Street Luv
New List, everybody!
So, the whole street harassment blogathon of 2009 has got me thinking about a new list. (When I die, they will find me under a pile of lists, one of them being a list of improbable ways I might die).
On the one hand, goddamn I hate knowing that once I leave my house, I am fair game to have my space intruded upon. On the other hand, I can’t hold it against people for trying to fulfill the most basic human urge to connect with another human being. Straight men with good intentions looking to honestly fulfill that need have the deck stacked against them. No, I’m not saying “What about the men!!!!” I’m saying, sexism stacks the deck against everybody, and provides innumerable unnecessary obstacles between human beings trying to connect in intimate or basic ways. While I believe that women have disproportionately more obstacles (and less resources to overcome them with), and obstaclesthat are more likely to result in physical attack, that doesn’t mean that boys ain’t got their shit to deal with.
To wit: our current concepts of masculinity and manhood require a demonstratable ability to acquire the exclusive attention and sexual favors of women, and that requirement doesn’t get waived on the basis of context. That is, you don’t get points for trying; you get points for winning.”I don’t have a girlfriend because the girl I like the best right now just isn’t ready for a relationship and I respect that,” doesn’t make you a man, though “I wouldn’t leave this girl alone until she gave me her number and now I won’t leave her alone until we’re dating” does.
Our concepts of masculinity and manhood also require that concepts like masculinity and manhood exist. I know that sounds patently obvious. But the idea is, “man” can’t exist as a discrete concept unless “woman” exists as a discrete concept. “Masculine” can’t exist unless “feminine” exists. So the two concepts must necessarily be in opposition to each other; one is what the other is not, one is not what the other is.
So men are tasked with this impossible, crazy-making requirement: to be a man, you must acquire relationships with women, but you must not identify with them, or even like them all that much. You are not a man until you can get a woman to pay attention to you, but you can’t acquire that attention by being interested in anything that she is interested in. You must first treat women like aliens, to prove you are not one, and then you must find a way to make them enjoy that treatment.
There is no reasonable way to combine those two needs at the same time, while also fulfilling the very basic human need to have a companion. Which is how you end up with the wild shit women deal with every day when they get harassed on the street. A man is attempting to accomplish one or all three requirements:
- establish that he is fundamentally nothing like her and never will be anything like her (which carries the implication that there is something wrong or undesirable about being like her)
- attempt to get her to give him exclusive attention, deserved or not
- attempt to acquire a positive human connection.
Does that sound confusing? Let me put it this way:
Man on street: Heeeeeey baby why don’t you come over here (Need #2)
Woman who is trying to walk to the laundromat: No.
Man on street: Well fuck you, bitch, you fat bitch, do you think you’re better than me? (Need #1)
Woman: What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you have a mother who fucking raised you? If you talk that way to me again, I’m going to call the cops, you piece of shit.
Man on street: Oh, hey, no need to act like that. I just saw a pretty lady, I was trying to say hi to a pretty lady. I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just saying hi. (Need #3)
Woman: ????? (quiet determination to be aggressively and pre-emptively dismissive to all men who approach her in public in the future so as to avoid this bullshit)
Second Man: Is that a Firefly T-shirt? That’s awesome! (Need #3)
Woman: FUCK YOU GET AWAY FROM ME.
Second Man: Jesus! Women are psycho bitches! (Need #1)
The fact that men are raised to view women as completely separate and distinct creatures that cannot be understood by normal male brains doesn’t help boys any. The Second Man in that scenario probably viewed what he was doing as pure and innocent and nice, and his intentions probably were — he was trying to connect with another human being. But because that man has also spent a lifetime fulfilling Need #1 — the need to distinguish himself as separate and apart from women and their experiences — he entered into that interaction with no idea of how much street harassment women put up with, and how much they hate it. Because of Need #1, he has no idea how a woman wants to be approached, how a woman would be receptive to an approach, because if he were to learn these things, he would not be fulfilling the bargain of manhood.
So!
New list.
This is going to be the list of Street Luv. This is going to be a list of ways men can approach women that are not uncomfortable, dismissive, humiliating, condescending, privileged, ignorant, or generally sexist bad sauce.
Comments are closed.
This risks being one of those “What about the men!!!!” comments, and I’m sorry about that, but, being a man, that’s the experience I have.
