Where are these subservient, polite women you speak of?
I haven’t seen that in years.
In years…? Oh, you mean “the good old days,” that men wax rhapsodic about? You know, good because women and minorities knew their places and internalized their annoyance and rage instead of speaking their minds.
Spice Weasel, bless you for the work you’ve been doing in these threads. You’ve shown amazing patience and I really appreciate it, because mine has run out.
I didn’t say I missed them, try not to take EVERYTHING out of context.
Instead of constantly being on the attack , maybe try looking at things objectively.
But thank you ,for lending credence to what I wrote.
Ok, fair deal, we are on the same page, if not the same paragraph. Normal social interaction:
Man asks out. Woman not interested. Perfectly Ok for her to say either No, or a weasel: “Not tonite, I have to…”. If it is NO! Man accepts No. if a qualified no, man can ask again. Woman then should say No! If man asks after No, that is bordering on harassment. If man asks twice after a no, that is harassment.
See, I was unable to read your non-verbal clues.
That’s not correct. Her claim was not (just) about men who "shake your hand when you just told me that makes you uncomfortable’'. It was about men who extend their hands to shake women’s hands without having ascertained in advance that the women are OK with it.
I’ll take your word for it that I misremembered. That is a different kettle of fish.
emph mine.
Point of order:
You must have missed the memo. Henceforth, using weasel in this way is unacceptable. Please use Ferret.
No need for that.
I believe this is the original claim. See also other posts in that thread, e.g. #145.
Followed by further discussion in a dedicated thread.
Oh. I accidentally posted in here again, not realizing it was the same thread I planned to leave. (after so many sexual harassment threads, they tend to blur together.) So I may as well add that I read and appreciate your response. I’m all for common sense and direct communication for sure.
Stoat? Polecats?
Ok!
Muskelid.
Looks like things have calmed down now. I stepped out because I didn’t want to contribute to that rapidly developing clusterfuck in any way. Seems to no longer be an issue.
Those links are a bit hard to parse without remembering the full context, but I will concede there is a lot of weird there. As the foundation of my original point was that it was a basically rational perspective, I’ll retract that. I’m at least sticking with the second claim, almost nobody on these boards thinks that is normal. So when we’re talking about women’s views on average… not that.
I think most people - not women only - are reasonable people. I think if we start with a baseline assumption that most people are not reasonable, we can get into trouble. Women already have an undeserved reputation for being unreasonable. The extent to which we’re biologically different is debatable, but I don’t see any evidence that we’re any worse about perceiving reality than men. I think our reality is different in many ways due to social context.
I’d like to believe that extreme victim-blaming attitudes like what I experienced so many years ago are an anomaly, too. Certainly it seems the incidence of these crimes has gone down in the last few decades. Maybe things are starting to change. I was deeply cynical about it when it first started getting press coverage. There’s still a part of me that is really bitter. But I will say one thing. In the years since I’ve been here, I’ve seen more and more men come out of the woodwork on these boards to call out misogyny and harassment and bad attitudes for what they are. This is heartening.
I think one of the corollaries to ‘‘more and more men are getting it’’ is that it might be helpful to acknowledge that most guys are acting in good faith. It is actually possible to misunderstand someone’s signals or intentions. It is actually possible to think someone wants a kiss when they don’t. Men are not mind readers and they are subject to some weird-ass social pressures, too. I’ve had women actively counsel me not to tell men how I felt about them. When I reported that I confessed to my then best friend (now husband) that I loved him, my own beloved Aunt said, “Jesus, Spice. Never tell a man that you love him first. It will scare the shit out of him.” Well, he wasn’t scared, he was relieved, because he felt the same way. Because not everybody lives in that box assigned by their gender. And I think no matter how stereotypical any given one of us might seem, we all live outside of it in some way or another.
Trauma complicates the hell out of male-female sexual interactions, and a lot of women have trauma. But I don’t want to live in a society where men and women refuse to trust one another or meet one another half way. It’s one of the reasons I… hmm, I won’t say I left the social justice movement, obviously I care very much about social justice. But I did step back from a certain contingent of feminists who didn’t seem to be advocating in good faith. They saw men as the enemy and I don’t. The main enemy I see is the unwillingness or inability to try to look at or respect the experiences of other people. That unwillingness to see other people - not men, not white people, not Republicans, Democrats, or libertarians - is our biggest social disease. That’s where we’re failing right now as a society.
You know, IMHO.
well reasoned post, thanks.
Certainly nobody on these boards indicated they think that particular poster’s position is normal, and I think the number of people in society at large who might think so is also small to the point that it might be ignored. It’s an extreme illustration of what’s out there - there’s a lot of room between that position and the societal norm, and any number of people might be somewhere on that part of the spectrum.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that all or most women misinterpret what is and isn’t sexual or other harassment. The claim in the OP was that some do.
What’s relevant here is 1) whether this may be a factor in some cases where there are accusations, and 2) whether there is no room for concern on the part of men about how they might be misinterpreted. “Some” would suffice for this purpose.
[FTR, I imagine most men never have issues of this sort, so it’s easy to virtue signal about this. But when confronted with people who say they have or do, ISTM that what they’re saying is reasonable.]
I’ve not seen anyone claiming in this context that woman are worse at perceiving reality than men. However - as I noted in another thread - due to prevailing societal norms, women misinterpreting consent is generally not a concern at all, while men making that same misinterpretation is a huge huge deal. So if there’s some % of instances where consent is ambiguous or otherwise likely to have been misinterpreted, it’s (the interpretation of) women’s consent that’s what matters, while (the interpretation of) men’s consent is a complete non-issue.
