Hi all
A while ago I was listening to a radio programme where a 15-year old girl was talking, quite frankly, about how unknown men ‘interact’ with her in public in unsettling ways. This could be shouting something out of a van driving past, walking up to her outside a bus stop and telling her flat out that she was sexy, asking what her bra size was, etc… This, she said, was more common when she was wearing her school uniform…
Anecdote #2: many years ago, back in the mid 90s when the internet was still embryonic, my friends and I used to log on to primitive ‘chat rooms’ signed in with a girl’s name and wait for the inevitable flood of desperate, creepy and aggressive sexual comments and requests. Our game was to harvest the creepiest/funniest comment we could, so that we could then cite it to each other on later occasions as a joke. Hey, that was the kind of teenager that we were. The point, I now realise, was that some guys act weird around girls when they think that no-one else is looking.
As many a female has since attested to me, when girls are alone (or at least, not in the company of other men), they become targets of peculiarly aggressive sexual comments from some men. The question is, what is the motivation behind this stuff? When a guy walks up to a schoolgirl waiting for the bus and asks her her bra size, what is his end goal exactly? Is this a pathetically misguided attempt to ‘score’? Or is the point more that in doing so, the man knows that he is making the girl uncomfortable - he doesn’t need/want her to say or do anything - the point is that he has already said it. If it is the latter, then what drives him to do this? Is it woman-hating on account of being lonely, or some fear or mistrust of females owing to childhood trauma of some kind or what?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts…