Nope, never said that. I said following, touching your arm, and speaking to you is not a threat. Do you see the distinction? It sounds like you, and others, do not.
I have said, many times, that one may respond to an actual threat. What you, and others, want is the right to pre-judge who may become threatening, and act on that. It’s not the same thing, it’s not acceptable, and it probably constitutes an illegal attack in some cases.
My, you’re pretty determined to downplay the words! “Chasing” becomes “following”, “grabbing” becomes “touching” and “yelling” becomes “speaking”. Further, where you’ve all changed the words of the person telling the story about the lady in the elevator, “holding” turns into “brandishing”. I’m going to take the word of the person who was actually there, over the guy who’s subtly changing her words to much less violent and dramatic ones for the purpose of proving his point that she acted irrationally and in disproportionate response to the threat that was posed.
You keep on trying to change the words of the story to make it fit what you’d rather it be, though.
No dear, this is the exact situation the rest of us are talking about. You, on the other hand, have constructed some absurd one in your head that you’ve decided to try to argue in favor while the rest of us discuss reality.
Following me, shouting demands for my attention and grabbing my arm after I said “please leave me alone” is not only threatening, it’s assault. I don’t care to wait until I’m beaten or restrained before I take measures to protect myself.
Even if I had never been assaulted, followed, attacked or afraid in my life, I’d still carry pepper spray for stray dogs. It’s a personal protection device at best, a warning to others at worst. But the presence of pepper spray in the open is not a threat to men. It’s relatively foolproof non-lethal common sense measure recommended by most public service officers. I give it very little thought, and nearly every male and female I see on a bike or running is also carrying it at the ready.
I don’t know what spooked the elevator woman, and it would have been foolish to consider spraying it in an elevator. Chimera should have reported her if he felt she was a threat to his safety. But her fearful display 23 years ago is not evidence that feminists everywhere consider all men a clear and present danger. It’s one anecdote easily discountable by the application of an anecdote wherein pepper spray was rightfully and legally used to prevent an attack.
It’s also fascinating that the men in this thread have grabbed onto this one incident from 23 years ao and not let it go, while countless women have given tons of more frequent and more recent examples that are hand waived away.
And telling that my previous statement about heroes was ignored. Each and every time I’ve been startled, cursed, grabbed or followed a hero has stepped in to help. The people who ran to help when that guy grabbed me in the parking lot were all three men. Each time I’ve had the occasion to ask a security guard to escort me to my car, each time I’ve asked my significant other to help me get rid of a persistent and offensive suitor: that hero has been a man. Sometimes I asked a man for help, sometimes that male hero was observant and saw someone in trouble and stepped in without being asked. The police officer who gave me my first can of pepper spray and some self-defense tips: a man. My dad, my wonderful ex-boyfriend, my husband: all heroes who would rush to help anyone in trouble, all men. The hero is much more common than the rare creep.
That incident has been brought up and discussed as often by the female posters in this thread as the male.
Why do you re-word “grabbing” as “touching” in the next sentence? You subtly moved the goalposts.
Grabbing my arm IS a threat and IS an attack. Touching (almost certainly, depending on the circumstances) is NOT. But Troppus said “grabbed,” and in the context of an aggravated person yelling at her coincidental to such grabbing, so why don’t we stick to what people actually wrote and not re-word it as “touched?”
(shrugs) Rape aside, no male who has ever grabbed my arm while yelling at me (barring rock climbing or martial arts training) has ever meant anything good by it. Never, in 40+ years.
This is an incredibly weak cite; it does not cite your claim, which is that it’s illegal to take pepper spray out of its holster unless you’re justified in using it. You’ve instead cited the assaultlaws that we’re all well aware of and tried, with zero success, to convince us that unholstering pepper spray is covered by those laws.
First, that’s a separate ridiculous point you’ve made, not the one I asked for a cite for. Second, if you want to provide backup for that ridiculous point, merely repeating your claim that it’s assault, and offering us the legal definition of assault, begs the question.
Shodan provided one (and I can’t believe he and I are on the same side of an issue. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!). His answer was that “I was afraid.”
Two more possible answers:
“I wanted to have the pepper spray immediately at hand in case I was attacked.”
“I wanted to display my capacity for self-defense.”
You might think that this last one is a threat, but you’d be wrong. A threat of the sort covered by the assault law says, “I can and will do something to you that is against the law for me to do to you.” Self-defense isn’t against the law, so saying, “I can and will defend myself against an attack from you” isn’t a threat.
This thread is shocking.
Edit: Good grief. I just followed your link, and hey everyone, look at what he trimmed from the definition of assault:
Got that? His link specifically includes how carrying a weapon can turn into assault, but he took that off, because it doesn’t apply to the situation at hand.
Blatantly dishonest use of his cites? Yeah, good show.
And from later in his own cite:
Emphasis added.
So I’ll cite, for my previous statement about what constitutes a threat, his cite.
Hell, solosam, let’s bring it home.
But being treated like a creep is more common than being treated like a hero, is the point of the thread. You seem to bbe under the impression that being expected to endanger oneself for others is some sort of privilege.
I’d say that while being treated like a creep is sadly more common that being treated like a hero, being treated like a nonissue is far more common than both.
