Now, I’ll admit I’m not too au-fait with modern music, but I have kids and grandkids and the music of female artists they play doesn’t include the ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ stuff you suggest. It’s PINK, and Katy Perry and similar. Maybe you need to get up with the times Old Fella. 
Maybe you need to re-visit your erroneous assumptions. Just sayin’.
Fair enough.
I’m sorry but I fail to see the “Catch-22” that exists between the obvious precautions against drinking to excess in a skimpy dress in a bar or nightclub and “assessing situations as they arise and using one’s own judgement” in the event an assault or harassment of some sort should occur while a woman is out in public or with acquaintances. They are completely different types of situations and call for completely different types of responses. In what way do you feel this is circular or mutually contradictory?
I don’t agree. People engage in such behavior multiple times as they go through their day.
And in this context it’s the only advice one can give when talking about how a woman should attempt to avoid or minimize yet to happen sexual aggressions whose timing, circumstance, location and degree are unknown.
I would quarrel quite strongly with the idea that a woman should not use her best judgement in attempting to avoid or minimize or escape an instance of sexual abuse because doing so might expose them to accusations of having put themselves in harm’s way. Such fear seems outsized to me in the first place, but should it be as prevalent as you and some of the others in the thread make it appear, the problem lies with the ones making those accusations, and they should in no uncertain terms be put in their place.
The threat is minimal, but some degree of risk still exists. Our parking lot abuts a fairly busy street and is surrounded on all sides by a large number of businesses with parking lots of their own. The women leaving our facility can easily be seen by traffic on the abutting street, and people on foot can occasionally be seen walking through these parking lots even though the businesses they belong to are closed and no housing or entertainment facilities are nearby. So what they’re doing on foot walking through these dark areas is anyone’s guess. A couple of weeks ago, while going to retrieve something from my truck, I spotted a guy sitting on the curb of an adjacent parking lot who just sat there facing our building and eating something that was in his hand. I couldn’t tell what it was. An hour or so later one of our female workers was ready to leave and I walked her to her car. The guy was nowhere to be seen when we stepped outside, but I spotted him in the shadows in the parking lot of the business next door to us on the opposite side from where I’d seen him originally. About this time another guy who works there came out to ask me a question, and by the time I’d answered it the guy had disappeared, only to appear a few minutes later walking over to the area where I’d seen him originally. The girl had gone by this time and we asked if he needed help of some kind. He answered no, that he was waiting on a ride. So we went back inside, and when I went back out about twenty minutes later to get something else from my truck, I was surprised to see him getting into a car and driving off, so he was apparently waiting for a ride after all, but why there in a cluster of darkened parking lots?
Anyway, about two or three times a month some guy will be walking past our parking lot late at night, and guys driving along the adjacent road can see the girls as they walk to their cars from our building.
This has been going on for a long time and the girls have just gone with it, because they’ve never had the opportunity to know any different. But eventually I began to notice the frequency of having one guy or another walking nearby late at night and I began to get concerned about our female employees being out in the parking lot in the dark alone and so began offering to walk them to their cars. And they began to appreciate it and express wonder at why other guys aren’t similarly moved to show them such consideration, and here we are.
So the risk is small, the need for elaborate and/or expensive security measures doesn’t exist, and the remedy for whatever risk does exist is simple and easy and takes very little time. And while you may object that these women are being unduly supervised and restricted by my assistance, I can tell you that their cheerful demeanor as we walk to their cars combined with their spoken appreciation for my accompaniment belie that assumption.
Yes, this is a possibility. I don’t know that it’s of any substantive consequence however.
The idea that their request would be an imposition rests solely in their own minds. They simply aren’t used to the idea that a man might be agreeable to doing something nice for them. This is unfortunate.
I don’t know what kind of societal environment you live in, or what your life history is, but it seems that you’re almost pathologically concerned or fearful of reproach should something bad happen to you…or at least this seems to be your overriding concern when it comes to women in general.
