The thing that always gets me about those articles, and I've read a few, is the blithe assumption that men don't deal with many of the same issues.*
Almost all of the calculations she describes I remember doing daily when I was a younger man, whether that was working out whether I was going to be the victim of physical violence,** or bullied by some over-entitled middle-aged dick-wad while at work, or offend someone who is crying out to take offence, or whatever. De-escalation, awareness of risk, policing your own language, behaviour, tone, etc. Those are all things that a lot of men have a great deal of experience with.
This comment not to deny that women are consistently faced with sexism, or that sexual harassment isn't a real and common phenomenon, and that a lot of women find it an ever-present oppressive force in their daily lives, of course.
* largely at the hands of other men, so, (some) men suck taken as read.
** likely, rather than rare, where I am from.**
*** and I've written before, that, in an almost direct mirror of the point in the linked article, there's a lot of signalling and behaviour that men are aware of and doing, that some women are completely oblivious to. I had the shit beaten out of me once because my then girlfriend wasn't reading the signals, and ignored the desperate de-escalation and signalling of submission that I was doing.
I am very curious to hear more about 2 ***, ttaM.
Possibly she just wanted you to get beat up.
This thread is kind of a sausage fest.
5: For evolutionary reasons, heterosexual men have the most keen insights into the experiences of heterosexual women.
I don't want to discredit ttam's experiences, but I do want to observe that whenever any post goes up about women's experiences, within three comments, someone (some man, I mean) always posts a comment which is some variation of, "But what about the MEN?"
Sorry, ttam. I know you didn't mean it that way.
It's just this always happens. Every single time.
I think part of the problem is the "we" of the original article. Sure, I think about how I'm presenting myself to the world. That means thinking about the racial breakdown of the group I'm part of at any given time, whether we're likely to read as straight or not, that sort of thing. It's not at all just about gender on its own. Some of the experiences resonated with me, but I think they'd have been more powerful if she'd spoken for herself instead of trying to speak for me too.
Of course, 2 isn't exactly universal either; I don't relate to it at all. I am definitely the "I don't deal with it, I don't get it" person that the article is addressing.
7: the post, or rather the huff linked from the post, isn't just about women's experiences, but specifically about how men generally are ignorant and dismissive of those experiences. So I think ttaM's point was kind of relevant, especially the ***.
There was an Ask Reddit thread a while back (that I'm too lazy to find) which asked women when they first noticed men looking at them in a sexual way, and the typical ages women were mentioning were scary young, like 11-12. The experience of being creeped on by a much older guy is apparently far more common than I'd thought.
10, well it's specifically about the men who leave comments asking whether the author isn't exaggerating the whole constantly-under-siege thing. And it's fair to say that I, personally, didn't have to worry about shit like that after grade school.
I'm going to generalize wildly here, and middle-class American men should call me out if I'm wrong (and, yeah, Delegar, I do feel the need to tidy up the "what about the men" issue before talking about the post itself, which I also have thoughts about), but I think middle-class American men generally live in a world where they feel almost completely secure from interpersonal violence that they didn't actively seek out. There are middle-class white American guys who are the kind of guy who gets into fights, that's a possibility. But if you're a middle-class white American guy who's not that kind of guy, your experience of violence is going to (really very rare) property crime, but almost never (past, maybe, kid fights in middle school?) the sort of socially mediated violence Matt is talking about.
Is that fair? I mean, I think it really is a UK/US distinction, but one that I am expecting the white middle-class American male commenters to back me up on.
(And the Huff Post article is, I think, aimed at the middle-class white American millieu, and doesn't sufficiently disclaim its non-universality.)
"Maybe I'm a total outlier."
Maybe her read would be that you're one of those who doesn't even notice they're doing it anymore.
Anyway, pace ttaM, while I could at most draw certain analogies from her experiences to race-related parallels, I don't think it should be the least bit controversial in any way that women come in for vastly more condescension, social pressure and outright invasiveness and intimidation than men do. Time has a great piece up on the view of both sides of the fence afforded to trans men, mostly a confirmation of things we already know but still darned interesting.
11: 12, here, is when the guy behind the cash register at Forbidden Planet started undercharging me for books and asked me to go to see his friend's band. Looking at Sally at the same age, I'm actually not, in retrospect, judging him that hard for being confused, if he was, and it wasn't a particularly aggressively threatening experience. But it did freak me the fuck out.
11: I guess it oughtn't to surprise us too much. I suspect most dudes can relate to the awkward experience of noticing a fine-looking "woman" on the street who turned out, at closer range, to be an early-developed girl of "holy-fuck-now-I-feel-like-a-pedo" age bracket. Not that I'm expecting anyone to admit to that experience necessarily, but those who've had it can feel certain that they've probably been that creepy older guy at some point.
(Actually trying to date someone who is twelve is of course a whole other league of creepy. I would hope most dudes don't relate to that. Ugh.)
What is it with the one-sentence paragraph and (especially) women's writing on the internet? Is every internet-writing woman under 35 secretly Bill Plaschke?
I couldn't. Get. through. The. Article.
Because of this.
Every single time.
You
Don't
Need
To
Universalize
Your
Formatting
Critiques.
DUDE, I was in the midst of writing the exact same comment as 18. I want to print that article and cram it into the authors gas tank and set it on fire.
18: Maybe HuffPo pays by the paragraph break oh wait ha ha nope.
21: Each paragraph break generates 23 more exposure units.
Does it spell something funny if you read down the initial letters of each paragraph?
I will confirm 13.1 from my perspective.
There is still a DID tantamount to DIK with intermale conflict/escalation/violence versus male/female. The former, as I gather, hinges much more on individuated considerations (strengths, attitudes, goals of the different parties); the latter, while still subject to those, falls more into pervasive structural patterns.
Nitpicking the article's prose style is boring as fuck of all you. Are you expecting to get an interesting conversation going about how long paragraphs should be?
Listen because your reality is not the same as hers.
Listen because her concerns are valid and not exaggerated or inflated.
(Covers ears) Too many paragraph breaks! Argggh!!
Would you be happier if she'd made them bullet points? Because that's what they are.
Anyway, taking Minivet's confirmation of my 13.1 as authoritative until someone disagrees about it, I will say that for a white American middle-class audience, the presumption that men aren't constantly worrying about managing/deescalating situations for their personal safety is correct.
Ta-Nehisi Coates just had a thing vaguely about this from someone who grew up in a black community -- I can't remember exactly what, but about strangers coming up to him and talking to him about stuff in a non-hostile but cluelessly annoying way, and thinking that black people don't do that because they are sensitively aware to the possibility that being annoying could turn violent.
28: Bullet points?! Jesus. Shoot me now.
(25 and 27 have it right.)
Most of what the author discussed applied to me in my teens and twenties. I started dating men in their twenties and thirties as a thirteen-year-old (mostly from the local BBS scene, but also church). Despite looking like a total dork with heavy bangs and bad skin who wore baggy t-shirts, jeans, and flannels everywhere (albeit one with breasts), I was most intensely cat-called at 14 and 15. I was frequently hit on by a high school teacher. I remember feeling intensely vulnerable, all of the time, but also excited because at least men thought I was worth paying attention to.
