I gotta wnder if theres two kinds of perverts here:
The first is aware what they are doing is wrong. I think this because they tend to strike in places very crowded, where it would be hard to identify the source of groping, or in a hit-and-run (several stories about getting groped by a guy on a bike. A bigger public reaction has a better effect- since they know they are doing something wrong and so fear being caught and identified.
The other is more sinister- the chauvanist, pervy teacher, molesting relative. They are so arrogant as to not even consider their actions are wrong. Unfortunately its their arrogance that protects them- people are prone to second-guessing what happened, rationalizing or even defending the offender. I think this kind of person is much harder to deal with.
I noticed that on To Catch a Predator some guys would panic and bawl their eyes out when caught. These men obviously understood arranging to meet with a young teen for sex was wrong and illegal. They are probably thinking they can get away with it without being caught. Ditto for the wary guys that circle the block or send their son to the door. But others would sit there and argue with Chris Hansen, believing having sex with a minor was no big deal. There were guys that had SEEN THE SHOW previously on tv and still took the bait, and at least one man caught on the show twice!
I cynically wonder that as long as men like this refuse to believe they are doing something wrong, the problem will never fully go away.
I just got groped two days ago. Is it sad that I barely even noticed it and just kept walking (crowded street, he was passing by in the opposite direction)?
I’m a dude and I have been groped, once about ten years ago. By another dude, in a gay bar. And not in a “feel up the ass cheek” way, it was more like “grab the whole ass cheek, to the taint” kind of way. I was just there to deliver the goddamned pizza, and I wasn’t a kid ten years ago, I was in my early 30s (I got kind of lost in my career path for a few years).
I’m not homophobic at all, so I didn’t freak out or anything. I didn’t feel violated, I was just like “That’s really fucking WRONG.” The guy who did it must have had chimpanzee arms (he sure as hell had chimpanzee hands!) because I turned around and there was no obvious suspect but, damn! WTF, dude?! At least I got a good tip. The bar was paying for a couple sheet pizzas. Gay guys are good tippers. (Seriously though, they are.)
I was 32 or 33 at the time. It really changed my perspective. I wouldn’t have been any happier about the situation if it had happened with a bunch of old women. However, I probably wouldn’t have minded much if I had been delivering that pizza to a strip club and was surrounded by hot 20-something women at the time. I would have demanded someone own up!
So yes, men are pigs, myself included. I also think the power dynamic of m/m and f/m groping is a lot different from m/f groping. But I seriously wouldn’t ever do that to anyone. Like I said, it’s just WRONG.
There are at least two kinds of pervs out there. I’d argue that there’s at least a third kind, one who knows that certain behaviors are wrong, but who attempt to claim that the behaviors shouldn’t be considered wrong, as they are natural or uncontrollable.
Tits and arse, yes, fairly often. I’ve had quite a few guys reach for my boobs until I glared at them, then they stopped, and tried to laugh it off.
The ‘successful’ groping attempts have all been guys I didn’t see until afterwards, or couldn’t work out who it was at all. Pretty clear that most of them know they shouldn’t be doing it.
I’m not sure how many times it’s happened- it just does, especially in crowded places, and it’s not always totally clear if it was deliberate or not, which is one other reason women don’t make a fuss. If you’re in the middle of a crowd, and it feels like someone just grabbed your arse, there’s this moment of- is it just someone trying to squeeze through the crowd, or a little kid or something innocent? By the time you’ve fully registered that it was a proper ‘grab’ not just someone pushed up against you, the guy’s gone, and you’d just look like a mad woman yelling if you tried to kick up a fuss.
Besides, a fair proportion of the guys (and some of the women) are likely to think it’s just a ‘bit of fun’, especially if there’s alcohol involved.
One thing though the increase of cameras has lead to is an increase of websites dedicated to post pics of cleavage, upskirts etc of women taking the subway or the bus.
The first time I was groped I was 11 years old and out buying shoes with my papa. He didn’t notice as he was a few steps ahead of me. I didn’t say anything. Since that day I have been groped so much I couldn’t begin to count. I’m counting rubs that I know were intentional.
Only one guy who did this to me is in prison, and here’s why it’s only one. This is how it went:
I was out in a bar with friends (wearing a knee-length flowery dress, why do I even say this?). I went to the loos, they were down a hallway where the light was broken. As I walked into the hallway a guy’s hand went straight into my hooha. I pushed him away, because we always just push them away. It’s such a fact of life it barely registers.
