/shrug. I dropped it because the point stands, whether it’s a male or female poster doing the filtering.
Still trying to tell other posters how and where to post? That’s not how the culture of the board works.
To any posts addressing me in this thread on the subject of women’s views toward men as a result of sexual assault, and my view that they have an important impact on our ability as a species to address the problem, I am reluctant to answer you in this thread anymore because it would be perpetuating what had become a hijack.
Spice Weasel started a thread about that topic specifically, so that this thread could be devoted to sharing experiences without arguing about how to solve the problem.
My only motivation in posting on this subject at all is as an advocate. I’m not posting because I take anything that anyone says on a message board personally or because I feel threatened or insulted that some victims respond one way or another. I’m on quite solid and high ground in both my opinion and activism on this subject and only posted to say what, essentially, Spice Weasel wound up saying much better in her thread.
No.
…I have responded to this post in the appropriate thread.
Why do I ask? Because your answer seems to imply a universal rule “The answer is yes. You walk down the street, someone’s coming the other way, you smile and nod that person in passing. Man or woman.” where it’s obviously situationally dependent. Since you didn’t take that into consideration then it seems that an analogy with cars would be appropriate.
I used to commute though Shinjuku train station, the world’s busiest, with several million people passing through it daily.
Pretty much everything you’ve said about cars is directly appropriate to that.
Where my family lives in Salt Lake City, people acknowledge each other walking on the sidewalk because you won’t see anyone else for another 20 minutes. You would look like a bobblehead in Tokyo if you tried that.
This all reminds me of the concept of civil inattention, which strikes me as the reasonable medium between the extremes of either:
A) tipping your hat to every single person you see, or
B) acting as if you are completely oblivious to every person you see.
The problem (for many women, at least) is that even the low-key acknowledgement of others inherent in civil inattention is interpreted (or deliberately misinterpreted) by some men as an invitation for more personal interaction - at which point there aren’t many ways for a woman to extricate herself without the man becoming hostile. I can certainly appreciate why some women feel the safest course of action while out among the general public is to feign complete obliviousness.
I would like to piggy back on your post, if I may.
I suspect that another thing men don’t fully realize is how traumatic puberty is for young girls. (Some women may disagree with me, but this is my impression based on a few things that I can add later if there’s interest.) It’s hard enough as it is when your body suddenly changes, but then you get all kinds of intense attention to specific body parts. Instead of exulting in the new attention, most young women feel humiliated, embarrassed and even targeted. As Sputnikkk describes above and as I’ll describe here:
Another issue I had that while nobody actually touched me was still sexual harrassment:
When I was a freshman in high school, I got my boobs and period. It was all new to me, so I didn’t have really any clue. I started to notice that some boys would seem to heckle each other whenever I was nearby. They never addressed me personally, but I overheard comments like “oh, she wants you”, leering glances, a lot of snickering and whispers. This went on for a few weeks until one day I happened to catch my reflection in a window as I passed by. Despite wearing a bra, my nipples were Mount Everest. I was so mortified that I switched to padded bras after that, and have been wearing padded bras ever since. Also, after I fixed the bra problem, the boys quickly lost interest in me, so that’s how I knew that was the cause.
I also couldn’t wear any graphic t-shirt for a few decades after puberty because I hated when boys would stare at my chest. So better to not give anybody another reason to look at my chest.
I’ve never been successful at explaining these feelings to the men in my life. I don’t hate my body. I just don’t want too much attention paid to it. It’s the definition of objectification, I know. But men don’t seem to see it the same way.
Oh, you aren’t kidding. I started my period when I was nine, and was a C cup in fourth grade. I was way ahead of the curve on puberty and it was discussed extensively by the other boys. The first time I was hit on by an adult male (not my stepfather), I was thirteen. How do you even begin to wrap your head around that kind of attention at that age? The abuse started at age 11 and it totally messed with my sexual development. You associate your changing body with the abuse and you develop the idea that you are required to be acquiescent to male demands regardless of what you want.
I couldn’t have normal relationships at that age. I had a boyfriend in 8th grade I really liked. One day at lunch he put his hand on my thigh, as boys are wont to do. It scared the shit out of me. Was he going to make me do other stuff? Notice I say MAKE even though the poor dude had no clue I felt pressured. In my mind, consent wasn’t even an option I had. I broke up with him through a friend, could not even face him after that.
I even stopped masturbating because I had a nightmare that my abuser found out and blackmailed me, or that it somehow meant I wanted his attention. I didn’t have another boyfriend until I was 17, and it was a pretty coercive relationship that eventually turned abusive. My sexual development was effectively stunted until, I am sorry to say, well into my 20s.
Part of what got me out of it is my Aunt had a really healthy attitude toward sex and always stressed communication. I knew about my tendency to freeze up and concede so I discussed that with Sr. Weasel up front when we started dating. We have to have those conversations in advance because I can’t articulate my discomfort in the moment sometimes.
Yes, those early experiences stay with you a long time.
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This is definitely a residual effect for me, and this might be the first time I’ve seen it described, so thanks for that. It’s not an everyday thing anymore. I think of it as Big Sweater Day.
