You do, I do, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to. If somebody feels safer pulling down their hat and staring at the ground and going about their business, that’s none of your concern. People have reasons for doing that.
Maybe you do. And I probably would too, if I lived in a town small enough where everybody knows everyone else. But I don’t.
But still, the main thing is: it’s not a reasonable expectation of others. You can smile at every passerby if you like, as long as whether or not they smile back isn’t something you’re going to be bothered by, or feel the need to remark on.
Ditto what you said about octopus. 
Actually I think this thread is working out great. It’s a sensitive topic, but people are expressing themselves, and much ignorance is being fought on both sides. Let’s face it, life is messy. Well done, y’all.
I agree. In my 20+ years of online life, threads like this usually turn out to be a shitshow. Good job everybody.
There’s another component to this that hasn’t been mentioned yet: cultural frames of reference. This plays a HUGE part in social interactions between men and women, especially where young people and cultures mix for the first time, i.e. college. Case in point:
When I was in college there was an episode where a man from some African nation (I assumed based on his appearance, family composition, accent and behavior) started paying me much unwanted attention. I was living in an apartment by myself across the street from campus, and he and his family lived in the same complex. I’ll keep it a short story by just saying that over several weeks the issue escalated to the point where he knocked on my door, asked to be let in, and asked bluntly if I was a prostitute, and I finally got rid of him by threatening to call the cops on him if he didn’t leave me alone. During that whole time and for many months afterwards I wracked my brain to try to figure out what in the world gave him the idea that I was available or even a prostitute. The only think I can think of was that I smiled a greeting to him one day as I walked to school. That got his attention at least. Then culture plays a part: “American women are easy”, no proper woman lives alone, etc.
After that experience, I am extremely reserved with foreign men. I’m sorry that sounds racist. But I need to see that they will treat me politely before I am polite to them because you never know when politeness will be misconstrued as “oooh, she wants me!”
Geez, adding another culture into the mix… that is fraught with peril.
Since we were discussing being asked to smile, here’s an article on that subject from The Atlantic online: The Sexism of Telling Women to Smile: Your Stories
There are several stories illustrating points made by posters here. This one is a conversation stopper:
I would never presume to tell someone I didn’t know to smile, male or female. I’ll do the smile and nod while walking down the street if someone coming the other way makes eye contact, but I don’t for a second think that places any obligation on them to smile back.
In the workplace if I saw someone looking sour, upset, angry whatever, I’m sure as hell not going to just walk up and tell them to smile. If someone did that to me I’d tell them to go fuck themselves. I may, depending on how well I know them, go over and ask if everything is OK, but that’s it
I am from Norway. If you go around smiling at strangers here, people may well assume you have some kind of mental issue. Wolf-whistling is mostly unheard of, with maybe the exception of Olso.
I have never asked or demanded that any person smile. But if I pass a stranger and get the courage to smile at them (I’m shy), I do feel kinda shitty if they don’t smile back. That’s my own insecurity. But I think I’d rather live in a world where people smile at each other.
Reading this thread, now I’m wondering if some dudes actively don’t smile at me because they read somewhere that women don’t like it if you smile at them.
I’m also wondering if they don’t smile at me because they think I’m flirting by smiling and aren’t interested.
Or because they don’t want me to think they’re flirting?
Or maybe I look weird?
This is a glimpse into the idiotic hell that is social anxiety. 
Incidentally, I once smiled at a guy while walking down a street in Guadalajara and he asked me for my number. He was actually sort of nervous about it, it was cute, and he didn’t push it when I told him I was married. He just wished me a good day and I continued down the street. I do not consider that street harassment, but I imagine if it happened every day it would get old fast. For all the talk about Latin American culture and how misogynistic it can be, I’d say I had very good experiences as a young, blonde American white woman in Mexico. I interacted with a number of strange men who were never once inappropriate, and I mean random shit like inviting me to grill out in their front yard when I was just walking by (we sat and talked for hours about politics and TV shows, best steak ever), and going out to dinner with some random-ass guy i met in the Hotel swimming pool in Barra de Navidad. He invited me out to dinner with him and his girlfriend and they bought me a souvenir. Attraction to me might have been a factor in either case, or not, but nobody was ever inappropriate. Nobody ever made me feel unsafe.
I feel really sad when people view men, generally, as a threat, because for every shitty experience I’ve had with a man, I’ve had about 20 amazing ones.
Or don’t know if you’re flirting, but don’t want you to think that they think you’re flirting? :eek:
You know, one thing I loved about working in NYC is you could just ignore people and it was fine. There are just too many people there to pay attention to every single one. Some people find New Yorkers rude; I just found them practical. I’m sure that people have had negative experiences with harassment in NYC, but the population is so huge it would be statistically improbable not to. I was also travelling at peak commuting hours which helped avoid a lot of that.
Yet here I was just reminiscing about how easy Mexico’s culture made it for a shy person to be more outgoing and social. Basically the opposite of NYC, especially in the rural areas, but that was nice too.
