I am not being disingenuous. Hentor asserted multiple times that he didn’t follow her; in fact he did follow her. Lynn asserted (and I agree) based on social norms that her moving away from him in the first place was likely an attempt to disengage with him, although obviously we can’t know for certain.
I know that if I politely moved away from someone at a gym it would be because I didn’t want to talk to them any more. I don’t know what’s so difficult about this. She moved away from him and he followed her. You can argue about the implications of that but you can’t just assert over and over that it didn’t happen, as if that will magically make it not have happened.
ETA: I do think the fact that most men in this thread are (possibly unconsciously) skipping over his following her to the next machine, while women tend to be picking up on it, is an excellent illustration of the difference between the genders in trained awareness.
I find the fact that a couple of women in this thread continue to assert that something happened that is completely at odds with the information presented to be very revealing.
I wish, that as an alternative to the Ignore feature, there was an Arsehole feature. When you tagged someone with Arsehole status, their thread text would all appear in brown. That way, rather than having big glaring gaps in threads, you could be reminded right away that a given poster isn’t really worth dealing with, while still being able to skim over their bullshit offering. It would also do away with the troubling experience of struggling to resolve why someone you misremembered as being worthwhile would say something so stupid. “Oh yeah, it wasn’t XYZ123 who says meaningful things, its 456XYZ!” It would save a lot of time.
Your interpretation doesn’t quote click for me, but perhaps I am misunderstanding the original story.
He spoke to her and then used a machine near her. (i.e. the following)
When she moved away, he did not follow.
It seems that if we attribute ‘follow’ to the first situation, a person exchanging communication with another person and then settling near this person as ‘following’ that person that we are then making stalkers out of a huge segment of the population, me included. I’ve nodded, said ‘hey, how you doing’ and then sat down in a nearby table to that person, so I must be following that person? We can say ‘the poster used this word, case closed!!’ or we can say ‘hey, that’s just the word used, let’s look at the situation.’ shrug
[QUOTE=Weedy]
He started talking to a girl as she walked up to the machine next to mine. She replied to him, then he followed her over to the machine, and continued talking to her as she began her workout.
[/QUOTE]
The way I read this was:
Girl approaches machine but does not reach it (hence “as she walked up to”). Man says something to her. Girl says something to man and then moves away (past him?) to the machine. Man follows her to machine and continues talking to her while not working out himself. So yes, there was a point where she moved away from him and he followed her.
He continued talking to her as she moved. When she deliberately moved away from him, he didn’t follow. There is nothing wrong with following someone in this situation - that is, whilst engaged in conversation with them - when there’s been no sign that the conversation is unwelcome. Look, people aren’t psychic (not even those who claim to have a spidey sense), and until such point as someone makes it clear that their conversation is unwanted, talking to them is not a problem. In the situation in the original OP, the guy stopped talking to her when he realised she wasn’t interested - no problem.
If someone is unwilling to make it clear they don’t want a conversation to continue, especially in a public situation like this, that is solely their problem, not the problem of the person talking to her.
Okay. (I sat and re-read and re-imagined several times.) I understand your interpretation. Put myself in her shoes a bit.
Yet, I can’t help but go back to the other side as well, on his end, he is just a human being who chatted with another human and then chose to work out near her.
Also, it feels like we are exaggerating his actions and exaggerating what happened. For example, they could have been standing a foot away from the work out machines. I mean, the machines they chose could have been the closest and most logical place to go
But this would be an assumption that may not accurately describe the situation. Just as the assumption that she walked away from him in the first place with him following. We just don’t know.
Precisely. To avoid the word-trap apparently associated with nuances of the f-word, I would restate the situation simply by saying that he approached her, but did not pursue her.
From what we know of the matter, we cannot even be sure that she rebuffed him, or that there was anything to rebuff. The only two people who know if anything remotely untoward happened are the two of them.
It’s a parody of the quote I was responding to. It reveals nothing more than that a couple of women persist in adding content to their description of this situation. Drawing broader implications about gender differences would be stupid and offensive, wouldn’t it?
Of course, it also highlights individual differences in bias, which makes spidey sense fallible - more so for some than others. It raises questions in regards to elbows description of spidey sense as a universal female trait.
If she is, it isn’t true. Actually none of what you quoted there is universally true. Some of us females haven’t been groped, maybe because we are too ugly for it, maybe because we didn’t need anyone else to take care of us.
I may decide that something/one is “off”, but it isn’t spidey sense fercrissakes, it’s the result of observation and experience. And I don’t go tattling to anyone about it either.
She was initially doing just that. That is what I called her out on; she retreated from that position (to her credit) and moved the goalposts (not so much).
Second Judith, For the last time, the factual chain of events as reported by Weedy were as follows:
Guy chats briefly with girl
Girl replies to him
Both move to a nearby station
Guy continues conversation Girl (may or may not have replied) Unknown, OP unclear
Girl gets up and moves off down the line
Guy does not follow and returns to his weights.
ANYTHING past this is fictional or added on by telephone process in the OT or over the course of this one.
It is clear that he followed once only to a nearby station and when she moved away, for whatever reason, he did not follow or persist. Whatever was exchanged between them is unknown and we only have Weedy’s interpretation of vague variables like facial expressions read from a distance and her opinion of ages to extrapolate anything from. None of that is even remotely enough to draw a logical conclusion from.
Anyone can be creepy, including women and kids. The word you’re looking for Acid Lamp is “rapey”. As in “Betty, are you sure you want to go to the bar with Phil? He seems kind of rapey.”
Now, I’ve never been groped in public, but as one poster in a recent thread insisted, women can be groped and not even know it. So maybe I have. Oooooo.
Put myself in her shoes a bit.