I’ll start with the last thing you wrote because it speaks volumes and is the crux of the issue, as far as I’m concerned:

Personal-is-political anecdote: I happen to hate it when a coworker (particularly a superior) slaps me on the back. I feel invaded by it even though I know it is well-intentioned. So when it happens, I say something like “Please don’t do that any more” in a very neutral tone. This immediately provokes a defensive diatribe: “I didn’t mean anything by it, it was just a friendly gesture, can’t you take a joke?!” at which I grit my teeth so as not to make a bad situation worse. All of which of course is exactly what a woman gets if she protests a hand on her knee. So, in a very small but not insignificant way, #metoo. It’s the recipient of touches who gets to decide whether they are acceptable or not.

I’ll say two things about this anecdote. First of all, this tells me a bit more about your own vantage point because, see, I also don’t like it if anyone, whether a superior or an inferior or anyone at work, slaps me on the back, and I even dislike fist bumps and/or hugs in lieu of handshakes. But you know what, and here’s the key difference: unlike you, if someone does this kind of thing to me, I put my own psyche and ego aside and think, “Okay, this guy/gal is just doing whatever comes naturally to him/her, and they don’t mean anything bad by it, so don’t make them feel awkward about it and just deal with it.” And you know what happens when I do that? It doesn’t turn into a big deal for me either, whereas if I’d said something, then it would make the other person feel apologetic or defensive, just as you said, and then create needless acrimony that I’d have to spend my time mulling over, which is not worth it to me. My viewpoint on this is that a part of maturity is having the discipline to grin and bear it in harmless instances like this. You, on the other hand, say something about it, and I find that to be a grossly inappropriate reaction, even if I share your underlying sentiment. And, frankly, I think you deserve the “defensive diatribe” you get in response, and you deserve your co-workers, behind your back, probably saying things like, “What’s up with that uptight A-hole who threw a hissy fit and started lecturing me after I gave him a friendly slap on the back?” The same thing that’s true of you is also true of some of these cases that have animated the #MeToo movement. Some are real harassment or assault, and others are just instances when someone made someone else feel a bit uncomfortable. A mature, adult culture teaches mature adults to deal with it and move on. A culture of brittle victimhood of the sort we’re migrating over to and that infantilizes women teaches them to be offended and traumatized.

That’s the first point about your anecdote that I wanted to make. The second is, perhaps, even more important. I actually just responded to someone else with some points that would probably be relevant in my discussion with you, so I’ll quote two paragraphs that I wrote there in lieu of reinventing the wheel:

The #MeToo movement has, in my view, actually trivialized real sexual assault by completely conflating legitimate concerns about serious sexual assault that goes unpunished with trivial nonsense about mere “unwanted sexual advances” of the kind engaged in by Al Franken, Donald Trump, Louis CK or Charlie Rose that mature women should be able to get past without thinking it’s a big deal that scars them for life. There are power imbalances in life and in the workplace all the time, and this is not gender-specific. On a daily basis, in every aspect of life, powerful men and powerful women behave abominably towards less powerful men and less powerful women. Workplace hazing rituals of all sorts are common. Bosses mistreat, insult and berate their employees, get them to do things they don’t want to be doing, etc., and the employee has to grin and bear it, at the risk of losing a job. Sexual advances are just one sub-species of this larger problem. This is life. We need to be raising kids that are resilient, that will be able to take it on the chin and move on without feeling victimized by this kind of stuff. What we’re doing instead is trying to turn a bit of over-the-line behavior at some office party that got out of hand into a big deal 10 years down the road and, as a result, create a generation of women who feel like they’re traumatized victims of sexual assault, just like we’ve already created a generation of African-Americans who feel like they’re they’re traumatized victims of racism and white supremacy.

We need balance, and we need to stop infantilizing women and start frankly acknowledging the manner in which women avail themselves of their sexuality to achieve their own goals. I would bet that for every one man in the media or entertainment industry that has crossed the line with a woman, there are probably two or three women who tempted, teased, flirted and slept their way to the top. Why is it okay for women to take advantage of men by using their sexuality in this way, but it’s not okay for men to take advantage of women in response? Do we need a #MenToo movement in response to the #MeToo movement? The reality is that sexual interactions, as I said above, are complicated, and we’re best off leaving most of them in the private realm, where they belong.