A lot of this improved in my mid- to late-twenties, which is also when I got married. I still looked pretty young, but I didn't quite radiate that sense of "Hey! Take advantage of me!" that I once did. I still get nervous when I'm in an enclosed space with men I don't know, or when I'm walking alone across campus at night.* Academic conferences are no longer fraught because I am exceptionally well-networked, and I can't imagine anyone thinking he could act inappropriately with me without immediate social sanction.
*I've noticed a tremendous difference between the US and Europe here. I feel much, much safer walking alone or in pairs late at night in Europe, and that sense of freedom is wonderful.
I take public trans, which mostly though not entirely accounts for the 2-3 times a year I feel I'm in fear-provoking, possibly-escalatiing-to-violence situations.
I thought RT backed up my sense of the frequency of this on a recent— last couple of years—thread.
I personally have to do some of the awareness stuff, but most white middle class American males don't live adjacent to genuinely unsafe neighborhoods. I never feel especially threatened, but there are blocks where I'm hyper-aware when walking, especially at night. But even that is mostly to keep from stumbling blindly into a situation; I don't imagine that there are predators eyeing me. To the extent that the interactions are social, it's communicating that I'm aware but indifferent, and so there's no reason to pay me any mind.
But yeah, beyond that, really outside normal experience. Although I should say that, working as I've done--either alone or in very small firms--I've never dealt with any sort of office politics that could even be cognate with what she describes. But it seems like what she's talking about (and I say "seems" partly because I skimmed) is specifically related to the underlying threat of physical assault, even if the assault is "just" an unwanted kiss. That is, deescalating to avoid being yelled at is really different from deescalating to avoid being hit or groped.
18 is correct.
13: I think middle-class American men generally live in a world where they feel almost completely secure from interpersonal violence that they didn't actively seek out.
Not American, but white-male-MC and this is true of me. Although my home country is extremely violent, the violence comes from outside the MC to take your stuff, it isn't interpersonal like ttaM describes. (I do recognize what he describes, from all-male environments, but in the MC it's just bullshit, actual violence is rare and not serious).
From this perspective, Fight Club is one of the most privileged movies of all time. Men so free from physical danger that they go around seeking it out.
Like idp, I only ever feel like shit is even threatening to go down while on the CTA.
I was wary of being 'that guy', and my comment was intended to be in any way in opposition to either feminism.*
But the idea that power imbalances, or dominance relations, or fear or discomfort in social situations are experiences alien or inaccessible to men didn't ring true. Because those are experiences that a lot of lower social status men, or men in particular kinds of social environment will be entirely familiar with.
* basically, the type of experience I was talking about is just another manifestation of 'teh patriarchy', and is a data point that is more in favour of a broadly feminist analysis, than against.
almost completely secure from interpersonal violence that they didn't actively seek out
I don't mean to quibble with your essential point, which I think is right, but an exception just occurred to me: sporting events. I'm given to understand that football and hockey games, in particular, can have a threat of violence in the stands, and it's very much a socially mediated thing: the drunk bro behind you spills beer on your back, now what?
I can't afford tickets to those sports, so I can't say how common that is--it may fall under "almost completely"--but from what I understand, if you're in the cheap seats a dozen times a year, you're going to experience that, if only indirectly (that is, the spill isn't on your back, but it's 3 seats down and you see the tension rising).
I live in what's arguably a gang neighborhood (California and Cermak, for those of you who know Chicago) and I do feel slightly vulnerable during the 30 seconds each night when I'm dismounting my bike, unplugging my headphones, and fumfering around with my keys. But clearly not that unsafe, since I'm willing to bike home late at night with headphones in.
re: 34
I rarely if ever experience that sort of thing now. Which is what, as a 40-something white male who lives a middle class of life of moderate privilege, you'd expect.
But it was a constant nagging background to my life up until my early 20s.
38: I went to a Steeler game this year. It seemed fine to the point of being like a bit of transplanted suburbia. Everybody was old because of the whole "I can't afford tickets" thing.
I've never been, but the iconic exception to 13 is a Trump rally.
Now that we're done for the moment, I think, with the menz, I will say that I am kind of with Heebie as not having experienced sexual aggression from men in terms of being afraid for my physical safety much at all. The thing with the bookstore clerk when I was a kid freaked me out, but I wasn't afraid of his escalating to violence, I just wasn't comfortable shopping there any more. Getting catcalled is an unpleasant experience, but I don't experience it as something that might turn into an attack (I could be wrong about this, I'm just talking feelings.) Inappropriate comments from co-workers? Pretty rare for me, and the two incidents I can think of that bothered me in recent years, I wasn't worrying about violence, I was just socially uncomfortable. (And neither was particularly egregious -- the sort of thing that would get to awful if they happened twice a day, but I'm personally coming up with a couple of incidents over the last few years, at which point they weren't that bad.)
I think falls under "actively seeking out".
I think with ttaM it's not an American vs UK thing, but a class thing. There are plenty of white men in the US who would have a similar experience, but not so much middle class.
middle-class American men generally live in a world where they feel almost completely secure from interpersonal violence that they didn't actively seek out.
This is true of me as well.
I read the linked article a couple of months ago and, while I think the basic point is important, I feel like I've seen more convincing pieces on the subject. But that does feel a bit like nit-picking. Things that are important enough to be worth repeating are worth repeating in ways that are slightly clunky -- and I don't have a good sense of what it is about the article that read as clunky to my ears.
From this perspective, Fight Club is one of the most privileged movies of all time. Men so free from physical danger that they go around seeking it out.
I am, as acknowledged, mostly free from physical danger, but that's part of what pissed me off about the movie. I found the scene in which they threaten the convenience store clerk appalling, and actively disliked the movie from that point on.
Because those are experiences that a lot of lower social status men, or men in particular kinds of social environment will be entirely familiar with.
Obligatory link to The Who's cover of "Young Man's Blues. But, that's getting far off-topic from the OP, and I apologize.
46: Yes, the series of articles on catcalling, creepers, the miasma of lurking sexual violence and its effect on women's decision making has done a good job of making me viscerally aware of how pervasive these experiences are.
Frustrating, because there's so little that can be done--as many articles point out, simply having a man present changes the dynamic. Be aware and don't shut women down when they share their experiences is a good first step, but I'm not sure what the second step should be.
someone (some man, I mean) always posts a comment which is some variation of, "But what about the MEN?"
This is true, and it's also true that "what about..." is usually meant to be dismissive, but the other way to see this situation is that identity politics really does make solidarity difficult.
I have to think there's a wide range of experiences here, or a wide range of how one reacts to such incidents. I have had creeps creep - most memorably when I was 16 and creeped on by an older dude who I then encountered the next week at my dad's 20 year high school reunion. But I've never felt vulnerable -- except when pregnant or recovering from birth. So maybe it's tied to feeling physically capable (even if in my case it's delusional to think I can physically fend off an attacker - size matters)?
29: *Between the World and Me* has some really vivid descriptions of the toll African Americans take from constantly having to be on guard against violence.
