Should? Nothing beyond what you did–keep yourself safe, don’t engage, don’t escalate. You had no way of knowing that drunk racist sexually aggressive young men would be harmless.
IANA lawyer or police officer or anybody else with professional expertise in this sort of situation, but from all the advice and recommendations I’ve seen and applied in my own experience, what you should do when being sexually harassed or assaulted is first and foremost what is best for your own safety. And it looks as though not responding and just walking away was a smart choice in that situation.
Yes, it’s natural to feel resentful and angry that a bunch of dickheads did a nasty thing to you and then laughed at your effective helplessness to do anything about it. Nasty dickheads engage in that sort of behavior for that very reason, in order to make you feel helpless, resentful and angry: that’s part of the “fun” for them. They deliberately take advantage of your ordinary decent-human-being civility (such as turning to look at somebody who’s addressing you as you pass them on the street), to try to shock, intimidate and/or repulse you with behavior that they’re pretty sure you won’t be able to do anything about. (Note the non-accidental 3:1 ratio of the people involved in this particular act of harassment, for instance.)
And no, your experience was not “trivial” or “nothing” or something that you should be expected to just shrug off and forget about. It was a nasty act of harassment by assholes who were trying to make you feel upset, intimidated and humiliated. What the perpetrators deserved was to be arrested and publicly exposed (pun intended) as sex offenders. The primary reason that doesn’t happen more often to harassers is our society’s entrenched attitude that sexual harassment of women by men is just “the way life is”, and women are supposed to be the ones responsible for either “shutting it down” (which realistically speaking is usually impossible and/or dangerous) or putting up with it and not making a fuss about it.
I’ll add to Kimstu’s (as usual) excellent commentary, slalexan, that if you had tried to report it to the police the gang of three would have denied it ever happened and it would have been your word against theirs, so your complaint would have gone nowhere worthwhile and might, depending on how viciously assholish they were, have provoked them into tracking you down and making your life even more unpleasant in revenge.
You are.
Joder, I didn’t have children.
I didn’t DARE have children because I was terrified that becoming a mother would turn me into a monster, into someone whose childraising philosophy would be “I gave you your life, therefore I can screw it.”
By the time I realized that parenthood doesn’t change people, it merely enhances what is there, the only way in which “my rice wasn’t overcooked” was the purely biological one. I was a high-earning woman over 30 in a high-mobility career; the only guys who have come close in the last 20 years are the jerks who do things such as make me travel for an interview so they can ask me for a “romantic breakfast” (I offered him fried eggs with chorizo, making it clear I meant his chorizo).
If one of these years I finally lose it and claw out the eyes of the last imbecile who’s told me I must have kids before I “run out of time for it”, I hope to make it spectacular enough that y’all will see it in the front covers.
Thank you. I’ve felt like such a mess this past week or so due to the Kavanaugh crap and the SDMB nastiness. I guess I forgot that we’re all helping each other just by showing up.
And I’m incredibly relieved that Starving Artist was banned. If you haven’t read Jonathon Chance’s post yet, you really should. It marks a real turn in the policies and attitudes of the mods. I feel like we were finally heard and believed–here, if nowhere else.
I count “discounting the whole ‘risk to the mother’s life’ reason for abortion because it’s impossible that pregnancy can put a woman’s life at risk” as being pretty jerkish; rejecting something one finds surprising as “completely impossible” just because it doesn’t involve one’s gonads, again I find pretty jerkish.
That particular bit was accompanied by considering that abortion and abortion-like procedures for cases such as a placenta with no baby should always be banned. Oh, and he is against adoption in both directions, even for children who have lost both parents (must punish them for their carelessness I guess?) and including co-adoption by step-parent. Any pregnant woman, no matter how she got there, no matter what situation the baby (assuming viable) is in, no matter what situation she is in, must carry it to term and raise it. And then he told this to two women who generally didn’t even agree on whether the sun was shining but yeah, we suddenly found a lot of things we did agree on.
“IANA lawyer or police officer or anybody else with professional expertise in this sort of situation, but from all the advice and recommendations I’ve seen and applied in my own experience, what you should do when being sexually harassed or assaulted is first and foremost what is best for your own safety. And it looks as though not responding and just walking away was a smart choice in that situation. ”
While this is surely true, I really feel like something needs to be acknowledged here. I want it affirmed that a NOT negligible number of women you see wisely following this advice are, in fact, feigning ‘calm indifference’. Sure, they appear to be just striding confidently onward. But they are, in fact, wondering why their racing heart hasn’t yet burst it’s s rib cage, they can hardly breathe, and they can’t really control this reaction. If they’ve been sexually assaulted, quite possibly recently, whether they reported or not, this form of sexual aggression can really trigger them.
Because a gang of men, being overtly, verbally sexually aggressive, on a public street, in broad daylight, kicks that women’s endocrine system HARD. Deep in her cavewoman DNA her survival instincts are now firing on all cylinders, with the gift of fear.
If you can understand why fireworks displays trigger veterans you can understand this trigger for previously assaulted women. They ARE being terrorized, right in front of you. And you probably think,”Look she’s handling it.” But she is just moving forward, eyes fixed, heart racing, unable to draw breath, being re victimized by what most people walking by see as ‘benign’, misogyny. It’s not benign. It can be absolutely horrific for recent victims. It can be terrorizing.
So, that young woman who bolts off the subway on the way to uni, because she was just groped by some wanker, gets to the street where she is now met with more sexual harassment. Meanwhile, self identifying ‘decent’ men are cool with it. Just walking on by, like it ain’t no big thing!
