Ladies, check in if you've never been groped (unwillingly)

In My Humble Opinion
141

Yeah, MOL, still, so what? You quote Renee, and she simply ASKED if it is possible that the way she carries herself could have deterred some gropers. Guess what? The answer could very well be yes! That doesn’t take anything away from women who have been groped. It’s not a competition.

I’m getting a very weird vibe in this thread. It’s not never groped vs. groped up in here. People are relating their own personal experiences and trying to figure out some stuff based on their own experiences. They can’t speak for other women. They are saying in THEIR case, they feel that maybe they have a presence that discourages gropers. It must be empowering for them, mockery about magic postures notwithstanding.

142

I agree to all of this. I don’t think for a minute that I give off any victim vibe, yet I’ve been groped, too - I think it is all about the idiots who take advantage of a situation, and not at all about the women.

That’s true, too. There was a case here recently where a guy was fondling a woman’s ponytail on transit and masturbating while doing it, and she was unaware of it - that was totally groping.

143

Not competing, and though I am generally pretty competitive, this is a competition I’d rather lose. I in general tend to think if something is happening to you over and over again, you probably need to change up your habits, but this isn’t one of those things. I have a hard time believing the idea of a magic perv shield or “aura” to adopt that’ll stop creepy, gropey guys on the train. Especially considering there doesn’t seem to be any connection among who it’s happening to. Most women I know – tall, short, skinny, fat, confident, insecure, black, white – have been creeped on by strange men. It just kind of happens. Not to everyone, but it’s not like people it hasn’t happened to have some kind of force field.

I can ask myself why I’ve never had my home burgled but others in my same neighborhood have. Do I have some apt anti-theft aura? No. If my neighbor gets robbed, she’s probably just unlucky, and it sucks to be her. But this doesn’t mean I’m doing anything special or commanding some kind of incredible strength that keeps pillagers away. Silliness.

144

Sillyness indeed. I notice you’ve changed the topic from comparing people who are often groped vs. people who are never groped to people who are burgled once vs. people who haven’t been burgled.

If some people in my neighborhood is getting burgled over and over and over again, and some are never getting burgled at all, I would probably wonder why, and I certainly wouldn’t blame the never burgled for saying, “Well, maybe there is something about my yard that is making it uninviting”. If they say such a thing, I certainly wouldn’t get all defensive and assume that the non burgled thought they were speccccialllll. Outta here with that.

ETA: And before it revs up again…no one is victim blaming. Women who are often groped ARE NOT AT FAULT IN ANY WAY PERIOD. Even IF a creep thinks he has a reason to grope one woman and not another, he is A CREEP and ENTIRELY AT FAULT.

145

Uh, no, I was talking people who have been groped vs. people who have never been. The burglary thing was just for comparison’s sake, which you may feel free to disregard. And I don’t think people who haven’t been groped by creepy ass men think they’re special. I’d say this is generally not the case, but the answer to the question “Do some posters think that the posters who haven’t been groped think they have something special about them that protects them?” is apparently yes. This is not to say “Women who haven’t been groped think they’re special.” It is to say “Some people who have posted to this thread seem to be operating under the belief that their lack of having been groped is because of their ‘aura.’” Which is stupid.

146

Ok. Maybe we have crossed wires somewhere. I am specifically fascinated with the idea that some women are groped OVER AND OVER and some NOT AT ALL, despite being similar in looks, and living in cities, etc. So your burglary thing threw me off, because it seemed to leave out the OVER AND OVER part. But I get you now.

And, hey, if you think it’s stupid, then, whateryagonnado.

147

I don’t think there is any special “aura” about me that has kept me from being groped. I don’t think I carry myself with any particular confidence or hyper-alertness…sometimes I’m a dozy daydreamer as I walk through my day, sometimes the keys are between my fingers as I walk to the car. In fact, and I know this is incredibly stupid, but when you’ve been single-not-by-choice as long as I have been it makes sense, I wonder what is wrong with me that I NEVER got groped? Even when I was young and skinny and frisky and cute? I remember thinking during the whole Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill thing when all the claims and statistics on harassment and groping started coming out, “what is wrong with me that this never happens to me?” Not that I want it to…but when some women report this as a seemingly daily thing in their lives ya gotta wonder.