The thing about feeling vulnerable, now that I think about it, was more about the aftermath. At the time, I was a (mediocre) multi-sport athlete, and very invested in my image of myself as a tough tomboy. That said, I did not have any confidence that the adults in my life or surrounding society would be effective in standing up for me or helping me get out of a bad position.
Wrt to catcalling, I did feel physically vulnerable.
13: That has been sometimes true and sometimes not, depending on region. In the country as a child, I was battered multiple times. In the suburbs as an adult, I've only feared aggression when I biked (from cagers). As a child, I was assaulted once. In the city, I've been assaulted by a drunk person once and (verbally) by multiple road ragers. So depending on context, I do fear for my physical safety.
The article and the experiences described here are underscoring for me just how much my earliest (gross but unremarkable) experiences of harassment have fucked up my radar for what is actually sexual aggression. For example, I am hyper-aware of--and uneasy around--random men on the train with their hands in their pockets, even though (1) it's been a minute since I was the sort of ox-eyed tween public transportation wankers like to wank at, (2) there are many legitimate reasons for men to reach into their pockets, I guess. Meanwhile, handsy co-workers have caused genuine problems in my adult life, and apprehension around drunk male colleagues would be an understandable and probably advisable reaction, but it's just not there. Honestly I wish I had, in the language of the OP, internalized fear more broadly; instead I'm naïve in some situations and paranoid in others. Cool world!
My experience matches that of the woman in the article -- that is, from the time I was eleven, and a guy (who was probably 30, but seemed really old to me at the time) asked me if I had hair on my pussy yet, until I was about 35, I was constantly harassed and sexually threatened and had to deal with sexual approaches that I neither wanted nor encouraged -- many of them frightening, many of them fraught.
When I was 13, three guys in a car cat-called at me, "Hey, bitch, nice tits!" and when I yelled back that they were assholes, they chased me, in the car, into a parking garage, got out, and threatened me -- with what, you know, wasn't specified. I was terrified, which was what they intended, and I learned the lesson they meant to teach me.
When I was 20, I was riding my bike home from school when a guy in a delivery van cut me off on a deserted stretch of road, pretended he'd stopped me because he wanted to know what kind of bike I was riding, and then offered me $20 bucks if I'd get in his truck and give him a blow job.
When I was 22, a religious student in my Greek class told me I was a slut, because he thought my shorts were too short.
In graduate school, I went out drinking with the male students in the writing program, and one of the (male) students spiked my Dr. Pepper and then when I was incoherent from whatever it was he'd dosed me with, tried to drive me home -- Dr. Skull (my future husband) intervened, or I imagine I'd have been another date rape statistic.
These are just a few of the literally dozens and dozens of stories I can tell you.
At 35, I got a PhD and moved to Idaho, and the way I was treated changed. Now the men I encountered saw *me* as a threat, interestingly enough. I still had trouble; it was just a different sort of trouble.
A few months ago, my kid was standing on a street corner here in Fort Smith, waiting for me to pick her up, and a guy drove by and shouted at her, "Hey, baby! Nice tits!"
So it goes.
there are many legitimate reasons for men to reach into their pockets, I guess.
We have coins and phones and keys.
Sally gets catcalls -- they don't seem to bother her that much, but she gets them. Given the neighborhood, they run racialized -- she apparently gets 'Snowbunny' a fair amount. Or maybe only a few times, but she mentions it as memorable. Again, she doesn't talk about as frightening in terms of fear of violence.
I wonder if it's a growing up in a city v suburbs thing or an age thing, but while I certainly don't have a memory of being harassed/perved on in the way young women are, istm that of course as a teenage boy there's a constant risk of fights and getting beat up. Like what else do the teenagers you see on the bus or whatever do? They fight. Of course most of the time nothing would happen at all but sometimes things would go off and of course if the wrong people went off then you would get seriously fucked up, so you had a constant low-level worry about the potential for violence. I don't get the impression that this is even a little bit true for boys of my roughly UMC social class in LA today.
Not anymore.
At. All.
They do not understand.
Nitpicking the article's prose style is boring as fuck of all you. Are you expecting to get an interesting conversation going about how long paragraphs should be?
Potentially yes! Or anyway, I think the way rhetorical tropes are disseminated and reproduced and (eventually) become predictable and tiresome, whether through simple overexposure or because people who aren't actually that good at deploying them pick up on them too, is potentially interesting.
And, crucially, it's a topic that gets little attention.
I mean, it is, obviously, a completely different topic from the intended topic of the post. But let's not pretend (let us do anything but pretend!) that prose style isn't something that one can interestingly discuss.
60 was how it was for me as well. Probably to be expected, IIRC we're less than ten years apart in age and grew up in neighboring cities.
Delagar, J., LB, Stabby, and all, thank you for describing the experiences of young women/girls. Even relative to the men who did experience threat conditions at young ages, what women go through is importantly different. We are awful at derailing when it gets to be talking about women's experiences.
And discussing it is enlightening. I would have never considered putting my hands in my pockets on the bus threatening--as Moby said, that's where useful stuff is--but I'll try to be more conscious of that in the future.
63.2: I don't think that's something I can stop doing. Every so often I get this anxious feeling -- did I lose my wallet? did I forget my keys? is my phone there? and I have to feel around in my pocket to check. I swear I have never masturbated in public.
I would have never considered putting my hands in my pockets on the bus threatening
You can use this the other way too (I've only done it a couple of times at night in the city): if someone is eyeing you, just slide your hands in your pockets; it makes people think twice about whether you're the guy to jump.
64: I don't think it starts to look weird unless you leave your hands in there for an extended period rummaging around. The ten seconds it takes to find your keys is fine.
As I have mentioned here before, I think there's a strange repulser effect when I am riding the bus our walking down the street, based on my size and demeanor -- the assholes who do a lot of street harassment are beholden to patriarchy in such a way that they stay quiet in the presence of someone they see as possibly more of an alpha male than them. This was NOT the case when I was younger and smaller, as I vividly remember my mother and sister being harassed, as well as seeing more of it in public.
From back at 14: "Maybe I'm a total outlier." Maybe her read would be that you're one of those who doesn't even notice they're doing it anymore.
This is probably true, but I really don't have internalized fear around the small power concessions that I make here and there. That's where this kind of piece starts to lose me - that I must grip my keys tighter if an area isn't well-lit, and I must hold my breath as I check my backseat, and I must generally be fearful of a perpetual attack.
Yeah, I think the framing and the rhetoric and so on (this is what it's like to be a woman) are extremely counterproductive. I have also been outlier-lucky, and far safer over the course of my life than a hell of a lot of men. (I can share some crazy stories if desired.) I realize that it's almost made me more paranoid about violence, though, out of a sense that my number's got to come up sometime.
The writing style must be a matter of drawing the increasingly bored and alienated reader's attention towards the sidebar links. The choir will scroll down to leave amens in the comments and the other readers will either be baited into going from "Why?" to "One reason. A reason we rarely discuss." (or whatever), or will bounce to a related story after they tire of waiting for new information.
There is a thing, and I don't know how to say this while not making it sound as if I'm attributing responsibility to the victims, which I am absolutely not, where some women draw a lot more harassment than others. I'm on the low end of the range, but I've seen friends get hassled astonishingly more than I do in similar situations. Something about demeanor, and I'm not sure what -- looking friendly and engaged, maybe?
