No offence, but I think you are making a similar mistake to the one the oblivious men are making. Lemme explain.
It wasn’t because I gave enough of a shit that I figured it out. I was lucky enough to stumble on HollaBackNYC. Just as some* of us men don’t realize this is happening, I think most women don’t realize that some men really don’t know. Just because it’s blaringly obvious to you doesn’t mean it’s obvious to us. And just because we don’t see it** doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
*Obviously, the men who do the catcalling are aware of the phenomenon. I would guess, however, most of my head-up-our-asses nerd compatriots really don’t know about this.
**Because the assholes whisper or don’t usually do it to my wife when I’m walking to with her or whatnot.
PS. I’m not writing this post to be combative. I’m not trying to absolve any of these men of any of their responsibility. I’m hoping that the women this happens to will realize that one of the ways they can fight back is to sit their menfolk down and tell them (1) this shit happens regularly and (2) it’s unacceptable. Or maybe I’m an incurable optimist, and it won’t do jack shit.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again. It should be socially acceptable for women to carry and use mace on guys if they feel verbally threatened. Especially since a lot of guys don’t just make comments, they will follow a woman and touch her if she doesn’t respond, or doesn’t respond in a manner pleasing to the guy. Because it seems that nothing else will work.
Teenage girls, especially, should be encouraged to carry mace. I got catcalled and followed and cornered and groped when I was a teenager, actually, starting before I was 13. I was sexually mature, but I looked vulnerable. And since some guys thought that they could get away with it, they tried it. If I dye my hair, I’ll still get a few inappropriate remarks, not as bad as when I was in my teens and twenties, but it’s enough that it tips the balance between dying my hair or not. I must exude sexual energy, because even after I got pretty fat, I’d get remarks. The only thing that seems to work is a combination of obesity, grey hair, and a permanent scowl on my face. And I use a walking stick now.
I think that most guys don’t catcall. But the ones who do won’t stop this behavior unless they think that they’re gonna get hurt if they continue doing it.
If the woman in question had been alone, how far would this asshole have gone? Would he have stopped at just a grab, or would he have tried to rape her? Who can tell? But clearly, he thought that it was OK to grab a stranger’s boob. He needed a good snootful of mace, or a severe beating, not just a quick punch in the nose.
Is calling someone a nigger analogous to lynching them? They’re both forms of bullying against black people, just on opposite ends of the spectrum of severity.
My analogy and LeeshaJoy’s analogy are analogous in that neither one of them is a valid analogy. Also, they’re both logical fallacies in that they are appeals to emotion (and piss poor ones at that).
I reject the analogy because it’s invalid, not because it violates my “delicate sensibilities”. Reading comprehension fail.
People are going to try and shoplift no matter what security measures are in place, just as guys are going to cat call no matter what women do or how they dress. You can’t control the shoplifter, all you can do is take all the necessary precautions. So I guess I should thank you for reinforcing my point.
So the next time I hold a door at 7-11 for a woman who glides through with her nose in the air and with not a scintilla of thanks or even acknowledgement of my existence, I can smack the shit out of her or mace her for being rude?
Or are over-reactions to things women find offensive about men the only ones that excuse physical violence?
Smiling at some asshole who barks an order to smile at you is appeasement. Walking around with a smile on your face when you don’t feel happy and aren’t in any way amused, just to avoid the assholes barking smile at you is appeasement. It is not incumbent on anyone to change their demeanor or behavior to “diffuse” socially inept assholes.
Not a real solution. If you don’t want to listen to music, then what? You’re right back where you started. If you’re on your phone, or with another woman and want to have a conversation, you’re right back to vulnerable. Once again we’re putting women at an imbalance.
When not saying thank you is an aggressive, confrontational and combative thing to do, then yes, you can mace her. Honestly, you couldn’t have made a worse analogy if you tried.
I’m not sure what “feeling verbally threatened” means. Isn’t it already acceptable in most places to use self-defense (including pepper spray) if one feels *physically *threatened?