This is utterly foreign to my experience. In the circles in which I’ve lived my life in, including even my childhood and teen years, hardly anyone would reproach a woman, at least not to her face, for the negative consequences of any behavior she was legally entitled to engage in. Such behavior might occur with one’s parents or one’s close friends or roommates, but that would be about it. And I can tell you without the slightest fear of contradiction that it would never even occur to any of the people I work with to blame a female worker for being attacked in the event she went to her car alone some night, much less to actually do so. I don’t know what kind of people you associate with, but from anyone I know or am related to she would be met overwhelmingly with sympathy and support.
I think to a certain extent you’re making a much bigger deal out of this than its reality warrants. Down here on street level, I walk one to three girls/women a night to their car. It’s a cheerful and pleasant experience. They talk about their dogs, or their boyfriends or their husbands, or what they’re going to eat when they get home, or what their kids are up to, or their plans for new tires when their tax refund arrives, etc., etc. More often than not I have to excuse myself to get back inside because they’re having such a good time enjoying the visit. Then I walk back inside and carry on with my work. Easy-peasy, not a big deal, and pleasant all around for everyone involved. It’s not a big deal to any of us. I promise.
sigh
It’s obvious you aren’t interested in having a genuine discussion and are only interested in spotting things you can jump to conclusions over and twist off on. I gave fairly detailed descriptions of the sort of random one-on-one male-to-male violence I was talking about, where guys involved in road rage incidents or perceived as looking too hard at someone at a gas pump can lead to violence. From that you choose to twist off and accuse me in angry tones of thinking boys aren’t victims of group-level mistreatment…an aspect of male-to-male violence that so far hadn’t even occurred to me.
The fact that you’d re-read my previous comments in an effort to determine whether I really meant what you thought I was saying convinced me that you were honestly making an effort to understand my point of view and to have an honest conversation.
Clearly I was mistaken.
Here you are denigrating women for choices they have made about clothing and image, while telling us all about the respect you have for women.
If you had respect for women, you’d respect their choices to wear what they want without using denigrating terms for them. It’s this attitude, not the choices women make, that result in some boys and men seeing some women as objects.
Yes, but if the objects would just behave, then they would be treated as behaving objects. And without behaving objects, men have no control over themselves.
See, the objects, when not properly behaving “trigger” men into raping them. The men have no agency in this.
“In the circles in which I’ve lived my life in…”
Did I really say that?
Apologies. I blame late night haste…and Paul McCartney.
I, uh… I think you’re not apologizing for the right things. :rolleyes: I’m not going to jump full into this massive fray, but I just saw this and…
Well, golly.
Actually, from where I sit, it looks like the attitude stems from some boys and men not seeing women as people. Whether they confuse us with objects or cattle appears to vary, but in any case they do not perceive us as equals at all.
Whoa whoa whoa. So we are supposed to avoid prohibiting certain forms of unacceptable behavior on the part of boys, or disciplining boys when they violate that prohibition, just because we’re afraid it will “anger and alienate the boys even more”?
Do you also advocate this same meekly permissive approach when boys are, for instance, picking on other boys, or cussing out teachers, or disrupting classrooms by being loud and unruly? Or is it just boys being “rude” and “crass” and “mean” and “crude” and “difficult” to girls, “in whatever ways they can get away with”, that you feel should be exempt from rules and disciplinary action?
Why should boys get a free pass on bad behavior just because they’re feeling “angry” and “alienated”? All young people feel angry and alienated sometimes. And yes, sometimes being punished for bad behavior makes the perpetrator feel more angry and alienated. That’s true for everyone.
Tough toffee. Boys need to learn how to resist taking their angry alienated feelings out on girls, without requiring the girls they victimize to coddle and “comfort” them into a happier frame of mind by responding to their “rude and crude” behavior with “niceness” and “friendliness”. That sort of appeasement simply encourages boys in a mindset of aggrieved entitlement and lack of self-discipline.
