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

In My Humble Opinion
161

I came into the thread thinking I’d be able to say I had never been groped before. But that’s not true. I was groped once when I was around 12 or 13 and my sister, my parents and I walked through a crowd of young guys at a street festival. They hooted at my twin and me, and someone grabbed my butt. My father didn’t see it happen. I’m kind of glad he didn’t 'cuz he was already boiling mad because of all the catcalls. He mighta killed somebody.

I wasn’t traumatized or anything. But it was messed-up, especially since there was was no way those guys didn’t know I was just a kid.

162

monstro, otoh, perhaps it would be better if more men do react when they see their loved ones being treated like that. Or heck, not even their loved ones, but anyone.

I’m glad of those friends who spoke out when they were harassed, and the perpetrator was removed. I wish it would happen more often.

163

When my daughter was offered alcohol, propositioned, groped and verbally abused by a teacher a few of her friends grabbed him and hit him.

They were charged with assault. He was charged with disorderly conduct. So a person has to be careful about how they protect themselves.

164

When I was 14, I was groped by my best friend’s boyfriend. When I was 27, I was groped by the boyfriend of a coworker. I told both my friend and the coworker about what had happened soon after these incidents. Would you like to guess what happened next?

If your guess was that on both occasions the groper’s girlfriend called me a lying bitch and did her best to turn all our mutual friends against me then you’re correct!

For our bonus round, would anyone like to guess what my mother’s reaction was when I told her that my best friend’s boyfriend had groped me? This is a tough one, so I’ll give you a hint. She didn’t say she’d speak to the school, my friend’s parents, or the boyfriend’s parents about it. Give up? She told me to stop crying because it’s not like he’d raped me.

That’s what happens to girls who talk about it. Not always, but often enough. While I’m (obviously) still willing to talk about it under the right circumstances, it’s not a topic I’m particularly eager to bring up in casual conversation.

165

Uh, it was rather clearly related to the two posts immediately before it, so I have no idea why you’re confused.

To spell it out:

In our culture, for some completely fucked up reason, women getting felt up in clubs is perceived as perfectly normal and expected, so much so that even women think – and have said so in so many words in this very thread – that it “doesn’t count” as groping.

The reason that utterly, completely boggles my mind and offends me no end, is that if we gender-reverse that scenario, all of a sudden it’s something weird and hinky and abnormal. My goodness clutch pearls nobody does that!

So why, exactly, is it “expected” and apparently okay that women get groped in certain environments that “don’t count” as “real” groping, but unexpected and abnormal if men are groped by women in that exact same environment?

TL;DR fucking sexist double standard affects cultural attitudes of men towards their access to women’s bodies. (News at 11.)

166

For my part, I didn’t mean to say that there was victim blaming going on in this thread, or that some women think they are special, or better than other women. I’m sorry if it came across that way.

I do think it is woolly thinking to think it’s up to the women to determine who gets groped and who doesn’t. It’s natural to wonder “what is it about me/her” but, for better or for worse, it’s not up to us.

167

At the kinds of clubs I went to in college, groping was the norm. They were pretty seedy and were full of horny young people looking to shag in a back alley. I’m not exaggerating. To me, getting my ass grabbed in a club like that is way different from getting my ass grabbed in a crowded subway. You can complain that that kind of club culture is inherently misogynistic, and I would agree with you. That’s why I don’t go to those kinds of clubs anymore. But people go to these places with the specific intention to get wasted and to stick their tongues down each other’s throats. So that’s why it never bothered me as much as getting groped on the subway did. You have different expectations of a subway than you do of a sketchy club. I don’t think there’s anything strange about that.

168

Im rather apalled that other women would turn on each other about this. No wonder its so hard to talk about! I mean, I would assume at least another woman would be likely to be sympathetic. If some friend of my wife told her I groped somebody my wife would probably kick my ass, not blame the woman that got groped.

For some men, there’s definitely a bad upbringing/chauvanism/ignorance behind their interpretations of women getting groped. But what about other women? How could they not be sympthetic?! Especially a mother hearing her daughter say something like this happened?