And I do admire people who have had these conversations with their partners. All I can imagine is how that can go bad really fast, so…nope.
I worked at a summer camp for mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed adults. Yes, in 1980 those were the terms used and those are the terms I’m using now.
There was a swimming pool. A client - perhaps 25 or so- was standing by the pool near me. She loudly said my name and I turned to hear, " I love you Cartooniverse ! " and see her pull down half of her tank top. One breast popped out.
I was pretty mortified and frozen, but a more experienced female staff member turned her away, got her rearranged and gently told her that wasn’t okay to do. Physically 25. Mentally… 5?
It’s never occurred to me to do this kind of thing to a woman. Then again, I was sexually abused by a teacher in High School for a few years so my tolerance for and interest in that kind of behavior tends to go towards … violently negative.
To answer the original post, I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times in my life that I was out in public, minding my own business, and men approached me, put their hands on me, spoke inappropriately, followed me, etc. This started when I was 13. I experienced the usual coercive date rape attempts in college. On a daily basis, from the age of 13, I experienced unwanted milder forms of attention from men, where they’d stare or outright leer, get too close, come up and tell me to smile, try to make me talk to them, etc.
Now I’m old and unattractive. I still have to watch out for rapists, as a woman, but what load off of me otherwise. Except my daughter is about to turn 13, and I fear for her having to deal with this. Half a century has gone by, and it’s no better for my daughter.
That it still affects you is clear; I hate they did that to you. I’m glad for you that you’re not so riddled w/ anger (as I might be if I were you) that it colors your every day.
In my sexual abuse support group in high school, there were about eight kids, including two boys. We were all referred to this group by various people mainly because we were all, shall we say, in the early stages of screwing up our lives and had attracted the attention of concerned adults who wanted to know why. I answered honestly, “I don’t know”, which it turns out is the standard answer of most messed-up kids – nobody had a clue.
So I learned a lot. At the time, I was not surprised that boys were victims too. It’s more surprising in retrospect, how at one point I had clear evidence that the ratio of male to female victims was about 1:3, but over time (to me) the male victims, or rather their voices, mostly disappeared…I feel like people are missing.
Thanks for speaking up.
It’s been a long time now since I was young and subject to all that crap. I’d say the first time I was grabbed by a stranger I was probably seven or so. A neighborhood boy, part of the pack of kids who roamed around after school. It had all the elements I became so familiar with later, the shock of the pounce out of the blue, the sudden bizarre violation, (he kissed me, that was my ‘first kiss’ I guess), and then the wash of humiliation and just wanting it to have never happened. He ran away laughing with his friends, having won something, I don’t know what.
I have had all the usual common things happen. The guy who gave me a ride but there was no handle on the inside of my door. The men who would grab my breasts if I got close, or run their hand up my skirt. The guy rubbing his crotch against me in a packed city bus. The near-rapes at parties. Lucky for me I was never actually raped, some of that due to my suspicious nature and some, I am sure, was just luck. Also lucky to not have ended up in a family with sexually abusive men in it. Possibly because my birth family was mostly women, there was just my dad and grandpa and everyone else was a woman.
I didn’t speak to anyone about any of it, and none of the women I knew did either, except in passing. It was like bad weather, something to be avoided if you could and endured if you couldn’t. There was nothing to be done about it.
What surprises me about the millions of responses to the original twitter invitation is not that there are millions of responses. Of course there are. It’s that so many men are genuinely surprised, so surprised that they can hardly believe it, as though there’s a whole world being lived right next to them they’ve never encountered. Well duh. I don’t know any women who would be surprised.
It doesn’t surprise me that many men try desperately to argue or insult it away, or make it be about them personally, somehow. That’s also just the weather, just the way it always has been, hardly worthy of comment.
I’m old enough to have come of age in the 1970’s, when feminism was as fresh and raw as could be. And fought against by men with everything they had, the whole arsenal of blaming, humiliating, denigrating, mocking, and worse. I remember the white hot rage I felt. Sort of. It was a long time ago and I was quite a different person. A much more vulnerable person.
It’s such a blessing being old enough that strange men don’t see me any more. I just don’t appreciate that enough. Being a person instead of a woman. What a grace that is.
my husband was groped as a boy. He was in a movie theater, watching an action movie. And in the middle of an exciting fight scene, the man next to him reached over and fondled his junk.
But I think that was the only time he was sexually assaulted.
Based on the stats it looks like boys are abused almost as frequently as girls. As boys become men, they are less likely to be victimized.
It’s pretty obvious to me why there is a gender disparity here. Sexual predators go for people who are weaker than they are. Boys are effectively as helpless as girls at that age. Once they are older, they are more of a threat and harder to exploit.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around a ‘sexual abuse support group’ in school.
Recent story about how a guy groped and attempted to kiss several women on a plane. One of his victims who complained was told that the perpetrator would receive a “talking to,” and that it wasn’t “the crime of the century.” Hearing this, she tweeted his photograph, since it was really no big deal.
They make it quite difficult for her to press charges, don’t they? I guess public shaming is all you can do…it’s almost like we’re returning to the days of locking someone in stocks.