Welcome to the working world! Get used to it, because it is not likely to get any better!
Previewed twice :smack: . I just can’t win here. Of course, that’s “brief skin-to-skin,” :smack: :smack:
Hey, that feels kinda good…
Yeah, but nice rack!
D’oh!
Ah, I think I may have finally seen part of the problem. echidna, sweetie… it doesn’t matter if it *is * your boss, your thesis supervisor, or the Pope, they *still * don’t get to touch you.
Perhaps if you’d assert yourself when it’s appropriate, you wouldn’t feel the need to vent your hostility at innocent bystanders.
Issues? Shoot, more like subscriptions by the sound of things.
Also, I’ll stand corrected on the handshake thing. In the business world I’ll offer my hand the same way to a woman that I would to a guy.
Diosa, being a man who does not inappropriately touch women (and is very careful about even appropriate touching) and who never calls anyone, including Mrs. D_Odds, sweetie or baby (I will glance, and on rare occassions leer - but never drool, though), I never realize just how pervasive this stuff is. Makes me wonder if the younger ladies in the office face that kind of harassment and I just don’t see it.
Yeah, Diosa has made an interesting post here that merits some discussion. It amazes me that that kind of sexist garbage is so pervasive, and I find myself wondering what Diosa’s proper response should be. The guy at the drive-through, for instance – I’m thinking she should have had his hide. I can understand being too tired for confrontation, but at the same time, I don’t think the guy should be allowed to get away with that shit. At a minimum, I think Diosa should be a little freer with the F word. No?
Since when is a public library part of the corporate hegemony?
Anyway, despite the violent fantasies, I’d say our OP here is a very passive girl. Most of these issues are easily solved by professional, forthright, and self-assured action.
If you don’t like to be touched, ask politely not to be touched.
If you have a problem at work, talk to your boss about solving it (rather than bitching and moaning via e-mail.)
If you feel the drawbacks of your job aren’t justified by the pay, find another job.
If your boyfriend is a creep, dump him.
Once that’s done, if you want to date a guy, ask him on a date.
But doing such things takes some courage and poise. It’s easier to suffer in silence, while inside going batshit crazy and planning your violent overthrow of the chauvinist pigs.
Yeah it can be annoying - as a lawyer at a North Carolina firm, it was not unusual for me to be referred to by clients as “Mr. Smith’s assistant” or “secretary.” But my brain didn’t go up in flames whenever it happened. More like :rolleyes:
No, I don’t think that’s it. echidna has read Miss Manners, and conflated multple things. Social inferiors are introducted to social superiors, at which point the superior elects as to whether or not to extend his or her hand for a handshake. As Miss Manners pointed out, this is very easy to decide when you want to introduce a high-school drop out burger flipper to the Queen of England, but not too easy to figure out these days in normal situations. However, women for the sake of this rule are considered to be socially superior to men of the same social rank overall. I understand her wish to adhere to this standard to some extent; there are times when I’ved wished that Miss Manners were required reading for anyone above the age of twelve. Our little platypoid procupine doesn’t seem to realize that it’s actually not required reading, and few if any people these days have the slightest awareness of this “rule.”
More importantly, what **echidna ** doesn’t seem to have understood is that this applies to social situations only. In business, there are no men and women, and no male/female roles. And yes, she wants it both ways - all the original “privileges” of womanhood without any of the “costs.” Well, pretty much everyone *does * want eveyrthing their way, so that’s not surprising either.
But I suspect that her belief that man after man is lined up to attempt to touch her in meaningless ways because they find her irresistable and can’t keep their hands to themselves is, shall we say, questionable. The fact that her boyfriend “defended” them is part of why I believe this, and the rest is based on the fact that I’ve known some extremely attractive women, and don’t know anyone my age (50) or younger who has consistently been the object of this kind of treatment. But I’ve known a fair number of women who loved to imagine that they were. And just the whole attitude with which the OR (Opening Rant) is written sugggests that this girl has a riduculously high idea of what she should expect from life and what she deserves by her own merits. She clearly assesses herself as soaring far above the Great Unwashed to whom the vast majority of us scummy human beings belong.
In short, she comes across as a first class bitch, and I hope never to meet her in person! Thank heavens I’m a straight woman; I feel sorry for the men she will encounter until she’s learned a little more about life and her expectations, if she ever does. There are a lot of folks who go through their entire lives feeling cheated of their “due” (and *always * by external, unpreventable, and generally malevolent forces).
echidna has accomplished something positive with this rant. She has made me thankful that I am plain-looking and clueless about non-verbal signals, which until now I regarded as bad things.
If men are checking me out, I’m very unlikely to notice.
Men don’t try to paw me.
Men are more like Muni buses (San Francisco transit) in my life- once one leaves, who knows when the next one will be along. So I’m forced to treat them like human beings, because I can’t get away with treating them like objects.
As soon as I finish making you dinner and rubbing your feet, baby. But, I mean, can you please buy me some shoes? I can do barefoot and I can do pregnant, but I simply cannot do barefoot AND pregnant. What is this? 1846?