Why wouldn’t a parent take something like this at face value?! :mad:

169

Same reaction my mother had when she found out that when Grandpa took my cousin and one of my brothers to the footie, he’d give them candy to masturbate in front of his friends. “It’s not that bad!” What, if nobody sticks a dick in you, it’s not that bad?
(For anybody wondering how come I still talk to the woman, it’s both because it makes relationships with the rest of the family easier and because I discovered I can get her to change her attitudes - since the bitch is, for some reason, a local social leader, changing her attitudes can have a pretty wide effect).

170

This thread has been a bit of an eye opener. I want to emphasize that I believe all of the stories given so far - that said, it’s totally outside of my monkey sphere.

I came into this thread expecting maybe one or two ‘stranger’ incidents and a whole lot more of the ‘a guy I was on a date with was trying to get touchy-feely and I had to rebuff him several times’.

It boggles my mind that normal (as compared to, say, CRAZY mumbling to themselves) men go around trying to cop a feel off of strangers (not that it would be acceptable if the people were not strangers, mind you).

As to my own experience - I’ve only had one that springs to mind. When I was a middle school boy there was this girl who would (seemingly) randomly grab guy’s junk and squeeze (painfully). She got me once and attempted to do it again a few weeks later (could have been months, my memory is hazy). I didn’t think it was sexual then (or now), but it was disturbing and painful. I think a teacher caught her doing it to someone and she got in trouble.

As I said, I don’t think this girl was doing it for the same reasons as the pervert men are in the stories that the women of this thread have given. Maybe I’m wrong though, I don’t know.

171

That’s horrible.

I have two kids that I hope this kind of stuff never happens to.

For all the people who have had this misfortune, what should a father do if their child comes to them saying they were groped?

Obviously I would believe my child and be supportive. I also think that I should probably confront the other child’s parents. If it’s an adult doing the groping I would hopefully be able to call the police as opposed to letting my animal instincts getting the best of me and mauling the guy.

I guess I’m asking what would have made you feel better that your parents could have done?

172

Women definitely turn on other women about this. And despite what Diosa says, I definitely have a reluctance to talk about in real life. Best case scenario is you get a bunch of pitying looks. Worst case scenario is, as others have said, women are disgusted by you and horrified. Usually it’s somewhere in between.

So you get the righteous types. “I would have kicked his ass! I would have cut off contact! I would have called the cops!” When really you just wanted it to stop. Then you get the other types. “What were you doing in that club by yourself anyway? Why did you have to walk across the parking lot at night? Don’t you know, you’re supposed to hold your keys between your fingers/walk with a man/never walk alone with a man/etc, etc, etc.”

I’ve mentioned before on this board that one of the men who groped me was my own dad. I don’t talk about that one much. People think I should have screamed to the high heavens and perhaps I should have…but I didn’t. And part of the reason was I firmly believed my mom would have never believed me. She already ridiculed and demeaned me, saying I was boy-crazy and too slutty (I had never even had a kiss). She called me a kanjari once, a whore, to my face, the sting has never gone out of that word, at almost 40 years of age.

The other times I was groped, well, as others have said, it was already well ingrained in my head that I was alone in this, that no one would help me.

All this being said, I have also wondered about the “aura”. As I grow older, I don’t get groped anymore. It definitely could be that I am less attractive than I was at 16, 17, 18, but I am also a lot more confident, and I don’t end up in groping-common places anymore. Is it my confidence? Or is it just that I am older and less pretty? Or just that I am rarely alone these days?

But all of the stupid advice for not getting groped doesn’t help against your dad. Or your grandfather, or your uncle, or any other family member.

173

In the case of the new teacher (one of the two times I tried to ask my parents for help in a case in which they hadn’t witnessed the abuse directly - neither time went well, while they did respond properly when they witnessed it), merely believing me rather than saying “you’re lying again! How many times have we told you not to lie?!” would have made an enormous difference. Among other things, it would have given me the message that asking for help works, rather than the message that “other people deserve help but you do not”.

It was in a place and time where calling the police wouldn’t have done shit, but all the other parents asked for blood and got the teacher placed on probation (which he passed, and taught at that school with no further incident for twenty years); what I would have liked my parents to do is recuse themselves from the board of the PTA and join the other parents in their very polite, very procedure-following waving of farming implements.

