I always had this image in my head — a predator would be old, entitled, conservative, have poor boundaries, be loud and aggressive and friendless.

I was so wrong. Mine was a well loved, femenist woke liberal in his 30s.

And it blew my mind. This man’s entire personality was his self-righteousness. Even now, his twitter feed is him shitting on colonialists, capitalists and cronies. And everyone still believes him.

I did too. But in my defence, I was still in uni. 21 year olds don’t have fully developed brains after all.

I’d like to believe that I won’t spend so much of my time in shock again. But either way, I wish someone had told me this when I was younger.

Intentions really don’t matter. It is possible to care about someone but be a toxic presence in their lives.

In most cases, it doesn’t matter if you intended to create a hostile environment. For two reasons — first, it doesn’t change the fact that the environment was hostile for an employee. And second, how can anyone prove your intentions but yourself? It’s like when I was a kid and my brother would claim that he wasn’t bullying me, I was getting bullied. It’s a stupid argument isn’t it?

So if you repeatedly ask someone to sleep with you with the best intentions, and you also happen to own the company, congratulations, you are now a bully.

Flat hierarchies aren’t a real thing.

Need I say anymore? Startups like pretending like everyone has equal power and everyone is equal and everything is fair. But it isn't. A founder in a sub 20 person company can quite easily get away with harassment. Because who is there to hold them accountable? They decide who comes and goes. They sign the checks. They hold all the power.

Friendships rarely exist across power dynamics.

Following our previous point, employers  and employees are rarely friends. The same holds true for managers and direct reports. There is a power dynamic that tips the scale. You might still have an honest relationship, but that doesn’t mean that one person doesn’t hold power over another.

No one has ever fucked their way to the top; only to the middle

There is this popular idea that women welcome sexual advances in the workplace because it’s easy to fuck your way to the top.

And that is bullshit — no one has ever fucked their way to the top. Maybe middle management — but no one loses so much of themselves for such little gain.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s begin.

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