I meant for people to interpret it as they chose. It’s intentionally vague. There are a lot of situations that can be interpreted as inappropriately sexual that can make a person feel upset, angry, hurt, belittled, etc. that don’t necessarily rise to the level of assault. So that’s what I intended with the first two questions.
I voted “never experienced any of the above”. I’d forgotten one little incident at work. I was bending over, and a middle aged male client ran his fingers across my back where a narrow strip of skin was exposed between my jeans and my top. A sharp “Oy!!”, accompanied by a threatening wave of the scalpel I was wielding at the time, adjusted his attitude permanently. I don’t consider it sexual assault. Maybe I should, I just didn’t feel threatened by it.
I have never been seriously threatened by any guy. So much so that when a friend tried to convince me 30 years ago that date/acquaintance rape existed I didn’t believe her. Much to my chagrin she then revealed that she* had been raped by an acquaintance. She was a mother of four and the most conservative Catholic I’ve ever known at the time.
That being said I still think people are blowing some of this stuff way out of proportion. I went to school and worked my whole life in a male environment**. Girls, I got to tell ya, there is always sexual tension going on. It’s kind of a natural thing. One guy I worked with, who had four kids, got the hots for me when I was hugely preggers with my first kid and thought it would be a good idea if we ran away together. Um, no. Thru-out my 35 year career I have been attracted to some of my colleagues and it was obvious that some of them were attracted to me, heh, sometimes at the same time. However being adults we dealt with it as adults.
Bottom line, sexual assault is against the law but sexual feelings are natural.
*I’m still sorry about that conversation AM.
**One of two girls living on campus with hundreds of guys. Never felt threatened about walking alone at any time of the day or night. Followed by working on a construction site with 2500 guys and me…many nights working the midnight shift walking the site alone.
I’ve got to say 99.999% of the guys I’ve known in my 55 years were “good” guys.
I also work in a male-dominated environment, and although most men I come into contact with are just fine, some are creepy and intrusive. I don’t get the feeling that this OP is about sexual tension, but about unwanted comments/advances/sex acts.
We had another thread recently - I don’t remember if it was about feeling safe, or about lewd comments - and a lot of women experience a good bit of annoying things. Ass grabs, tit grabs, comments … it happens regularly. Most guys don’t do stuff like that. It’s the small fraction who do that we’re talking about.
Yep - you can be having a perfectly nice day, interacting with men and women and not thinking anything of it, and then some douche bag decides to act like a pig. I’ve had that sort of thing ruin my whole day before, compounded by male ‘friends’ suggesting that buddy was ‘just being friendly’ and I should ‘get over it.’
Look - I know friendly. Pressing your erection up against the backside of some woman on a crowded bus is not friendly - it’s fucking disgusting.
It’s times like that I wish I carried garden shears in my purse.
FWIW - I checked the first 5. I guess I’m appealing to perverts. :rolleyes:
I was molested twice when I was a very young child. One was a family member and the other was a teen who lived on our street. When I was a twelve I was held down and assaulted by a guy I trusted but he gave up after I started screaming. He spat on me and left me in the bushes and I ran back to the house and told my brother, who beat him and made him apologize.
At my high school it was so common to get “touched” (which is waaay worse than it sounds) we thought it was something all girls dealt with. What would happen is in the gym at some point during PE a guy would find a way to shove his hand up a girl’s shorts and go over to his friends to let them smell their fingers, then they’d make some crack about our scent. I had that happen once. I still remember that boy’s name and how it felt, and how ashamed and disgusted I was. Oddly most girls would get mad, but like an annoying fly mad, not like some guy just stuck their fingers in my panties mad. We were numb maybe? Why none of us told I do not know, except we hated the teachers and didn’t trust them to help. After all where were those teachers when it was going on?
At my first job, I think I was around fourteen because I was only allowed to work like ten hours a week, the owner got really friendly with me and this other girl, treated us like his daughters. Then a few months later he offered each of us 200 dollars to spend the night with him. I said no, but my friend said yes. I felt violated and so hurt because I trusted him; hell I thought he was the greatest man on Earth until then. So that wasn’t an assault, but still a bad memory. The other girl had sex with him many times after that and he’d buy her stuff. She was only thirteen, maybe fourteen and thought this was a great deal. He had to have been in his fifties or sixties.
