.

What he fails to note, when making this equivalence, is that abuse is essentially socially constructed - the definition of abuse is, more or less, “the broader society feels that the actions of a mini-society is wrong, and describes that wrongness in harm-care terms.” As Europe is in the process of discovering, what passes for more or less normal in one culture may be easily considered abuse by another even in the absence of ill will on either side (and all the more so in the presence). The extent to which people reporting abuse can be swayed by peers suggesting that the abuse was either normal or not OK, should also raise an eyebrow as to how cut-and-dry the link is between “behavior matching our rationalistic definition of abuse” and “being experienced as unjust suffering.”

As it happens, Western ideas of abuse, at least those acceptable to polite company, treats the people involved as though they were some sort of ideal gas rather than creatures with biological differences. As a result, it tends to flail wildly when its assumptions about human equality and neurological uniformity are not met. Extreme case: OK, child abuse is when parents behave badly and harm their children. Is “parent abuse,” where children behave badly and harm parents, a coherent concept that should be punished in the same way? Why not? Try answering without betraying ageist assumptions!

Men and women are different - not just because of the extreme and underestimated strength difference, but also the iterated evolutionary and cultural game theory based on cheap sperm and expensive eggs. And so, when you get right down to it, an impotent patriarch is a different category of thing than a tyrannical patriarch who is overruled by the state. It’s not surprising that men and women have different patterns of reporting such abuse, and that they’re treated differently the public square. And while both categories of abuse contain both real injustices and false claims, as long as we lump both in this abstract category of abuse, we will not recognize the differences in demographics, causal behaviors, and effective solutions.

