When the erstwhile establishment feminists have lost a post-feminist feminist Journalism professor willing to tell them so in the NYT, well, that can only mean one thing: CAT FIGHT!

After all these years, we are again debating the definition of unwanted sexual advances and parsing the question of whether a dirty joke in the office is a crime. Conservatives have mocked the seriousness of sexual harassment; liberal and mainstream pundits have largely reverted to the pieties of the early ’90s […]

The truth is, our Puritan country loves the language of sexual harassment: it lets us be enlightened and sexually conservative, modern and judgmental, sensitive and disapproving, voyeuristic and correct all at the same time.

Recent conservative parodies of the concept of sexual harassment hinge on a certain weakness or blurriness in the definition. The problem is, as it always was, the capaciousness of the concept, the umbrellalike nature of the charge: sexual harassment includes both demanding sex in exchange for a job or a comment about someone’s dress. The words used in workshops — “uncomfortable,” “inappropriate,” “hostile” — are vague, subjective, slippery. Feminists and liberal pundits say, with some indignation, that they are not talking about dirty jokes or misguided compliments when they talk about sexual harassment, but, in fact, they are: sexual harassment, as they’ve defined it, encompasses a wide and colorful spectrum of behaviors.

[…]

The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose: when I was at Princeton in the ’90s, the guidelines distributed to students about sexual harassment stated, “sexual harassment may result from a conscious or unconscious action, and can be subtle or blatant.” It is, of course, notoriously hard to control one’s unconscious, and one can behave quite hideously in one’s dreams, but that did not deter the determined scolds.

If this language was curiously retrograde in the early ’90s, if it harkened back to the protection of delicate feminine sensibilities in an era when that protection was patently absurd, it is even more outdated now when women are yet more powerful and ascendant in the workplace. In her brilliant and enduring critique of the women’s movement in 1972, Joan Didion wrote that certain strains of feminism were based on the idea of women as “creatures too ‘tender’ for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets… too ‘sensitive’ for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life.”

[…]

Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, excessive or confused, where sexual interest is always absent or reciprocated, in other words a universe that does not entirely resemble our own. We don’t legislate against meanness, or power struggles, or political maneuvering, or manipulation in offices, and how could we? So should we be legislating against rogue flirtations, the floating out of invitations? […]

[…]

In our effort to create a wholly unhostile work environment, have we simply created an environment that is hostile in a different way? Is it preferable or more productive, is it fostering a more creative or vivid office culture, for everyone to vanish into Facebook and otherwise dabble online? Maybe it’s better to live and work with colorful or inappropriate comments, with irreverence, wildness, incorrectness, ease.

Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from the risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal? Should we aspire to the drab, cautious, civilized, quiet, comfortable workplace all of this language presumes and theorizes? At this late date, perhaps we should be worrying about different forms of hostility in our workplace.

None of these arguments is new, naturally: equity feminists have for years been making these same arguments. But what we’re beginning to see is a pushback, even in the academic universe long controlled by second-wave or gender feminists — those I’ve called establishment feminists — against the stifling totalitarianism and double standards forced on a culture in the throes of all sort of manufactured social guilt.

Various grievance group industries or lobbies or political blocs are beginning to witness their messages mocked and dismissed and marginalized — not just by conservatives, but by those they’d hoped would help them retain the political power their grievance posture afforded them in a country awash in PC. Cries of racism have lost much of their force, as “racism” has been defined down to mean, eg., “disagreeing with the economic policies of a Black President,” or a child calling his dog “boy” in the presence of an elderly Black man who may himself have once been called “boy” in a derisive manner. “Homophobia” has been defined down to mean “disagree with the cultural institution of same-sex marriage by judicial decree”. And sexism, and its politically vital component, “sexual harassment,” has taken on so subjective a form as to be, frankly, ridiculous as it’s been socially deployed.

And deployed is precisely the right word: too many frivolous claims used to game the system against risk-averse employers trying to negotiate a litigious climate steeped in PC bromides and faux self-righteousness, has led to a culture of nuisance settlements and potentials for blackmail.

But the times, at least in the popular consciousness, are a-changing. The fact is, the various grievance movements, regardless how they started out and however laudable their initial intentions, have long since become about power; and once the public recognized that — and began the counter-assault on PC dicta by way of mockery and derision (balanced with the spread across political divides of more sober arguments against the linguistic bullying of these identity blocs) — the slow but much needed diminution of such cynical power politics may finally have begun in earnest.

And we will all be better off for it.

(h/t geoffb)

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update: more here.