Well, you’re the one who confidently asserted all the way back in post #200 that it does exist, and undertook to explain why:
By the way, what level of “rudeness and crassness” and “being mean” to girls on the part of boys do you feel falls below the “particularly troubling” threshold? Calling them obscene names? Snapping their bra straps? Joking about their bodies? How much and what sort of nasty behavior towards girls are you suggesting that we accept and normalize as “not particularly troubling”, on the grounds that the poor dear boys who engage in such behavior are just feeling “awkward” and “insecure”?
This is yet another Catch-22 of the whole traditional gender expectations mindset. Girls who want to be treated with ordinary decent human civility are required to make sure they deserve it by being “feminine and girly”. Girls who “act street”, whatever that is, are considered to be no longer entitled to civil treatment.
And girls who are simply going about their business not being mean to anybody else, and wanting other people to refrain from being mean to them without imposing conditions of “femininity” and “girliness” on their behavior to qualify for exemption from mean treatment, are evidently SOL.
Boys who are mean to girls, on the other hand, are awarded sympathy for their feelings of “awkwardness and insecurity” and “anger and alienation”, and we mustn’t correct their mean behavior because it might make them feel even more angry and alienated. No, instead we must encourage the victims of their meanness to make the boys “comfortable” with a “ladylike” demeanor that “says they’re friendly and they like you as a person”.
What amazes me about this attitude is not that some men still endorse it—it’s very easy to see its advantageous aspects for men and boys—but that they still expect women and girls to buy into it. Do they really think we can’t see the blatant double standard in play there?
But it’s so simple, really; if those foolish women and girls would just dress appropriately there’d be no problem!
The Catch-22 is pretending to rely on women’s own “assessment” and “judgement” of situations while tacitly reserving the right to decide retroactively that a woman who gets victimized was doing something wrong.
It goes like this: An exaggerated hypothetical situation is initially offered as an illustration of poor judgement, typically one of these stereotypical “Skank Asking for Trouble” scenarios involving skimpy clothing and too much alcohol. And then when a woman finds herself among the vast majority of assault and harassment victims who were not in a stereotypical “Skank Asking for Trouble” situation when the assault or harassment occurred, she gets retroactively saddled with responsibility anyway for “putting herself in a potentially dangerous situation”: “Well why were you walking to your car alone after dark?” “Well why were you riding the subway at rush hour?” “Well why were you alone in his office with him with the door closed?” “Well why did you take your eyes off your drink even for a minute?”
Before an assault or harassment occurs, the description of “what a woman shouldn’t do” to “avoid putting herself in harm’s way” is one of these blatantly reckless hypothetical scenarios about getting blind drunk in a strapless minidress. After it occurs, the description of “what a woman shouldn’t do” to “avoid putting herself in harm’s way” is pretty much whatever it was that she did. Catch-22.
But this “remedy” appears to be operating almost entirely at your own whim and availability. If you’re not around to volunteer as an escort, then your female co-workers have no recourse, except to ask for accompaniment as a favor from one of your male co-workers who apparently have not volunteered for such duty.
See above re: not being so defensive. Whether something counts as restrictive supervision is irrelevant to whether or not the supervised party enjoys it.
If this workplace security measure requires your female co-workers to be accompanied by another person, then it is supervision. If they are being encouraged to believe that this workplace security measure makes a significant difference to their safety, and it is not automatically immediately available to everyone at all times, then it is restrictive. This remains true no matter how much fun you all may be having in your companionable strolls through the parking lot.
You speak very confidently on behalf of your male co-workers here. Do they all agree with you that it’s not an imposition to be indefinitely on call to accompany female co-workers out to their cars at random times after dark? If that were really true, wouldn’t more of them be volunteering for this escort duty?
Or is this simply you arbitrarily deciding that men always ought to be chivalrously willing to escort women and therefore it ought not to be perceived as an imposition?