If I understand you correctly - and I often genuinely struggle with understanding you correctly, I’m not trying to be obtuse - you’re saying unwelcome advances toward men are often treated like they are a non-issue. Well, it’s an issue to me no matter the gender involved. I agree there is an unfair double standard. I want to kill it with fire.
You might also be saying that women’s view of whether or not they consented is often favored over men’s view of whether or not that woman consented. I’m not sure if you’re talking about sexual harassment or rape or everything in between. In general, I see no issue with favoring her perception. The onus is on the initiator of the sexual contact to determine whether their partner consents. Allowing that mistakes happen. I think you can reasonably mistake consent for a kiss, even a grope. I am not so sure you can reasonably mistake consent for intercourse. I’ve read accounts by men who accidentally almost raped someone because they were so into their own needs they had no clear awareness of their partner’s lack of consent, and I recognize the intent was not there, but it’s not like we can say, ‘‘Well, he didn’t mean to. Misunderstandings happen.’’ We have to have some level of accountability for that kind of obliviousness.
If we’re talking about sexual harassment or milder levels of sexual assault, I guess it depends on the context. I hate categoricals, especially for stuff like human relationships. I’m not in the ‘‘ask for everything before you do it’’ camp. If a woman is flirting with you and gazes longingly into your eyes and you kiss her, it’s not sexual harassment (unless it’s at work, because it creates an awkward situation.) If you’re kissing her and she puts her arms around you and you grab her ass and she’s like, “Um, no.” It’s not sexual assault. I think it’s unfair to call it that.
There has to be some reasonable attempt to communicate that the behavior is unwanted. But on the flip side, it’s completely unreasonable for a man to think he can walk up to a strange woman, flirt with her, and if she flirts back that means he can grab her ass. There’s like a continuum of behaviors here for feeling out consent and it’s unlikely to be well received if you skip over a few steps. I don’t feel sorry for guys who do that and then claim they thought they had consent.
A thought experiment that might help guys is asking the question, “What made him think she wanted that?”
The answer that points to consent is something like, “Well, she smiled at me and put her arms around me and made a happy noise” (or whatever, depending on what the behavior was.) This indicates the man made a reasonable decision. If a woman claims she was assaulted or harassed based on a single decision she didn’t like, and he can point to those clear indicators, it’s dumb to consider a man guilty of some crime.
But if he can’t think of a clear rationale, it’s probably reasonable to conclude consent wasn’t there.
If we’re talking about rape… a piece I think is being overlooked, is that if a man has a woman in an isolated location, he makes a sexual move, the women resists or otherwise indicates a lack of consent, and the man continues in spite of her protest, the dynamics have instantly changed. The larger, stronger person has the power and doesn’t care what the smaller, weaker person wants. For many women that is neurologically interpreted as an immediate threat. The standard response to threat is to freeze up and do nothing. That is the case for almost every kind of threat in existence. It is the reason mass shooting victims huddle under their desks, effectively waiting to be shot. People have all sort of heroic ideas about what they would do in a threatening situation, but those ideas are wishful thinking. The minute he puts a woman in that headspace by persisting when she asked him not to, it is completely unfair and unreasonable for him to put the burden on her to fight back. Now the guy might be thinking, “Hey, she didn’t tell me to piss off and she’s not punching me in the face. See? I knew she would be into it if I persisted.” Silence and stillness are not consent. They are indicators of a person who is overwhelmed or scared.
Is it the case for every woman and every scenario, ever? No. Sometimes women can get out of that initial freeze response and tell a guy to shove off. Sometimes they don’t feel threatened at all. Sometimes they said no, but really wanted him to persist because they are all about perpetuating a culture that doesn’t take women seriously. Maybe sometimes they are legitimately persuaded. But the freeze response happens often enough that awareness of this dynamic is really important. It’s particularly the case if someone is with a new partner, someone whose signals they don’t really understand very well, literally all I think most women are asking is for men to err on the side of caution. It’s not that big of a deal for a guy to mutter, “This okay with you?” if he has any doubts. And contrary to popular belief, he won’t lose man points for checking in. Any woman who deems a man inferior for making sure his partner actually wants him is not worthy of that man. There is a sizeable contingent of women who think there is absolutely nothing hotter than consent.
It’s probably not up your alley, but I wrote an entire novel that is heavily thematic on the difference between sexual dominance and sexual assault. Some of your posts, particularly in the other thread, indicate that you think guys have to give up the former in order to avoid the latter. I posit it’s not true. I wrote a whole book about a sexually dominant male who is hyper sensitive to issues of consent. These men exist all over the place, but you can most easily find them in BDSM forums. From a purely statistical lottery perspective, I’d feel safer with a random self-identified Dom than anyone pulled from the general population.
In part. Really two or three things.
1a) that unwelcome advances toward men are often treated like they are a non-issue. 1b) unwelcome advances toward men frequently are a non-issue, because even when unwanted, the guy is not likely to get all that worked up about it.
And 2) there’s a societal expectation that men and not women make most of the advances, and since women don’t make most of the advances, they also don’t make most of the unwelcome ones.
As a practical result of all of the above, a woman who is completely clueless about understanding consent from language and social cues will do OK. A man who is clueless to the exact same extent is in big trouble. So the cluelessness of (some) men is a big deal. The similar clueless of (some) women is a non-issue.
I wasn’t talking about dominance - more about initiative. And it’s not that you have to give up the former for the latter, but that if you don’t give up the former then you have a higher risk of the latter.