Dear Thinking Inside Your Box:An excellent question, astute reader! It would probably look something like this:
Remember when you wrote about how porn impacts our view of women? Or your post on feminism? Or that weird post you wrote about control groups and carrots? What would happen if you were to combine those together into one post?
Sincerely yours,
Thinking Inside Your Box Pretending to be a Reader
I’ve never mentioned what type of work I do (and doubt I ever will), but it’s one of those twenty-first century jobs enabled by the computerized revolution, where people can make shitloads of money without hardly even trying and kids in their early twenties suddenly have nearly limitless expense accounts at their disposal. Not to toot my own horn, but it’s also a job I’m pretty fucking good at.
Feel free to comment with “toot your own horn” jokes as desired. If you need help getting started: I have a bad back, so maybe suggesting I acquired it by attempting such actions would be a good jumping off point. And… go.
A job like this is always going to attract a lot of youngsters. The type of people who are just out of university or college, too young to have families (so they can spend all their time at the office), but also too young to have a whole lot of life experience. The kind of annoying Type-A go-getters that we hate to meet at parties because they only talk about work and what type of car they just bought.
The problem with these kids is that they’re too young to be real good at what they do – you need experience for that, no matter how smart you are – but they’ve spent their whole lives being the best in their class and the smartest in their group so they have trouble listening to others because they always think they’re the smartest people in the room – up until now, they always have been. So how do you get them to listen? Simple, you put them in the same room with someone who’s even smarter, or at the very least more experienced, and they’ll naturally gravitate toward this source of free knowledge. And thus the idea of mentorship was born.
That’s not actually how the idea of mentorship was born. Mentorship is just a modern-day equivalent of apprenticeship. I was feeling glib when I wrote that paragraph.
Having been around for a while, and (as previously mentioned) being good at what I do, I’m often called upon to mentor kids as they come to my firm, and I enjoy it. I’ve been told I make a pretty good mentor. I’m helpful but fair, and my mentees know that I care about them and their careers, but that my primary goal is not to make them feel good about themselves but to make them better at their jobs. Usually they end up feeling better about themselves anyway, but it’s because they get better at what they do.
I was at an event recently that was crammed full of these eager young minds waiting to be molded, and it was very flattering to have so many kids wanting to get my advice, wanting to know what I thought about certain topics, and just generally wanting to hang out and hear war stories. They bought me drinks on their expense accounts, I bought them drinks on mine, and I revelled in being the centre of attention for all the right reasons.
And you know what else I did? I refrained from sexually harassing anyone. I didn’t grope a single person, and I didn’t verbally suggest acts of a sexual nature to anyone. I know, I know, I’m an amazing human being and all of the awards and accolades you’re planning to shower me with are truly deserved. I just wish there were enough hours in the day to attend all of the ceremonies that you’d like to plan for me, but alas, my schedule is tight.
Now, it’s possible that you don’t recognize my greatness. Perhaps you think not sexually harassing anyone is unexceptional; that it’s the norm, not the exception. Hopefully you’re right, and I AM being tongue-in-cheek. It is not, in any way, exceptional of me to have been a mentor to a group of twenty-somethings and simultaneously have been a decent human being. We all know that men sometimes abuse these types of positions of power, but we all hope that they’re the exceptions.
But I have to say, there is a temptation in these situations, which I’d like to explain in this post. No, not a temptation to grope girls or to come on to them; these are vile acts, and ones which any man should steer clear of. No, it’s a more subtle temptation: it’s tempting to view them as coming on to me.
Already I can hear women around the world throwing up their hands in exasperation. Even the ones who will never read this post (the vast majority of them – somewhere near 100%, statistically speaking), who simply feel a tremor in the force indicating that another man is being stupid somewhere. I don’t blame you, I only ask you to hear me out. This is not a post to try to defend myself, it’s a post to help you to understand the mind of men.
It started out with this post from Slate, talking about a scandal in the scientific community. Some guy named Zivkovic had been creepy with a bunch of young science-y girls, and it’s finally coming to light. A key paragraph from the post was this one:
Zivkovic clearly creeped out at least two and probably more women, so he is by definition creepy. At the most reprehensible end of the spectrum of possible explanations, Zivkovic is a predator who surrounded himself with inexperienced women because he considered them easy prey. Or perhaps he has some mental health problems with impulse control. But there’s a chance he was just extremely optimistic about his chances, blind to the power differential, and unaware of why so many young women wanted to have coffee with him in the first place. If so, he is still entirely at fault. These explanations aren’t exhaustive or even mutually exclusive, but the last scenario is something we can potentially learn from. (emphasis added)As a man, I found myself nodding my head as I read that. And then, when I spent the weekend with a bunch of neophytes, acting as their mentor, someone they looked up to and wanted to get advice from and just generally wanted to hang out with, it hit me again, because it’s a very real temptation to feel this way. There were hundreds of kids there, only a small percentage of which did I form any real connection with, and those few were evenly divided between males and females. Having just recently read this post I could easily see the temptation at work in my soul: when a dude wanted to hang out and hear war stories and buy me a drink it was because I was a valued mentor, someone to look up to (or suck up to); but when a girl did the same thing part of me wondered if she was attracted.
Let me re-emphasize what I just wrote: even after reading that Slate article, with the ideas still fresh in my mind, I still had to actively remind myself that attention I was getting from girls was work-related and not hormone-related. I had no intentions of acting on it even if they were, it would have been a terrible breach of trust, but that’s not the point of this post, the point is that I simply wondered in the first place.
To be clear, this is not a “poor me” man post, nor is it a blame-the-victim post where I say that girls these days are asking for it. I am trying to get women to understand my point of view, not to excuse it, just to, literally, help them understand it. Because many of them, especially the younger ones, will find themselves thrust into mentor/mentee relationships throughout their careers, and they may find that their male mentors will sometimes act strangely. Those mentors will be having some of the same thoughts I was having:
| “That guy just bought me a drink and wanted to hear about the good ol’ days. Nice guy; laughed at my jokes. Bit of a kiss-ass, but that’s OK.” | “That girl just bought me a drink and wanted to hear about the good ol’ days. Pretty young thing; laughed at my jokes. I know I shouldn’t think about her in that way, but… if she’s coming on to me, instead of the other way around, then anyone would forgive me for letting her have what she wants.” |
Am I excusing him for thinking this way? No. But I am saying that it will happen, and that women should be prepared for it. We don’t think like you; yes, it’s bad, but yes, it happens.
So how do we move forward? How do we curb these tendencies in men’s heads? I don’t know.
But some thoughts:
- Men should be aware of the problem, because it really is their problem. We need to get ourselves out of the mindset that any woman who wants our advice is just using an excuse to hop on our ponies.
- Women should also be aware of the problem, not because it’s their fault, but simply so that they know what’s going on and can try to deal with the situation accordingly. I have no advice for what to do in these situations that won’t make it even worse for yourself; talk to some older women in your profession and see how they’ve dealt with it. Get a few opinions, because you might get anything from jaded “men are pigs” comments to “it’s not so bad, let ‘em slap you on the ass” comments, and a whole bunch in between.
- There are a number of industries which have a dearth of women, especially in positions of leadership, and we need to fix that as a society. Having as many women in positions of power as men will greatly reduce the rate at which shit like this happens.
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