You appear to be suggesting that such retroactive reproaches are okay as long as everyone except family and close friends are engaging in them behind the victim’s back.
As I said before, if this is just an agreeable little social ritual rather than something which has any real significance as a security measure, then it doesn’t matter in the least from a safety perspective.
But you are flip-flopping back and forth at will between attitudes along the lines of “I’m chivalrously offering my escort because I’m concerned about my female co-workers’ safety and I care about women and I know what bad things can happen to them when walking alone” and “This is no big deal and there’s no significant risk and we’re just having a pleasant social interaction and nobody minds at all.”
This is muddleheaded thinking. If there’s no significant risk and nobody’s actually worried about any threats to their safety, then the whole “chivalry” and “concern” and “protection” aspect of this escort ritual is just a social fiction employed as an excuse for some harmless workplace socializing. If there is a significant security risk that this escort ritual is successfully mitigating, then rationally speaking your co-workers should be worried about the threat to their safety, and your workplace should be trying to implement some sort of after-dark security measures that are more effective and reliable than your part-time one-man volunteer escort.
You’re trying to have it both ways: arguing first that your “chivalry” as a security escort is serving a significant useful purpose so your female co-workers should be depending on it, and then at the same time that there isn’t really any significant security risk so there’s no need to replace your volunteer “chivalry” services with safety measures that are more reliable and convenient.
Which makes sense if the ultimate goal here is just to minister to your ego by making you feel admired and appreciated and depended upon by your young female co-workers, but not so much if the goal is genuinely to address safety concerns. Of course, if there aren’t any real safety concerns to be addressed in the first place, then it doesn’t matter one way or the other and we can quit arguing about it.
I’m seeing a *lot *of ankle there - are you *sure ***Starving **would approve?
[checks ankles] Oh, you mean in EddyTeddyFreddy’s link. My ankles are modestly covered, I assure you.
Bless my heart?
“Some” people can be found who harbor all sorts of bizarre notions. I don’t believe it’s typical at all for most men to think of women as objects or as being “unequal”, at least not in the sense that unequal means “less than.”
Women and men are different in many ways, and men are aware of that, but this isn’t the same as saying women aren’t as good as men or that women are merely objects.
A great many men, in fact I’d say most, devote a great deal of time and money in an effort to keep their wives or girlfriends happy.
Yes, some men will treat women badly. But most are very happy to find one where mutual love exists and a lifelong relationship ensues.
And let’s not forget that some women will treat men badly.
There’s plenty of good and bad to go around on both sides.
No. In the small percentage of cases where the rude or crass behavior is overt enough to be actionable, discipline certainly is warranted. But in my opinion, to get in the boy’s face and wag your finger and accuse him of acting out due to awkwardness or insecurity is only going to embarrass him and create unnecessary anger and resentment that is likely to come out in troublesome ways further down the line. It’s fine to let such boys know that certain behaviors will not be tolerated. It’s a mistake to humiliate or patronize them in the process.
Here, you are putting words in my mouth yet again.
Hopefully you understand now that I’ve advocated no such approach.
Again, I trust you understand by now that your misperception of my comments has led you to concoct an entirely erroneous scenario not at all in keeping with my actual sentiments.
It’s really no mean feat to do this. It pretty much comes automatically in heated discussions when one side is anxious to demonize the attitudes and mindset of their opponent.
Yes. And in that explanation I clearly stated that “some” boys may display rude or crass behavior in an effort to appear uninterested in girls.
Surely you know this as it’s in the very quote you posted. Is it not clear to you that “some” refers to a small but unknown number of boys who might be displaying this behavior?
I have to confess to being at an utter loss as to why you’d me ask all this. I have zero recollection of indicating tolerance for the behaviors you mention, or for the alleged possible “acceptance” and “normalization” of them.
Perhaps if your mind weren’t so cluttered with exaggerated requirements and expectations there wouldn’t be so many “Catch-22s” in your life.
