Your second statement is my opinion of all the male worrying that sometimes occurs on the Dope that men will be victimized by all these women filing false rape charges. For centuries women have been told to avoid sexual harassment and victimization by having witnesses to their behavior, so that’s my response to men who are afraid they will be victim to women filing false rape charges: “If it bothers you so much, just avoid being alone with women.”
You should have gone to the nearest drinks vendor, picked up a straw and a few bits of paper, and returned to pelt her with spit wads until you got her attention.
FWIW, the handshake jokes are pretty fucking stupid, and people should knock it off with them. She doesn’t want her hand shook by a dude, that’s her right, don’t flip her shit about that.
It’s everything else that she deserves a lot of shit for, from slapping a teenager to agreeing that murder is an appropriate response to a man who tries to shake a woman’s hand to calling people who adopt kids monsters to making up bullshit stories about the thousands of people she’s talked to about saying “congratulations” to a bride.
But her decision not to shake a dude’s hand? Whatever, leave her alone about that one specific thing.
OK. Well, as it stands, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I haven’t been accused of anything yet, and I would be very surprised if I ever was. So, you’re cool with me continuing being alone with women? No issues there?
You could have written a note and held it against her hand. The touch of just about any inanimate object against the her wrist would have produced the same reaction as your hand, so you could have used that. You could have asked another woman to get her attention. I don’t know enough about either you or the woman to comment on your morals. It’s was benign social encounter, but not everything in life is.
He could carry around a trained canary that knows how to flutter in front of a woman’s eyes then fly back to him, for just such occasions–but why would he? A vanishingly small number of people of either sex object to this sort of benign social touch, and it’s their job to prevent its occurrence.
I’ve got a severe needle phobia. Like bad enough that I feel faint and unpleasant when I see someone else with a hypodermic out, like bad enough that when a diabetic is checking their blood sugar it makes me feel ill.
That’s on me. It’s not up to everyone else to change how they handle needles, anymore than it’s up to everyone else to change how they handle benign social touch just because of your dislike of certain types of it.
And saying that doesn’t mean that I approve of stabbing strangers with used syringes, any more than saying you need to take care of yourself means I approve of sexual assault. For fuck’s sake.
Oh for sure, she has every right not to shake a man’s hand if she doesn’t want to, having a ready line such as “I’m sorry I can’t shake hands,” is perfectly reasonable and should be honored.
Really, the problem with her view of feminism is that it doesn’t give women any agency.
As long as he didn’t touch me I would have just said thank you, picked up the fallen items, and continued about my day. If he had touched it would depend on what his intentions appeared to be. Men who are genuinely courteous are almost always quite capable of making it obvious that they have good intentions. With jerks, the jerkdom always seems to poke through their veneer.
BY the by, I decided to see if I could source that quote (just in case it turned out to NOT be from Edward G.), and google provided me with but a single hit. I’m not 100% certain that this is where you sourced that quote, but I’m going to call your attention to the following rubric which I found on the page:
Can you figure out what it is that either you, or your immediate source, failed to do?
After we’ve had a few women presidents, when half of the House and Senate are female, and there a female CEO’s running half the Fortune 500, it might be perfectly reasonable to say all a woman needs to have is a ready line such as “I don’t shake hands with unrelated me.” Until that golden day, I don’t think it’s reasonable to require the oppressed person to have to constantly ask, “Don’t harass me.”
No, she wants us to live in her world. All men should know they can’t shake hands, just like everyone is supposed to know you never, ever say “congratulations” at a wedding. This is our world, and she wants to impose her values on us. She wants to come into our world and tell men, “don’t shake my hand or it’s rape and women don’t claim rape if it’s not rape, do they?”
I… don’t actually have a problem with that. And the “don’t be alone with a woman if you don’t want to be accused to of rape” thing somehow made much more sense the way you explained it now.
I guess I’ll take “advocating randomly accusing innocent men of rape” off the list of things you’ve been accused of. For now. Maybe there’s more we can debunk, too.
I must say, ZPG, you’re not coming across as all that nutty at the moment. Now, why am I finding that weirdly disappointing?