As one of those “straight men with good intentions” (I hope), I wanted to thank you for writing this post. I’ve been reading the other blogs’ posts about street harassment with some amount of frustration/annoyance/guilt because a) they seem to lump all women into the single group of harassees and all men into the single group of harassers which strikes me as incorrect and offensive on both sides, but b) I’m clearly in the privileged group so I have no right to say that, but c) simply “I pledge to try very hard never to harass anyone” doesn’t seem like nearly enough action on my part, but it’s against the rules to say, “ok, what should I do?” since that’s making it about me and not the victims.
For a guy who really wants to avoid Need #1, the overwhelming advice from most posts like this seems to be “never initiate a conversation with any women because she might not want to talk to you.” But then, I know some women, and they’ve admitted to me that sometimes they _do_ want to be talked to. On the other hand, maybe they’re only telling me that because that’s what nice girls are supposed to want. But Need #3! Crazy-making indeed.
I guess what makes it really bad is that I could take one of the stories from your list, act out one of the opening lines on someone, and get at least 3 possible reactions depending entirely on whether my victim had been harassed yet that day: 1) good conversation/enhancement of her day, 2) polite response but clear disinterest, or 3) I could creep her out and ruin her day, and *I might not even know* because of her training to act like a nice girl. It’s possibility #3 that often prevents me from saying anything at all. That and the fact that feminist sites often react hostilely to any claim that #1 is possible. So I really appreciate that you, ya know, recognize the possibility of good interactions.
Anyway, sorry that was so long. Keep up the good thoughts.
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JeffreyY, I’d like to share my thoughts on this with you, since you’ve shared yours with us.
Firstly, advice? Eye contact. If she initiates or makes eye contact, there’s a fair chance you won’t encounter 3). No guarantees though, of course. But if you are well in her field of periphery vision and you can’t make eye contact, there’s a fair chance she doesn’t want to talk to you at that time. She has seen you – I guarantee it. You won’t need to say ‘excuse me’ to get her attention – she knows you’re there, and if she’s not looking your way there’s likely a good reason.
Secondly, to address a) and b) – yes, there are women who harass men on the street. There are men who have ben harassed.
There is a world of difference. Yes. There. Is.
Both in amount – I’m talking almost every time I leave the house without a man I am harassed (I rely on my feet and on public transport to get around). Not complemented, not chatted to – harassed. And in type – harassment which is nasty, degrading, frightening and more often than not ends in verbal abuse; harassment where I actually fear for my physical safety.
The day I see numerous blogs where men gather and discuss how degrading, frightening and frequent they find the harassment from women, is the day I personally will be more inclusive of men when I talk about street harassment.
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JeffreyY, you wrote: the overwhelming advice from most posts like this seems to be “never initiate a conversation with any women because she might not want to talk to you.”
I haven’t read all the advice, but that’s not the overwhelming advice I’m seeing women give to men. What gets lost is “any women not indicating in some way an openness to talk to you.” It’s only when men write that they can’t figure whether a woman is open to contact or wants to be left alone that those men are told to err on the side of leaving unknown women alone.
When you are in proximity to other men you don’t know when and why do you decide not initiate a conversation with those other men? In those scenarios I suggest also not initiating a conversation if the other person is a woman.
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Whoo, I was totally not alluding to women harassing men, and it really sucks so many men show up with that trite reversal that you thought that’s what I was saying.
I was trying to say that there are lots of women and men who are neither harassers nor harassees. Why do I say that?
Women: See the responses to Expecting Crickets. The assumption that all women get harassed actually hurts women who don’t experience harassment, since they seem to assume (incorrectly) it’s because of something wrong with them. On “offensive”, while, not being a woman, I can’t be sure of this, I’d expect any assumption that all women are the same in some way to be offensive in a similar way that my assuming that all women (say) like flowers would be offensive.
Men: I hope you’ll agree that saying “men harass us on the street” is offensive to non-harassers in a similar way to how saying “black people mug us” would be offensive. Now, the statistics are different: you’re much more likely to be harassed than mugged, and (unlike black people afaik), men are actually more likely to harass you than non-men. But judging a group even based on statistics is still offensive to the members the statistics are wrong about.