If someone is close enough to use mace on and is being verbally aggressive, they’re being physically aggressive too. Someone saying offensive things and getting into your personal space is a threat, period.
Am I speaking Chinese here? Am I really being this misunderstood? Ouch. What I’m saying is try different stuff out and see if something works better.
But you’re probably right. Keep doing the same things over and over, and you’ll probably eventually get a different result. You can likely change the world by doing absolutely nothing.
Yeah, but when you stumbled on HollaBackNYC you gave enough of a shit to read it and take the stories there seriously. You didn’t roll your eyes at the precious delicate princesses whining about guys being guys, or tell them all how it can’t possibly be that bad, or suggest ways they could rearrange their whole lives to avoid this sort of treatment. Judging by the responses in this thread, that’s pretty goddamn rare.
In this thread, women are telling men that this goes on, that it’s common, and that it’s unacceptable. And most of the men are dismissing our experiences as exaggeration and oversensitivity and telling us to just suck it up and give the bullies what they want. It’s not that these assholes don’t know–we’re sitting right here telling them, ffs–it’s that it doesn’t directly affect them and thus they don’t give a shit.
And since the rape analogy has everyone’s panties in a wad and comparing yelling “nigger” to lynching someone, let’s compare verbal assholery to verbal assholery. Let’s examine the response this thread would likely have if it were a story about one of a group of white guys yelling racial epithets at a group of black guys and them beating the shit out of the wrong cracker. In that case, nobody would bat an eye at someone expressing the opinion that physical violence is wrong, and it’s horrible the innocent guy got beat up, but the shithead doing the yelling rather had it coming.
But when someone in this thread expresses that opinion about this situation–OMG, man-hating bitches at 3 o’clock!!!111eleventy!! If we’d hit a guy for that, we’d probably set his crotch on fire for asking what time it was!!! And we’re all just making these stories up and exaggerating and over-reacting anyway.
Nobody would tell a black person they should smile all the time, or walk a certain way, or wear earphones or dress a certain way or change their behavior in any way at all to avoid some asshole yelling “nigger” at them. No one would have the cast-iron balls necessary to suggest that black people can’t change other people’s attitudes and behaviors and therefore have to rely on changing themselves to avoid verbal abuse. No, we would consider those suggestions completely outrageous and evidence of racism in the person who made them. That person would be reviled, told that sort of attitude was utterly unconscionable, that there was absolutely no excuse for thinking and acting that way.
“Should be socially acceptable” implies that it is not currently socially acceptable for women to use mace for that reason. My question is: if it is already socially acceptable for women to use self-defense when they are physically threatened, what is implied by “verbally threatened” that isn’t already covered?
You might want to take note that “Acting like a dick” was the criterion expressed and it was that which I was responding to. In other words, acting like a dick is not sufficient provocation for the idiotic over-reactions that people in this thread are attempting to justify. In most jurisdictions, outright name-calling or the use of so-called “fighting words” is not sufficient justification for striking (or macing) someone.
It had to happen sooner or later. I agree with Der Trihs. Someone whistled. Someone else got beaten half to death. It’s a fucking assault and battery for no cause. And CrazyCatLady starts with the rape shit and all that? Damn.
Yeah, you’re right. It’s easy for random assholes on the internet to be dismissive. I agree lots of people are being totally out of line in this thread.
I guess what I was trying to say is that by telling the men you know personally (husbands, boyfriends, brothers, really good friends) about will make it affect those people much more directly and personally than telling SDMBers. The reason I believe this is that I didn’t know for 28 years. I really wish someone would have told me! Yes, I should have been more observant, but I still wish someone would have told me. The more men who are told in such a way that they can’t ignore/deny (ie, by loved ones), the less socially acceptable it will become. I may be wrong about this, but it seems like this and pepper spray are the only possible solutions. Not that I have anything against pepper spray…
Incidentally, has anyone tried a response along the lines of “what would your mother say?” Just curious.