The last time I was held down and forced to have sex by a guy I’d dated a few times. I was bruised up and angry but didn’t feel “raped”, actually I think I was in denial and stayed that way for a while. I was so angry I sought revenge of my own instead of reporting it. I was really really stupid not to, but I think it threw me in to an irrational depression I lived in until this year. That was right after I met Mig, so around seven years ago. We were working together and I came in all bruised up the next day, I was just in a fog. I didn’t even tell him what happened until we’d been together a few months.
Every girl I went to school with was raped, molested, or otherwise had to deal with something painful related to sex or being dominated at some point. Every single one. It almost seemed like a fact of life. That is so messed up.
I voted for the “I have been made to feel uncomfortable in a sexual situation by a man I thought I could trust” option only.
I dated this guy for a few years, and we broke up because we weren’t sexually compatible. Basically he is a horndog and I was looking for something else. But, we stayed friends. He knows I am totally against “friends with benefits” but kept trying to push the envelope to see if maybe I’d change my mind.
I forget what the circumstances were but we ended up getting drunk and watching TV at my house one night (something we did while still dating). This was at least a year after we’d broken up. I did let him get a little touchy-feely the more drunk I got, but as I started to sober up I wanted less and he wanted more.
I could have pummeled him some and kicked him out of my house (I’m a very big, strong woman with a black belt), but I remember my train of thought was “he needs to stop on his own so no one gets embarrassed.” Seriously, that is what I thought. I just kept saying “no, come on man, stop it, let’s finish watching this show” and he kept crawling all over me.
At one point I did shove my foot into his throat, and pushed him away. I think at that point he got it and calmed down. Since he is my friend, and he was very obviously drunk, I let him sleep it off in the guest room and I went to my room and closed the door.
I still haven’t brought this incident up with him and how it made me feel. We still do hang out but I don’t even give him the slightest hint of sexuality while we’re together. And I give him the benefit of a doubt that he was drunk and I was drunk and I let it go too far.
If I did tell him I felt like he was [this close] to sexually assaulting me that night, I think he’d be incredibly remorseful.
Oh that jerking off in the car thing happened to me too but I was older! And then another time there was this guy in our neighborhood who stood at his front window flashing the kids. He and his friend were busted for child pornography months later, but it’s so strange how it was just a joke for us kids to see him flashing us but nobody thought to tell an adult, or no adults listened.
Okay, I got two threads mixed up. One was about the most sexist act you’d ever witnessed. The other was about things shouted at you from cars.
I’ve been in IT for 20 years - male dominated. And I was raped by my boss. I’m not blowing it out of proportion. It happens.
I, for one, did not check boxes over sexual tension. Yeah, that’s a normal part of life. I checked boxes because I’ve been purposely made to feel uncomfortable, sexually harassed and raped.
I’m not seeing a lot of people here who are relaying stories of “sexual tension.” I’m seeing a lot of women who are relaying stories of some guy being a jerk.
Let’s see . . .
Best friend from high school? Sexually assaulted by her boyfriend.
Best friend from college? Sexually assaulted by a date.
Best friend post-college? Raped multiple times by her boyfriend.
Dear friend I met five years ago? Raped during college, still suffering from PTSD.
Me? I can think of three or four situations where if I hadn’t listened to my gut and gotten the hell out of there, something bad would have happened. There was also one boyfriend who held me down while we were making out and wouldn’t let me up when I asked. I’ve been propositioned by married men and gotten come-ons from men who five minutes after assuring me he was fine being “just friends”.
These are things I think a lot of men just don’t get. Not because they’re bad people, but because they are innately good and at the same time, incredibly naive. There is no equivalent for men to what many women encounter and endure. Yes, some gay men are just as inappropriate and persistant towards straight men, but there is extreme societal disapproval. Hell, in some places, you can get away with murder if you’re a man and you claim the other man was coming on to you. More than that, statistically speaking, gay men are far more uncommon than straight men, so there are a lot more inappropriate and persistant straight men than there are inappropriate and persistent gay men.
It may not sound like much, that a man makes an unwanted advance. What’s the big deal, after all? I like to point to Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear and an insight he wrote:
Men, in general, are taller, heavier, stronger, and more aggressive than women. A man who is willing to violate social norms is more likely to be willing to violate legal ones. A man who is willing to harm a woman to get what he wants is, in all probability, going to accomplish it. A man who dismisses the fears of women because it hurts his ego to be considered a potential danger is a man who lacks empathy, and that is a trait prevalent, perhaps universal, among men willing to assault and rape.