What I meant to say and stopped before I got to, is that the article sounds like someone on the high end of the range universalizing. Like, that's a plausible description of her experience to me, but I would (pulling percentages out of the air) think that maybe only 20% of women have it that bad, and there's a spectrum going down from there.
Whatever that quality is, if it exists, it seems to be completely and utterly beyond any individual woman's control. That's the important thing. It goes without saying that if it were anything you could actually turn off to protect yourself, of course you fucking would. It's not anything like "being friendly and engaged," I don't think.
70 I've seen that. Someone I knew in Morocco, a young American woman, couldn't walk down her own street without getting harassed like crazy. And most of the American women there had much less of a problem. But damned if I could figure out what was going on. She wasn't wearing culturally inappropriate clothing or sashaying down the street.
Right. Yes. It is absolutely not a voluntary thing.
I think of it as having something to do with apparent friendliness, because the women I know who get hassled much more than I do, also seem to be better at connecting with strangers/new people than I am. But that may not be a general rule.
Men who would naturally be allies are unlikely to be the ones acting like this which means they're the more clueless ones in terms of understanding or noticing when it is happening. Personally I've almost never observed the behavior described, and you can tell me how often it actually does happen, but that doesn't substitute for actually seeing it as far as understanding its effect on the target. Meanwhile men who do act like this are likely to see it not just from themselves but from their similarly-acting peers but they couldn't give a shit since they're perpetuating it.
I have a different problem from 16, my girlfriend-eventually-wife passes as extremely young so I had the situation of being a 20 something guy who looked like he was dating a 14 year old. In the first few years of teaching middle school out of college she was often mistaken for a student.
Doesn't Occam's razor suggest that the answer is "a booty."
That was not actually serious, as I guess I have to add in this context.
78: You'd think, wouldn't you? But no, the big variability really doesn't seem to be about looks. I mean, pretty people get more hassling as well, I think, but that's not the only difference.
God, what is the mildly pro-sexual harassment song about bootys that I'm just on the tip of remembering. Like a guy complementing the booty and then getting sass back and going on and complementing more bootys. It's not Positive K's "I've got a man" but it's similar era and style.
Men who would naturally be allies are unlikely to be the ones acting like this which means they're the more clueless ones in terms of understanding or noticing when it is happening.
Yeah, we've talked about this way back in Classic Unfogged. It's a real Michigan J. Frog thing, where he won't sing with anyone watching. Men don't harass women in front of other men, unless they feel like the other men are allies.
76 is the thing I've learned to point out when (decent, natural allies, etc.) men I know instinctively act suspicious or downplay the extent to which street harassment is genuine harassment and not awkwardness/attempted flirting/whatever: "You don't see it happen much because when you're around they don't do it, which should tell you everything you need to know."
I'm definitely out on one end (among men) of the doesn't-really-get-hassled range, and for about as long as I can remember (except maybe for bullies in middle school, but even then..). I don't know what it is, though. I also get to spend every flight I'm on sitting in silence next to people when I'm told most other people get stuck having lengthy conversations. With men I think it's just a social dominance or apparent confidence thing, where people who seem more nervous or imposing get targeted as a kind of hierarchy reinforcement. I have no idea what the corresponding thing would be when it comes to men harassing women would be.
I swear I have never masturbated in public.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater and the rubber duckie.
I know exactly what 70/71/etc are talking about. There's some combination of appearance, behavior, and I-don't-know-what that seems to get encoded as prey.
Harassers/predators seem to have an uncanny ability to sniff it out (maybe a kind of reverse of The Gift of Fear?). I don't have it, but I have definitely witnessed what happens to women who do.
This conversation (about variable rates of getting shit from men) always makes me feel guilty. I don't know what I'm doing that works for this! If I knew how to do it, I'd share.
Did you bring enough for everybody?
70 is a real thing, and I suspect it's a result of non-verbal cues from the person that say "I will be unlikely to make trouble for you if you harass me or try to impose your will on me". For the people I know who were most likely to be harassed, it was absolutely true that they were least likely to make a big stink about it (or at least looked like they were).
Is it really that indirect? This is America and such. "I will be likely to make trouble for you" could be as simple as class.
One of the prime examples I knew was a woman in her early 20s, solidly middle class, but very naive about judging someone's intentions.
1) I don't think there is that much wrong with men sharing their experiences in these conversations, and as we have seen above talking about what is different for women and what is comparable is one way to build solidarity and empathy.
2) As far myself, my umm milieu kept me somewhat aware of my environment and watchful of violence until I was around 35. Experienced physical violence half dozen times. Being small and looking vulnerable, and living in some fringe neighborhoods in the early 80s, I got looks and advances from butch gays.
3) How do I put this? Posit I am fairly far into the Borderline Personality Syndrome, perhaps because of childhood abuse. What does an attitude of expecting aggression, abuse, even violence generate in the persons in the environment?
Once saw one of my homeless friends walking side by side with a new acquaintance, and he was talking with his hands, and he told me afterwards "If the guy had flinched, I would have gone into him."
What do people mean when they tell you to freeze in front of a dog or wild animal, move slowly, back off gradually?
One of the things I kinda hoped to share over the years is that there is a relationship between feelings and expressions of rage and fear, and rage is somewhat easier to work with. But this probably isn't news.
This is one of these areas where I quickly start to doubt the wisdom of creating stories, in this case about women who are naturally (or fatally, if you like) prey-like and women who are naturally resistant. But I am full-on hysterical about ever being regarded as a victim in any way (and, at this point, probably delusional about control over my own fate generally), so I may not have a good read on whether it's useful to others. I'm pretty sure my track record of impressive immunity to shit from men is 90% luck, 9% being ugly, and 1% having a repellent demeanor in general.
83: IMX it's either low-powered telepathy or body language, with the latter more likely. I'm not large but I've never been hassled. Now that I've aged into ostensible prey status I'll have to consider what to do about that.
Hypothesis: Women and girls from an early age walk around with a constant feeling of diffuse rage at the world they live in, but because Patriarchy, are unable even to recognize their rage as rage, and must call it fear. However, from the outside it still feels like rage.
This is one of these areas where I quickly start to doubt the wisdom of creating stories, in this case about women who are naturally (or fatally, if you like) prey-like and women who are naturally resistant.
I brought it up, but I do agree with you that it feels really problematic talking about it in these terms. I just get stuck on how to talk about it: what I want to say is that the article, and articles like this generally, doesn't well represent my experience, but I know a fair number of women for whom it does seem to represent their experience, and I don't have a good explanation for any difference between us.
I really don't like the 'prey' language; not that it wasn't well meant, but it gives me the collywobbles describing anyone as such.
The other thing I would commend to my brothers' attention is the number of women you see out in public who are both wearing headphones and walking briskly without making eye contact. Not too hard to deduce why they engage in that behavior.
Structuralism sees almost everything ass metaphoric, synecdoche (fuck sp) etc, and I can't deny that North Korea, that miserable poor isolated lowest of countries (ok above Palestine) that is seen as an aggressive violent asshole...and bright coloring as a defense mechanism in insects came to mind,. Mind moves too fast and randomly.