I’ve chaperoned a camp for 6th graders, I’ve been trusted – nay, commanded – to be in the bathroom with underage boys (stalls and urinals, not a family restroom obviously) to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves or do something stupid. I’ve been alone with single kids and groups of kids at the request and command of female chaperons and people in positions of power. Children like me (for some reason), and people trust me with their kids. Yeah, it would be hard to convince strangers to let me babysit for them, but in my family I’m the “go to” person to watch the kids while the other adults do adult things because I love playing with kids and they have fun with me. Whenever I’m in a position of responsibility over kids, I almost always get singled out by the group to be the one to be with the kids and interact directly with them the most because children are drawn to me (and I’m very nonthreatening), and parents usually seem very grateful about my interactions with their kids.
Yeah, men legitimately face issues with being labeled a creep by strangers – both when it involves kids and women in strange places. It is a prejudice that certainly exists, is more common than it should be, and needs to be changed, but it’s not some overarching looming factor that dooms all men to be walking on a minefield anytime a child or woman is within 500 feet.
We already have such polls, the British Crime Survey, and there are analogous BJS reports in America, don’t rely on crimes being reported but survey a random sample of the population to get anonymous representative data. That’s the reliable way to get rape stats, not relying on police reports, not relying on feminist advocacy research, not relying on anecdotal evidence.
http://www.justice.gov.uk/statistics/criminal-justice/sexual-offending-statistics
The BCS shows that over half of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police, and that about one in every two hundred women has been the victim of such a crime committed by a stranger since the age of 16.
Feminist stats are normally quite difficult to find sources for, other than one website citing a book citing another book citing a study that says nothing of the sort. The Woozie effect.
I’m specifically thinking of the Koss study. I can’t find a like to the study, but it asked a number of questions, one of which was whether the respondent was “definitely raped”. A rather large majority of those declared rape victims by the study answered no to that question. However, while I once read the study I can’t find a like to it now. There’s an anti-feminist academic look at it here (actually calls herself a feminist, but most feminists disagree).
For prison rape, I was thinking of the famous Human Rights Watch report “No Escape” (available online now), and of this study showing the most frequent perpetrators to be guards, and of guards female guards. Not strictly relevant, but there’s a particularly nasty tendency to act like prisoners somehow deserve to be raped, or are all just animals going around raping each other. Ironically, the study shows that it’s only in female prisons that inmates make up the majority of victimisers of inmates. Anyway, the HRW report shows the total number of prison rapes of men to outnumber all reported rapes outside prison.
For child abuse I mostly source from the Canadian government report “The Invisible Boy”, available here. It cites studies for all its claims.
RAINN says one in ten are men, the 25% was from a British source I can’t find now. But the CDC in this report, which attracted a lot of MRA interest, finds unusually high levels of rape of women, and unusually low rates of rape of men, but got the attention of MRAs because it also included those men who were victims of “forced rape” (not forcible rape), that is being forced to penetrate the perpetrator or a third party, and found men being forced to penetrate someone to be as common as women being raped. So that would be 50%, if we rely on the CDC and if we regard being forced to have sex with a third party as being just as rapey as being forced to have sex with a rapist.
I’d provide links to things like rape in war being more common on men too, but I’m too lazy to do so unless asked.
Lay 'em on me, chief, I’ll see if I can find some. I’m no master researcher, but I’ve accrued a certain number of seemingly reliable studies on certain aspects of the MRA, discrimination in the workplace, female privilege in schools, whatever else.
It’s REALLY fun when some clueless creeper makes a point of coming around to your job and asks when your shift ends, because he has plans for the two of you afterwards.
Some men think that they are entitled to a woman’s attention if they are interested in her, even if all she wants to do is do her job. In every job that I’ve had as a cashier or clerk, there were men who thought that if I smiled at them, and was pleasant to them, that I was interested in going out with them or having sex with them. In some jobs, I could stay in the box office or behind the deli counter. In other jobs, though, if I was not physically separated from the customers, I’d always have some guys who didn’t understand that it wasn’t OK to drape an arm over my shoulders, or pinch my butt, or otherwise ignore my desire to not be touched.
I’ve only known one woman who worked with the public who didn’t have this happen to her…she weighed about 450 pounds, and was mentally challenged. I’ve talked to a lot of other women who have worked with the public, and every one has had similar stories. Yes, these men are in the minority, but apparently there are enough of them around, or they are active enough, that every woman gets more of this attention than she wants. Some guys don’t know about boundaries. And some guys don’t care. The thing is, it’s impossible to tell which guys are going to take no for an answer, and which won’t, just by looking at them, all we have to go by is their behavior. And a person who grabs someone’s arm and starts yelling at that person is probably not going to respect a polite request to cease and desist.
I agree. I don’t let it keep me entirely away from women, like CCitizen does. It’s more like driving while black, you’re not going to let it stop you driving and as a disadvantaged group you’ve got bigger problems. But it’s important too. There’s already a much larger level of discrimination against men going into female-dominated occupations than vice-versa, and those two factors will certainly reduce the number of men going into teaching, and female teachers give male students lower marks and retard the development and achievement of male students.
I’m still waiting to hear what alternative you guys suggest from Troppus since she can’t use pepper spray because it makes men feel unsafe and want to attack her in self defense because she’s holding it.
No-one has suggested she can’t use pepper spray to defend herself.
You’re just drawing your own conclusions as to when the situation crosses the threshold into it being appropriate to use force to defend yourself. You argued earlier that a man chasing after her, yelling, and grabbing her body didn’t constitute a threat. You later agreed that what she had done was appropriate. That’s great and all that you acknowledge it, but she doesn’t need your permission or assessment of when it’s appropriate to defend herself. That’s part of the problem. She has to trust her own judgment, not your retroactive twisting of words to make it sound like she behaved rashly.