I worked various retail jobs in college, and you wouldn’t believe how many men see a woman trying to do a job and think “Awesome! There is a girl who is paid to smile and will lose her job if she runs away. Now’s the time to get sleazy.”
I’ve got a dozen similar situations. Perhaps the worst was when I was working as a hotel desk clerk. I worked alone in a small office. Sometimes I’d be on duty for a week straight, 24/7, sleeping in the manager’s quarters behind the front desk. Quite often I’d get business men coming in solo and hoping to get some action, and figuring the desk clerk was an easy place to start the quest. Often they’d ask me for good bars to pick up girls for sex at (I’d always direct them to the local gay bar, haha.) Anyway, these interactions were always uncomfortable because I was alone in the office, and I’d be there at night.
One time a guy came in speaking Spanish. He talked for about ten minutes, and I had no idea what he was saying. After some talking, it became apparent he was expressing some sort of affection to me. I was confused and as it went on, I started to get extremely uncomfortable. After some time, he left five dollars on the table and left.
It was not a good night’s sleep that night.
I don’t think you guys realize how this stuff can get under your skin. When you know you have been personally targeted for something, and you have no idea what. And you know that wherever this goes, you may not have control over it. And you are at work, and you can’t really leave the situation without disrupting your whole life. It’s just a deeply uncomfortable feeling.
When I was working as a sales rep( I was selling lighting products to architects and engineers ). I encountered so many men that would pretend to have a need for the commercial products I was selling in order to try to get close to me that I purchased and wore a wedding ring to work every day.
It was infuriating – not only because of the annoyance factor but the economic one --------- I wasted a lot of time working up layouts and budgets for projects that didn’t exist — and these idiots all seemed to think I was pretending to be a sales rep in order to sleep with lots of men.
The ring ( and it was a real one, it cost a couple of hundred bucks ) is still in my jewelry box. When I die, whomever finds it is going to think I harbored some sort of deep secret in my life, they will never suspect the story is so mundane
Broomstick: No, Mr. Lecher! A cat is a living creature.
Lecher: I don’t care. [kicks it with his new sandals ]
[throws over some empty shoeboxes ]
Lecher: Now I’m going to grab me some sweet handshaking.
Broomsticj: No, Mr. Lecher, that’s sexual harassment. If you keep it up, I’ll yell so loud the whole country will hear!
Lecher: [laughs] With a man in the White House? [laughs] Not likely! [laughs more]
A story you cannot miss. A message you must not ignore. If you know a woman or just are one, you must see this film.
Gosh, because it’s not like a woman who had a decent modeling career and has lived in NYC all her life would know anything at all about being hassled by men, right?
I speak from my experiences (note the plural, there). I know how how to handle it because I have been successfully handling it all my life. My approach works.
A lot of people don’t get it. To their eyes, these questions are perfectly reasonable and non-accusatory. They don’t see the subtext at all. They don’t see that the problem isn’t you, but rather the jerk in your story.
A few years ago, I vented about a creep in my workplace who kept pestering for a date everytime I saw him. To me, this behavior is beyond wrong. It’s rude, it’s obnoxious, it’s unprofessional, it’s exasperating, and yes, it’s creepy. After the tenth time or so I turned him down, he had to have known that I didn’t want to go out with him; but that didn’t take away whatever thrill it gave him to keep asking me. It was like he saw me as being some slot machine that eventually had to pay out if he pulled my lever enough times. I wasn’t a human being whose feelings were worth considering. I was a game.
Some posters told me that I was leading him on by not being explicit in my rejection of him. I needed to be firmer, harsher, less cordial, because otherwise I was giving him good reason to keep up the pestering. Some women out there play hard to get, ya know? How’s he supposed to know your “no, I can’t make it, but thanks” doesn’t actually mean “no, but ask me 10 more times and I might say yes”? This is the problem with women; they are too nice and wishy washy. Blah blah blah blah.
And to this, I say ignore it. The guy is a jerk who belongs under a rock somewhere, and his behavior has nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do, and all to do with his screwed up psychology. A lot of us can relate.
On behalf of nice guys everywhere I just want to say: Eeeeewww… I hope you can get back on an even keel soon. I’m giving your comments a lot of slack because you’ve been “creeped on”.
And after talking to my female friends in retail, I am seriously NEVER flirting with anyone in retail ever again (actually, I’m just an overly friendly person, but not in a store any more). I honestly had no idea how often you have to deal with creepers.
Hahaha. It’s funny, you see, because lechers never attack. Rape and stalking never happen. So women have no reason to fear for their personal safety when people are acting unpredictably towards them.