And the Patriarchy has a lot invested in interpreting rage as fear. Carry on.
Outa here.
Being prey is also context-specific. I don't experience much street harassment, average for the area, but I think people who have a more intimate or social connection seem way more likely to try to take advantage of that somehow than they might with other people. I have a lot of thoughts (and feelings!) about this, but today is maybe not a good day for that.
18,20.THIS
Pay tribute to the hegemonic traditions.
It's certainly my experience that some women are more vulnerable to this shit than others but I don't get too far if I try to find some common characteristic or constitution underlying that vulnerability. IME if you're approachable, some dingus thinks he should approach you, if you're aloof he (or perhaps some other dingus with different tastes) wants to teach you a lesson, and so on. Life's rich tapestry of dinguses.
And some of us are Belgian and accompany waffles.
Decent baby, sufficiently fat but not the best I've eaten. 3.5/5 stars.
I haven't eaten anything softer than a marble in 57 years.
I am someone who strangers reliably pick to engage with all along the spectrum from aggressive up close and personal sotto voce proposition (decidedly UMC white men in business districts the world over looking for an afternoon in a hotel room, think minor league DSK) to an endless stream of tourist families asking for directions. Earlier this week I was on a sidewalk outside a CA state courthouse just before 8 am looking all lawyerly, with a male colleague, on my phone and 3 different down and out folks asked me what time the clerk's office opened, where to pay a traffic ticket and just wanted to make sure I knew how much my shoes were admired. I am clearly giving off the approachable thing. Yet while I have occasionally felt physically at risk over the years, mostly I don't. I think it is a drag to occasionally have to pump out extra whatever to convey the over the top devotion of eg the dude at the lunch place near the office needs to be dialed back. But eh seems part and parcel of being human. I have a good friend tho who doesn't seem to be able to calibrate to a useful pitch and ends up eg avoiding certain market stalls. I can see the misconceptions, crossed cues unfolding before me.
On a more lighthearted note, since the child achieved about 5'10" or so I regularly am assessed by young women when walking down the street with him, as they try to figure out the connection. Hilarious to me because he is utterly oblivious.
I imagine Al should weigh in here, hasn't she always talked about how men tried to hit on her since a very young age and would often do insane things?
I agree that the "prey" language is s difficult, but victimology does tell us that offenders are particularly good at selecting victims that are easy to victimize -- less privileged, easily disbelieved, powerless, etc. it makes sense the same would be true for other forms of harassment
Babies are easy to victimize. I can tell.
Heh. My giant child is still extremely babyfaced. No one, but no one, is looking at me walking with him and thinking anything other than that I'm his mother, 6'2" or not.
Regarding victimology, this may not be a useful discussion to have about the full range of obnoxious behavior from flirting with a colleague to sex trafficking. I'm still holding tight to my belief that a huge amount of it is luck (and then what follows from being lucky or unlucky, and then what follows from being lucky or unlucky a second time). For every piece of anecdata I can think of an opposing piece. Larger trends are possible, but they'd have to be pretty damned strong before the benefits of turning them into myths would outweigh the harms.
My giant child is still extremely babyfaced.
Tell me more. A lot more.
People ask me for direction often, including when I'm in some place I don't know anything about. No one is interested in my shoes or an afternoon.
I engage strangers regularly, hopefully in contexts that don't make them afraid.
People are asking me for money more often now than they were last year. I don't know if that means the economy is getting worse or I'm somehow looking more generous/prosperous/cheerful.
114: I've noticed a large uptick in panhandling Downtown, as has a coworker. I don't know what the hell happened.
And I do get asked for directions a lot. I suppose that means I must be non-threatening, but I'm pretty sure I also give off weirdo vibes.
I get asked for directions often also. I assume that's partially because the streets here are confusing.
Re: approachability, I'm a pretty unremarkale looking not-especially young female person. Last spring, I was with a friend in a not-great DC neighborhood. He wanted to buy something at a convenience store, and I said I'd wait outside in the sunshine. It was pretty, and I had a pleasant expression because I was happy. I got approached, chatted up a bit, by a few men in a short period of time. Nothing too aggressive, just walking by with some banter. I was starting to get alarmed at the frequency and how close one guy got to me, and I couldn't figure it out. I thought about retreating back into the store. Then I realized I forgot to put on my City Face, my Don't Fuck With Me expressionless, slightly hostile face. I did the middle distance stare with that face, and it stopped immediately until my friend walked out. I was really surprised at how different that was. I have had similar experiences in SF and Chicago when I forget and just look blandly pleasant.
+ and - appropriate letters so that's English.
The other thing I do is play a LOT of defense. I've never been groped by a drunk coworker/boss because I'd pretty much never stand close enough if I thought it might happen. My "large personal space bubble" is sometimes a joke with friendly coworkers, but yeah. It must be nice not to devote that tiny sliver of brain power to avoiding those interactions.
I think the amount that street harassment is a thing, I think, varies from place to place. But people whose perceptions I trust* report wildly different amounts, both depending where they are, and who they are.
My wife, I think, rarely, if ever, experiences street type harassment -- although it happens -- but she gets skeevy -- afore-mentioned minor league DSK type -- guys hitting on her in borderline creepy ways at work, all the time. So often that she doesn't really remark on it, except when it's maybe someone less skeevy so it comes across as flattering rather than creepy.
Not to harp on about men, again, but similarly, I had friends when I was a teenager who were seemingly 'marked' for being targets by other guys and friends who were not, and it was pretty hard for me to work out what the relationship was between their self-presentation and what happened to them. I was probably on the outer end of the range, because, age 16, I was a femmy looking skinny guy who wore make-up. But I had other friends who seemed to get picked on even more than me, who were, to my certain knowledge, tougher than I was. But some kind of unconscious vibe they gave off picked them out (or they were just unlucky).
* not to imply that those perceptions shouldn't be trusted in general, or doubting those who experience it, I just mean people I know well enough to calibrate.
100: I almost invariably notice it a lot more in the company of young women in their twenties or early thirties who code to mainstream heteronormative eyes as physically beautiful. Of course my city is notoriously troglodytic for street harassment, but even by those standards some of this stuff gets incredibly fucking brazen (to the point of unsolicited physical touching) and this is when they're in the company of friends.
Regarding victimology, I suspect that once a woman has one very abusive experience (e.g., rape, sexual abuse, emotional abuse), she's more likely to find herself in another bad situation. Among my peers and my students, it seems as though we are divided between those who have had multiple bad experiences and those who have had none. It would be easy to get into victim blaming, I think, if one doesn't recognize that the first bad experience is basically about luck and social position.
Looking back, there were certainly things I did that made me appear more like prey, mainly because I was so desperate for affection and respect. I think that came across LOUD AND CLEAR to predators. On the other hand, in order to have changed the vibes I was giving off I would have needed to have had a very different family situation. There's not anything I could have done about that. It's taken a boatload of work to convince myself that I deserve to be treated well.
[Some of it also had to do with norms, of course: all of the men in my local BBS circuit who had girlfriends were dating girls 4-10 years younger than them (i.e., thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds), so I didn't feel like an outlier. The real problem was when some of those guys turned stalker-y.]