. . . I’m sorry I got uppity. 
I can tell you with complete honesty that I encounter this stuff every single day, just in varying degrees. Whether it’s the above situations or something small like someone explaining something to someone else, then turning to me, slowing down, and using smaller words in their explanation to me. Every day it’s something.
Men hooting, hollering, touching on me, or hitting on me isn’t THAT big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it adds up. I have no idea why so many men think it is ok to touch me, but they do- at the gym, at the store, etc. The funny thing is that the “gentlemen” always touch me under the guise of helping me- because, you know, I’m such a delicate flower that I cannot get that can of peas down myself :rolleyes: .
Now, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it more than anything when someone (male or female) does something nice like help me when I’m clearly in distress or opens a door for me, but let’s be honest: it’s often very easy to detect the true intentions of someone (especially when they follow up by asking how old you are, if you have a boyfriend, and if you wanna fuck. Woo!).
I’ve talked to my friends about this sorta stuff on many occassions. Most of my friends are male and we’ve even talked about this. In fact, after I had this discussion with some of my guy friends, they later brought it up again after they noticed how different people treat me. We even did a little test: we were with some people talking politics or something- my friend isn’t even college, I’m a double major in Political Science and History, so clearly that topic is my favorite and something that I’m at least slightly knowledgeable about. No matter what my friend said (and no matter how silly or absurd it was), the group fully accepted it, nodded, and agreed. Whatever I said was immediately questioned. Every. Single. Time. Of course this is just an anecdote, but it goes to show what I see every day.
As far as cussing, making a scene, or kicking some ass: no matter how many times it happens, it always leaves me shocked. You’d think that I’d be used to it by now, but everytime I get surprised. I’m a tremendously optimistic person (everyone says that I’m the perkiest person they know- perhaps to an annoying degree 
) and maybe I just like to have some faith in the human species. That’s my main mistake :p.
Like I said before, on certain days this stuff really gets to me. In fact, I’ve caught myself questioning if there is even anything I can do to change this. But then I realize: who cares? Stupid is stupid and I can’t change stupid. To some people, I will always be either “a pretty young girl” or “that nice woman, I bet she was pretty when she was younger.” I could simultaneously cure cancer, AIDS, make peace in the Middle East, and get everyone in the US a free 52’’ plasma TV- yet there would still be a chunk of the population that would think, “Aw, how sweet. That pretty young girl got so lucky.”
I’ve learned to use the stupidity of others to my advantage- I started doing this in debate. My male opponents would ALWAYS assume I was no competition because I was a girl (they later told me this). They’d go in expecting nothing and get their asses kicked because their expectations were so low. Perhaps that’s how I maintain my optimism about the whole thing: no one ever suspects the pretty young girl :eek: .
I reckon I could stop wearing makeup, skirts, and doing my hair. I could, if I wanted to, get rid of my So Cal accent that I’ve got. I could stop listening to pop music and only listen to orchestral. I could, but I’m not. I’m not ever going to compromise what makes me happy just because some dumb ass thinks I’m a ditz. Someday I’m going to be that dumb ass’s boss and it will be sweet.
You handle just the bolded piece and I guarantee you’ll never catch me even glancing your way. 
Well, echidna has just made one posting in this forum, the OP to this thread. Mind you, the discussion has been interesting 
My contribution: I knew the rule about women offering to shake hands first, but I thought it was really old-fashioned. Maybe that’s because I’m in favour of gender equality, so it doesn’t upset me if (for example) a woman opens a door for me because she got there first, or because I have both hands full. I even once had a woman give me her seat on a bus – perhaps because I was carrying a one-year-old child at the time.
Wow, this is absolutely amazing to me. I was in high school in the early-to-mid 90s and participated in debate as well, and I found that a) a good chuck of my competition was female, b) there was no obvious correlation between gender and success in debate, and c) no one found this the least bit strange. I have no recollection of it ever even being commented on.
Well, I make no bones about the fact that my experience may very well be an area-specific issue and I am in no way claiming that my experience is wide-spread.
Here, there were definitely a lot more male debaters, all of the debaters that were “feared” were guys,and the top 10 were almost always male.
The quality of the judges in this area are regularly called into question, so again- this may just be an area-specific issue. Bakersfield (and this entire valley) is a bass ackwards place sometimes (very conservative, very traditional, and very specific about roles). In fact, I never had this problem at the State Championships or most invitations, just in our league.
The quality are, indeed.
And invitations= invitationals.
Bah. Fuck grammar, maybe this whole making Excalibre sammiches and babies isn’t such a bad idea.
I find few things more annoying than unattractive shrews who need to constantly point out how pretty and admired they are. Uh-huh, ya sweetie, suuuure he kept trying to grope you. And as a woman, I’ll put forward to you men that 80% of the time women *think *they’re being hit on, they’re not. How accurate does that sound?
“You are all invitationals!”
“I’m not! I’m an invitation!”
Um, sweetpea, I don’how to tell you this, but I’m not