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What unsettles me about #MeToo is that the norm it broadly describes — a desolate moonscape of predatory men, vulnerable women suffering a litany of abuse and indignity — is so contrary to my experience.

I don’t mean here that I am the lucky one who wasn’t physically assaulted, either. There are millions of women equally lucky. Most men don’t attack women, or flash their privates about or parade about the office naked, or masturbate as an opening gambit.

It’s how the less serious stuff is now being interpreted — the grabs or fumbles, the stolen kisses or passes, the come-ons — that really troubles me.

Negotiating the relationship between the sexes is tricky turf, always.

It's how the less serious stuff is now being interpreted that really troubles me

How do you know if someone is interested in you if not by how he responds to flirting, teasing remarks or eye contact? How can you tell if you want to have dinner with someone if you can’t try out a double entendre and see how she responds? How can any one grownup be genuinely traumatized by a grabbed knee, a look, a joke, even a proposition?

(There are now ads running on the Toronto Transit Commission system that mark spots on buses and carry a tagline, “This is where Marsha stared to avoid a leer.” Good grief.)

Are we to believe that women always get it right, that women don’t sometimes mistake ordinary friendliness for sexual interest?

I had dinner last week with two women friends. One was for decades a secretary at a newspaper.

She was brilliantly capable — she organized the predominantly male department and all of us in it — and hideously underpaid. She was the very sort of woman you would imagine male bosses preyed upon: She needed the job, she was cute as a bug, she was vulnerable.