What I don’t understand is the reluctance to talk about it. Not report it to authorities…I can completely understand how impossible it is in most cases to even figure out who the groper is, much less apprehend him. But to your friends and coworkers? I can imagine that if I got groped on the way in to work, the first thing I’d be telling my coworkers is “You would not believe what just happened in line down at Dunkin Donuts!” I plan on taking a poll of my best girlfriends the next time we are together. I sort of assume that the two nurses will have been groped numerous times, since they deal with a lot of people not in their right minds. And our one friend got groped a lot on their senior Girl Scout trip to France…she was gorgeous and very blonde and the other girls in the troop got totally ignored by the Frenchmen, while she got grabbed and even pushed into a cab one time…luckily she just shot out the door on the other side.

The closest I ever got to being unwillingly groped actually came from two female customers and inspired our workplace No Inappropriate Touching of the Sales Associate meme. Two very butch women asked me to show them some items over in a tight corner of the store, so we were standing very close to each other as I answered questions when I became aware that one of them was kind of stroking my upper back. I quickly moved out of range. I thought perhaps she had just absent-mindedly done it, thinking she was touching her partner. But years later I found out information that made me think that she was the woman my ex-husband had been rooming with, because she also showed up at another location I was working at, and the staff there were so frightened by her appearance that they lied and told her I had gone home already when I was actually in the back room. The description they gave matched the first woman, and years later my ex told me that she had stopped by both workplaces trying to meet me and work up to discussing the problem of Him.

148

This. I’m absolutely not bragging or thinking I’m special when I say I’m not groped because I’m “menacing.” What I am really saying is that clearly I am too gross for even pervy pervs to want to give me the time of day, and that sucks in its own way.

149

ZipperJJ, fuck that. What are you doing? Listen, you all don’t have to do this shit. You aren’t so awful that no one will want to grope you. Plenty of women have been groped, through no fault of their own…fat, skinny, old, young. You know that. So the fuck what if someone DOES think they have a kick ass magic fucking posture??? You know what, fuck it. This thread is fucking sick.

150

Enough of this carriage non-sense…let’s take another look at this in another light.

Who is NOT likely to be groped? Well let’s go through it.

Take Hilary Clinton as an example. If you saw Hilary Clinton walking on the street your chances of being able to grope her are slim to none. She has secret service, body guards, hell, a whole entourage. It also makes her an unlikely overall target. The perpetrator doesn’t want to be reprimanded, obviously. The perp knows if they grope someone as high-profile as HC they will be tagged and bagged.

Honestly I’d say there are two perps: opportunistic gropers who are generally horny and see a chance to grab a piece of flesh and get away with it, and the “lifetime” who will actively seek out targets. One is clearly more dangerous than the other, IMHO.

Not to derail the subject too much, and perhaps I need to make another thread, but any Guys out there had groping experiences? Either end?

When I was in high school I went to a concert and a girl kept grinding on my hips. I never asked for this attention, didn’t solicit it at all, but when I put my hands on her ribs she backed off quickly. Left me confused! But in the end I understood.

In Club Hell in Providence I was dancing with a girl, incredibly drunk I was, and after several heated dances I kissed her neck a few times. She made a line about using the restroom and left immediately. When I sobered up I was embarrassed and wished I could apologize.

I have seen some luscious women in my days, and for the ones I didn’t have a prearranged agreement with for touching, it never really occurred to me to grope. I suppose in my mind the satisfaction from such an action is so trivial and fleeting, while the disrespect and risk are so laughably high. Don’t get me wrong, I’d day dream all day about doing it, but only to my benefit, not to the woman’s displeasure.

151

Nevermind. I don’t want to get into this. Sorry I offended.

152

Honestly, I don’t think it’s necessarily a reluctance to talk about it. Lord knows, I’ll happily recount times some weirdo got all weird on me, because at least then you are taking some control (even after the fact) of a situation that was totally out of your control.

What I think happens is that women are conditioned- generally, of course- early on to just think that, well, this is how the world is. Many women don’t talk about being groped or cat called or whatever because it’s so mundane to them that it’s not even notable. As I believe a few in this thread have said, some of us couldn’t even remember all the times we’ve been harassed if we wanted to, because it happens so frequently. I remember the particularly notable incidents or the most recent, but I’m sure there are countless ones lost to me shrugging them off over the years.

