Comments | zandperl: My take on Geoff Marcy

zandperl

My take on Geoff Marcy

Nov 05, 2015 12:59

Trigger warning: sexual harassment, sexual assault

Got to emailing with my father about the Geoff Marcy case, and decided to share here.

( You read those trigger warnings right? )

sexual assault, sexual harassment, trigger warning, geoff marcy

Comments 4

jennekirby November 5 2015, 20:12:26 UTC

Yeah, Buzzfeed has definitely done an interesting job of embracing the high-paying viral stuff so they can spend $ on the low-paying serious journalism.

I've been following this story and it's both sickening and 100% unsurprising to me, as a woman with a graduate degree in the physical sciences.

zandperl November 5 2015, 22:19:10 UTC

Marcy's actions are unsurprising.

I want Berkeley's lack of response to be surprising but it isn't.

The amazing outpouring of support from the astronomy community - the 2,500 signatures, the Berkeley astro grad student letter, the Berkeley astro postdoc letter, the Berkeley astro faculty letter, the many blog posts, the many tweets, and so on - all of that, now THAT is surprising to me, and in the best possible way.

Edit: And FWIW the author, Ghorayshi, did a biology degree at Berkeley, I think a Master's? So maybe she had connections in the astronomy department, in HR, or involved with EEO stuff who clued her in. Clearly she was able to track down at least one of the still-unnamed complainants though, as well as getting interviews w/ people in or previously in that department.

q10 November 5 2015, 22:31:09 UTC

'As for what he did, they're calling it 10 years of sexual harassment, but to me something described as "Marcy placed his hand on her leg, slid his hand up her thigh and grabbed her crotch" isn't just words, that's assault.'

THIS. I think it's tremendously important not to downplay the evils of verbal sexual harassment, or the real danger and individual and societal harm it can represent, but calling incidents like the one described in quotes 'harassment' without further explanation is obscuring some pretty seriously big-deal-ish parts of the picture.

zandperl November 5 2015, 22:54:21 UTC

Just occurred to me, sexual harassment usually refers to a pattern of behavior, while sexual assault can be a single incident but requires touching. I was thinking that calling that incident harassment was downplaying it, but I'm wondering if it would also be reasonable to say that calling it an isolated assault would be downplaying the systematic nature of Marcy's actions. It's kinda like there's two axes of badness here, systematic repetition of events, and severity of individual events, and this one's bad on both axes ( ... )