Yes. I think this is the third time someone has commented about good men not being able to quite ‘get’ it. I remember a former boyfriend who was shocked at hearing a first-person account from a mutual friend about her rape. He was a good person and couldn’t fathom forcing himself on a girl. It was then that he realized the reality of rape, I think.
Slight hijack, but this discussion reminds me of something SmartAleq passed along from a woman’s blog:
*I’ve been cat-called and cow-called from moving vehicles countless times, and subjected to other forms of street harassment, and sexually harassed at work, always by men. I have been sexually assaulted - if one includes rape, attempted rape, unsolicited touching of breasts, buttocks, and/or genitals, nonconsensual frottage on public transportation, and flashing - by dozens of people during my lifetime, some known to me, some strangers, all men.
But I don’t hate men <snip>. In fact, there are men in this world whom I love quite a lot.
<snip>
It would, however, be fair to say that I don’t easily trust them.
My mistrust is not, as one might expect, primarily a result of the violent acts done on my body, nor the vicious humiliations done to my dignity. It is, instead, born of the multitude of mundane betrayals that mark my every relationship with a man - the casual rape joke, the use of a female slur, the careless demonization of the feminine in everyday conversation, the accusations of overreaction, the eyerolling and exasperated sighs*
Acquaintance rape. He told me he had a knife and rope. I thought people would think I was a slut so it took me a long times to come to terms with that.
Was in a dorm common room after a party with a guy I’d slept with once before, a while prior. We weren’t dating or anything. Without warning/permission/welcoming cues he stuck his hand down my pants and stuffed a couple fingers into my vagina. Since I had a tampon in (and he was forceful so it definitely got shifted, hard), I shrieked and bent over in pain, and he took off.
Harassed by guys driving by in cars, and in a bus station. This included graphic solicitation of sex when I was a definitely underage teen.
A few incidents of butt-grabbing by strangers, mostly at clubs.
Oh, I almost forgot - not assault but very, very creepy. I was at a club at the end of a very difficult week that included having to put one of my ferrets to sleep, so I just wasn’t in the mood. My husband was dancing with some of our friends while I was sitting at a table. I’d had maybe one or two drinks all night, but I was exhausted from sadness and overwork, so I looked like I was passing out at the table, propping myself up, leaning against the wall, etc. I felt a tap and saw my husband out of my peripheral vision, barely (through my hair falling over my face, and around my glasses). He said something. Music was way too loud for me to understand anything. He grabbed my wrist and I started getting up; he pushed me ahead of him and started steering me through the club, towards the door. I was still groggy. Then I noticed that we were kind of bumping into people, and that this - and how I was kind of being steered like that - was not my husband’s usual way of acting. I realized the guy behind me wasn’t tall enough to be my husband, and woke up instantly. I tore my wrist out of his grasp and took off into the club, back to where I’d been sitting, and met up with my husband.
(TLDR: Dude assumed I was super-drunk-passing-out-girl and tried to hustle me out of the club to do whatever bad thing.)
Yeah, it happens a lot. There have been way more incidents than I care to recount here.
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One, after dress/tech rehearsal for a show with a small regional theatre. I was in the green room, just about to change back into street clothes, although still wearing a tank top and long skirt when this happened. Fellow cast member enters the room, walks right up behind me, and without a word to me wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me into him. He knew I was seeing someone at the time, and I’d never even hinted at being interested in him, because he was about as far from my type as you can get. Even better, we were the two leads, we were all of a day from opening night, and our characters flirt and fall in love on stage for something like 9 performances. Thank god there was no stage kiss.
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Was put through several auditions for a lead role in an independent film. Was eventually cast in a secondary role, and was given the script to read. This was the first time I found out that the lead role required 1> nudity, and 2> a sex scene with the male lead. The filmmaker was casting himself as the male lead, of course. Did I mention that he was at least 20 years older than me?
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Just a couple weeks ago, at a going-away party for some friends, I am keeping to myself sitting in an armchair when a staggering drunk dude I’ve never met before staggers up to me and sticks his hand out for my camera (a $600+ SLR) and insists someone needs to take a photo of me. I politely say no thank you, and he keeps going, eventually trying to snatch the camera out of my hand while I pull it away and tell him firmly that NO, he can’t have my camera.
I thought it was over until 5 minutes later, when he walks up to me from behind, wraps his arms around my shoulders, and starts sloppy-kissing my neck. I was still in the chair and he was standing above me, so unfortunately I had no leverage, so all I could do was shove my hands backwards to push him off. I nailed him in the eye (accidentally, but I’m glad I did because I couldn’t create enough physical power to push him off otherwise – and I hope it hurt like hell). Even worse, all of this happened with 50 other people in the room, in direct line-of-sight of at least 10 of them. Not one person said a damn thing. They just watched.