The key word being “evidently.” I happen to think your speculation is wrong, and that most school girls in this country who simply go about their business not being mean to anybody encounter very little mean treatment.
I would phrase it more like, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I wait with a combination of dread and amusement to see how you pervert the meaning of this phrase into one that imposes strict impositions and restrictions upon the freedoms of females while simultaneously rewarding boys for being as mean and abusive to them as possible, while simultaneously pointing out that solutions for these impositions and restrictions on the girls, and for the boys’ meanness as well, are said to exist, their Catch-22 nature renders them confusing and impossible to utilize.
It’s sure to be a dilly!
This man thinks you’ve lost all perspective and can’t begin to address issues involving the difficulties that exist between men and women or boys and girls with anything close to a realistic grasp of what is the real world experience for most women or men.
Why is it not OK to humiliate those whose actions are all about humiliating young women?
Your attitude and mindset are being demonized because they are so outrageously patronising and dismissive of real women living real lives in the 21st century.
Then boys need to be taught that such behaviour is unacceptable under any circumstance.
Have you been tested lately for dementia? :dubious:
Have you read any of the replies in this thread that mention the COMPLETE OPPOSITE to what you ‘think’?
This has to be the funniest (and saddest) thing I’ve read on the interwebs in a bloody long time.
Jesus.
Can you give some examples of “rude or crass behavior” in such a situation that you consider not “overt enough to be actionable”, along with a few that you consider just over the borderline of actionability? You’ve now clarified that you think behavior like obscene name-calling and bra-strap-snapping and joking about bodies ought to be actionable, but I’m not getting a clear sense of what you consider not actionable.
(Although I do have to say that if you think that obscene name-calling and making fun of physical characteristics constitute a “small percentage” of instances where boys are being “rude or crass” towards girls, the accuracy of your estimates may leave something to be desired.)
It is certainly not clear that “some” necessarily implies a “small” number, although I certainly agree that it implies a number smaller than “all”. But since I never said that this is a problem with all boys, your objection’s irrelevant.
Then what sorts of “rude and crass” behaviors of boys towards girls are you suggesting do qualify as not “particularly troubling”?
I have no objection at all to the possibility of finding out that we’re actually in vehement agreement that boys shouldn’t be allowed to treat girls badly. But I can’t tell whether that’s the case unless you are willing to be candid about what sorts of specific bad treatment towards girls on the part of boys you think should be allowed.
Sadly, I completely concur with you that in today’s persistently patriarchal and sexist society, it is indeed unrealistically “exaggerated” to expect or require non-sexist attitudes and behavior as a regular thing. However, if we keep pointing out the problems when we see them, we have a shot at gradually improving the prospects for the future.
If the message we actually intend to convey to children is in fact a non-gendered egalitarian universal sentiment like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, then we should convey it in a non-gendered egalitarian universal way. Cluttering it up with gender-targeted exhortations about girls being “ladylike” is merely obscuring the message.
If the school had in fact painted on its wall such a non-gendered egalitarian universal sentiment, along the lines of “Encourage good behavior in others by behaving well yourself” or something like that, nobody would be complaining about it at all.
Call me a wuss but I’m trying to figure out if I want to ask for his opinion on what rude and crass behavior of anybody towards anybody else does he not find objectionable. Isn’t “objectionable” or some synonym somewhere in the definition of “rude and crass”?
Not being a woman, I have no first hand experience with how much of this goes on. But I’ve spent a great deal of time with a lot of women over the course of my life. I’ve spent time with girls at school, around the mothers of friends at school, around the women my father dated after my parents split up, around my own mother and her mother, and my dad’s mother. I dated a lot of girls, some for a long time, and spent time talking with and becoming friends with their mothers. I was married and became close friends with my wife’s three sisters. I’ve worked for companies most of my life that had lots of female employees, many of whom I became pretty friendly with. There is a generation of young women in my family who I’ve been extremely close to all their lives and I’ve spent lots of time with them and their friends all through their lives, including their teens and twenties.
