> This is, sadly, the best thing to do because you don't know who is going to take offense.
Then excessive avoidance gets reinterpreted as snobbishness, sexism, not wanting to be inclusive, and so on. "Men actively avoid me and sit father away during meetings, they don't invite me for beers after works, it is a hostile environment". Anyway it is a fine line. And one can interpret a lot of behaviors as stemming from sexism or misogynism even if they are not.
No, it's not a fine line at all. There is a huge chasm between ogling someone undertaking physical activity and excessively avoiding them. You probably behave toward your male colleagues in a way that would fit neatly somewhere between these two extremes. Is it particularly a US issue, this inability to behave like a grown-up at work? In the UK, in my experience, men and women tend to work together, on an equal footing, with no problem whatsoever.
> There is a huge chasm between ogling someone undertaking physical activity
If anyone -- attractive man, unattractive man, attractive woman, unattractive woman -- started hula-hooping in the middle of the office I would expect people to stare. Not because it's sexual, but because it's peculiar. The gap between "stare" and "ogle" is hardly objective, let alone a "chasm."
Julie described the group of men as 'gawking'; as far as I'm aware, this is more or less interchangeable with the term 'ogling', in common use here in the UK. This is significantly different from just staring - it implies a sexual undercurrent, i.e. paying particular attention to someone's physical characteristics. Maybe this is a cultural thing, but the clear implication in the original report was that the staring/ogling was inappropriate, particularly because it was undertaken by a group solely consisting of men.
Ogling is defined as "stare at in a lecherous manner."
The hard part here is defining "lecherous" but it would seem to imply that he is watching in a way that signals sexual intent.
It's worth noting that women are generally much better at interpreting body language than men are, so it's possible that a guy is watching the woman dance and getting some sort of erotic enjoyment from it, tries his best to hide it but some subconscious subtle clue gives him away.
Having said that, hoop dancing would seem like an inappropriate thing to do in most offices to begin with but I would say the same thing about nerf gun fights.
Then excessive avoidance gets reinterpreted as snobbishness, sexism, not wanting to be inclusive, and so on. "Men actively avoid me and sit father away during meetings, they don't invite me for beers after works, it is a hostile environment". Anyway it is a fine line. And one can interpret a lot of behaviors as stemming from sexism or misogynism even if they are not.