It’s our curse to bear.
And our bear to curse. Fuck off, bear!!
For someone who complains that other people put words in his mouth, you sure made a lot of assumptions about what I said.
What people are trying to point out to you is that telling women how to dress or how much mace to carry is pointless unless we address the real harmful factor - men who hurt people.
Yeah. Because you’re really fucking bad at talking about rape without sounding like a huge cunt.
Not everyone is bad at talking about rape without sounding like a huge cunt. Some people are capable of empathy. Some people aren’t best known for their defense of a child rapist. Those people should offer that advice. You should shut up and listen.
Ah, you’re so close to understanding the problem with the sign referenced in the OP… 
Not at all. “Putting words in someone’s mouth” means that you are attributing to them things they did not say. But I didn’t do that. I clearly stated that my inference was an assumption, and then left it to you to say whether that assumption was the correct one.
Forgive me, but it appears for all the world that what they are doing is saying that anyone who dares suggest such precautions is an asshole.
And how are such suggestions pointless if they help keep women from harm? What sense does it make to adopt the attitude that until a danger is removed we should stop cautioning against it?
And lastly, what do you mean by “addressing” the factor that [some] men hurt people? I’m unaware of any culture or country anywhere in the world where men don’t hurt people. So how do you propose this addressing be accomplished?
I think this is where the major disconnect lies between people like you and people like me. I take it as a given that some men are going to sexually abuse women. I take it as a given that some men are going to beat women. And I take it as a given that some men are going to grope or harass women while simply going about their day-to-day business.
But I also take it as a given that men are going to attack or beat up other men. I take it as a given that some men just like to get drunk and pick fights. I take it as a given that some men are going to fire frozen paintballs from cars at pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists. I take it as a given that some guys are just plain mean…to men, to women, to animals, you name it.
Thus, the to my mind the only sensible and realistic response to the fact that such threats exist is to try to determine the factors that lead up to them and then try as best as possible to avoid putting oneself in that position.
Hence the types of precautions (and on occasion, recriminations - justified or not) that liberals find so offensive.
Liberals, on the other hand seem to think that if we can just “educate” people (or shame or demonize them) sufficiently, they will then begin to behave as desired, and all will be well…but in the meantime we must attack and villainize those who seek to keep women safe, because heaven forfend, it puts the responsibility for a woman’s safety upon the woman!
Well, guess what? Men take steps or moderate their behavior in order to avoid dangerous or threatening situations, some of which can pop up instantly at any time during their day. And yet men don’t go through life feeling entitled to behave as provocatively or carelessly as they want, free from any and all harmful consequence.
The fact that most women thankfully do take steps to avoid dangerous situations and/or to moderate their behavior to keep themselves safe puts them squarely on an equal footing with men, who have always found it necessary to do the same.
You might want to think about that for a moment, unless you happen to be of the mindset that asserts, “We want equality, except when we don’t!”
Your posting history clearly demonstrates that statement is a lie.
Did I call it or what?
Starving Artist, you still haven’t addressed the current question raised by this previous exchange concerning the topic of the OP:
You’ve been insisting all along that it’s a good idea to encourage girls to try to influence the behavior of boys by responding to boys’ “rudeness and crassness” or “rude and crude behavior” or “being mean” with a “ladylike demeanor” that “says they’re friendly and they like you as a person”.
But you’ve been very coy about actually specifying what particular form(s) of “rudeness” and “crassness” and “crudeness” and “meanness” on the part of boys you think warrant this sort of conciliatory “ladylike”, non-“threatening”, “friendly” response from girls to make the boys who are engaging in that rude behavior feel “comfortable”.
It still seems to me that the appropriate response to rude and crass and mean behavior on the part of boys is for adults to clearly prohibit and discipline it, rather than to encourage girls to endure it with a soothing demeanor in the hope that it will eventually “evaporate”.
And if we just want to give schoolchildren the general message that good behavior in oneself often inspires good behavior in others, we can easily accomplish that without loading it up with heavily gendered baggage about “ladies” and “gentlemen”.
“I am a man and naturally women would tell me if they were sexually assaulted, but since they haven’t they clearly weren’t. Res ipsa loquitur.”
