Broomstick, I think people are making the the jokes with :rolleyes: or in support of you, making fun of him, or sharing what they’ve heard/experienced. I don’t think anyone is making light or fun of you. If they are, fuck them. You’re in the right here.
And how cool is that, you’re a cobbler. I was seriously debating becoming a cobbler instead of a goldsmith, but went with the shiny bling. Cobblers are good people. Keep your chin up, and be proud, you’re part of a really ancient craft tradition there, even if you’re just fixing brand-name sandals.
He has to live with being him, every day, forever. Imagine how horrible that is.
Is it really hard to imagine why a woman might find this sort of “boorish and rude” contact potentially frightening? Not only did he continue pursuing her after she made it clear his attention was unwanted, but he came back to yell at her the next day.
That would set off alarm bells for anyone sane I would think.
What a total slimeball. I’m with the poster who suggested that you should talk to your boss about this, and see what is recommended if this scum comes back again to further harass you.
I also want to specifically suggest to Bricker, that anyone who would come back to a place of business less than 24 hours after forcing one’s cell phone number on a worker there, and berate that worker for failing to use that number to call him has such misguided views of where social boundaries should be, that I’d be pretty scared of what else he’d consider reasonable. That’s not cluelessness, that’s aggressive and scary behavior.
Wow! That is horrible, Broomstick. These are the kind of guys that make the rest of us look like troglodytes. No, strike that. That is being mean to those poor trogs.
It is good that your spouse is supportive. Is there some way for your business to block the creep from ever harassing you again? Do you think this might escalate into stalking? There is some pretty significant jail time associated with a conviction for stalking.
I respect your courage in bringing the situation to this forum. I know I must be rather sheltered and isolated when I say that this kind of behavior is utterly alien to me. It is very sad that such behavior is par-for-the-course when it comes to women in the workplace.
Good luck, and I hope this never happens to you again.
Bosstone, no - I don’t think that coming back less that 24 hours later can be considered mild.
Especially not when she’d told him she wasn’t interested in the first place.
I can interpret it no other way than as aggressive behavior. No matter how mild mannered his tone might have been. (Which I don’t believe for a moment, but I’ll admit to the possibility.)
BTW, I’m going to puke at the next male who comes in to make this shit about how horrible it is for the other men who get tarred by the actions of a few like this asshole.
Fuck that whininess. Suck up and deal with it. Life’s not fair, and you will have to deal with unfair comparisons all your fucking life.
Don’t make this about YOU, for the love of carytids. WGASA
So was the first time you two slept together as good as you thought it would be, or even better? Since you’re leaving your husband, be sure to let him down easy. He didn’t deserve this. He’s just an unintended casualty of the sex bomb that went off in your shoe shop.
She made it clear the day before that it wasn’t happening. He came back and bothered her the next day. That shows her that he has a complete disregard for boundaries and not much interest in what she actually thinks, or respect for her right to make her own decisions about who she does what with.
That’s unsettling, and it doesn’t matter whether he was “nice” about it or not. Who’s to say he wouldn’t be waiting in the parking lot when she got off her shift? It happens.
Creeps that do this kind of stuff are bad enough. What’s almost worse is self - identified “good guys” who would know better than to actually do this shit, but who never fail to tell women they are overreacting when someone else does it. :rolleyes:
Okay, fine, when he came back to hound her the next day, she didn’t indicate that he yelled. He merely said a bunch of sexist things about his ex-wife and then aggressively pursued her even after she indicated that she was completely uninterested. And then when she failed to cooperate he came back to hound her about it the next day.
But you’re right, she didn’t say he yelled. I shouldn’t have exaggerated.
“Flirting”? In what world is referring to your ex-wife as a bitch, pursuing someone and making it clear that you don’t care that she’s married and that she’s uninterested, and then forcing her to take your phone number, “flirting”?
I’ll shut up now, because I really don’t like turning this kind of thing into a semantic hair-splitting parsing thing, only just to point out that there was enough ambiguity that those of us men with less direct experience weren’t intentionally downplaying it. It sounded like Broomstick was pissed off with an annoyance and wanted to rant in the Pit, not fearful or threatened.
Anyway, regardless of how it actually happened, it seriously isn’t good. I’ve dropped a male coworker in hot water for making a female coworker uncomfortable, and I’d like to think I could do the same for a female employee with an asshole customer.
Buh? The rest sounded wearyingly the same old same old until I got to this. He really expected that a married woman he had only just met, in a retail setting, would actually call him? I know that most of these sorts of men are delusional but this one really takes the cake.
If you were female and particularly if you smaller or in some way vulnerable, you would understand how this sort of thing can be scary. And even if you were a female sumo wrestler, it just gets old. It’s demeaning, degrading, dehumanizing it be looked at as merely a collection of orifices. Boorish and rude is when a man insists he buy a girl a drink when she has already said no; what happened to Broomstick was bordering on abusive and stalking. Despite what far too many males still think, human females are not on this earth simply for their amusement. This was not a man lacking in social skills (!), this was a man who placed the same value on Broomstick that he would on a rubber sex doll.
I know it’s difficult for men to get since they are never put in this position. The closest example I’ve been able to come up with is imagine how you would like it if the only value all women put on you was how much money you would give them. And even that isn’t all that close.
While I certainly understand why the men in this thread would see it reasonable to down play the actions of this guy and not assume the worst, I hope you guys can at least understand why the women here feel as we do.
If from the day you hit puberty until society deems you unattractive (and sometimes even then!), you are constantly hit on, followed around, molested, and generally bugged everywhere you go. . . you’d be pretty testy, too. I can’t even count all the times in my life I’ve had strange men try to grope me. Or hit on me. Or try to follow me to my car. Or attempt to get physically threatening when I say no.
When I was a teenager, I thought I was doing something wrong and deserved this pigs harassing me. As an adult, I just get pissed off. Well, that’s not true- sometimes it’s really scary when guys follow me still.
Sure, they might be harmless, but I’ve had enough non harmless encounters in my life to- at the very least- be wary.
WAG: In an ideal world, she should have told him no, period. No “I’m involved” or anything like that; it just sets you up as sounding like “maybe - if it weren’t for my boyfriend I’d totally fuck you now” to horny guys. When the phone number was pushed on her, in an ideal world (and in which she’s the shop owner, I suspect), she should have told him to get out/fuck off/etc.
Except, yeah, this isn’t an ideal world and women are told to always be polite and plain “no” is never never never an OK response to being asked out because women should be flattered if a guy thinks she’s pretty/wants to “date” her and argh…
Anyway, yeah, I’d be at least somewhat disturbed if this happened to me at work. I’ve been pretty lucky at my workplace but know of a few male patients that female techs in my department try to not be alone with in the same room due to inappropriate questions/comments/attempts to touch their hand/hair/back/whatever.