Okay, after having slept on it, I realize I should clarify. What I was responding to was the bullshit knee-jerk response that any slight against a white male is somehow ‘oppression’ of the entire demographic. I completely agree that the assault described in the OP was so far out of line that you can’t even see the line anymore, and the women involved should be punished under the law.
Of course there will always be shoplifters and it makes a difference whether they are 6, 16 or 26 years old too. That doesn’t mean everybody shrugs their shoulders and says there’s nothing to be done about it. Apart from laws against it, the general social attitude is against as well. People might not want to intervene in case they get hurt but most consider it something they would feel ashamed to do and it is their attitude that keeps it down, the fact that theft is not acceptable to them or their acquaintances.
What teenage boys might shout at girls and each other probably doesn’t matter so much because most of the girls are just as capable of the same (until it gets to the level of serious bullying). How their mates might approve of shoplifting doesn’t matter so much either because the laws are there to control that. But after a time they expect to grow up and shoplifting isn’t ‘devilry’ showing off any more, it’s either juvenile or straight deliberate theft and not socially acceptable either way except for a very small underclass. Why doesn’t catcalling go the same way?
Somehow a lot of otherwise adults still accept what they or they mates should long ago have grown out of. They’re not going to yell ‘Baldy’ or ‘Four-eyes’ at somebody of the sort and collapse in hysterics at the amazing fun of it, they’d think it retarded and they’d be right. So why do they still feel able to do the equivalent at women?
Could it be in part that we (and Americans even more so) are very hostile to anything un-masculine? That includes a lot of women comparing themselves to men as a standard and taking for granted that what is traditional of men is ‘better’ and unsupportive of men they’d call ‘wimps’ and ‘fags’ for disputing those standards, often positively hostile to men valuing anything ‘feminine’ on grounds that in some way they are trying to exclude women from these ‘superior’ formerly masculine activities. It isn’t necessarily the women who is despised as much as what is feminine about her - and maybe a femininity the men feel afraid of enough to demonstrate their rejection of it (and so rejection of any suspicion of it in themselves).
Maybe one way to get these tit-heads to grow up is to value ‘the feminine’ (which to some extent includes respect for others) a lot more than we do.
I think we’ve long strayed from the drunken broads in the OP who beat up an innocent guy, and have gotten into a general discussion of catcalling in general, and women’s anger about this.
So anyway, you know, this kind of steet harassment has never, EVER happened to me while my husband was with me. For the three years we’ve been together, and in every city we’ve been in, no one has ever Hey Baby’d me while standing directly next to a 6’2" broad shouldered men. No light stalking, no horn-honking, not so much as a single whistle in my direction has occured when with the spouse. Not a coincidence. So gripe and quibble about the rape analogies all day long, but it’s bullying, plain and simple, and there’s not a whole lot the victim can do about it.
What else are we supposed to do? Always be with a male companion? Wear burqas? If we hit the guy, we’re overreacting. Shall we all permanently change the way we naturally are and would like to be, so that people do not harass us/rape us/shoplift from the Macy’s we manage, etc? The women being heckled this way are not inviting this kind of behavior. It’s not ladies of the evening with their ass cheeks hanging out who are treated this way. It’s all of us. No matter if we smile or scowl, regardless or how we dress or what we look like. We’re talking about people minding their own business, walking to work or the post office or home, or wherever, and had the audacity to be alone or with other women all while sporting a vagina. Come the fuck on, alrady.
Of course there will always be shoplifters and it makes a difference whether they are 6, 16 or 26 years old too. That doesn’t mean everybody shrugs their shoulders and says there’s nothing to be done about it. Apart from laws against it, the general social attitude is against as well. People might not want to intervene in case they get hurt but most consider it something they would feel ashamed to do and it is their attitude that keeps it down, the fact that theft is not acceptable to them or their acquaintances.