The basket of names of men accused of sexual impropriety is filling right up. More than 100 so far. Now begins the pushback, and with it a long process of deciding whom to acquit in the court of public opinion, whom to forgive, whom to punish.

Chief among the pushers back is Catherine Deneuve, excellent and beautiful French actor, who was among 100 women who signed a letter stating that men’s “freedom to pester” is “indispensable to sexual freedom.” The signers (writers, performers, academics and businesswomen) said they see a “hatred of men and sexuality” in the wave of finger-pointing. Part of me isn’t surprised that it would be 100 French women who push back. Vive la difference, after all, has described France’s perspective on sex for centuries. They fear we may be throwing out the baby with the bath water.

This is more than just a matter of nuances of language. The pushers back are correct that the swarm of accusations has failed to distinguish flirting from impropriety from harassment from assault. Most of us who want to end sexual predation do not want to end flirting, do not want to make it even more difficult for people to connect in what may become a real romance. Most of us exist, after all, because two people decades ago liked what they saw, liked better whom they met and then fell in love.

And when all are equal or when nothing can come of flirting or swooning, then flirt away, swoon away. If neither has power over the other, then no one needs fear having to yield to power by giving sex or other attention. Or, when I fell for Natalie Wood in “Rebel Without a Cause,” there was no possible outcome, so let me swoon away.

It’s not only power. It can be simple repetition, too. That can turn flirting into harassment. If a man whistles at a woman on the street and she tells him to stifle, he should stifle. Too often, rebuffed men try to stitch up their egos, so they make another approach. And another. And another. That is harassment. Sometimes it is stalking. Can you say Roy Moore (former chief justice of Alabama who was reported to have been banned from a shopping mall in Gadsden, Alabama, for stalking teen-age girls)?

There is a cultural context here, too. And culture changes reluctantly and over time.

Consider this artifact. I began high school in 1954 in Athens, Tennessee. At McMinn County High (the white school in town), football ruled. Every Friday, we had a pep rally in the auditorium. After Principal Foster led a prayer, he called the cheerleaders to the stage and encouraged us boys to run down the aisles and stand at the foot of the stage (so we could look up the cheerleaders’ skirts). No one in the schoolhouse suggested that this was improper. Mr. Foster, after all, was known to be a pious Southern Baptist.

We had pep rallies for our boys basketball team when I returned to University High School in Columbia, Missouri, for my final three years, but no way in the world would Dr. Maxwell have prayed before the assembly or told the boys to rush forward so they could look up the cheerleaders’ skirts. ‘Course, our cheerleaders wore Bermuda shorts.

Consider also that some people may confuse sexual predation with nasty dispositions or non-sexually toxic situations. I’ve worked in six newsrooms. In some, we turned out very good newspapers. In none of them was I ever aware of sexual predation.

The atmosphere at The Kansas City Star was toxic at best. I saw male reporters cry when berated by an editor, even heard one quit over the two-way radio when the city editor commanded him to interview a family whose daughter had just been killed. That was not sexual harassment, but it was toxic behavior, even harassment, and we were taught that as we rose into the ranks of editors we should keep things poisonous.

The Star was a very good local paper and has won a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, none of them during my four years on staff.

At The Montreal Gazette, we published excellent newspapers, winning National Newspaper Awards (the Canadian Pulitzer) year after year and, in 1976, bringing down the provincial government of Premier Robert Bourassa with our investigative reporting of corruption. I won none of those prizes, but one of my reporters won for public service reporting and a friend asked me to edit his series on food corporations before he turned it in to his editors. He won an NNA for investigative reporting.

The harshest thing I ever heard in the Gazette newsroom may have been when the city editor, buried to his hairline in copy, looked at me through his eyebrows while checking a story I had just edited and said, “There’s only one ‘c’ in acute, Bob.”

Good newspapering, and no doubt other good work, can happen in both a poisonous and a congenial setting. But poison doesn’t always mean sexual impropriety, harassment or assault. We need to distinguish whether harassment is sexual predation or just nastiness.

It is more than a little likely that among all those accused since the Harvey Weinstein story broke in October are some men who have been victimized by former associates who see an opportunity for a spotlight that has eluded them. And it is more than a little likely that, given our culture of a-boy-chases-a-girl-until-she-catches-him, some of the accused sincerely believe they were only mutually flirting or playfully and mutually teasing.

Some lines are clear. Sexual assault is clear, even if it is just unwanted touching. Sexual harassment and stalking should be clear. But it gets murkier when someone believes he is complimenting someone else’s appearance or tells a suggestive joke among equals. Here is where we need to make distinctions, and individuals will make individual distinctions about what is harassment. Vive les differences.

Bob Neal lives in New Sharon. He likes romance and hates harassment, sexual or otherwise.

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