I think you meant dark handicapped parking space after midnight in a wheelchair at the gym.
WTF?
Here’s a thread from 2010 about how common sexual harassment is for women on the Dope, for people looking for a broader sample size than just people who’ve posted in this thread and their friends and partners.
Basically Slithy Tove nailed it in post 39 of the closed thread:
Neither “Oh my god, you hysterical women are always overreacting about sexual harassment, BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH” nor “If only you women were stronger and feistier and didn’t put up with any of that crap, it would magically disappear!” is a helpful way to solve either of those problems.
Guys, you guys, stop fighting: I HAVE THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATION FOR THE WHOLE DAMN THING!
The weird gym guy in the original thread is clearly a recent Icelandic immigrant to the US! This would explain everything!
Shoulderbumping? Check – Icelandic men do it all the time. (My cite? That New Yorker article from a couple of years back where the writer describes getting aggressively shoulderbumped already on the plane over. No, I can’t find a link. Sorry!)
The incessant socializing? Why of course – he just moved to the States, and now wants to 1) pick up new friends and 2) practice his English! (Or should I say his Vinlandic?)
The fact that he’s in a gym in the first place? Naturally – those axes aren’t going to throw themselves!
I say invite him over for some fermented sharkfin, chat about Björk and the Þingvellir, crack a few jokes about volcano ash and crashed economies (probably the reason he came over in the first place, right?), then round it off with half a dozen shots of moss schnapps – the poor little lost Viking will feel right at home!
All properly formed quotes contain a link to the post in question. It’s the blue-backed white chevron next to the posters name in the quote.
Come back when you’ve asked more than one woman, okay?
Seriously, this hasn’t happened to your wife so it’s all bullshit? This attitude is the reason, sexually assaulted women, don’t want to tell, y’know.
What you’re really advocating, to my mind, is that women, (who more frequently than not, do have such experiences), over ride their own life experiences, ignoring what it’s taught them, because you think it’s a slur on all men. Nice.
I’m not going to engage any further, in this, with you, because I don’t see any point. Nothing is going to convince you. As I said, just like a naive 12yr old girl, you’re flat out not going to believe, it’s that kind of world, until it happens to you. I was that way once, myself, so I can understand.
But hey, my very first pitting, in over 10 yrs of posting!
And over the hugely controversial subject of the frequency of groping of tween/teen girls.:dubious:
I feel like I have truly arrived now. So thanks for that, anyway.
The OP is worried about the mans psyche if it is brought to his attention that he has boundary issues? If that will crush his psyche then one will really have to watchout for his revenge fantasies that are sure to follow.
I suggest you go ahead and reread that thread SecondJudith linked to…
Bollocks. First off I didn’t pit you, I started a new thread to finish off the exchange we were having in the closed thread. I placed it here because initially it was between two posters rather than the board as a whole, but If a mod would like to move it to GD or somewhere else that’s fine by me.
Secondly, I’ve asked a few more friends. My younger sister does not report any random men bothering her in the manner you suggest. My mother says that in her community that type of behaviour was not tolerated, and likewise does not report anything other than being wolf-whistled at a few times when she was a college student.
So there are a couple more data points. I noticed you now have moved your goalposts though from all women experience this to “More frequently than not” which is just cute. So I assume you must mean 51 percent or more; that being the minimum amount of women reporting needed to qualify as “more often than not”.
All the reliable numbers I can find suggest 1 in 4 to 1 in 3 , so somewhere between 25 and 33.3 % If you assume that half don’t report (that’s being generous on that) you could get over 50%. Even there, that means there are still 40% + women who will never experience the events you suggested that every woman does.
Get over your indignation. I never once suggested such things never happen, are not damaging, or are bullshit that should be ignored. I said that your assertion that it happens to everyone is bullshit, and demonstrable bullshit at that.
No. The OP thinks that reporting a man for being a possibly being a perv when he has done nothing even remotely inappropriate is wrong.
In the original thread, the person in question did the following things:
Bumped shoulders with a lot of people including women. The OP was unable to determine the cause of this, but is fairly certain the guy was not doing in an a violent of aggressive manner. It was just odd.
Talked (exclusively to the OP’s observations) to other guys his age (OP assumes early thirties) and younger women (OP again assumes late teens early twenties). He chatted briefly with one woman who responded to him and followed her over to her next workout station and continued the conversation, possibly without reply from her (OP is unclear). At some point she got up and moved to a machine farther down the line and he went back to his weights station.
That’s it. The OP never spoke with man, nor heard their conversation, nor knew anything about the relationship between him and the other people he interacted with. The board replied to Mind your own business, and the OP quickly replied that perhaps she had been over thinking what was probably nothing.