174

I don’t think the attractiveness of the victim is a particularly big factor for gropers. It seems obvious that just being female is enough for a lot of them, and some seem to go for whatever female human happens to be within arm’s reach. I also attracted the most unwanted sexual attention of my life (groping, leering, catcalls, etc.) when I was young, between the ages of about 12 and 15. This was not, by conventional standards, the period during which I was the most attractive. I didn’t even have a particularly “womanly” figure at that age; while I was tall, I was a late bloomer in the chest department.

I think pervs like to go after adolescent girls not because they’re more attractive than 20-somethings but because they’re more vulnerable. A teenager is a lot more likely than an adult to be confused, intimidated, embarrassed, or frightened by the groper. Teenagers also aren’t known for having great judgment, so there are decent odds that a teenaged victim has something else to hide (e.g. she was out after curfew) that would make her reluctant to come forward about the groping…even if she felt she could count on the support of her parents, which is definitely not a given.

Just from the perspective of getting away with it, groping a beautiful adult woman seems like a bad bet. This isn’t to say that beautiful adult women don’t get groped, but it seems like people are more willing to believe that a beautiful woman would be groped (rather than just making it up for attention or something) so her complaints would be taken more seriously. I’d guess that a beautiful woman in distress also attracts more white knights than a teenager or plain-looking adult, and to the extent that confidence is a factor, a beautiful woman also seems more likely to have a confident demeanor. Although if the woman is beautiful but also perceived as “slutty” then that’s a different story; she’s all too likely to be blamed for whatever happens to her.

175

While it is true that perhaps it won’t be nice to respond groping with assault (as you or your protector may be accused worse than the groper, when it shouldn’t), it’d be nice if there is a public shaming, outcasting, refusal of services, etc. My grandmother (when she was younger) was groped, made a fuss, and the guy was publicly chided and told to leave the bus at the next stop. A similar thing happened to my friend. The guy was told to get out of the vehicle (it was not at his destination).

The incident mentioned earlier, where everybody spent a night at the police reporting the incident, could’ve been solved if there were a “no groping” policy. The bouncer could really remove the guy from the place and tell him not to hang around and be around the establishment at least for the rest of that night. Repeat offenders? Not admitted to the place. Something like that, to make them know that their actions DO have consequences.

176

I agree with the point about adolescent girls. The first time I was groped, I was 16. I was doing volunteer work at a tiny local post office in Korea, and the postmaster was an old guy - old enough to be my grandfather. It was summer, so I was wearing shorts. He kept stroking my thigh while telling me I was going a good job. It made me super uncomfortable, but I was too afraid to say anything. I kept telling myself that he was probably just being friendly. I didn’t want to be rude to an elder. Also I needed the volunteer hours to graduate, so I didn’t want to risk him getting angry and not signing my papers. In hindsight, of course, I realize what a perv he was, but at the time I just kept trying to convince myself that it was all in my head.

As for the groping in subways, it mostly happened on a particular subway line at a particular time of day. Oddly enough, in the mornings.

In the past I have heard of men on Seoul subways take advantage of very drunk women. The women are sitting down and pretty much unconscious. The men will sit next to them and pretend to be their boyfriend, taking them into their arms and feeling them up. When other passengers confront them, they get angry and say that it’s none of their business, that they’re “with” this woman even though it’s clear that they’re not. Pretty fucking brazen. I don’t think it happens as much anymore - with the arrival of smartphones anything that happens on the subway goes straight to the internet, and Korean netizens are pretty famous for making your life a living hell if they choose to.

177

I do, yes.

Why the excluded middle, then? It’s certainly possible to go to a club and hook-up WITH the consent of all parties involved. Why throw your expectation of consent out the window just because “oh that’s the way it is”? I just don’t grasp why groping under these circumstances “doesn’t count.” Were you groped? Was it consensual? If your answers are “yes” and “no,” then it counts, and I don’t know why you’d say otherwise.

The “it doesn’t really count” attitude is what these guys are relying on to get away with their shit.

178

About this and many other things. If I ever get run over on the street, I fully expect it to be another woman running me down - women don’t like to stop for other women crossing streets. If people think it’s just men that are competitive, they haven’t met women.

179

I’m a dude, and I’ve been groped.

180

All of this reminds me - my mother was groped during her wedding reception by the groom’s best friend.

It pretty much ended the friendship.

ETA: And yes, plenty of people thought she was overreacting.