I think there are a number of questions that need to be asked here:
- What is defined as "helping" women?
- How many actual cases of men being seriously punished for such incidents as holding open a door or trying to help a woman on a project exist?
- Why is it that men are threatened by the idea of being punished for wrongdoing as opposed to being threatened by the idea that other men might be harassing and/or assaulting women in the workplace?
On question one, sometimes I think men get a way too focused on the little things they call "helping" like holding a door open rather than actual help like ensuring women get paid the same as men or making sure that claims made to HR are taken seriously rather than women getting the third degree. Men want to be perceived as moral upstanding citizens by their actions in a moment but don't seem to take a look at the broader picture ("tunnel vision"). Now that men are facing actual consequences for serious violations of their workplace policies, it seems to me more likely that men are crying discrimination over the fact that they have to be concerned with getting caught doing something wrong rather than being concerned about the staggering number of cases of women being harassed or assaulted in the workplace.
One question two, as I mentioned in my commentary for question one, men have a ridiculous case of tunnel vision. One incident where an HR department overzealously punished a man for an honest misunderstanding and suddenly that makes men on the same level as women. We're talking about undoing centuries of systematic dehumanization: women, for the better part of human existence, have been considered property not people in Western civilization. Women didn't gain the right to vote in America until 1920 (and even then it was only white women with wealth and leisure to go vote as opposed to women of color and working women). As history as shown, legislation doesn't reflect the practice of the people of the land. Just because women have had certain rights for a number of years, it doesn't mean women had the practical ability to do what they should have been able to do.
On question three, I have seen a quip from a professor at my alma mater which went viral a year or two ago on social media, "The only thing worse than being homophobic, racist, sexist, or classist is being perceived to be those things." I see a lot of men gripe and complain about the idea that they have to be careful about what they say and do, but that in no way is equivalent to the harm that being racist, sexist, homophobic, or classist does to people. It's a fundamental lack of perspective created by never having to worry about the things which people of color, women, queer people, and socioeconomically disadvantaged people have to deal with.
Stipulation 1: I am largely against PC-ism. I think it may have started out and is continued by genuine folks who want to make their classrooms, workplaces, and social environments a safe place for historically and currently disenfranchised people, but I think being PC creates the same "tunnel vision" problem that men have. Words hurt, yes, but there are bigger fish to fry than making sure that someone uses all the correct terminology (this is especially important considering that queer terminology is a still-evolving, ever-developing dictionary of concepts). Furthermore, we cannot have conversations about actual progress if we're always tip-toeing around our words trying not erode someone's ego. So yeah, language is important but I think we get too hung-up on language then we miss the whole point of trying to change things.
Stipulation 2: Coming out of Call-Out Culture has been a real eye-opener. You see, there are lots of people out there who experience oppression on one or two axis (queer and suffering from mental illness, queer and living with a physical disability) who get caught up in a particularly violent and self-castrating ideology which paints itself as the only true form of progress. They use their oppressed status as a way to shield themselves from actual, useful criticism and refuse to acknowledge that any strategy other than their own could be more beneficial to helping themselves and others like them. Instead, this ideology creates such hostility, escalating every confrontation into a zero-sum game that many people who would otherwise help are completely turned off by what they've seen.