Later, Elbows, and few others start assigning all manner of nefarious intentions and hyped up versions of the facts into the thread. They are of the opinion that any man who might even trip their “spidey-sense” should be reported to someone “just in case”. When asked HOW they have developed such a reliable indicator of “creepiness”, she replies that ALL women go through unpleasant sexual advances in their tweens / teens, and that those damaging encounters leave them with a sort perv radar.
I took issue with such a broad assertion, and apparently for doing so, I’m now “calling all such experiences bullshit”, which is also untrue. I merely believe the following to be true:
1.Women have *different *experiences that lead them to form their “radar”. Some more than others, some none at all, and while it is a useful instinct it is not to be relied upon soley.
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Understanding that, it is unreasonable to take pro-active action against, or assign intent to any person that has not demonstrated they are indeed seriously breaking social boundaries. It is also unreasonable to assume that every male has ill intentions or is nothing more than opportunist who has not yet had his chance to act out.
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That when such mistakes occur, they are just as damaging to a male’s view of the world as those that happen to women.
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Understanding the last point, such mistakes should be avoided whenever possible.
That’s it.
Why do you feel the need to speak up in defense of the creepy guy? Why in this scenario is this the side you choose to ally yourself with?
Because the facts as present by Weedy in the original thread are not enough to label him as “creepy” in my opinion. That was the point of that thread. “Is this creepy and what should I do about it?”
That thread is actually a good example of how such encounters get blown out of proportion quickly by a populace who loves to see a pervert around every corner. It quickly went from one guy following one woman to one station and having a conversation, (even if it was a short one) to “a guy who is following young girls around”. It went from a guy of adult but indeterminate age talking to young woman also of indeterminate age to " an old guy talking to teenage girls".
There is no need to assume the worst, and myself and many other posters agreed. Only a vocal few decided the guy was creep for no other reason than their “spidey-sense” and at least one advocated talking to management about it. I’m calling bullshit on that. That is witch-hunt behaviour. If someone is a creep, then the creepiness will show through in a manner that is clear and present. It is unreasonable to grab the pitchforks over something so innocuous.
I had considered starting a pit thread on this myself, but in the end I was just too damn lazy.
Frankly, I had never heard so much bollocks as that spouted by that fucking nutjob Teflon Elbows. I mean really Elbows, you use your “Spidey sense” to judge if some some random guy in some random situation is a creepy rapist? You feel perfectly at ease speaking to managers and other patrons casting aspersions about some guy who might be a dirty peado just because your third nipple is tingling?
What a complete fucking bitch. Yeah, yeah, I know on the Dope its rape month all year round, but curtain twitching busybodies like Elbows do nothing but harm to all sides of that particular discussion. This isn’t a concerned citizen speaking up when a car pulls up beside a kid and offers him some candy, this is a fucked up twat telling everyone she can find that some guy could be a dangerous rapist because she thinks the way he spoke to some girls was a little bit strange.
I mean, your fucking “Spidey sense?” Who do you think you are, Joe Cabot from Reservoir Dogs,
I can’t help but picture you as some fat bitch outing communists during the McCarthy years, or as some fat widowed villager screaming “WITCH” back when you were young. In your world there are billions of rapists out there, and I’ll bet that for every hundred times you accuse some random stranger of being “a bit creepy, you should keep your kids away from him”, that it will take only one news report of a genuine rapist being sentenced to affirm all your suspicions and to keep you fighting the good fight.
Your “Spidey sense?”. Well I have a spidey sense too, and you know what its telling me. Its telling me that you seem like a bit of a social misfit, you seem a little clueless, a little odd. Well thats enough for me, its my duty to contact Ed Zotti and let him know there is a creep in his midst, and he should watch her carefully.
As someone who participated in that thread and agreed that Creepy Guy’s behavior was creepy, I just want to point out that “pervert” is only one possible subset of “creep”. If I say someone is acting creepy, I don’t necessarily mean they’re a big ol’ perv. I just mean they’re, y’know, creepy. Maybe they’re a perv. Maybe they just have no sense of appropriate boundaries. Maybe they just don’t know when to back off. I don’t know. All I know is, the behavior is creepy.
If there were a woman inappropriately following people around to various machines and shoulder-checking them, I’d think she was acting creepy too. This isn’t some kind of “omg all men are rapists” thing for me.
I agree. Elbows took it to “groping” and implied all men were hand-shake rapers.
Hence this pitting…
Fair enough. “Creepy” is usually associated with ill intentions in my experience. Perhaps its usage is broader than I had thought. In my circle creep/creepy is reserved almost exclusively for pervs.
