Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on ‘Microaggressions started out as a legitimate issue’.

Like, I can see putting a hand on someone’s knee as being actually innocent, even though invasion of personal space is always suspect. I had a coworker who always put his hands on people’s backs when talking to them at their desks, for instance. It made me uncomfortable, for obvious reasons, but I didn’t attribute ill intent to it, because the dude was probably autistic. On the other hand, it can absolutely be anything but innocent, and there’s no way for a woman (or much less often a man) to know the intent motivating the incoming hand. For some reason, we have yet to evolve the ability to read each other’s thoughts. So we either condemn hands on knees entirely or try to determine which hands on which knees are problematic. The former option is, of course, easier to implement, but as Thomas Sowell says, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs,” and it’s hard to predict what the trade-offs. Chesterton’s Fence and whatnot.

But the crotch-to-backside thing? How could anyone, even a male, not recognize that as sexually aggressive? Nothing could epitomize more perfectly what sexual harassment is than pressing clothed cock against clothed butt. It’s miming the act. It’s a velvet glove, a veiled threat, a transgression with just enough ambiguity to allow plausible deniability. Do these male friends not believe that there are men who actually do that kind of shit? Is the issue the same kind of oblivious theory of mind failure that lets people believe that Putin wouldn’t use nuclear weaponry if Russia were losing a war or that no man would ever dress like a woman just in order to get into women’s intimate spaces?

This is actually one of the reasons I hate “microaggressions”. In order to render the claimant infallible, the concept makes actual harm irrelevant to the claim’s truth. But this means that actual harm is irrelevant to the discussion! Imagined and performative victimhood is put on the same moral footing as actual, genuine, real victimization. Sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault are reduced to mere perceptions and thoughts in your mind. It’s just that your mind makes it “real” in the Matrix-like way of social constructivism.

Further, the “micro” part is really the standpoint epistemology component. The aggression is micro in the sense that those in the oppressor class cannot see it with their own eyes, instead requiring the assistance of someone with the appropriate social positionality to see for them. That is to say, it’s in principle impossible to construct an argument that would allow a man to understand why any particular behavior is harmful to women.