Look you can attack me personally and question my morality all you want.
But the only thing that will achieve is prevent a reasonable conversation on ***ual harrassment. If you start with the attitude that "bw has a different view on this, he must be a ***ist, woman hating, creep' you have already killed the conversation.
I don't believe that it was harrassment, and I should be able to say that without certain labels and insinuations. If you disagree with me, that's fine as well. But that doesn't give you a higher moral ground.
When I said "Not saying she is entirely responsible for this, but more the reaction in the media by other journalist", I was referring to the backlash.
I never said any of those things. I asked why you get to tell Mel McLaughlin that she should have laughed it off. You're completely denying her actual experience (whatever that experience actually was) by attempting to police her reaction.
I'm superficially sympathetic to the notion of not labelling it '***ual harassment'. Not in any defence of what Gayle did, but for the point that OS raised about trivialising 'actual' ***ual harassment. However, doing that strikes me as a classic case of the whataboutery that Spark was talking about ("there's worse so this isn't
real ***ual harassment"), and three men are contributing to a definition of what constitutes ***ual harassment and are policing how actual victims and actual women use that term.
Once more, I'm not quite sure why you (or I, for that matter) get to tell women what is or is not ***ual harassment. Hence, up until now I've tried to avoid commenting on that side of the debate.
And there is no way that McLaughlin should be
blamed in any way, shape, or form for the backlash against Gayle. Gayle did what he did, and he has to cop the consequences of that. McLaughlin is in no way responsible for that, and suggesting that she is responsible is the absolute height of stupidity and arrogance (especially since she'd basically said nothing after the fact)