Yeah. If strange men spoke to you on the street, you were expected to ignore them.
Once in the 1970’s I walked into a bar in the middle of the day in a generally safe small-town environment and had a tableful of young men call me over to sit with them. I’m partly faceblind and I assumed they knew me, that I’d met them at a party or somebody’s house; I went over and sat down at their table. They were so obviously taken aback that I quickly realized they didn’t know me at all; and they certainly didn’t expect a strange woman to come sit down with them and join the conversation, even though they’d asked her to.
Men who did start talking to random women in public were expecting the women to ignore them; or to get scared and go away.
It would also be easier for young people to move out of their parents’ homes if American cities still allowed SRO (Single-Room Occupancy) housing, where residents could rent out individual rooms in a dormitory-style arrangement.
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It’s coming back in the form of co-living, aka adult dorms. But muxh more upmarket and only in major cities like NYC or San Francisco. Zoning is a huge obstacle, even for “normal” apartments in most areas.
Kommunalka are still around in Russia and apparently still popular with some segments of the population like pensioners and single men. They were horrible for families, but don’t seem all that bad for singles.
I grew up in the 90s, and I don’t think I ever got more male attention in my life than I did between the ages of 13 and 15. Strange men talked to me all the time and I didn’t know how to deal with it. And that sense of awkwardness has lingered well into adulthood. I think every time I go outside, a part of me still expects random men to yell shit out of cars at me even though it hasn’t happened in decades. It’s weird how those early formative experiences can stay with you.
But nobody ever said to me: “You get to ignore this.”
Also they can get quite pissed when you ignore them.
Are you saying there was a time where they didn’t get pissed off that you ignored them? That sounds nice.
(Also there’s a very clear and readable difference between a guy talking to you to be friendly and a guy talking to you to be creepy. I’m not opposed to like, talking to guys. I just don’t want to be talked at.)
I hit my teens in the 70s, and although new societal freedoms were weakening the old prohibitions, it was very much still recognized that it’s okay to completely ignore a strange man trying to have a conversation with you. If he kept talking to you after you ignored his first conversational sally, other people would start glaring at him.
Ignorable people didn’t include those who were just asking the time or inquiring about directions or something, mind you: it was still mandatory to respond politely to a polite question of that sort, even if the answer was just a brief “Sorry, I don’t know”.
But if that response was taken as an icebreaker warranting further conversation on other more intrusive topics, then it was haughty-silence time. Redirect your gaze back to your book or whatever, and become dignifiedly unconscious of the other person’s existence.
Well, not necessarily, assholes have always been assholes, but there was a limit to how openly and directly they would express their pissedoffness, due to the aforesaid glaring.
The thing is, a lot of the more skilled creeps are pretty good at initially seeming like they’re just talking to be friendly. I can usually tell the genuinely friendly ones pretty easily nowadays, because they’re just as happy to get chatty with a frumpy old bat like me as with the pretty girls.
Heh, I think this is where my particular brand of spectrum-adjacency came in to protect me. I also didn’t get much random stranger male attention (probably in part because I was not particularly feminine at all as a teenager) but when I did, I was mostly oblivious and also sort of oblivious to them being pissed off (I mean, there I could see it, but I literally didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it, so I kept up with the ignoring). I think this actually came off as haughty silence as @Kimstu says, as somewhat later I was informed that people thought I was stuck-up.
I’m still pretty oblivious. I was walking with a (white, less oblivious) friend just a couple of years ago when a guy started shouting at us. I was like, ok, whatever, and ignored him, and my friend yelled back at him, “hey, it’s not okay to say things like that.” It wasn’t until she said that that I realized that he had specifically been saying racist things to me, and I completely hadn’t understood that. (And, I mean, it was pretty blatantly racist, I just hadn’t actually been paying attention to the words until she said that.)
Just reading through this thread for the first time, so if this gets addressed downthread, sorry to be redundant but I had a thought right here.
When we talk about being a person with little or no influence on the patriarchal system we all inhabit–well, almost everyone who ISN’T a white adult male of a fairly specific range of religious affiliation has minimal input into how things are run. Yes, juvenile males are in that basket too–but here’s the thing, if they have the penis, the pale skin and go to the right church, they will be automatically granted a bunch of say, once they become adults. Nobody else gets that. You’re a woman all your life, you aren’t in the club. You’re a BIPOC, you are not and never will be in the club. You’re LGBTQIA+ and will never be part of the club, nope. You’re a poor who’s in the wrong religion–you might get a fractional shot at the brass ring but realistically you’re not gonna be in the club.There’s really only one group that is destined to have a shot at inheriting the keys to the kingdom. One.
