Wow, I never had considered that this could be just a myth.
I definitely heard it threatened on one or more occasion, though that might have been the kind of blustering reminiscent of “this will go on your Permanent Record” from grade school.
On the most memorable invocation of this threat, one of my friends had been standing watch in the engine room at a watch station that happened to be at the top of a steep set of stairs (“ladder” in naval terminology). He had been casually rocking backwards and forwards on his heels with the ladder behind him, catching himself on the handrails each time–then he missed. He fell down the ladder in such a way that his head smacked into the no-skid steps and he ended up with a concussion and spent several days in the hospital. I remember his condition was bad enough that his parents flew in from out of town to be with him.
When he eventually returned to our shift, our watch officer gave him a proper military dressing down, invoking the “damaging military property” threat.
Poor guy. His experience was bad enough without having to get his ass chewed out for it–his transgression came with its own built-in punishment.
When the Me Too movement was starting to gain steam there was a thread here asking if women would be willing to share their Me Too stories. It became a very long thread with many, many people sharing stories of their harassments and assaults. It was truly heartbreaking.
I’ve tried to find that thread but cannot, so I’m going by memory.
Anyway, the people who think harassment (and assault) is vanishingly rare not only never receive such complaints, but are ignorant to the fact that it happens at such a large scale. I admit I was taken aback at the sheer numbers of people who came forward just on this board to share their stories; it was very eye-opening.
My ex was real mad at me one day and threw a coffee cup at my head. It hit the wall and broke, and he got even madder at me because it was his favorite coffee cup. So it has definitely happened at least once.
Yeah, there was a thread ten miles long about how invisible to other men catcalling, following, and harassment of women is. Most of the men still weren’t convinced that it happened frequently no matter how many women told them otherwise. It led to quite an exodus of women from this board.
I’ve never had a woman come on to me since I started wearing a wedding ring (except a prostitute one time, but I don’t count that). Never had one come on to me before I got married either, with the exception of Ms. P. She says it’s happened but I just don’t realize it.
I grew up in Los Alamos New Mexico, a town that is surrounded by wilderness frequented by all sorts of wild life and was an avid hiker and backpacker in boy scouts, but I have never seen a bear outside of a zoo.
This has been my experience as well (well , minus the prostitute bit). My wife had to ask me out on our first date, and she’s claimed that several women have hit on me in the intervening years but also claims, with no small amount of glee, that I’m too thick to realize it. I honestly don’t know if its true (the women hitting on to me part…). Regardless, I’m convinced wearing a wedding ring has absolutely no effect one way or the other on my non-attractiveness to women.
I’ve worked in academia for a decade and have never, ever seen this. Obviously this isn’t to say it doesn’t happen, but at the community college I work for if any faculty did this they would become a campus pariah very quickly – doubly so if the younger woman was a former student.
We, men especially, have to be mindful of our social interactions with significantly younger people of the opposite sex simply because the mere appearance of impropriety can have negative career implications.
This is location dependent, I’m sure. I live in western Oregon and have seen bears in the wild several times, the first time when I was ~13 and rafting the Rogue river.
I, who am straight, was at a gay bar with some gay friends and other people. The bartender was doing the whole gay lisp thing asking the others what they wanted. He got to me, and completely dropped the lisp to take my order. The abruptness of the turning on and off the speech pattern was striking. He certainly did have a very well calibrated gaydar.
Oh, probably not at a community college. When I was getting a humanities degree at a major university I was already married, and older than most of the grad students. I had some acquaintance with the young female grad students, and it was kind of astonishing. I asked an older male friend of mine who taught creative writing there (not a professor, a fiction writer) whether it was awkward at faculty parties with a mix of older wives and these new young girlfriends and wives who’d supplanted their friends. He laughed and said, well, there aren’t many of those original wives left.
I would imagine that adoring young grad students might be hard to resist for a baggy decaying English professor who was never exactly hot stuff to begin with.
Although the nubile grad student action wasn’t noticeable in the particle physics department, according to my husband, who worked there.
Hell, a bear ate my bird feeder last winter, ten feet from my door. While we shouted at him and banged on the window. I’ve seen five or six bears in my neighborhood in the four years I’ve been here. They are quite common. Rural New England.
I volunteered at a food pantry one summer when I was in college, in the early 1990s. More than 50% of their clientele were senior citizens, which was quite a surprise to me. I was probably qualified for food stamps at one point, but I never inquired about them because I didn’t need them. My brother was on them for a while (he tells everyone about it) and he got $99 a month, again in Iowa. It enabled him to eat better than he otherwise would have, and freed up money he could use for utilities, hygiene products, gasoline, etc.
Some areas do have programs for low-income seniors that could best be described as “WIC for old people.” The emphasis is on locally grown or produced items, and if you go to the downtown farmer’s market, you’ll see lots of people from the low-income senior highrise the next block over, often on scooters, with their Senior Nutrition checks in hand.
Also in the early 1990s, I had a pen pal who’d had some experiences that she couldn’t explain in any way other than possible UFO encounters. She did, however, see something while she and a friend were driving from Terre Haute to Indianapolis one Memorial Day weekend at dusk, and when it started to buzz, they pulled over and, terrified, hid in the ditch. It then lit up and revealed what it actually was.
It was the Goodyear Blimp.
Embarrassed, they got back in the car and continued on their journey.
While we’re on the subject, I occasionally see posts from local Facebookers: “A black helicopter just flew over my house!” That’s right; it probably came from the National Guard base just north of town, and they’re doing training exercises.
Over the years, working in IT, my brother has worked with a lot of people from India and its environs, and they’re always surprised that people do not do the following things in public, at least not as much as movies portray it:
Having sex in public
Doing drugs like cocaine in public
Openly carrying guns and other weapons
At least, in Iowa City, they don’t, or at least not in the circles they run in. (There was once an urban legend about someone who robbed a downtown Iowa City bank in broad daylight, while wearing a Big Bird suit, and was never caught.)
