Why Do We Need This Help?
The “Me Too” Movement was founded by Tawana Burke many years ago, long before it became popular for Hollywood actresses to pretend they invented it themselves. This African-American woman activist was encouraging everyone to consider the possibility that more women have experienced sexual harassment and assault than we realize. She encouraged folks to simply ask the women in their lives about the harassment they had experienced thus far, and as a result, people were shocked to discover that their sisters, aunts, mothers and grandmothers had swept lifetimes of sexual harassment (https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/social-science/law/concepts/sexual-harassment) and assault under the rug in the name of getting along to go along.
People have been comfortable abusing women in the workplace for as long as humans have found ways to distinguish themselves from one another. Even other women can sexually harass and assault you, as we have learned recently from investigations into the fashion industry! It is exhausting. Just last weekend, I went over to my new next-door neighbor’s home, just two weeks after I had met his entire family for his fortieth birthday party (including his pregnant wife, who is due any day)! After all his guests left, he closed the door of the barn we were hanging out in and offered me something to smoke and drink. As soon as he got the chance, he begged me to kiss him and tried to dance with me, and I was repulsed.
His wife is nine months pregnant, and this man was idiotic enough to try to engage in inappropriate behavior with me while she slept in their brand-new marital home. This is the nature of sexual assault: men are so comfortable with this type of disgusting behavior that they do not even consider pregnant wives or the comfort of their lady next-door neighbors. All they care about is the immediacy of their sexual desire and they are unwilling to care for anyone else’s feelings but their own. This is why modern feminists often say that women do not actually mature faster than men, it is simply that men are allowed to behave in an immature manner for much longer, thus, it appears that women grow up faster than men.
How Can We Fix This?
As little girls, women are taught to cover up their bodies and hide themselves, lest they attract unwanted attention from older men. Instead of ensuring that the older men who visit our homes are respectful of the children they encounter, we place the burden on a young girl to mitigate her own sexual harassment or assault. In fact, in many cultures it is still appropriate to question what a woman was wearing before her sexual assault, thereby finding ways to justify the awful attack she endured. If you want to learn more about the definition of sexual assault, you can find this information online. It is ridiculous behavior, and yet, we still must navigate this sexist world as women, especially in the workplace, where men are often accustomed to being able to sexually harass all of the women around them with no consequences.
When we think of some of the most famous businessmen in America, we are often thinking of men who have sexually harassed countless women around them. And yet, we do not include those discussions in our general histories of these great men, because we would rather consider their innovations, inventions and accomplishments than recognize that they are full human beings who have committed horribly sexist actions with no regard for the feelings of the women around them. Additionally, we have sustained a culture that allows men to think that women want them, even when women are not even remotely interested and find them repulsive.
This is another reason why compliance training online is such an important part of how we can improve our society that is riddled with institutional and cultural sexism. There are many lessons we can learn from online compliance training courses that will help us throughout our lives, lessons we will continue to use in workplace after workplace. Good and proper training should stay with us no matter where we end up working, as we will need to pass these lessons on to our peers as time goes on. The power struggles that we wrestle with in our corporations and businesses can be surmounted if we are able to focus on coming together to prevent sexist harassment from continuing in our workplaces.
It is never worth it to just appease the older people in your office space who are willing to either commit or overlook sexual harassment and assault. These people are dinosaurs who need to get with the times. Just as we ended various other elements of our society that were unsavory and designed to promote foolishness and discrimination against other marginalized groups, we can protect women. Men are not better than women just because they sometimes possess more physical strength. Men are just people — no better than anyone else, and they ought to learn how to behave better in the workplace with compliance training.