The Midwest is known for its niceness, but it’s more of a superficial niceness. You’re expected to talk to strangers but you can’t get too personal. People will exchange pleasantries with you in the supermarket or whatever, and it’s awkward to me. It seemed like the friendliness in Mexico was much deeper, people will ask you all sorts of personal questions and reveal things about themselves, and on that account i was more comfortable with it.
FWIW as a male from the US living in Mexico I can say that the typical Latino stereotypes of machismo and misogyny or whatever aren’t evident here, at least not often.
My work puts me together with lots of graduate and postgrad students and researchers from the US and Europe who are disproportionately female and in their mid 20’s to early 30’s (prime crotch grabbing material I guess) and the experiences they relate from travels all over Mexico are all similar to yours.
Local men seem to absolutely dote on their wives and daughters, to a point I guess it could be construed as chauvinistic to some US sensibilities, but it’s not in a misogynistic way.
One time a friend was staying in a nearby tourist area, however, and she ate at the same restaurant almost every day because a waiter there kept giving her a huge discount. Like about 90% off the actual cost. I kept telling her this guy was trying to get a date - there is absolutely no question, he’s into you and that is his way of trying to impress you. She insisted that wasn’t the case so we made a little bet and I told her the next night I’d go with her to eat and we’d see what happens.
He was totally off the hook angry and indignant. He acted like she had been stringing him along by simply accepting the discounts that he kept insisting on giving her without her asking for them, and said since she was there with her “boyfriend” (as he gave me a sneering once over) there wouldn’t be any more discounts.
So, some things are the same all over no matter where you go.
Gender note: as a boy, I often had people tell me to stop smiling, as if it were something offensive.
Good grief. That sucks. I guess you were expected to be grimly serious. :rolleyes:
No, their choice to smile back, nod back, or ignore me is not anything that bothers me. I just see my nod as basic social courtesy, but recognize that others may not share that view, or may share it generally but not that day, or whatever.
The topic on the first hour of the Diane Rehm Show this morning is about this very topic, namely, validation of how common this routine violation of women’s personal space and bodies is. You read it here first. (Okay, maybe not first.) Just tried to go to her page to post the link and couldn’t get through–too many people right now.
NOTE: On the show they are emphasizing that all men don’t do this, and in fact MOST men do not do it. This is NOT a campaign against men, but only the men, like Trump, who believe they are entitled to touch and grope women.
Got to Twitter and search for #notokay. There have been millions and millions of posts.
Good grief. I knew this behavior (behavior like that named in the title of this thread), and I assumed every woman has experienced *some *of it, but I had no idea how common.
The upside of all this is that it IS coming out in the open. Social media, especially Twitter, has made this possible. It is the very definition of mass communication.
Perhaps part of the problem is that men have not been taught how a gentleman comports himself in public.
A gentleman who passes a woman on an uncrowded street touches his hat (hats are not optional) and smiles. He does not speak to a woman to whom he has not been introduced until and unless she speaks to him first. Speaking to a lady on the street is the action of a cad. The polite response from the lady is a slight nod of the head - a return smile is optional but not required. And especially -
A gentleman does not grab a woman by the crotch until she has indicated that such attentions are welcome to her, and until they have been properly introduced.
Regards,
Shodan
For 25 years I lived in or around Tokyo, a city infamous for gropers on trains. It’s bad enough that they now have women-only train cars during the peak hours.
My ex-wife told of a number of times she was groped as a high school or university student as well as when she became an adult. Other women friends also gave similar accounts.
I witnessed one man grab a young woman’s crotch in public. It was at a train station and the woman was standing in front of a pillar which was wider than her. A man walking from the other direction suddenly reached out and grabbed her crotch. She was in complete shock and was motionless.
I was walking toward her about 40 feet away. The man continued walking and then when he got about 15 feet past, he turned to see her reaction.
(Which was just as I was closing in on him. I was young and foolish and I chose a more physical solution rather than holding him for the police. The woman seemed as though she just wanted the problem to go away.)
The young woman just looked like she wanted a hole to open up and swallow her. People often wait for friends at train stations and as this was ancient history BC (before cell phones) she was probably stuck there until her friend came.
I haven’t spent very much of my adult life in America and none after I graduated from university, but from everything I saw in Japan, I simply don’t doubt stories of woman being molested and either unable to respond or don’t want to for various reasons.
I disagree, Shodan. I think most men are taught how to behave properly with women. It’s just a few that lack a sense of empathy or are sociopathic who do stuff like this.
Yes, most of them are. But I think [ol][li]there has been a breakdown in the consensus of what constitutes proper etiquette in public in the US. Much of the old code was racist and sexist and repressive, but much of it wasn’t. We’ve gained from the receding of the old, iron-clad rules of etiquette, but we have also lost.[/li][li]Men learn how to be a man from their fathers. With the rise in divorce and single-parent households, mostly headed by women, men have less opportunity to learn what a decent man does. [/ol]ISTM that “a gentleman doesn’t do that” is at least as valid a response as #notallmen.[/li]
Regards,
Shodan