Yes, I understand that’s why women often make such excuses. And I sympathize with women who feel that they need to do that; and in some cases I think they’re wise to do so.
What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t need to do it; and that therefore it’s not a good solution to say ‘just tell them you’re seeing somebody, what’s the problem?’ I don’t know that that’s what @RivkahChaya is saying; but I’m afraid that’s how people will read what she’s saying.
Difficult for most women over 16 or so to pull off. Especially difficult if they also need to be treated as an adult otherwise by the person they’re turning down.
Women can cuckold a man, which is something men can’t do.
The sexual strategies are different. Women at their “peak” will attract more male attention than the reverse situation for any male at any time. But the penalty, being impregnated by a low quality, unreliable man, is significant. Weeding through many potential partners with a significant penalty probably favors a cagey approach.
Men have different needs. Women expressing overt interest are rarer. But the biological investment by men is less, and ideally a man can impregnate many women in a short amount of time. So displaying “he’s the best” while making intentions clear work better. Men don’t gain from a cagey approach, as it is assumed most women have ability to attract multiple suitors. So men are better off being conditioned to make many approaches, and to be able to shrug off the rejections.
Only true because sexual infidelity by a woman can be defined as cuckolding her male partner, whereas sexual infidelity by a man isn’t defined as cuckolding his female partner (I have no idea whether the term is used by gay couples and if so how.)
But they’re doing the exact same thing. Calling it something different when a woman does it to a man only points out the inequality of common attitudes.
Possibly true on average. Certainly not true for ‘any male at any time’ compared to every woman ‘at peak’ or otherwise.
That’s very likely to be societal pressure.
Yup. Conditioned by societal pressure.
We need societal pressure to instead condition men (and people of all genders) to take no for an answer. That would free up women (and people of all genders) to clearly say yes, no, or ‘maybe some other time’. And that would save everybody a whole lot of hassle.
I used to get hit on a lot by college-aged men once I got my braces off, which is to say, just before I turned 13. I thought it was screwy at the time, but about 10 years ago, I happened to see a picture of myself at 13, and I suddenly realized that I did, in fact, look several years older than I was.
I was 5’2 or 3, and a 34B, fairly slender and somewhat athletic (I biked and swam a lot). I never had acne, and I had a long face with high cheekbones-- not a babyface by any stretch.
If I was wearing a university T-shirt, and on campus (where my parents taught) it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption that I was a student. I might not have quite looked 18 or 19, but there were plenty of 18- and 19-yr-olds who looked a little younger than they were; I easily passed for 16 when I was 13, 17 when I was 14, and so forth. So when I was on campus, a lot of people assumed I was a freshman.
I’d been hanging around on the campus since I was a baby, and I was a little precocious in my manner and speech from my parents expecting me to behave that way around adults from a really young age; I also had an alto voice.
I had a point when I started that-- oh, yeah. It sounds unnerving that I got a lot of attention from adult men (albeit, very young adults-- 18-22) when I was 13-18, but I didn’t dodge them by saying “Pervert! I’m 13!” I just said “No, thank you,” and then got the hell out of there. Rarely did anyone follow me.
Very young men did take “No” for an answer. They didn’t start to get annoyingly persistent until they were a little older, like 26 or so. By the time post-grads were hitting on me, I was old enough to vote.
I wasn’t addressing that. I was addressing what Spice_Weasel said, which was that ‘the vast majority of adult male attention’ she got was when she was between 11 and 14; which I took to mean that such attention dropped off abruptly when she hit her later teens and beyond; while you seem to be describing attention that started when you were around 13 but continued while you became significantly older than that.
From your description I’d tend to agree that in your case between your appearance and the context of the situation (there aren’t usually a lot of 13 year olds on college campuses) they just thought you were older than you were.
Correct. And I did look older. Some guys genuinely did not know, others were lecherous creeps. (And some may have been put off by me being twelve but thought they were harassing maybe a sixteen-year - old and that would have been totally fine.) The “I am twelve” line came from a guy working a 7-11 register and I really think he didn’t know my age, because he was horrified when I told him. I was so young I didn’t really know what to say, but that did the trick.
I have this memory of walking to the car in the rain or snow with my Mom. She had a jacket around my shoulders and was holding me close, and these guys started following us across the parking lot in their truck, alternating between harassing us for being “lesbians” and making sexual overtures. These are the kinds of scenarios where directness is not a safe option, and my mom just kept repeating in a sing-songy voice that I was her daughter until they went away.
In a majority of cases where I’ve been hit on, however, I am much more worried about hurting someone’s feelings than I am about my safety. Fellas, I get that it is hard to risk rejection. May it be some small consolation that it’s often really hard to do the rejecting.
You know, I learned to risk rejection when I learned to ask women out, and from that, I learned to ask men out.
It dawned on me that one of the reasons women don’t respond to invitations they wish they could accept with something like “I’m busy then, but I’m free the next night,” is the assumption that men are always paying.
It feels wrong to dictate the terms of an occasion someone else is paying for.
The first time my husband asked me out, I was busy, but by that time, I knew how to handle it. It happened that what I was doing was helping out my old boss at the art film house where I worked in college, because he was stuck for a projectionist, and as it was the summer, and I had an interpreting gig with the school system, getting two weeks of showing movies was helpful.
