[allhailkatt]

I'm guessing it's going to create power differences, where those willing to deal with social complexity will end up on top. The more people you can talk to, the better your career will do.

Much like any game of Settlers of Catan.

These incidents have been pushed against for a while, and while the same rhetoric was used in the 70's, nonetheless here we are without gendered want ads.

[wahern]

  > where those willing to deal with social complexity will
  > end up on top

You could also draw the opposite conclusion: bullies and predators like Harvey Weinstein are more successful on average preciously because they're less risk averse and less inhibited when leveraging their power. The #MeToo campaign doesn't change that dynamic much, especially at the extreme where you find abusers. The consequences come, if at all, long after the reward.

This doesn't just apply to sexual harassment. Sexual harassers are adept at wielding their power, which is an incredibly useful skill in any field. Very often that translates into socially aggressive behavior, even if it doesn't escalate to anything technically improper.[1] If the consequences aren't swift and transparent, theoretically we just end up evolving more skillful harassers and/or culling the aggressive non-harassers.

Just another way of looking at things. I wouldn't premise any real decisions on such a theory, but it's something I wonder about, at least in the business context. I mean, there's a reason success in business and politics correlates so strongly with so-called psychopathic character traits.

[1] What immediately comes to mind is that hilarious scene in Along Came Polly where Alec Baldwin violates almost every imaginable aspect of bathroom etiquette as part of a not-so-subtle dominance display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHApjKcZAgI

Because powerful people cross these boundaries so much, you can literally signify power by exaggerating this sort of behavior. See, e.g., the above hilarious clip (because comedy is funnier when it's rooted in shared experience) and Donald Trump (from the truth is stranger than fiction department). In fact, I suspect that it's precisely because we (both men and women) are so used to powerful people crossing these boundaries that women find themselves in difficult situations where the nominal boundary had long been crossed yet they were nonetheless dazed by the turn to more sexually aggressive behavior.