My guess would be that a lot of women are socially conditioned not to fight back as children, and to acquiesce as adults to situations that make them feel less than comfortable. This doesn’t mean we’re incapable of having a rational reaction to a situation that may or may not look odd. I would say that the way you’re raising your kids is a bit different than most of me and my peers had been raised. I’m 28 and I didn’t have in-depth discussions about appropriate and inappropriate touch, but we did establish the idea of personal space and not invading other folks’ personal space. It was a bit of a stepping stone toward what you’re teaching your kids.
How old are you? :dubious: I’m asking this because it’s very obvious that you’re significantly older than me, and I’m wondering where this “OMG, everyone gets assaulted” attitude is coming from. I’m thinking that my experiences from growing up in the 1990s and early 00s may have been affected by a difference in the way we accepted or didn’t accept inappropriate sexual behavior.
I think a lot of this is generational shift and your bad experiences making you paranoid. I didn’t get assaulted as a teen or tween, and I didn’t get touched inappropriately during that time either. Maybe it’s because I didn’t skulk around like a scared rabbit throughout those years; maybe it’s because I often went places with other folks or that I remained aware of my surroundings. It could even just be that I was always a tall kid who gave the impression that it’d be more difficult to victimize without potentially receiving some damage in return. I was an adult before anyone tried to behave in a sexually inappropriate manner with me, and I’ve learned in those years to treat it as being something you call people out on. Men are all different, and some guys are going to use behaviors that you see as inappropriate as flirting; all an adult has to do is let the person know that the inappropriate behavior is inappropriate.
Maybe you just lived in an area where there were a lot more people and statistics played its hand with you and your agemates in regard to inappropriate sexual behavior. Maybe you’re conflating bumping into people as being on the same level of inappropriate behavior as rape, and that’s where your statistics are being skewed.
Completely understood, and I can agree with your point. I just don’t think the guy is creepy; maybe a little socially awkward (and socializing with his peers), but not creepy.
The difference between going “he’s creepy” and “he’s creepy; he must be stopped” is applying malice to that creepy behavior. I know a bunch of folks who have “creepy” behaviors, and most of the time it’s a matter of them not knowing this behavior is “creepy” for the people who label them as such. This can be anything from the distance between people when talking, conversation topics, eye contact (or lack thereof), or just the fact that the person labeling them creepy thinks they’re ugly. (For example: a guy you find attractive flirts with you = good, even if you’re not looking for a date; a guy you find unattractive flirts with you = creepy or unwanted, regardless of whether you’re looking for a date. How does “creepy” guy know that you think he’s ugly before he interacts with you?)
That said, asserting your boundaries in a friendly manner goes a long way with most guys that you find creepy. You don’t like that he waggles his eyebrows at you? Tell him. You don’t find him attractive, but he’s flirting? Let him know so he can go flirt with someone else. He has this habit of coming up behind you without you noticing, then saying “hi”, and you think it’s creepy? Let him know. How difficult is this?
Next time try reading for comprehension. I only mentioned groping as an explanation of the life experience that gives women the spidey sense. I repeated, and clearly stated that, for me, it was not about his actions. Actions we cannot possibly hope to interpret because we were not there to see.
If it creeped her out, she should speak up, discreetly. That’s all I suggested.
Why? If my daughter frequented the gym I’d want someone to say something. If I owned the gym I’d want someone to say something.
Call me all the names you want (you’re making me giggle, truly!), but your reaction to the, easily explained opinion, of one persons view, says a lot more about your delicate egos than about the women who sense a creep in their midst, to my mind.
But I’m sure you’re advising all your tweenagers to over ride their own spidey sense, about the guy they are about to climb into an elevator with, rather than err on the side of caution. Because to do otherwise is to slur all men in your eyes.
Ditto, when your own spidey sense pings over the undo attention your 6yr old is garnering from that preteen boy at the playground. After all, he’s not actually done anything, you’ve just got an uncomfortable feeling. Of course, you’ll just leave them together until ‘something’ actually happens.
Or is it okay for you to do it when it’s yours you’re protecting, but not okay for women, who’ve had actual life experience to go on?
I’m a woman, remember?
And, absolutely, you should pay attention to your gut feeling. But going so far as to report the guy to management, based on what the OP observed? Way over the line.
You just seem paranoid to me, like mothers who won’t let their 14 year old children out of their sight, or people won’t go to the city because it’s full of criminals.
By the way, what do we mean by bumping shoulders?
Don’t go there. 
The closest the OP was able to describe it as is similar to the maneuver that men do to each other in a nasty manner, but NOT nastily. So some sort of non threatening, possible friendly bump.