The statistic's been thrown around forever that 1 in 4 women experience sexual harassment/assault in their lives. When you think about that, and realize for every woman harassed there had to be an aggressor, and overwhelmingly the data pointed to male aggressors....I think people just didn't ever really think about what this said about the likelihood incident rate of male aggressors would be. AKA how many there would probably be in the general population. I think everyone just assumed that a very small fraction of men were chronically repeating this behavior on everyone around them in their lives. Idk.
Although the math is relatively simple, it's a difficult calculation without knowing how many people the typical predator preys upon. If it's 25, then one might expect that one in a hundred is guilty of that behavior, which seems low but not unreasonably low. I really have no way of even guessing, but I'm almost sure that most people who commit any sort of sexual violence don't do it to just one person.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. So: 1 in 4 women experience sexual harassment/assault. And for every A there's a B. Therefore it follows that 1 in 4 men are sexual harassers, right? Pretend that's true. That means that 3 in 4 men AREN'T HARASSERS. Yet here we are, "all men are bad." But let's take a step back: Harvey Weinstein: 57 victims Louis CK: 5 victims Roy Moore: 9 victims Al Franken: 4 victims John Conyers: 2 victims Danny Masterson: 4 victims (of rape, not sexual harassment) Bill Cosby: 60 victims So what's "very small?" Clearly - whatever it is, it isn't small enough. However - if we assume that male predators harass two women in their lives on average, we're at one in 8. Here's what I know: My sister settled with one architecture firm because she was one of six women to report harassment by a principal at the firm. She settled with another because she was one of four. Meanwhile, I worked for an architectural consultancy firm that was sued for sexual harassment three times in the four years I was there. We had 11 employees, 7 of them were male, and all three suits were against the principal of our firm. I can't find any statistics to reveal how likely a man is to sexually harass or assault a woman. No matter how you slice it, it's probably less than 1 in 4. But here we are: all men are bad, all men should STFU. So we attend our sexual harassment training (I get to do 4 hours of online training if I want to keep working, thanks to Harvey Weinstein) and everybody's insurance rates go down and we propagate the notion that sexual predators lurk around every corner and we tell young men they can't attend rape prevention marches because "we're part of the problem" and we wonder why the entire situation is so adversarial. I worked for a firm where my boss sexually harassed a drafter a year. That's bonus money I didn't get. Every year. That's a shity-ass firm building a reputation... every year. And I never so much as hugged anybody there. And you can think "sweet jesus we should stop hiring female drafters" which is accurate and horrible but the better move is to find a new job SO YOU DO and end up at a 500-person company where the sole purpose of trade shows is to rent a block of hotel rooms, get plastered and recreate the Tailhook scandal twice a year. I didn't hug anybody there, either.When you think about that, and realize for every woman harassed there had to be an aggressor, and overwhelmingly the data pointed to male aggressors....I think people just didn't ever really think about what this said about the likelihood incident rate of male aggressors would be.
I think everyone just assumed that a very small fraction of men were chronically repeating this behavior on everyone around them in their lives. Idk.