I’ll address my remarks to raventhief and Typo Negative both, since both of their posts basically relate to the same subject.
With regard to why I’d think Typo’s behavior worse, there are several significant differences between what he described and the behavior I’ve been talking about, which is someone putting their hand on a woman’s breasts or crotch over their clothes. First of all, for Typo to grab me by the crotch would entail his grabbing a handful of things that may cause physical pain, or would almost certainly cause pain were I to try to wrench myself free. Secondly, in order to put his tongue down my throat (and has Trump said he does this? I haven’t heard about it if so), Typo would have to grab me by the shoulders or in a bear hug while at the same time grabbing me in a moment of surprise in order to catch me with my mouth open. And like some of you suspect, some of the disgust would be due to his being a big, burly man. I have no problem with homosexuality and have several friends who are gay, including a couple of great guys who’ve been a couple for many years. But I’m not gay myself and the idea of someone like Typo Negative sticking his tongue down my throat is particularly unpleasant. Much moreso in fact than the crotch grab, where pain or injury would be my primary concern. So it’s this grabbing me and taking physical control of my body in such a way as to prevent escape and forcing his tongue down my throat that to me makes the difference between what is simple assault, such as placing one’s hands on a woman’s private parts over her clothes, and behavior that crosses the line into criminal behavior that should rightfully draw a more severe penalty, something more along the lines of what someone would get were he to assault someone with his fists.
But all of this is really somewhat beside the point. What I’m contesting is the notion that putting one’s hands on a woman’s crotch or on her breasts over her clothes is some horrible, outrageous event worthy of traumatization on her part and prison time on the offender’s part. Men and women both encounter things in life that are threatening and unpleasant. With women it’s sometimes unwanted sexual attention, being groped, etc. With men, it’s physical aggression, bullying, being challenged to fight, hit with fists, etc. Hell, I had some young dipshit try to pick a fight with me a couple of months ago when I pulled into a 7-11 to get some gas. I hadn’t even noticed him but he pulled up wanting to know what my problem was and why I looked at him “hard”. He threatened to get out of his car, kick my ass and put me on the ground. I assured him that I’d been on the ground before but his kicking my ass was not a foregone conclusion. I could tell he was mostly showboating for his poor young wife/girlfriend who was holding their baby in her lap, trying to feed it and pleading with him to stop, and that he didn’t really want to fight. I could tell this by the fact he kept making threatening motions to unbuckle his seatbelt but never quite going all the way. So I pointed out to him that there were undoubtedly cameras all around and asked if he wanted to go to jail, and I told him that whether he kicked my ass or I kicked his, I’d still press to have his ass put in jail for as long as possible and then would sue for damages and most likely be living in his wallet for years to come. At at various times during all this he kept threatening to kick my ass and making threatening noises with the buckle of his seat belt, and finally I just looked at his terrified young wife/girlfriend, turned my back and walked away into the store to pay for my gas, and at some point while I was walking away they left because his car was nowhere to be seen by the time I got inside and to the cashier to pay for my gas.
Now, I’m 68 years old and this guy was probably 22 or so, slender and a good four or five inches taller than me (I’m 5’10"). But I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it, that in the event a fight should break out other customers and probably some of the cashiers would rush to break it up (I’m a regular and buddies with the guys who work there) and I know a few tricks that would probably have had him on the ground screaming in pain in pretty short order, although maybe not depending on whether he was a better fighter than I had him pegged as.
But the point in going into all this is to show that we all have stuff come up that we have to deal with, and the best way to deal with it is to do the best we can at the time, take the hit if need be - because that’s what grown-ups do - and get on with our lives without letting it convince us of our own helplessness and victimhood. As for me, I know that stuff like that happens sometimes and I got on with my life, never once bemoaning my fate or feeling I’d been done a great injustice or victimized. And as a result I’ve scarcely given that guy a thought since.
But to get back to what we were talking about earlier, girls in the 50s and 60s knew what to expect from the guys they went out with. Their moms prepared them in advance and told them how to deal with it, and the way guys acted on dates was a common thread with all their girlfriends. And girls rarely went out with guys they hadn’t already gotten a pretty good read on as to whether he was likely to be a jerk who wouldn’t take no for an answer or not. But the thing is, if they got groped or treated badly by some guy, they put it down to his being a jerk and didn’t let it affect the way they felt about themselves. They stopped seeing the guy, told their friends what an asshole he was, and got on with their lives hardly giving the experience a thought.
And contrary to current opinion, guys could not just do anything wanted to women in those days and get away with it. I recall once when I was about 14 visiting a buddy who had a pretty good-looking big sister who was about 17. My friend and I and another friend of his who was about 15 were sitting at the kitchenette when my buddy’s sister walked by in a tight pair of pedal-pushers (as they were called then) and this other guy reached out and patted her rump and she walked by. She whirled around and slapped him in the face so hard it almost knocked him out of his chair an yelled, “DO NOT EVER TOUCH A GIRL ON THE BOTTOM LIKE THAT AGAIN! EVER! DO YOU HEAR ME??” And naturally, me being me, I couldn’t understand what the big deal was (:p) so when the incident came up to my friend’s mom I asked her about it and she said that you just don’t touch girls or women on the bottom (that’s how people talked then). It’s disrespectful and you should never do it. (Given my age she left off the sexual connotations so I still didn’t get it, but the next couple of years took care of that bit of ignorance.) But the point is that during this same era, women and girls set boundaries and enforced them, and they were a hell of a lot better off than now where any and every affront is a source of outrage and victimhood.
I remember years ago hearing about how liberals were working to create a society of victimhood, and that’s exactly where we are now. If someone says the wrong word or does the wrong thing (in this case, a hand on a crotch) it’s “OMG, THE WORST THING EVAR!!!” and the recipient is trained by societal expectation to be traumatized by the experience, to feel victimized and helpless and negatively affected for life, and the offender is widely believed to be deserving to lose a career he’s spent perhaps decades striving and sacrificing for and/or go to jail for what in reality and according to any kind of objective assessment is a relatively minor offense.
It does not do people favors to convince them through your own reactions and attitudes to their misfortunes that they have been irrevocably wronged and traumatized by some unfortunate thing that has happened to them and that they’ve permanently damaged. It’s much better for people to be brought up to learn how to deal with adversity and then put it behind them without taking it personally.