/snipped/
I see one of the early seeds planted in women that they can/should fix men; the idea girls should take control of boys for their own good starts young w/ the kind of message we’re all talking about. How many times have you seen a man being treated as a woman’s project? I know I’ve done it myself, thinking I had the responsibility.
Hell, at least 75% of “bad boy charm” is the notion that “I can fix him!” (no you can’t).
In a codependent relationship you have the Person Who Needs Saving and the Protector (usually male) or Fixer (usually female). The genderedness is a social thing and therefore varies* but the relationship being unhealthy and exploiting what should have been a healthy trait (the intent to help others) is unchanging through time and space.
- Cis-female, but I was raised to be a Protector, both because that’s what my mother wanted from everybody and because in my father’s culture, Noblesse Obligue doesn’t give a shit about groins.
I don’t know that being coy is the correct way to describe my lack of specificity regarding the behavior of the boys at the school in Houston. We simply don’t know what their behavior was.
Nor do we know the motives the school’s administrators had mind in putting that quote above the girl’s lockers. It’s just as possible that they saw the boys behaving in benign ways that the school’s administrators felt were ungentlemanly, such as perhaps ignoring a girl and walking past after seeing her drop her books on the floor instead of stopping and offering to help. Or ignoring them as they struggle to get large or heavy objects out of their cars. Or using foul or sexually related language in their presence. Treating them like guys, in other words.
And perhaps some of the girls complained about this, because young girls don’t like being ignored by young boys and treated like they don’t exist, so they began to complain to the school’s administration that the boys don’t behave in a very gentlemanly way toward them.
So it’s possible the school’s administrators recognized this and perhaps attributed a certain amount of it to what they perceived as unladylike behavior on the part of the girls, and felt that one of the ways the boys might be inspired to treat the girls in a more ladylike way would be for the girls to begin to behave in a more ladylike way themselves.
Now clearly we don’t know that this was the motive either. So all we’re really doing is speculating. And in speculating there’s simply no reasonable way to be specific about certain imagined behaviors, and how or to what extent they should be addressed.
As you might imagine, I don’t regard behaviors based on a person’s gender to be “baggage.” Like it or not, men and women and boys and girls are different in a lot of ways. And as such they react differently with members of their own sex than they do with the opposite sex. So a general message that good behavior inspires good behavior will not result in the same behavior coming from boys toward girls as toward other boys, nor from girls toward boys as toward other girls.
The reason? Each sex has different ideas as to what constitutes good behavior, and each has a better understanding of their own sex than it has of the other. So even if everyone involved is trying to use good behavior, those behaviors will not be identical and they will inevitably result in misunderstandings, hurt feelings and resentment, with the result that we’re right back where we started.
Is this really what you draw from that paragraph, that my being a man is the reason woman should speak to me of sexual assault?
Or would it more likely be that in 55 years of spending time with women of all kinds and in sorts of ways, including romantic relationships and marriage, none of them in all that time has complained to me about the constant non-stop sexual harassment and assault that, according to Kimstu, statistics prove women experience as they innocently go about their daily lives?
They have certainly complained to me about plenty of other things men do, so why not that? If daily life were like Kimstu suggests, I would expect women all the time to be complaining that “I can never so much as set foot out of the damn house without some asshole grabbing my boobs or my ass or shaking his crotch at me and yelling obscenities.”
But I’ve heard nothing like this in all in the 55 years since I turned 14 - 15 and began experiencing talk involving sex coming from the girls and women in my life. I’ve not even heard about wolf whistles or suggestive comments or excessive requests for dates. And I’ve certainly never seen any of this assaultive or harassing behavior myself, and I get out and around a lot and I always have.
So my guess is that most women experience sexual assault of a serious nature pretty rarely if at all while out in public or otherwise going about their day, and that to whatever degree they encounter minor harassment and annoyances, it happens so infrequently, and they consider it so minor and inconsequential, as not to be worth mentioning. And that perhaps Kimstu’s “statistics” have been exaggerated by someone with an anti-male or woman-as-victim agenda to make it appear that women’s lives are considerably more fraught with abuse than is the case in reality.
The responsibility? Or the desire to create acceptable behavior in a man you were inexorably drawn to?