I really can't emphasize how different things became once I turned 27 or 28. The amount of harassment I received went way down. I still rely on the sunglasses/quick walk/earbuds thing, though.
Canada was a city notorious for street harassment? I had no idea.
That surprised me too. "Hey nice Cans-ada"
Canada has all sorts of cities notorious for street harassment, I suspect. They're just not the better-known cities.
123.2 is probably why you're supposed to love your children and be open about that even though they take advantage of your love to hit you for Pokemon cards.
Don't show skin in Moose Jaw, is what I tell my daughters.
In re harassment of people read as women:
Since I started looking more butch/gender-non-conforming/whatever* I've started getting a lot more hostility from men. Before, I was basically invisible - too fat and plain to bother with, plus thousand yard stare. And now I get a lot of weird hostility and the occasional body-check on the sidewalk. What's more, this is stuff I get from well-off guys in suits more often than from prolier people. It's the damnedest thing. I can't figure out whether I should just belt up and find a job where I can transition** so that it will stop, or whether in the current political climate that would just make things worse.
Honestly I'm a little worried about all this trans panic stuff, because I have this vision of myself as unemployed, too transitioned to really revert to passing as a woman but too broke to access testosterone.
But the point being, it very clearly does make a lot of men really mad that I am neither trying to be fuckable nor gladly fading into the woodwork. (Which is just bizarre - I mean, it's not like I had men after me when I tried to look like a girl.) You think that men do not literally get angry just because a total stranger looks uninterested in fucking or mothering them because that sounds so ridiculous and overstated - but it's the truth! And it's another thing that you're not really likely to observe unless you yourself are gender non-conforming in some way.
*Basically, I have a (very nice thank you) short haircut and I wear the girlier kind of men's shirts; also I lift weights and have wide shoulders in any case; also I have never had a very feminine expression. (There's something...I can't really explain it, but when I see myself in the mirror alongside other women, we just don't have the same kind of expression. I'm not sure if I'm (appropriately) frownier, or just use my eyes differently or what.)
**I would be fired out of hand if I transitioned here. There is no possible question about it.
128: I don't know if I'm simply reading too much into my own experience, but I think that fathers of daughters can make an enormous difference here, especially those who are divorced from the child's mother. There's a lot to be said for paying extra attention to daughters in their early teens, especially once they hit that "fly into complete rage every time they even think of their mother" stage.*
[Maybe it's ironic that my dad is the one parent my sister and I now have a relationship with, but he really only went emotionally AWOL for a few years. It's just unfortunate that those years coincided with me turning 11 and him meeting and marrying a woman with BPD. Lousy taste in women, my father.
My sister was really upset, once my dad found out about my sexual abuse (years after the fact), that he didn't track the guy down and beat him up. I was relieved, though, since having my dad beaten up and thrown in jail for assault didn't seem like a really effective way to make things better.]
*That's a thing, right?
Now that I've read about the Pogge scandal at the other place, I can say this is the area where I still feel the brunt of being a young-ish woman who cleans up well. When male senior scholars are enthusiastic about me and my work, and draw me into their crowd, I really do question whether they're responding to my work or my presumed fuckability.
Are the women on the high-frequency end the same women who get students pouring out their hearts and get strangers asking for directions? And other things of that ilk? I get none of those.
I remember Oudie, I think, gets asked all to often to supervise unaccompanied minors on a plane. That would make me fearful.
In my house, I try to teach my daughters the three principles of being a "mighty girl": DON'T go to Moose Jaw, DON'T have bad luck, DO carry a chainsaw.
24: please explain what DID and DIK mean?
It's better to avoid all Canadian cities whose names take the form of an adjective describing a noun: Moose Jaw, Whitehorse, Red Deer, etc.
134 - I'm a bit frosty in person and am never approached for directions or ad-hoc babysitting, but am a mid-to-high-frequency recipient of truly gross moves from total creeps. The more ambiguous stuff--too-friendly greengrocers etc.--I get less of.
134: Yes to students crying in my office. No to people asking for directions (thank goodness, because I have no sense of direction). I look pretty damn harmless, I think, so I volunteer to accompany minors, help parents traveling alone, take family pictures of tourists, etc. While walking, people bump into me all the time, so I don't think I have much of a physical presence.
J, Robot's father and Bitch married a third woman? Small world.
I was wondering the exact same thing as 134. In non-harassment contexts you hear about this sort of differential interaction with the world. Basically the only time strangers initiate speaking to me is to reach something on a high shelf (I'm 6-1). Sometimes I get complimented on my hats (mostly--almost exclusively--by African-Americans), but I can goes days of walking around town, shopping, etc. and have close to zero stranger interaction. But I know that this isn't how it is for many people.
As Stabby says in 100, there's also obviously an opposite effect regarding harassment, where being too receptive and being too aloof both mark you for harassment. Huh; I wonder if there are different harassers who respond to the different signals? I mean, I think the Venn diagram would have a ton of overlap, but it would make sense to me that there are guys who mostly respond to receptive-seeming women (possibly even with some notion that it might not always fail) and others who mostly respond, with anger, to aloof-seeming women.
That would make me fearful.
That you'd get stuck with college costs?
No to people asking for directions (thank goodness, because I have no sense of direction)
People with no sense of direction can recognize their own.
"Hey, maybe she can hel- oh, never mind."
I'm going to consider 134 as supportive of my speculation in 141.3.
Wow "too-friendly greengrocers" who *AM* I.
A woman who asks too many questions about cucumbers?
...but I think that fathers of daughters can make an enormous difference here...
I can't remember where, but I have a distinct memory of seeing an advertisement instructing fathers to be affectionate to their sons because this would keep the sons from going teh gay. Which, I guess, is at least taking some pressure off mom.
51, 133: I have a hard time trusting anyone who claims to be doing the right thing for altruistic reasons. It seems they usually end up being a Sc/hw/yz/er or a Po/gg/e:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/yale-ethics-professor
What's that quote that goes something like "Don't support me because you feel bad for me; support me because you realize we share the same oppressor"?
I never witnessed or experienced sexual harassment myself. I only know about it because women have described their experiences to me. Actually, that's wrong. There was that professor who was just too friendly to me and my classmate. He was later busted for doing a Boy Scout.
Not typically harassed; but students pour out their hearts in the office, I get asked for directions, to mind small children/expensive laptops, etc. I suspect it's unlikely that there's an obvious set of characteristics that makes potential victims more attractive to jackasses; too much can vary by context.*
* e.g., at my previous job, I'm sure it was the fact that I'm a woman that lead students to think that they can confide in me. Here, I'm pretty sure that it's because I'm from out of state.
Certain white women in late middle age have found themselves besieged with friendly requests, because they're the perceived safest kind of stranger there is.
That will change soon enough. Early middle-aged white men in windowless vans used to be perceived as the safest strangers before serial killers figured out to use this as their cover.
Could you have a look at 137 please? I am also confused.
Yeah, I'm sorry for introducing "prey." I was casting about for some word that could illustrate how harassers (apparently) see vulnerable women/men, but that wasn't the right way to go about it.
tldr: I like what J. Robot's saying.