When I came out of the loo I saw, in silhouette, the guy do the same thing to my sister, who reacted the same way. That was, for some reason, too much for me. I walked over to him and told him to never touch my sister again and get the hell out of the bar. He shoved me into a corner and started yelling at me that he owned all the women in the world and he could grab any pussy he wanted.
I walked to the bouncer to ask him to get the guy out. I watched the bouncer go over, and then walk back to the door. The guy didn’t leave. So I went to the bouncer again. He couldn’t make him leave, he said. So with steam coming from my nostrils I called the police. As I grabbed my phone from my purse, some ladies smoking outside asked me what was up. When I told them, they calmly said: “oh yeah, I’ve had that happen in there.”
The police were there in minutes, with two vans. They pulled the guy out, and asked me, my sister and two other friends who he’d done that to to ride in the other van.
We went to the station. The guy was dragged past us, and issued threats. Then we sat down to wait. They told us the special sex crimes inspector would come over as soon as possible. The police station was cold, and the seats were hard. We waited. I started to feel bad for dragging my friends into this. One minute we were all fine, having a good night out, next we were freezing in a police station.
It was morning by the time the inspector arrived. I let all my friends go first to tell their stories, it took forever. When it was my turn I learned why: idiot inspector had to search endlessly for the letters on the keyboard, using one finger to type. It was so slow it was like a joke. I wondered if it was a candid camera show. I was still freezing.
Finally it was over, it was the following afternoon. I had spent about 12 hours in a freezing police station. My bike was still at the bar, so I had to walk home, exhausted.
A few months later I was asked to show up in court to testify. More fun and games.
So the guy is in prison, there’s that. I doubt I’d go through this again though, I wouldn’t really recommend it. I wish I could. This behaviour needs serious consequences, and usually there are none. If I called the police every time this happened I’d spend half my life in that cold police station telling the idiot inspector what happened this time…
Oh btw, I thought I had never been groped, but then I remembered, it happened twice in a movie theater.
First time I was about 12, second time about 15. Same thing each time, during the movie, guy comes sit in your row and veeeery slowly gets closer and closer, and then you feel a hand groping your thigh then having a go at your crotch.
I was stunned.
(I’m not a woman, but since it occured when I was still being seen as a girl, I think it qualifies.)
Ass grabbed in a K-Mart when I was 15. I was standing in the music department looking at some 8 tracks and someone grabbed my butt and squeezed hard. I turned around expecting to see my mother, who I had come in with, or a friend playing a joke but instead there was a guy, a K-Mart employee, standing at the end of the aisle leering at me. He ran off and I followed him until he disappeared through an ‘employees only’ door into the storage room in the back. I thought about reporting him or telling my mother but I figured no one would believe me and my mother would tell me I imagined it or something. I regret that I did not report it now because I worry about how many other women he did that to or if he graduated to something worse. I didnt go back to that store for a long, long time because it gave me the creeps.
When i was college I went a WOMAD concert (World of Music Art and Dance, nothing to do with mad women). The big concert at the end was Peter Gabriel, Sinead O’Connor, and prolly someone else I’m forgetting.
The crowd was huge, and tall apparently. I saw this short girl wandering around jumping up and trying to find a spot in the crowd she could see from. There was a small crate or box or something near me, so I called her over and let her stand on it. She could finally see the concert. We chatted a bit, but mostly just watched. She had obviously been drinking or something and wobbled a bit on the box. I put my arm around her waist to hold her steady and she put her arm around my shoulder. It was pretty sweet.
At some point I’d slacked off a bit on the pressure on her waist, and she wobbled again and started to fall. I tried to grab her and was, well, successful. I missed her waist as she fell away from me and my hand slip up her torso till it found something it could hold onto, her breast. She didn’t fall, but she immediately pulled my hands off her and ran off into the crowd.
I still feel bad about it, kinda ruining things for her. So, whoever you were, I didn’t mean to grab you. Really.
I remember there was a news article a few years ago about this man who sat down next to a sleeping girl on a plane and covered her with a blanket and managed to get his fingers into her vagina. The article said he had her “DNA on his fingers”…so he had been doing it for a while.
My two thoughts were “How do you sleep so deeply?” And :eek:
This. I’ve know at least three women who this has happened to, because I was there. However, they never ever mention it and prefer to pretend it just didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, when conversations like this come up, two of them flat out lie. So yeah.
For me I was first groped at 14. I slapped the shit out of him, but he just laughed.
I’m a guy and I was groped at 13. My instinct was to get away and never, ever tell anyone about it.