Anyway, when DH asked me out, and I was busy, I told him I was showing a movie, but if he liked movies, he could come by, and I’d let him in gratis; if he wanted to, we could do something afterwards. I was prepared to pick up the check if we went out for coffee afterwards, but in any event, I’d gotten him a free movie.
Saying “I’m free the next night” is way different than saying “I’m free the next night, and we’re going here, and you’re paying.”
Jeez, when I was working setting up a new meeting time involved all sorts of negotiations and time changes. Now there are websites which allow you to enter a range of dates and times for setting up meetings. Maybe the 21st century dater should use them.
I had better predecease my wife. I don’t think I could handle dating again.
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I can believe that you might respond to your best buddies that you’ve known forever that way, but I have a hard time believing that you get a positive reaction after responding to newer acquaintances that way. You may think that that’s a reasonable response, but IMO it’s a bit blunt…literally never once in my life has anyone declined an invitation of mine that way and I’ve never turned down an invitation or a date that way.
Let’s say that you start a new job and they’re having a happy hour and you don’t want to go, you would say, “no, I’m not interested, but thanks anyway?” Seems like that would put you on the fast track to social isolation at work. I think that the vast majority of people would decline by saying something like, “I wish I could, but I have to pick up my wife from the airport…next time for sure.” The fact that their wife hasn’t been on a flight in 5 yrs is inconsequential.
I disagree that one can push harder when making a non-romantic invitation…maybe with your bff or your siblings, but with anyone else that’s not only rude, it’s clueless. It’s true that that person wouldn’t be labelled a creep because the term creep is commonly reserved for men who act creepy around women that they’re attracted to, but they probably would be called weird or aggro or some other term that indicates their lack of social graces.
Everyone is expected to take a hint whether the invitation that they’ve offered is romantic or platonic and everyone is expected to be gracious and polite when turning down an invitation. Saying something like, “no, I don’t want to go” or “no, I’m not interested in doing that” is tactless and kind of rude.
The examples that I gave are rude because the truth isn’t being obscured…when the truth is obscured, the response becomes polite. Turning down an invitation with, “no, I’m not interested, but thanks” isn’t very polite, but turning down the same invitation with, “that sounds great, but I can’t make it” is more tactful even though the first one is closer to the truth.
When someone doesn’t want to date someone, it’s typically because they don’t find that person attractive in some way…to turn down a date invitation like, “hey, would you like to grab a bite to eat?” with “no thanks, I’m interested in you in that way” or “no thanks, you’re not my type” would be rude and bitchy…true, but still rude/bitchy. In the same way, the examples that I gave in my first post are true, but they’re also rude.
I assume he means that men cannot trick a woman into believing she’s the mother of some other woman’s child. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to raise a child you’re not biologically related to, but it’s definitely wrong to lie about paternity.
That’s incredibly disturbing. I can’t decide if the 11 or the 14 part is worse. Were you around a lot of men who only like really young girls?
Yes. Although I don’t think my experience is very unusual. The problem with unwanted sexual advances from adult men at that age is that I never really got the chance to develop my own sexuality on my own terms. It just became this threatening thing I didn’t want to deal with. It’s the reason I’m so aggressively in support of young ladies developing sexual agency, understanding how to set boundaries, learning what is required for consent and recognizing red flags in relationships. I’m really glad I didn’t have a girl child (AFAIK) because navigating that with the baggage of my own issues would be really challenging.
That really sucks. It’s so difficult being a teenager and trying to find your own identity anyway, without adding in all that harassment. In some ways being not-so-attractive is a blessing, but I’m worried about my daughter going through this when she’s older. I thought it would be better by now, but things seem so much worse for girls than when I was growing up.
My senior year of college, a guy in one of my classes asked me to study with him. I was doing really well in the class, and a couple of people had asked me to study with them, so I didn’t think he was interested in anything but studying. I told him I was meeting with a couple of other people, and he could join us.
He showed up, and after we were done studying, he hung out and walked out with me. He asked me if I was going to whatever ball game was playing that weekend, I don’t remember whether it was football or basketball.
The degree to which I detest sports cannot be overstated.
So I told him no, I wasn’t going, and I didn’t care for whatever sport it was, but I was going to get a cup of coffee at [popular location] if he wanted to join me now.
I wouldn’t have wanted a relationship based on a mutual interest in sports that didn’t really exist, particularly considering how much I don’t like sports.
I wasn’t actually planning on stopping for coffee, and he had a class, so I just went home, but I did spend a lot of time at that place, and I would have been perfectly happy if he’d said “Yes.”
I don’t think there’s anyone I want to spend time with so much, that I’d do it at a sports game. Not even the deity.
Cuckold historically referred to a husband with an adulterous wife and is still often used with this meaning. In evolutionary biology, the term cuckold is also applied to males who are unwittingly investing parental effort in offspring that are not genetically their own. Since the 1990s, the term has also been widely used to refer to a sexual fetish in which the fetishist is stimulated by their committed partner choosing to have sex with someone else.
It’s derived from the word ‘cuckoo’, so the connection should be obvious.
