The delusion that Elizabeth Warren "slut-shamed" Kirsten Gillibrand.

I'm reading "Did Elizabeth Warren Just Call Her Fellow Senator a Slut?" (by Tyler O'Neil at Pajamas Media) because it was linked by Glenn Reynolds in a post that says "And yesterday [Warren] was 'slut-shaming' fellow Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand."

O'Neil is talking about Warren's response to this Trump tweet...

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!

... which I blogged about here. I said a few things about what Trump was doing with that tweet, but I ended with:

Trump is toying with sexual innuendo. The woman is "USED!" and she "begg[ed]" and "would do anything."

So it didn't surprise me when, later, I saw that Elizabeth Warren tweeted (in response to Trump's tweet):

Are you really trying to bully, intimidate and slut-shame @SenGillibrand? Do you know who you're picking a fight with? Good luck with that, @realDonaldTrump....

That's not Warren slut-shaming Gillibrand. That's Warren seeing the same thing I saw, I believe. I said "toying with," where she used the device of asking a question, and I said "sexual innuendo" where she said "slut-shaming." It's the same point.

O'Neil concedes that Trump's language "does seem sexually suggestive," which I think gets him as far as agreeing with me. So what's different about how Warren put it? O'Neil says the term "slut-shaming" is a way to criticize someone who's "blaming the victim of sexual assault" because she was acting or dressing a certain way, so that would mean that Warren implied that Gillibrand must have been overtly manifesting sexuality and that it was wrong of Trump to react to her expressiveness in a negative way.

I think that's what O'Neil is groping at. I'm trying to help O'Neil make sense even as I think that O'Neil does not make sense and that whatever shred of sense there may be is used at the price of looking as though he'd just do anything to attack Elizabeth Warren.

Which accusations of sexual harassment are the same thing that has in the past been called "slut shaming"?

This is a question I've been puzzling over for a few days.

One answer is cynical but too easy and therefore boring and distracting: What men do is called harassment, but women can do the same thing and if you criticize them at all, you'll get criticized for slut shaming. Some might say it's a justified female privilege because the odds are so much greater that a man wants sexual overtures from a woman and because the odds are so much less that a man will feel physically threatened by a woman. Others will say this female privilege discriminates against men or is hypocritical, because you're ready to punish men for what women get away with all the time.

But maybe the term "slut shaming" is applied to different words/behavior than the term "sexual harassment." Please help me explore this topic.

Wikipedia has an article, "Slut Shaming":

Slut-shaming is defined by many as a process in which women are attacked for their transgression of accepted codes of sexual conduct, i.e., of admonishing them for behavior or desires that are more sexual than society finds acceptable....

Maybe "slut shaming" is mostly done because of the way the person is dressed and the knowledge that she is sexually active, it excludes things like groping and aggressive propositioning, and it does not include the element of pressuring anyone else to provide sex in order to get some non-sex benefit (like a career benefit). It's just a sex-for-sex exchange offered and freely rejectable, without consequences.

ADDED: I'm reading some comments and seeing one key issue. Slut shaming is something women do to other women, because they resent the competition and want to rein in the woman who is perceived as too sexually attractive. You might want to say sexual harassment is different, because the woman who attracts sexual attention doesn't want it and is asking to be defended from it. And yet the other women — the non-attractive — can also complain about sexual harassment. If a superior is offering career advancement if women get sexual with him, the women who don't want to be "sluts" have a grievance. And the woman who is perceived as sexually active and expressive — the "slut" — can inspire other people in the workplace to think she's going to get the advantage that isn't available to me.

That's all very different from what got me started thinking about the question in the post title. I was imagining Harvey Weinstein going on the offensive and saying, You're slut-shaming me! I'm a sexually active, sexually expressive man, and the prudes and the envious are trying to repress me.