I’m happy if there are people like you who aren’t exposed to this kind of stuff. I guess it’s a case of thinking everywhere is like what you experience. Maybe there are some circles where it doesn’t happen, but incidents like I describe are widespread and not isolated to me.
It’s demonstrative of the kind of comments that pass between guys. It displays the attitude there is something wrong with promiscuous women.
Honestly, I don’t encounter anything like that in real life. I am aware of some related stuff such as the whole ‘nice guy’ thing mainly from threads here on the sdmb or on reddit.
Two conversations in a bar:
Man1: I’m a rapist.
Man2: Get the fuck out of here.
Woman1: I’m a slut.
Man2: How intriguing. May I buy you a drink?
My life is, broadly speaking, like what Mangetout described. I think it’s potentially a majority of people actually who mainly deal with decent people where relative good will and decorum generally prevail in every day interaction, not just some. OTOH obviously, it can be reasonable to say something not that usual is still much too usual and therefore something worthy of everyone’s attention. It very much depends exactly what it is and the eye of beholder.
As I mentioned before I worked at a shipyard, now decades ago. Everyday conversation was very crude and would get a solid F grade by, like I said, either traditional standards of gentlemanly behavior or today’s woke/PC type standards, the two wouldn’t be at odds in that particularly case. And a few women worked ‘on the front line’ (guys had to behave themselves relatively in the offices where more of the staff was female) and while all I recall put on their game faces every day, I doubt the atmosphere was enjoyable to them. Physical assault I never heard of there, though I don’t know for a fact.
I still think the opening comparison is probably too much apples and oranges. You don’t want people (men or women) to ‘shame’ rapists, but send them to prison if their crime can be proved. People (it’s usually men) who create hostile environments with stupid sexual comments are probably a more like to like comparison with those who hold women to one standard of sexual behavior (maybe more often men but women actually do that not so rarely either) and men another.
This is a much clearer statement of the point, indeed.
Just anecdotally, I recently encountered some people (not anyone I knew) talking about the film “Bombshell” and how it was all about women who “slept their way to the top and then cried rape”. And this has been a sadly common subcurrent to the whole MeToo thing - women are told that if they don’t submit to sexual advances their entire career with be destroyed. And when some do, out of necessity, they’re seen as sluts who used their sexuality to get ahead, as if it was somehow the women’s fault that they were sexually harassed. This attitude is not going away.
I want to revisit something I said above:
In hindsight, the “probably not” only really applies to the US and some other Western countries. In the Middle East, Africa, China, India (although there’s been a little progress there), and various other parts of the world, the balance is still tipped heavily in men’s favor and some countries actively prosecute actual rape victims. So globally, the statement definitely holds true.
This 100 times over.
In the 1990s I used to shoot a lot of rap videos and Hip-Hop videos, if there is any difference between the two.
Hyper-sexualization and rapey (s.i.c.) behavior was rampant throughout both in front of the camera and behind.
The most egregious and offensive example was a video I shot for a 12 year old boy named The Fabulous Chi Ali.
He was basically still a kid perhaps just hitting puberty. And yet there he was surrounded by young women wearing almost no clothing. The lyrics of the song in the behavior in the video were quite aggressively sexual and offensive to all of the women appearing in it.
This attitude and behavior was not limited to those kinds of music videos but in my memory it was more aggressively promoted their than elsewhere. I have no clue why.
I cannot imagine the complexity of growing up a woman in this culture.
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There are plenty of people who still hold women’s promiscuity as more serious and judge it more harshly than men’s promiscuity. As I previously mentioned, the whole “good girls don’t have sex on a first date” meme is exactly judging women for their sex choices.
You folks seem to have a confused notion of shame, as if it is some minor inconvenience that doesn’t amount to much, and that shame and prosecution are mutually exclusive. We shame drunk drivers. We shame pedophiles. We shame murders. We also prosecute them.
Whereas with rape, often the accuser is shamed more than the accused.
There’s millions of sources out there for information on the topic. One book I read was by Jon Krakauer (author of Into Thin Air and Into The Wild), called *Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town *.
http://www.jonkrakauer.com/books/missoula-tr
It discusses a four year period at the University of Montana, where hundreds of rape allegations were made, many of them against start football players. The book documents how most of the cases were mishandled by the police, prosecutors, and university officials. It was eye-opening to me.
As far as workplace sexual harassment, I never witnessed any. When I was younger and first started professional work, I naively thought things like that were a thing of the past, that my generation didn’t act like that. Annual sexual harassment awareness training was largely unnecessary. #metoo is eye-opening in that regard.
In an after work social setting, I heard accounts that one astronaut was known for his constant propositioning of women in the job. I can’t recall now if being handsy was part of that. I think so, but that conversation was years ago. My take away was the woman was describing this as just the way he was, and to blow it off.
There was one guy who griped to me about how this one woman was advancing quickly, and commented it was because she had big boobs. I saw no indication she was using her sexuality or her sex to speed up her advancement. The difference in their career paths lay in the fact he was an hourly technician, and she was a salaried engineer. Did she get preferential treatment over us other engineers? Not that I could see. Her rise in authority matched her success and ambition.
I *wish * the statement in the OP was patently untrue. Sadly, while as written it is a bit overstated, the underlying sentiment has a lot of truth. A lot of sexually aggressive and sexually dismissive attitudes and behaviors are accepted or tolerated, while women are scrutinized and criticised for their “risky” behaviors. And rape trials still largely end up being determined by the woman’s (accuser’s) sexual reputation and behavior, not the accused.
This thread has made me think back about my life and I can think of two sets of cases that are probably relevant; they are examples of (what was) sharp differences in gender-based treatement, but maybe aren’t really exact examples of the phenomena being argued:
1: in secondary school, there were a couple of cases where teachers had sex with students (aged 15 or 16).
When the teacher was male and the student female, the girl was considered a victim and the man was considered an offender
When the teacher was female and the student male, the boy was considered a troublemaker and the woman was considered, well, I don’t know what the word would be; ‘easy’? ‘oversexed’?
2: At the same school, I was sexually assaulted by a group of older pupils (a mixed group of male and female) - they chased me down, dragged me to the far end of the field and stripped me naked, then pinned me down and jeered at me. I reported the matter to the head of year, who basically told me to walk it off.
In cases where individuals or groups tried to remove the clothes of a female student (they were not exactly similar, but cases such as boys deliberately ripping open the blouse of a girl, or pulling down her skirt), male perpetrators were disciplined and expelled from the school.
I am so sorry this happened to you. Sexual assault is sexual assault, and gender should not matter one whit.
Thank you. It was horrible, and stayed with me a long time, but on reflection, maybe the path my life took as a result was one I can now be grateful for (doesn’t make the original thing right, but you have to look for the bright side)