Okay, might as well write about it, although it's done now and it's a part of my life I don't think about much anymore, I was an absolute magnet for this. Here are some from the highlight reel.
0-12, very low social skills. People getting cross at me all the time for not being nice enough, abrasive. In spite of this, music teacher in public school gloms onto me and at first school dance, tries to encourage, using mime, the boy I'm dancing with to move his hands down to my caress my ass. (Boy doesn't, thank god. We both are weirded out.) I try to solve the social skills problem by developing a shy femme persona for high school, which works but suddenly: a host of other problems.
Sweet nerd guy, I like him, awkward handjob, some kissing. He starts getting too intense, way too much poetry etc. I pull back. He starts telling me he's going to kill me, kill himself but me too. His friends corner me in the hall, call me a cock-tease. I don't know what that is. I'm really young here, (I haven't heard "cock" before.) They're super angry. He goes off to get some psychiatry for a while but keeps up the stalking and threatening on and off through high school.
A man, 40, I'm 15. He's leading a mixed ages community activity thing I'm in. He wants to be my pal, he used to coach football, wants to coach me in how to wrestle. He's married, has kids my age. Adults in the group suggest to me it's not cool what's going on and I sort of agree but it's confusing and I'm not sure how to say no to doing stuff with him when he's said we're friends. By this point he's taken me on a hike and taken pictures of me, fully clothed, art shots right? When I see the photos I'm shocked because that doesn't look like me. I look seductive. He'd told me how to pose. He angled the camera down my top, his wife's top, actually. I make up reasons not to be around him after that. So at a big awards presentation at the end of the year, he tells a joke onstage in front of 50 people about my body being under-developed. There's this horrible air-sucked-out-of-the room silence, and a couple of adults boo softly. A couple of adults tell me after that he shouldn't have said that, but that somehow makes it feel more humiliating. I don't know if anybody said anything to him though. Somewhere I have a letter from him about our special friendship and his fear that when I get older I'll have kids and become fat and not special and wonderful anymore. Like Al has expressed, I'd like those photos back.
Same community group, grandfather figure guy at least 75 goes to give me what I think is a peck and sticks his tongue down my throat. That was my first kiss with tongue, come to think of it. Did not see that coming.
16, another boyfriend, we break up, a few years later I'm on a written list of people he's very angry with, and his psychiatrist thinks he might be violent toward the people on the list, so I get called in. The psychiatrist knows my dad. The story about the first boyfriend comes out, and the psychiatrist says, I'll never forget this, "If you don't stop what you're doing you'll be dead before you're 30". He looks angry. But he *doesn't go into what it is I'm doing* and I don't know and I'm too scared and embarrassed to ask because he looks angry at me and adults being angry at me is scary, and I feel like a fool and bad for having done something that I'm probably going to continue to do because I don't know what it is. I date my gay friend for the rest of high school. (I also have plenty of nice side romanc-y times where nothing bad happens, also lots of normal harassment, these are just some specially curated moments of bad.)
Student moment outside the reference library: a guy sees me smoking, comes over and flirty-bossy tells me I shouldn't smoke. I have been studying why I am a shit-magnet and am working on assertion. I say something light but designed to cut the encounter short, not engage. He pulls in close to my face, whispers, "You have ugly eyes." He has an accent and I actually think he probably said something else because that's just such a weird thing to say, so I stupidly say, "what?" He pulls in nose to nose, and repeats it, followed up by a whispered, "you're garbage."
End of professional school, it was a notoriously hard program to get into and to graduate from, at this point I have a crew cut and am presenting androgynous because I associate a femme look with being a shit magnet and catcalling and crazies and I am trying to get away from that, also I think I'll look more professional. I graduate, head of the program takes me into his office, shakes my hand, sticks his tongue down my throat. That one...I did not see it coming and it really fucked me up. Because I'd been feeling proud and I couldn't feel proud the same way after that. Because to me it meant I couldn't ever know why I got in.
So those are just a few moments. But here's the weird thing, I spent so much time stressing over what I was doing and what I could do differently, self-defense courses, assertiveness training, and then I turned 35 and the whole thing just stopped. Like a faucet turning off. There's been the odd store guy who needs to dial it back like DQ said, but it's not like he threatens to come to my house and kill me, it's not fucked up in that particular way. The very last catcall I had was when I was 35, two teenagers pushing their bikes, one of them leaned over in passing, locked eyes and whispered, "slut". And that was the end of it.
My guess is that being short and big-eyed and young tripped some people's predation fantasies, or MPDG projections, or whatever, and short and normal-tired-eyed and middle aged just doesn't do the same thing for certain fuckheads.
As a PS, my 10 year old son presents right down the male-female line, and when he gets taken for a girl it's startling to me the difference in tone of voice compared to when he's taken for a boy. (He's brainy and grouchy and prickly just like I was at his age, so when people condescend to him it's really jarring. "Wow a girl in the Warhammer section!") Last week we ran into our first creepy guy at twilight while we were looking at frogs by the river. "What are you girls looking at?" in a certain tone of voice that got my neck hair standing up. Or I could be over-reacting. That's the tiring thing, you could always be over- or under-reacting. (And what does that even mean anyway?)
DID Isn't DIK and DIK, Inverted KID respectively.
154 is a whole screen full of a skeazey, which seems like quite lot. I don't know what happened to the old guys, but I bet the young ones are now voting for Trump.
Stalker nerd guy is a philosophy professor, I am not even kidding.
Well, they can't all be economists.
154 just kept getting worse and worse. Murder time.
154 makes me want to apologize for, and beat up, all of humanity.
No no, it got better! Just like the videos say . I got old, it got better, and I was never even assaulted, unlike many friends and some of the Unfoggedariat. My feeling is this is a pretty medium normal North American life.
Just realized 163 contains a bit of denial. But I'm saying "assaulted" imagining much more violence.
Sticking a tongue in your mouth is assault.
In non-harassment contexts you hear about this sort of differential interaction with the world. Basically the only time strangers initiate speaking to me is to reach something on a high shelf (I'm 6-1). Sometimes I get complimented on my hats (mostly--almost exclusively--by African-Americans), but I can goes days of walking around town, shopping, etc. and have close to zero stranger interaction.
There's always the panhandlers who walk up to you and engage in friendly small talk for 30 seconds before going into the spiel about how they missed the bus to Greensburg or whatever. You realize that in the year 2016 nobody except a panhandler is going to walk up to a random stranger on a crowded sidewalk and engage in friendly small talk, right? I'm on to you from the getgo, buddy.
165. Yeah. It is. I guess I could accept that. I would certainly call it that if someone else said it.
You realize that in the year 2016 nobody except a panhandler is going to walk up to a random stranger on a crowded sidewalk and engage in friendly small talk, right? I'm on to you from the getgo, buddy.
Now this is a really good example of how my lack of social skills was not a help to me. I liked the guys who were my friends, and I liked the idea of having men as friends, and after one bad encounter in a big city I was moaning to my boyfriend that if I was a man then that guy and I would have had a conversation and maybe struck up a friendship and that would have been cool, that would have been what I'd hoped for, and my boyfriend said, "guys don't do that. They don't do that with guys, either." Now I don't know if that's true, but it had been true in my experience that small talk with women strangers had lead to friendships and I just transposed that onto guys. I really was trying to figure out the whole people thing starting from a very unskilled place.
Sure, small talk with strangers can lead to friendship. In a bar, in a waiting room, even on the bus maybe. But not on a random sidewalk where a stranger picks you out of the crowd to approach.
Yes, even past self would have flagged that one.
162 is objectively pro-domestic violence.
Frowner's guys getting angry at women for not performing femininity is a thing I have witnessed (and increasingly so here in NC as our horrorshow state gov't whips up the gender boundary panic) and it is so completely baffling.
You realize that in the year 2016 nobody except a panhandler is going to walk up to a random stranger on a crowded sidewalk and engage in friendly small talk, right?
Or a cop. He/she better damn well have that skill or be actively working on it.
I've seem the thing in 172 as well from men, and it's fucking horrendous. Not from friends but I do remember seeing that at school openly and in public. Again trans people are still at a next level of discrimination. Much more open.
My only personal experience with 174-like stuff was my close college friend (from Eastern Europe) who drunkenly confessed to being "into" butt grabbing on public transit. When I said something like uhhhhhhhhh I think that's assault maybe you shouldn't do that?" He busted out the "in my country, it's fine" which I'm pretty sure isn't true. Also he sounded like The Count from Sesame Street so now I always think of The Count as a subway butt grabber.
He pulls in close to my face, whispers, "You have ugly eyes."
It's the details that bring home how horrible this kind of thing is.
You realize that in the year 2016 nobody except a panhandler is going to walk up to a random stranger on a crowded sidewalk and engage in friendly small talk, right? I'm on to you from the getgo, buddy.
My family say they prefer to drive with me because beggars never approach the car. And I don't even try to wear a Fuck-Off Face. OTOH, I do get approached for directions quite often, I think because I look like I know where I'm going, which usually I do.
In the sens of street plans. Life, career and so forth self-evidently not so much.
re: 134 / 149
Funnily enough, we have a senior management drop-in session at my work. A surgery type thing where people can drop in one-to-one for a confidential conversation with one of management, and raise concerns.* We've been running it for six months, and, up until a couple of weeks ago, I was the only person who had anyone come to their sessions.**
We also have a group-moaning session, that runs every couple of weeks, and has a staff representative committee that is working through issues with management. I'm the management rep for that, too.
So, people seem to have decided I'm on the approachable end of the spectrum.
* bullying/harassment, contract issues, workload, whatever.
** there are/were 6 senior managers, with a 50/50 gender balance.
So, people seem to have decided I'm on the approachablesocialist end of the spectrum.
FTFY
#2 had an 86 or 87 DL which had the most uncomfortable bucket seats I've ever had the misfortune of sitting in. We used to measure trips in "ass hours" and "ass minutes." After 30-40 ass minutes you were seriously beginning to hurt and 2 ass hours were excruciating.
re: 179
It would be nice if that's the case, but I doubt it. Most of the other managers are non-pointy-haired liberal types. It is an academic institution, after all. It might be, though, because I'm the only 'senior' manager who has been a low-level grunt here, so possibly people think I'll understand them more. I've been promoted a couple of times in the past four years, and acted up a bit at senior level before that last promotion. All of the other managers came in from outside.
Just to round out the picture here I feel compelled to defend flirting and other very pleasant human interactions, from the small pause and discrete admiring look, mild flirtations with perfect strangers that one will never see again, repeated repartee (there are various stands at the market where only one of us ever shops so as to give the other one's flirtations space to breathe), the long running and contained simmer work crushes delicately conveyed and never insisted on, and all the way to the several times I've had longstanding admirers pick the perfect moment to let me know that if they were not otherwise perfectly happily settled in life they would definitely set their caps on me. All of those are delightful, delicious parts of being alive and I would deeply regret living in a world without them.
The worst aspect of long-ago sexual abuse is that it still greatly curtails my ability to enjoy sex without needing to be quite drunk. It's frustrating, and completely unfair.
My sympathies, Lady. That's horrible.
Yes, my sympathies as well. I can't even imagine how awful that must feel. Ortberg addressed a similar issue as Dear Prudence recently, but her advice was "don't have sex for a while," which... doesn't seem very helpful.
183: That sounds like the sort of thing they do in Europe.
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I dunno if this is on-topic or not, but I feel a little tiny bit more positively disposed towards humanity after learning that my alma mater (a public HS) is having a Racial Justice Day on Monday with FIFTY different workshops with titles like "Know Your Rights" and "Comics, Zines and Other Means of Rebellion"
There's also a gender equity student club that a friend's kid was involved with recently (and his younger sister might still be part of).
So that's pretty cool, right? Some little bits of social change do move in the right direction, sometimes.
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184: deepest sympathies, Lady. I hope soon there will be a safe, targeted way to defang such memories.
184 From the male side, in my younger days I seemed to attract women that had been abused in some way. Both of my ex-wives had been raped and sexually abused and I didn't find out the full extent until after we were married when the when the full extent as in 184 became apparent. No matter how hard you try to be supportive, it just reaches a point where it becomes impossible to live with. Just for being a man you pay the price for all those previous abusers.
190 is weirding me out a bit, though anon is probably speaking accurately about his own impressions of his experience, especially if it was meant to be a supportive response. I guess it's fair to claim that not having the sex life you want is "paying the price" but that seems like misplaced focus. Yes, it's unfortunate and uncomfortable if something about you triggers a partner. Despite being a woman, this is something I've had to work through at times with partners who have abuse histories. But there are ways to be sensitive that aren't just about being supportive but collaboratively finding ways to change yourself and approach things differently. I've found the process has made me a better person and partner, even in relationships that have ended up not working out.
Lady, you're not alone but I'm sorry to hear you're stuck where you don't want to be. That feeling of brokenness can seem overwhelming, but even people without trauma histories end up a mess about sex. It's really tough stuff and I hope you can find help that actually helps.
Yeah, anonymous 190? A) I really hate unsigned comments and B) your comment, immediately following Lady of the Lake's, sounds as if you're actively trying to make her feel that her trauma is probably an unconscionable burden on her partners, which is a shitty thing to say. You may not be able to cope with a partner with a history of trauma, but thankfully you don't speak for everyone.
All right, I am anonymous. I was not just talking about sex, it permiates many aspects of life especially trust issues. We spent a lot of time in counselling in both cases. I did not mean to shift the burden, just to note how some assholes can ruin someones life in far reaching ways. I wasn't the dumper, it just became impossible to live together. I suppose I should not have said anything, but abusive people, usually males, are the worst, causing long term damage to peoples lives.
Do you mean all men or not all men?
I'd like to take a broader, warmer, more egalitarian position, and say that people are awful. Really, the worst.
Of course. So manly that Kenny Logins songs run through my head all day.
A real man would spell Loggins correctly.
I don't see how you could spell Loggins with muscles, unless it was one of those weird British place names like Cholmondeley.
Kenny logins every time he's on a public computer and logouts afterwards, with his muscles.