I’ve often heard or read that certain women are drawn to “bad boys” because they’re interesting, or they’re exciting in that you never know what they’re going to do next. Or that they make the woman in question “feel protected.”
And what of women and teenage girls who find “nice guys” dull and boring? These are often the guys that a girl’s parents approve of. So where is society’s motive to “plant a seed” that nice guys are dull and undesirable?
This is the first I’ve heard of any woman having become involved with a bad boy purely out of some subliminally instilled obligation or responsibility that she fix him. Is a woman ever responsible for her own behavior in your world? Or are they all born as innocents who would remain ever thus if not for the self-serving manipulations perpetrated upon them by society or by men?
Frankly, it’s beginning to look like you people view women as helpless, inborn saps, incapable of using their own intelligence or judgement and only arriving at any sort of belief or behavior because it’s been preordained and thrust upon them by outside sources seeking to use them to their advantage.
In other words, “I am woman, hear me roar!” is not the message coming through in this thread.
No we don’t, but presumably you knew what you meant when you stated very definitely in post #200 that boys “may display rudeness and crassness” towards girls for reasons that you explained as having to do with boys’ feelings of “awkwardness and insecurity”. And you claimed that this was a situation “where ladylike behavior can be beneficial” in displaying attitudes of friendliness and liking towards the boys who are behaving rudely and crassly, so as to make them “feel comfortable”.
So my question is very simple: what are some specific forms that you had in mind of this “rude and crass” behavior from boys that you think girls ought to respond to by being more “ladylike”?
That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense either. Why should we encourage boys or girls to regard helpfulness, self-sufficiency or foul language as gendered issues? Why not just straightforwardly and consistently tell all students “If you see somebody else struggling to cope with dropped or heavy objects, offer to help them. If they decline your offer of help, leave them alone. Don’t use foul or sexually explicit language.” ?
Why are you so focused on trying to complicate this sort of simple and easy basic rule of good behavior by insisting that it needs to be directed in a gender-specific way?
:dubious: Well, they’re bound to if adults keep trying to drum it into them that basic good behavior is somehow fundamentally different for boys and girls. If we instead concentrate on promoting and enforcing standards of basic good behavior for everyone that aren’t loaded up with gender-specific criteria, then both sexes will probably have much more similar “ideas as to what constitutes good behavior”, despite their biological differences.
After all, we seem to manage to teach both boys and girls many of the same standards of universal basic good behavior already: e.g., we teach them in day-care centers that you shouldn’t hit people and you shouldn’t take their snacks, or in grade school that you shouldn’t cheat off other people’s test papers or steal money out of their lockers, and so on.
So I’m not as pessimistic as you seem to be about the feasibility of teaching both boys and girls other standards of universal basic good behavior, such as “Be helpful and respectful towards other people”, in a way that’s not intrinsically gender-specific.
Again, it might help if you would give a specific example of what you think constitutes a situation where “everyone involved is trying to use good behavior” but which nonetheless results “in misunderstandings, hurt feelings and resentment” solely because of this postulated fundamental incapacity of boys and girls to correctly understand each other’s behavior.
I have to admit I did skip that bit. Soooo… we are supposed to reward crass, boorish behavior with friendliness?
Well, here’s the verbatim text of the remarks in question:
I also have been asking Starving Artist why we should consider it a good idea to encourage girls “to reward crass, boorish behavior with friendliness”, and not getting any very persuasive answers. The rather vague and unconvincing thinking seems to be that it’ll work because boys want girls to like them, or something. Which of course, even if it were true, doesn’t address the fundamental unfairness of expecting girls who are treated rudely and crassly by boys to smile and take it with a “friendly demeanor” to make the boys feel “comfortable” in the hopes that maybe it will incline them to stop being so mean.
Not reward it, ameliorate it.
If you’ll recall, the idea is to lessen the boys’ alleged crass and boorish behavior.
How exactly do you think rewarding it will accomplish that?
Huh, I have no idea why I wouldn’t have given you the same answer as the one I just gave Nava, but there it is.
And now I’m out and will be until late tomorrow night. Just FYI for anyone wanting to discuss since I’m not usually here at this late an hour and the expectation may be that I just arrived.