On the school bus in grade school there was usually one or two guys who would think it was a cool prank to run by and grab a girl’s boob. Nobody else thought it was funny but nobody did anything about it either. I would think no girl got out of grade school within at least one grab.
Funny that I didn’t class my being groped with the situation those girls were in.
I was groped when I was younger than 10 (I don’t remember how old now). A woman pinched my ass at Disney World.
I’ve been inappropriately touched, pressured, leered at, even inappropriately kissed, many times in my adult life. And I’m ugly and overweight. I can’t imagine what attractive women have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
The ass-pinch was the only time I felt violated and shocked.
Well, that, and I suspect that at least a few women (though nowhere near all! Totally not saying that!) who claim it’s never happened to them have just forgotten about it. I remember recently I happened upon a sexual harassment thread here from a few years prior. I was reading along thinking, “Man, I’m pretty lucky that a lot of this stuff has never happened to me!” Then I found that I had actually posted in the thread and I had completely forgotten about many of the incidents I mentioned in that post. I remembered them then, but at the time I posted, they were a much more common occurrence in my life. Now, I’m living in the suburbs vs. the city, I drive everywhere instead of walking and/or taking public transportation, I work in an office and not a bar or restaurant, I don’t go to clubs anymore, and if I did, I probably would be accompanied by my husband, and so there’s just a lot less opportunity for such things to happen. And for me, at least, it’s easy for “that never happens to me now” to elide in my mind into “that never happened to me”. I mean, groping is a really sucky thing to have happen, and the fact that it is so common is indicative of a much larger problem in society, but I’d wager that for many women, an individual incidence of groping isn’t all that memorable in the context of a lifetime of events.
You’re absolutely right: it shouldn’t be a risk, and you shouldn’t be told you shouldn’t have (done whatever), and should never be told you’re asking for it. But that doesn’t mean you’re not responsible. It’s up to you to take care of yourself. There are perfectly legal, legitimate, and otherwise reasonable things we could all do, that, if we did them, it significantly raises the chances of us coming to harm due to the immoral and illegal actions of others.
It all happened so fast, and I don’t react quickly in the best of circumstances. Also, based on the guy’s reveling in being spotted, I suspect that he would have enjoyed it even more (being yelled at). It was the kind of scene they put in a movie or TV show to build antipathy towards a character so we’ll be happy when he gets it in the end.
Nope. No chance at all, but I’m not enough of a writer to convey the scene well enough.
You’re right; I didn’t mean you were doing wrong, I just meant that it was understandable that you’d get a tut-tut from a teacher. Except for this …
If other teachers knew this, then they were criminally negligent not to report it.
Huh? She was being perfectly reasonable. The guy who groped her was a first-class asshole. He deserved to do time.
I was in the bus station in Cleveland many years ago and there was a section of the waiting room set aside for women and children. I sort of hesitated about going there and a man who was cleaning the floor said I better go in there if I didn’t want some drunk pawing me. So I did. I wish the LA city buses had had a women’s section back when I rode them daily.
I really don’t know any women who haven’t been groped. We’re old now so we talk about it.
My heart really breaks for any of you who said you tried to tell someone, and that person either called you a liar, or blew you off, esp. as children. That was my experience, and why I just kind of came to feel that it would happen, I would strike back if I could, feel bad and scared for a while, and then go on.
On my first trip with my girl-friend to the “City”, I was about 11, maybe 12, and I keep getting my ass rubbed at pedestrian crossings with street lights. I would move up, and there it would be again. At the second light, I looked back and there was a huge man leering at me, and now he’s trying to get up my skirt. I didn’t want to alarm my friend, but our next stop was at the bus stop, and I didn’t want him there, so I grabbed her and we ducked into the first shop I saw. It was sadly very crowded; no one could help or paid attention so I headed for the back wall, trying to get away–he followed and trapped me there–felt me up good and proper, laughed and left. I was in total shock, I guess. I don’t say a word to my friend, and I’m not really sure why, but we left, he was gone, and we got on the bus. When I got home I told my Mom. Well, it was my fault surely, and I was completely mistaken-it had never happened.
So hell. What do you do? It happened a few other times, once with a drunken uncle who pinned me to a door and felt my tits, and once with a boy friend of my cousin who was babysitting. Once with a teacher–damn, you had better never go stand by his desk, he was all over your ass, even with a full class in session.
Nothing I could do–no one’s going to believe me, I guess this is just my lot.
And as an adult, of course. Too many times. Like I said, I don’t think I’m grope-worthy, in fact I know for sure that I have a bitchy resting face.
Hooray for all the women that could report never having been groped. I hope you never are.
(Seriously though, they are.)