The thing about horrible people is that they’ve had their whole lives to be horrible, and they get good at it with practice. People who commit horrible acts for psychological gratification (as opposed to for money or whatever) generally don’t run out of the shadows and grab people. They test their victims. They see how far they can push things, getting a handle on what kind of victim you’ll be. Then, when they feel like it’s a good setup, they do what they are there to do.
And there are all kinds of psychological tricks that work on pretty much anyone. For example, murderers and rapists will often solicit a small favor from a target. This creates some cognitive dissonance, so that the victim feels invested in this interaction and is more willing to go on to the next step. Often times the baddie will set a tone of mild disapproval, which subtly encourages the victim to win his favor by “performing well.” These are all real things that work in other situations- for example, pick up artists use the “neg” to pick up women, and soliciting small favors at work is actually a really good way to cement relationships with coworkers.
Baddies are pretty good at getting you halfway down a bad road before you know you are there. They start with an innocuous line of conversation, and they try to get you deeper and deeper into it before they start turning on the weird. Then they see how you react to the weird, and use that to judge if you’d be a good target. But they are really good at all of this, and it’s not reasonable to expect to see it coming.
For you and the person you’re responding to, it’s worth pointing out that, although at the time I weighed around 90 lbs, I’m a man. Even so, trust me, the dude wasn’t thinking that the tiny 18-year-old hippie working at the bakery was a fellow Freemason.
I posted that story because your OP had a very visceral effect on me, and I think I can trace it back to the creepy dude in my own retail past (in my story, my one regret is that I didn’t call the Big Brother program to report him; I strongly and seriously suspect him of abusing his “little brother”). Had I not had that experience of harassment (and others, such as the time as a teenager that a large man followed me down an alley making kissing noises and saying, “how much, how much?”), I’m not sure I’d get it either.
Nitpick: Left Hand of Dorkness, the poster who recounted the incident with the creepy customer offering a “palm-caressing handshake” on his first day at work, is male. The creepy customer he encountered was a gay male creep, as the anecdote makes clear:
Except that the customer finally caught him in the store, demanded to know why LHoD was avoiding him, and then angrily chastized him about not being straightforward with him. So yeah, skeevy customer hitting on skinny boyish teenager.
Oh shut up, you pious twit. You’re as stupid as you seem if you believe this, and if you don’t believe it but just wanted to launch into yet another boring “me! me! me!” diatribe, then stop flapping your yap here, and get a blog.
Since your post suggests that you have some sort of congenital brain defect, allow me to explain in teeny-tiny words: To whatever degree my post was funny, it’s funny because it’s a Simpsons quote and because Broomstick’s initial reaction (in post 8) to purely supportive posts was so over-the-top freaky bizarre. If you don’t want the guy who stalked you mocked (which is what she was reacting to in posts 2-7) and only want {{{{{huggles}}}}}, don’t fucking post in the Pit, post in MPSIMS where you’ll get people {{{hugging}}} you and posting ASCII art of kittens and flowers. Hell, even Broomstick seems to understand the miscommunication when she says "So, sorry if I offended someone who was trying to by sympathetic or came across as rude but I am fucking pissed as hell about this as well as scared and it doesn’t bring out the best in me. "–and I can understand the “I was freaked out and it doesn’t bring out the best in me” feeling perfectly.
But I’ll bet you DO you know this but you just want to lecture someone about your own shallow, boring opinions in your standard condescending tone.
I had an experience like this once - a 60+ YO man who despite repeated firm assurances that i was not interested, kept coming back and making me uncomfortable. Now I really wasn’t afraid of him or anything but it was annoying as hell.
If you’ve never been in this position, no, you can’t really understand. It’s creepifying to have someone lurking everytime you step out of the office, or even stopping by your office just to say hello. (He worked in the same building). And I don’t really want to be a bitch unless I have to. I still have to see him around the building. I just want to be left alone.
This thread is amusing. Even though we’ve had thread after thread of “Rape happens all the time, everywhere” vs. “No it doesn’t, and only creeps do it,” the feminists want to go another round. But the funny part is that no one is playing the role of their opponent. All of Broomstick’s critics have been about her posts in this thread, not her feelings about the situation, not about how the creeper was justified…none of that.
And yet we still have people like even sven trying to rally the troops to go “So what, it’s her fault?!”
Broomstick, I like you. I’m sorry this happened to you. It must have been scary for you. But with the exception of a pissed-off Steophan late in the thread, I don’t see anyone saying anything remotely close to “The guy’s not creepy” or “This is all your fault” or “You deserved it.”