You see how this interfaces with your anecdote? Yes, you’re exactly right. Your superiors in the office are going to do things that make you feel insulted, demeaned, used, abused, harassed and worse. If a mere slap on the back is enough to set you off, I don’t know how you handle incidents that are a bit more significant than that. I’m not saying that we need to turn the other cheek anytime someone does something we feel is inappropriate, no matter how egregious, but my point is that it’s a question of degree, and learning how to navigate these kinds of cringeworthy incidents is part of what everyone, men and women alike, has to learn in their lives.

We need to be making distinctions between real sexual assault that breaks laws and trivial nonsense that people should be able to handle. That’s the line the #MeToo movement is eviscerating.

Many of your other points amount to this, if I may paraphrase and summarize: yeah, yeah, men tend to act a certain way right now, but there’s no reason that can’t change in the future, just like it’s changed in the past, so why is it so unfair to expect men to use some self-restraint, even if women are dressed or acting provocatively?

And my response to that is, sure, you can try to change the way men react. But don’t you find something a bit odd about the fact that the nature of the change being called for is completely unilateral? Part of the point I was making in my original article is that we live in this increasingly schizophrenic society that, on the one hand, is perfectly okay with women exercising less and less restraint in deploying their sexuality in the way they look and the way they act and, on the other hand, expects men to exercise more and more restraint in response. Isn’t it a bit (as in very) weird to have this approach of “women can look and act like whores but men have to react like saints and puritans”? So, yeah, you can try to force men to keep restraining their natural sexual impulses (though if you go too far with that, they wind up being like repressed priests who turn to molesting children for their kicks), but then why wouldn’t you also try to force women to restrain their natural sexuality? Either we should be saying, okay, our society’s become too sexually unrestrained and we need to turn back the dial for everyone and go a bit in the direction of some Islamic theocracy, or else we should be saying, okay, we want to live in a sexually open society, so women should do what they’re going to do and men should do what they’re going to do, and we’ll just use the criminal law and our common sense to draw lines when they need to be drawn. And there are obviously places between the poles of, on the one hand, a theocracy and, on the other hand, Sodom and Gomorrah, and that’s fine, but one thing we can’t do is have a Sodom-and-Gomorrah standard for women and a Shariah-law-standard for men. That just doesn’t work for anyone.

And I’ll again quote something I wrote in that other response:

[S]exuality is inherently complicated, playful and risque. It’s a give-and-take, where women often do things to entice men or lead men on, and men might misread signals or think something’s being suggested or offered that’s just in their heads. And women also change their minds about events that transpired. If they feel self-disgusted after what they did during a boozy night out, they might suddenly start feeling like victims when, in fact, they were complicit. This should not later become the subject of this kind of public shaming, firings, disciplinary actions, etc., where decades have passed since something may or may not have happened.

One last thing in response to this comment of yours, as far as why in my experience men are the ones who tend to enjoy philosophy, literature, politics and culture discussions more than women. You wrote:

You might want to examine what factors in how you and your friends conduct discussions tend to exclude women. I enjoy discussing literature, politics, and philosophy (and related subjects) with both men and women, but in mixed groups it is a little more difficult to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to contribute. Not to put too fine a point on it, men often don’t know when to stop talking.

I actually am someone who tends to be hyper aware of these kinds of dynamics and when someone who doesn’t often contribute to a discussion speaks up, I’ll go out of my way to listen and even to politely shut up some of my more verbose friends. But it’s ultimately not about that. I think it’s more a matter of socialization, as I said. As soon as the discussion turns to some of these more “heavy” topics, many women, I find, tend to tune out and start chatting with their girlfriends about lighter fare. I don’t think this is anything that can’t be changed over time, but for now, to repeat myself, “it is what it is.”