The ‘just ignore them’ advice, while prudent, grates pretty badly none the less.
The victims have to just suck it up? Grrrrr…
I feel so much better about this now. When I think about that day, I think a lot about what I should have done. I should have had a sick comeback. I should have called the police or campus security. I should have detained them so that they could be arrested.
I think my biggest regret is that I didn’t stop them from doing it again. I wasn’t particularly traumatized by a penis and a some laughter at my expense but, what if someone else was? Did I fail to protect them? They were clearly dressed for this. Did they leave the house planning on flashing people after leaving the bars?
Since recalling this incident here and with my sister, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. I have depression and it has become the new fun stick to beat myself with. I’ll have to work through my regret on this.
No one should feel bad for not thinking clearly in a stressful situation. Your brain is not adapted that way. The primitive part of your brain is trying to protect you. It literally blocks higher-level thought. The lower-level brain takes over and focuses only on safety. At the time it happened, I doubt if you could answer “What is 2 plus 2?” It’s totally natural to be flustered and not be able to think clearly in situations like these.
Ot was not your responsibility for thie pervert’s behavior, or to correct or police him, and given the circumstances going to the authorities may not have produced much of a result anyway. You have noting to feel guilty or regretful about, and neither do any other victims of sexual assault or violence in believing that thir behavor or appearnace somehow coerrced their attacker(s) into an assault.
Stranger
As Stranger pointed out, you are not responsible for these jerks’ illegal, deviant behavior. I’ll go further: Every moment you give to regret or guilt over what you did or didn’t do with respect to their actions is a further triumph they enjoy over you. Let it go. It’s the only way to win.
I encourage you to use the experience to think through how you might handle such a situation in the future. One of the big advantages these creeps have is the element of surprise. Such situations arise so fast, we usually simply react. If you have a game plan in place, it can help a lot.
Take a self-defense course. It will give you confidence and you will feel better to do something proactive. You’ll learn a lot about situational awareness and how to assess potentially dangerous situations. It will teach you how to keep your head.
I hate to say it, but due to my own all-too-frequent incidents, I no longer view lone groups of young men idling in the streets or parking lots as harmless. They probably are, but I prefer safe over sorry. I will cross a street to avoid an encounter. I may even change my route. Otherwise, my mouth can get me into trouble. Not worth it.
My best wishes to you for success in putting this experience behind you.
I would like to say that you do not have to be responsible for protecting everyone else, either. While some people can take on the stress of reporting, it is not for everybody… and that’s ok!
Have to rant over Trump’s remark, “It’s a very scary time for young men in America.” I am spitting mad. Fuck you, you bloated little barnacle! It’s been a very scary time for young women in America for over 242 years, but of course, we don’t count. Nor do Black men of any ages. Nor Muslims. Kavanaugh has been walking fearlessly for the last 36 years while Ford has been dealing with anxiety attacks.
It’s bad enough when they scare so many women who’ve been assaulted/raped into not reporting. It’s bad enough that reporting rarely ends in conviction. It’s bad enough we’ve been denied, diminished, and tainted. Now the perpetrators are getting sympathy. What the hell kind of rabbit hole did we fall down?
OK, done. For now.
“Dear dads: Your daughters told me about their assaults. This is why they never told you.”
And Junior Cheeto is “afraid for” his sons. It’s a dangerous world out there for entitled white guys. We really need to look out for these poor dears. We will never care about our daughters like this. We will never worry that* they *are targets, that they get hurt. But our sons are in grave danger from these terrible females deciding that they’re not going to take shit anymore. :rolleyes::mad:
Republican women who are survivors of sexual assault supporting Kavanaugh is really bothering me.
The knee jerk reaction of some on the left to not believe that they were ever sexually assaulted is also disturbing and wrong - that’s what all women get, don’t do it just because she disagrees with you.
I just don’t know how they can still support Kavanaugh after that hearing. He was a perfect example of entitled, elitist, white, male, douchbag, fratboy, asshole, LIAR. How do you side with THAT GUY?
But then every single day I’m gobsmacked that people are enamored with Trump, especially women. Really? THAT GUY? Every day for about three years now - gobsmacked.
For the evangelicals, it’s all about bringing the Apocalypse to town, and you have to admit, Trump looks nothing if not like a false prophet. For hardcore single issue pro-lifers, this is their chance to reverse a movement that they regard to be murder.
I have no explanation for non-evangelical, non-adamant-anti-abortion Republican women except that the fear response has been so stoked about immigration, employment, loss of national status, et cetera that they don’t actually listen to what the Orange Bloated One is saying and how poisonously ignorant and self destructive it is. People are willing to be deceived when they think they can get something for it, but Trump is such an obvious, obnoxious, self-promotional shill for badly thought out ideas that it is hard to imagine why anyone was fooled by him to begin with, and remains uncritical despite the “accomplishments” of the last twenty months.
You’d think Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski would vote down on Kavanaugh because I’m morally certain that they’ve had to endure more than their fair share of this kind of shit from men in rising through the ranks of the GOP, but it seems as if remaining in the Republican establishment is more important to them than blocking a nomination that, even if Kavanaugh is in line with their political beliefs, is morally reprehensible and is very likely going to result in blowback to the Republican party and everyone who cast their lot in for this asshat.
Stranger
oops.
Imagine what it must be like for them. Always having to be aware of their surroundings, just to make sure that they are not going to be followed or trapped by some potential accuser. Every time they go on a date now, they are going to have to think to themselves “do I trust this girl? What do I know about this girl? Is she a potential accuser?” How horrible that must be. :smack: