How to deal with unwanted attention?

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DogsWithoutHorses;

For every example of "male privilege" you can give me, I can give you an example of the opposite. For every disadvantage women face, I can point out one that men face.

society views women as a collection of holes, it views men as walking wallets. it considers women to be useless, and men as expendable objects to be used. women are more likely to be raped, men are more likely to be murdered. women have a much harder time getting high prestige jobs, men are judged far more harshly when they can't get one. women are looked down upon for having sex, men are looked down upon just as much for not having sex. I could go on and on.

women's position in society sucks. but so does men's. i get that men have advantages in certain areas. but so do women. i reject the idea that one gender or the other is privileged.

Ooh, good argument. World ain't fair. Never heard that one before.

Hey! Don't like being approached by strangers? Tough s**t, world ain't fair.

See, I can do the same.

Don't like being called an as*hole when you act like one? world ain't... oh wait, that actually is fair.

You yourself said she did it immediately. Not giving the guys a chance to be either nice or dicks. Your friend made assumptions about people she'd not met yet, then said hurtful s**t based on those assumptions.

edit: unless you weren't being literal when you said "immediately." i do have a problem with figuring that out sometimes. If that's the case, then nothing I've said applies to you or your friend personally, and I apologize. though I do stand by what I've said in a more general sense. unfortunately there are people who really do behave the way I've interpreted your friend as behaving.

unfortunately, women's responses to the sh***y guys does impact the decent guys. because those responses are not directed solely at the sh***y guys. they're directed at every future guy, decent or sh***y.

I could just as easily say that, when one goes out in public, they are putting themselves in a position where they might be approached. that is, she put herself in a position where an undesirable outcome is possible.

if he has a responsibility to not be offended when things don't go the way he'd like, then she has a responsibility to do the same.

I don't think they have a responsibility to not be offended, they can if they want to of course. If that's how they like to live.
Who said girls get offended by guys approaching them? some may, but I'd guess most of them are just fed up.

I agree, when you go out in public anything can happen, but again, that is still not an invitation for anything. And if some guy "invites himself" well things will happen, and he may not like them.

It's hardly an issue of feeling offended, it's an issue of my safety being at risk.

When a guy tells me I have a nice chest whilst placing an uninvited hand on my shoulder, he's making me question my safety and he's violating my personal space.

Then I have to decide whether to keep being polite or to loudly call him a creep. And the whole time I have to consider that he might be really unstable.

This happened and the guy moved across the row. Within a few moments he started shouting at me and telling me to... we'll it was graphic, and the bus driver warned him and then made him get off of the bus.

I don't know what it is about my milkshake that is bringing all of the crazies to the yard... or... yeah. It's not a matter of attractiveness, something about me is making me look like a suitable target lately.

And there's a fear/reluctance to call them out that's fed by attitudes like the ones posted here, that we're being meanies if we don't get their life story before we act to remove/protect/assert ourselves.

What's with placing misogyny on women's shoulders? How men react to poor treatment is their responsibility. If someone beomes a racist after a dark-skinned person does them wrong, they are still wrong for being a racist.

This was why I pointed out that people weren't taking your recent experiences into account. This was supposed to be a personal thread and while I understand natuarally that it is going to evolve into social constructs at some point, those posting still need to respect that this is a personal thread.

Exactly! While totally irrelevant to the main conversation, I've experienced many things in life that would lead me to believe women have the upper hand in several circumstances - especially when it comes to the workplace and HR and the entire family court system. Heck, many, many years ago I was accused of a crime I didn't commit and while there was zero evidence (only "he said she said") the court system favoured her "to set an example for others". (Good thing it wasn't too serious of a charge and the charges were later dropped... those 10 days in prison were a bizarre experience into how twisted and psychotic some MEN can be!)

Last edited by BlueMax on 13 Oct 2012, 6:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

Given that this entire thread has been me on one side, and a whole bunch of people on the other, I'm gonna assume that when you say "attitudes like the ones posted here," you're talking about me.

I never, not once, said not to call the guys who'd actually done something offensive on their s**t.

In fact, I said outright that women should call them on it, if they actually do something wrong.

I interpreted a post to mean that a member was advocating being unnecessarily cruel toward guys who'd not yet done anything wrong. I argued against doing that. I did not argue that women owe the men who approach them their time. I did not argue that no men ever act inappropriately toward women. All I said was "Hey, maybe saying 'you're ugly' to a guy who'd done nothing wrong was needlessly harsh."

I turned out to be mistaken about what that member was advocating but, in the meantime, another member came in to argue that it is perfectly acceptable to say things like that to people just to get rid of them, whether they'd done anything to deserve it or not. And a few members who argued that, when stuff like that happens, the guy should just suck it up because the woman was probably frustrated at how other guys had acted toward her.

At no point ever did I say that women should put up with actual harassment. All I said was "even if you're annoyed, try not to be a dick."

How, exactly, is saying that guys who've done nothing wrong don't deserve to be s**t on the same as saying women are being mean when they protect or assert themselves?

If 100 [insert race here] people in a row all treat someone the same, negative way - it's perfectly understandable and all-too-human that the recipent will develop a distaste for said race.

On the flipside, an unspoken factor in the above example is what if the guy approaching those 100 [x race] people is acting like a total jerk? He brought on that racial distaste by his own behaviour.


Some men may be approaching women in a terrible way and getting painfully rejected. Some of that rejection is his own damned fault!

Oh my gosh; she did it immediately whenever anyone tried to hit on her by commenting on her body. When they were being invasive. Yes; she did not allow them to show themselves to be nice once they already started out crudely.

Look, the technique she used was in an entirely NT context wherein some men used the situation of encountering a beautiful woman to make a crude comment in order to entertain themselves and their guy friends. This was intrusive to my friend and she dealt with them in NT verbal shorthand. Believe me; no one lost their ego over it. It just got them out of her sphere, the guy's friends got a good laugh and the crude guy then had one experience that, maybe, might make him think before being crude again.

Sheesh, forget I ever said it.

And my argument was not that women were responsible for misogyny.

My argument was that "if it is acceptable for women to treat men poorly, based on past experiences with other men, then why is it not accpetable for men to do the same?"

It was meant to point out, by comparing it to behavior that many here complain about, that neither is acceptable.

Read my posts in this thread again, you'll see that I said from the start that the misogyny on this board was not acceptable, and that women were right to complain about it.

My point was, in fact, the same as what you said above. How someone reacts to poor treatment is on their shoulders. That other men being as*holes to her in the past does not make it okay for a woman to treat future men poorly.

I'm sorry for whatever's going on in your personal life. And I'm sorry that some men are being dicks to you. I didn't mean to ignore that. But I saw someone giving what looked like terrible advice, and I responded to that. I (thankfully) turned out to be wrong about what, exactly, she was advocating. But all I was trying to say, all along, was "don't be mean to people unless they give you a reason to."

I didn't realize it would be such a controversial statement.

Apologies. A misunderstanding on my part. From the way it was worded before, it sounded to me like your friend was being cruel to any guy that showed an interest. Which didn't seem like an entirely unreasonable interpretation, given that I've known people who do exactly that. Glad I was wrong.

mds_02 - my comment wasn't directed at any specific poster, try reading the thread again and see if you're the only person talking about misogyny.