Threads like this are a perfect example of why these things get forgotten. We all have different definitions of “groping” or “rape” or “harassment” or whatever-- and frankly, many of us have never even given the distinctions much thought. So, once we say, “No, seriously: a family member fondling you is definitely groping” then the person might for the first time realize, “Holy shit, I was groped!” Lord knows I look back at things that happened that I thought were perfectly normal, every day life things when I was a teenager that were definitely inappropriate. Like the teacher who would always “accidentally” bump into my chest with an open palm several times a week. Or the other teacher who started sending me dirty emails about how he wanted to eat me out in a park. See, as an adult-- a rational, intelligent, nuanced adult-- I look at those situations (particularly the second one) and am utterly horrified that I didn’t report them, because those were obviously grossly inappropriate. But at the time, I had been conditioned to believe that maybe that’s just how things were-- or maybe I was doing something to deserve this attention that made me so uncomfortable. So, I never told anyone but my closest friends.

153

I’ve been groped a couple of times in my life and I’ve never told anyone about it IRL because 1) I found it embarrassing as fuck and didn’t want to prolong/relive the embarrassment in talking about it, and 2) I really, really did not want to hear the familiar lecture What You Did To Attract That Kind of Attention and its cousin, It’s Not That Big of a Deal Chill Out.

154

Why? Serious question, why is it different, and why should you “expect” it to happen, as if that makes it okay for it to happen as long as you’re in a club? Which environments are okay for groping? In the public bathroom? On the street? In the office? In a bar?

It’s statements like this that make me believe that the vast majority of those who claim to have “never” been groped, or “only a couple times” are skewing their numbers (likely a lot) because of all the groping they decided, arbitrarily, “didn’t count.”

THAT’S how insidious this is. The culture has even got women believing they asked for it.

155

Or that it’s just normal. Like sneezing or something.

156

I’d like a show of hands how many women have grabbed a guy’s crotch in a club, and all parties involved thought it was perfectly unremarkable to do so…

157

hahaha yeah, it’s funny in a very sad way. Because once I had remembered I had been groped in movie theaters, it took me some more thread reading to realize “oh. yeah. when I was 5 my brother (ten years older), made me do stuff to him. But it doesn’t count as groping because he didn’t touch me with his hands.”
Except that he also did. But that I usually don’t remember it anyway because it wasn’t as bad as what I remember most.

158

I know I’ve certainly asked myself why me? Is it my clothes? Do they know I “do it” from looking at me? All that stuff. It was society’s message and I internalized it.

It makes sense to me that any thinking person would take time to ask herself whether it’s something she’s doing wrong. Unless we are a person who always blames everyone else for what happens to them it is only natural to question if I’m making an error. But I didn’t have the education yet to answer that question without blaming myself.

Once upon a time we only had male-oriented views to answer that question. But with the rise of education about victimization we can now have more answers to chose from that are less self-blaming.

So I’m really glad some of us finally spoke up about the other side of the coin. “What is it about me that I never get groped?” I knew you were there! Why? Because before I had a boyfriend a million years ago I used to ask myself the same question. ETA: In clarification. Why didn’t I have a boyfriend. Enough guys were groping me but nobody was dating me. Was I one of the “bad” girls? Why?

And thank you for taking the risk to share. Such courage.

Its another male-oriented oldie but goody. I was defining my self worth by whether a young man wanted me or not. Still getting groped in the school hallways but not feeling loved and valued.

And I was! I was just focusing on people who didn’t love or value me and not paying attention to the ones who did.

It’s a learning experience to find an answer to that question that helps with your self-esteem. And part of it for me was learning not to focus on the bad-vibe folks. It gives them way too much power over my thoughts and feelings. Those guys in the hall are still around. Wouldn’t want them now.

Everything in this thread that sounds sick are the honest thoughts of other women and, I think, reflections of what society has projected onto us. So, sick, yeah. But not necessarily the people who are voicing them.

If every woman was given a voice to tell her story-

159

For the record, I never have, and I am unsure what this comment adds to the discussion??

160

Since I’ve been quoted, no I don’t think I’m special or really have a aura or anything. I don’t know why I’ve never been groped or ogled or cat-called, and was just throwing out a suggestion. Maybe tomorrow something will happen to me and I will join the ranks of assaulted women.