To add to the creep factor, later I discovered that this guy I’d never met had sent me a friend request on Facebook a couple days before the party. Apparently he’d seen my RSVP on my friends’ FB event announcing their party, and had targeted me in advance. Creepy as all fuck.
- Less than a week after that, I’m out for a run along the lakefront run/bike trail, and some guy on a bike follows me, pacing me, staring at me (instead of, say, paying attention to what’s in front of him) and mumbling something or other at me, for half a mile before finally giving up.
Countless incidences of groping by classmates in junior high and high school. Guys who followed me around a nightclub after I explicitly and repeatedly told them no. And tons more.
I’ve also been pawed up by a woman who kept following me around a club dance floor, too, FWIW.
At my old law firm, an employee of some big out-of-town client was visiting for several days to prepare for some big discovery phase. During the process of working closely together late one night getting a database set up, the guy offered one of our IT techs his hotel room key. She was something like 19, nothing like that had ever happened to her before, and she was completely freaked out.
I have to give the firm credit; it sent the guy packing and told the client to send someone else.
I chose the first two options.
When I was 15, as I was taking a walk outside, a man drove up to me and showed me his penis. Yeah, that was nice. He also said stuff to me, but I can’t remember what. This guy scared me, 'cause he circled the area I was in two or three times. It was about week or so before I felt safe enough to go on another walk.
At age 7 and 8, a man whom I trusted and liked would expose himself to me. Like, a lot. He also coerced me into kissing him on the lips once. Fortunately, it never went beyond that (and I’m extremely thankful nothing else happened, especially after reading all the horrifying stories in this thread). Still very creepy, though.
I was sexually molested by my mother’s boyfriend as a child. A stranger also exposed himself to me and my mother at a hotel when I was 9 or 10. As an adult, I’ve been groped, cat-called, attacked with a crowbar, and in one instance, I’m 99.9% sure a man was planning to drag me into his car before I cut across someone’s lawn and fled back to my home.
My mother and one of her three sisters have been violently raped. My mother was attacked by a stranger, her sister was date-raped.
Several of my female friends have been molested, assaulted, or raped. One was raped by both her father and uncle, and then raped by a police officer while growing up in Soviet-era Lithuania. Another friend was roofied in the bar she worked at; fortunately, the bartender rescued her from what could’ve ended up being a very nasty situation.
I have no problem with women keeping me at arm’s length(literally and figuratively) if that makes them feel safe.
The men(and a couple women) in the gay men/straight women thread were overreacting. You aren’t going to convince any women on this website to not feel uncomfortable around men if they are uncomfortable around men. It’s just a natural human reaction to past bad experiences, and it is not wrong for them to feel that way. I don’t think they are saying all men are potential rapists, just that in the past they have had a bad experience and can’t help but be wary around most men.
I also don’t think that we should jump on those men for being slightly offended. It’s also a natural human reaction and I think that if many men came into a thread and said that they can’t or don’t trust women, there would be a lot of Doper women coming in and getting all indignant as well.
Good for you. Especially since you weren’t going to get any help in this assault from the onlookers.
I answered that I’d been sexually assaulted by a male stranger. This happened twice when I was a child and young teen. The assault, in both cases, would have led to rape (or so the guys told me) if I hadn’t been able to defend myself. I should have also checked the first two boxes, about being made to feel uncomfortable in sexual situations.
And count me in as another who thinks that men just don’t get it. Either they would never dream of doing anything like this, and don’t see it happening, or they DO dream of sexual assault, and see nothing wrong with it. Because women are all just bitches or hos, right?
One other thing to consider. The position of women and men in western society is still very much in transition. The casual sexism and harassment described in this thread - the groping, the exposures, the put downs - all that used to be a normal way for men and women to interact when a woman stepped outside her “place”. It’s well within living memory for men and women both. On top of that, there’s still most of the rest of the globe, where women are treated like shit not because the men there are evil or unusually cruel but because that’s the just the natural order of things, like the sun rising in the east.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that women will continue to maintain the advances we’ve made in demanding better treatment. History is not on our side. On a personal level, it would be naive for women to assume that every man they meet holds modern views on sexuality. This is especially true with older men who were raised with very different expectations.
Men who are angry about not getting the benefit of the doubt can take it up with their fellow men who still act aggressively towards women.