In other words, I’ve spent literally tens of thousands of hours around women of all ages and in all sorts of circumstances, and in situations where they felt perfectly safe and comfortable with me.
During that time I’ve heard a lot of stories about men or boyfriends or ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends who were jerks and the bad/awful/creepy/violent things they did.
But I have never in all that time, and I repeat, NEVER, even once heard any of them complain about having been groped or harassed or assaulted even in a minor way, while innocently going about their day-to-day business.
Not once!
This is incredible to me. I absolutely cannot help but think that in all this time my wife, or one of my girlfriends, or one of the adult women I became close to while in my teens, or friends with as an adult, would not have mentioned in some way or for some reason, that they had had such experiences. I would think that if nothing else they’d just want to express annoyance at always having to put up with it if it were as frequent and pervasive as you claim, or to express the surprise and outrageousness of it had it been rare.
So I can’t help but think that these horror stories you keep raising about how women are constantly being assaulted and harassed are being blown out of proportion for the sake of effect and that the true risk is relatively minor, and that the instances of their having been reprimanded or accused of some sort of wrongful culpability in whatever happened to them is being exaggerated too. No one in my family and no one I know would behave that way toward any woman in our circle to whom any such thing happened. It would be unthinkable.
Frankly, all this smacks of manufactured victimization in service of a cause, and intended to raise ire toward the injustice of it all.
This is not to imply that you are implicit in creating or intentionally promoting such manufactured victimization, but you certainly seem to have bought into it and to find it infallible.
So as to the “Catch-22” situations you’re always perceiving and the conflicting messages that they’re alleged to be sending to women, I don’t know what sort of answer you expect from me. My suggestion as to their answer to the questions raised by the inquisitors in the post above would be, “Because I had no other choice!” Or, “Why in the hell would you ask me something like that?” Or, “I was riding the subway at rush hour in order to GET HOME!!! Why the hell do you think I was riding it?”
In other words, just because some insensitive or accusing dolt asks such a question, it doesn’t mean the woman involved has to provide an answer that they find acceptable. Frankly, your approach seems to be the one that belittles and insults women as it seems a primary concern in fighting abuse and harassment is to ensure they won’t have to account for their actions leading up to it, when the proper response should be along the lines of, “How dare you?” or, “It’s none of your damn business!”
They also have the option of walking to their car alone, or of waiting until someone else, male or female, should be ready to leave.
Okay, since I’m tired of arguing about it, I’ll grant that it involves supervision and restriction. So what? None of us thinks of it that way. And since no one’s there to attempt to convince them that this overbearing man who’s ostensibly looking out for their safety is actually subjecting them to anti-feminist supervision and restriction and they’d be better off taking their chances with random foot traffic in the dead of night, it’s of zero consequence.
I don’t know that “on call” is an apt way to describe it. More like a randomly occurring interruption that takes maybe a minute or three and involves a pleasant 50’ to 125’ walk and chat with a young woman. None of us are under such tight time constraints that this presents an undue inconvenience.
That’s a pretty accurate statement of my view, which in my opinion is the least we can do in face of the fact that women face risks and dangers that we men do not. In fact I would to tend to think it boorish in the extreme for any man to object to taking a few brief moments to help keep a female co-worker that much safer as she walks to her car, especially in the dark and in an area where random men with no apparent reason for being there are occasionally spotted.
This interpretation is incorrect.
And if it does have some significance as a security measure, does it then matter from a safety perspective?
Not at all. It’s a combination of the two. It’s an agreeable little social ritual that also serves the dual purpose of making our female employees feel safer as they walk to their cars in the dark at night, and to actually provide a measure of safety that would not exist otherwise.
And now, I am way past tired of arguing the finer points of my role as an ‘escort service worker.’
I trust that we have exhausted the subject.