And this article says I’m supposed to be super concerned about that group. Well, no, I won’t. If those who run things are worried about their younger cohort, maybe they should do something about that.
I think it’s more productive for the rest of us to tear down that restrictive system and replace it with one that is much less dependent on irrelevant imaginary qualities of a favored ingroup. Maybe construct a society that, y’know, works for and benefits the greatest percentage of all humans. Equity, that would be good.
I think all these examples sort of proves how too many options and lack of lack of a well defined social structure has created conditions where many men don’t really know how they should be acting. Not that we should return to some sort of rigid Victorian-era class system where men and women had strict rules about how to behave ladies and gentlemen with strict courting rituals. But I don’t think we really teach men and women how to behave like “good people” (whatever that means). Particularly when it comes to dating
I’m a white male with “little or no influence on the patriarchal system”. Does that make me a BIPOC LBGTQIA+ woman?
I’m always curious what sort of magical utopia people like you would build if you could actually tear down the system and rebuild it. One of the biggest problems with the current system is that it’s controlled by the top fraction of 1% who own most of the wealth and who also mostly happen to be straight white men. These aren’t elected officials (for the most part) and don’t represent the wishes of any people other than their shareholders and their own egos. So simply replacing some percentage of them with a more representative set of douchebags doesn’t really solve anything because it’s still a huge amount of power concentrated within a small group. And you can’t replace them anyway because they hold all the economic power and own all the media.
As it happens, David Schraub weighed in on this very issue the other day:
One of the interesting things about “equality of opportunity”, as a concept, is that while it’s often used as a conservative talking point (“equality of opportunity, not equality of result”), if one actually takes it seriously, it would require a pretty radical reordering of our social structures from top to bottom. Do you know how hard it is to actually establish equality of opportunity? For example, one would have to either eliminate economic inequalities altogether or (this is no easier) eliminate their impact in terms of how they affect the starting positions of young people. Whatever world that looks like, it’s very distant from our own.
No, it makes you (and me) the beneficiary of institutional -isms that have resulted of history, and that even those in power have minimal influence on, and of implicit biases that most are innocently ignorant of.
Which also doesn’t change the fact that there is increasingly a larger share of men in the not college educated group than women and that while many college educated individuals, saddled with huge debt, are not in the “haves” group, the increasingly male not college educated group is more and more in the “have nots” …
Realistically? A totalitarian state or a chaotic failed one (if the attempt to impose the former causes a collapse). That probably won’t be the original intention, but it’s the inevitable outcome of trying to forcibly restructure all of society according to some grand vision. Because regardless of what the vision is, the only way to force it upon a population that doesn’t want it is a pervasive authoritarian state.
It’s a fundamental flaw in utopianism; the attempt to achieve it makes it impossible. It’s self defeating.
I am reminded of Paul Bettany’s speech at the end of the movie Margin Call where he is telling his young colleague how if they take their hands off the scale, “the whole world gets really fucking fair, really fucking quickly, and nobody actually wants that”
I think it’s the same thing. People want a sort of manufactured sense of structure and stability but no one wants to be at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Like how do you even establish “equality of opportunity” and what does that even mean? Like everyone is in a giant labor pool in a constant state of competition on price and skills and whatever other metrics are used to evaluate people? That seems to be the direction we are heading in with the gig economy and outsourcing and armies of contingency workers. It makes economic sense on paper but in reality it creates a huge amount of instability for individuals because you can’t be certain what skills and experience to acquire (particularly as it takes significant time and effort and money to acquire them) or what your level of income will actually be from year to year.
But then the traditional method of identifying potential high achievers at an early age and funneling them into a path of elite academic education as a pipeline to institutional leadership also poses challenges in that it creates a class structure that is often inflexible and exclusionary.
Sort of off topic, but I kind of find the idea of “diversity” and “inclusion” sort of absurd and laughable if the thing you are diversifying and including people in is inherently unfair, if not outright evil. Some examples from film and TV:
The reboot of Gossip Girl where the main cast is multiethnic and sexually/gender diverse as opposed to the original all white rich Manhattan douchebags
The brilliant non-binary character Tyler who works for Bobby Axlerod’s hedge fund in the show Billions
How the First Order in the new Star Wars films progressively recruits women and minorities into their stormtrooper corps, compared to the space Nazis of the Imperial era.
I mean you’re still doing amoral and evil shit. But hey! At least it’s a representative group doing it!
Ninety years ago when tens of thousands of teenage boys were riding the rails or roaming the streets, they could be put into the Civilian Conservation Corps where they’d do useful work and learn technical skills and self-discipline. Undoubtedly there was dangerous work conditions, bullying, sexual assault, etc. Today that would sink a CCC mass revival despite whatever good might come of it. Plus, government programs are in eclipse; so unless some billionaire wants to buy half of Montana and put thousands of kids to work landscaping it to his tastes, that’s a non-starter.
It could be exactly what we do today, but eliminating the influence of personal status on the opportunities available to the next generation. I don’t suggest it’s easy or attainable, but it isn’t a particularly opaque concept.
Part of the idea is that multiethnic sexually diverse groups shouldn’t be a thing you notice as being out of the ordinary, they should just be ordinary, and they won’t be ordinary if we only use them for the purpose of making a point about ethnicity/gender/sexuality.
I don’t know if you have to completely tear everything down, but you can make changes on the margins.
I’ve heard that since orchestras have gone to anonymous auditions, the percentage of women musicians hired has boomed. Things like that – not always assuming the male candidate is superior (or having their underlying biases make that assumption below their level of awareness).
Right. My point is that if you are telling a story about a group that is inherently privileged where racial inequality is part of that privilege, it’s a bit hypocritical to exclude that from the story. Otherwise you’re just telling a Disney fairytale about princes and princesses (I’m looking at you Bridgerton).
True, or women either for that matter (witness Spice_Weasel’s experience of not having learned that it isn’t rude to just ignore a man who’s hassling you).
As always in such cultural shifts, it’s the assholes who exploit the social uncertainty to their own advantage, and the well-meaning people who end up coping with the consequences.
Yeah, too much outsourcing of personal relations to commercial enterprises that have no interest in ensuring that their customers treat each other well, as long as enough of them keep paying.
Yeah, when conservative commentators use the term they generally seem to be thinking of a situation where historically disadvantaged groups have no explicit legal barriers prohibiting their participation, but no measures may be taken to compensate for the legacy of historical disadvantage stemming from the earlier legal barriers.
So the historically privileged “old boys’ network” remains securely in place, but a few disadvantaged-group superachievers can work their way up through it as evidence that hey, we’re all equal now!
And it’s easy to see what, for example, outright Communists mean by equality of opportunity: literally everybody gets exactly the same childhood environment and access to educational and other advantages, full stop.
In between those two extremes, it’s tough to determine how effective “equality of opportunity” among historically privileged and historically disprivileged groups would look like or how it would be achieved.
I don’t need utopia. I’m actually okay with some class stratification, the problem is the absolute floor, the people at the bottom of the hierarchy, should have a decent quality of life, and they currently do not.
Also it shouldn’t be based off race or gender or stupid bullshit.
I was a poor kid who was academically talented and I have to wonder at that, because I didn’t earn my intelligence. I put in the effort at school but I no more controlled my intelligence than my gender. And I had WAY more opportunities than other kids because of my academic success. And a lot of jobs for academically talented people pay more.
So there are some inherent inequalities in the system and any attempt to get rid of all of them doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. But we should control for the ones we can and at least ensure the people on the lowest rung of the ladder are still okay.
See, the really fun part is watching white men twist and foam trying to insist that they are, in fact, the majority. This isn’t true, and maybe the population DOES want some big changes–so long as you’re counting the ACTUAL population, and not just the “ones who matter.”
It also doesn’t need to be utopia to be a big fucking improvement. Raise the floor a bit and lower the ceiling considerably and it’s kinda wonderful the resources that shake out to improve society for everyone, not just for the few. I don’t think I’m some starry eyed idealist for holding the opinion that nobody should be a billionaire so long as anyone is starving, has no roof over their heads or can’t see a doctor when they’re sick.
Not to mention that putting the white men in charge keeps devolving into authoritarian states with actual Gestapo and concentration camps, over and over and over. Pretty sure it’s a low enough bar that the rest of us could improve on it.