And this kind of generalization hurts exactly the men who are closest to being on your side. I lived in a house with four women in college, and so I got to hear their complaints about street harassment pretty often. I’d occasionally ask them how I could know I wasn’t harassing anyone accidentally, and their answers would usually be along the lines of “oh, you could never harass anyone.” If I had a little more self-confidence, maybe I’d just take that as permission to do whatever I wanted, but it’s really hard for friends to accuse other friends to acting badly, and fighting privilege requires us to always examine our own assumptions, so I’ve never quite been able to believe them. And I suspect lots of potential feminist men are in the same position of worrying that “men do this” means we do this.
Now, does the generalization hurt us as much as the constant street harassment most women face? Not at all. But I think Harriet’s post goes some way to reducing our hurt by showing us that “what I do resembles the good stories more than it resembles the bad ones”, and I appreciate that.
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I hope you’ll agree that saying “men harass us on the street” is offensive to non-harassers in a similar way to how saying “black people mug us” would be offensive. Now, the statistics are different: you’re much more likely to be harassed than mugged, and (unlike black people afaik), men are actually more likely to harass you than non-men. But judging a group even based on statistics is still offensive to the members the statistics are wrong about.
That’s an unbelievably false analogy. First of all, saying “men harass us on the street” is a statement of fact, just as saying “black people mug me on the street” would be a statement of fact if I had been mugged many times and only by black people. That’s unfortunately not impossible to imagine. What’s offensive is saying that all men harass or all black people mug. And that’s never what women who complain about harassers are saying; if that’s what you hear, that’s on YOU.
Additionally, in this case the statistics are RIGHT. Only men sexually harass women on the street.
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I hope you’ll agree that saying “men harass us on the street” is offensive to non-harassers in a similar way to how saying “black people mug us” would be offensive.
I’m sure you hope that people will agree. But no, pretending that women’s fear of men is just like evil racism is, well, I think the phrase is “drama queen”.
If a black person says “white people say racist shit to us,” I, as a white person who avoids saying racist shit, am not offended that their generalizations hurt my precious feelings. I recognize that there is a chance, perhaps, that I may have unwittingly said some racist shit, or shit that a black person perceived as racist but I didn’t. I also recognize that somebody who is getting the verbal equivalent of being punched in the face over and over again should get a little slack in the generalization department, and shouldn’t be first and foremost concerned with my white-person ego.
If you’re going to be offended, how about being angry, not at the women who are afraid of you, but about the harassers who made them afraid?
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I don’t want to stick my head into this back-and-forth too much, because it’s, um, What About The Men 101. Sorry, dude, but it is.
But here’s a thing.
I totally get how you feel like you’re being unfairly judged. How it feels gross to be generalized, instead of treated like an individual person. How it just feels humiliating and angering and disgusting to be treated like you have done something wrong simply based on your existence.
I totally get that because that’s how I feel when I’m sexually harassed.
The difference is, you can avoid those feelings. You can choose not to read these threads. You can not befriend feminists, or women who are vocal about their feminism, or men who agree with them. You can leave your house every day with absolutely no fear that a woman will approach you and tell you that you are offensive.
I can’t.
This is where the privilege comes in. You can reasonably find a place in society to express your anger at being generalized with poor characteristics, and you can be reasonably sure that place will not be intruded upon by women demanding you consider their feelings, and telling you that you are way more unfair than they are.
I can’t. ‘Cause, uh, you’re here. Hey.
Nobody should have to feel the way you feel now, or the way I feel when I get sexually harassed. But the answer isn’t to tell women they aren’t allowed to make judgments based on their safety and experience of the world. The answer is to change their experience of the world. That’s a thing you can do by using the hurt you feel now to empathize with a hurt we can’t escape.
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Clearly I’ve gone off in the wrong direction with this. I really did just want to thank you for making my experience better (as you say, you weren’t responsible to, but you did anyway), and instead I managed to be yet another guy on the internet making your experience worse.
I’ll just go back to lurking, reading, and trying to notice bad experiences out in the real world in time to do something about them.
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Jeffery Y,
I didn’t ‘think that’s what you’re saying’ because of all the other men who come up with that trite reversal. I thought that’s what you were saying because YOU wrote this:
“they seem to lump all women into the single group of harassees and all men into the single group of harassers which strikes me as incorrect and offensive on both sides”.
So, you’ve cleared it up, and said that your issue is that you think saying “men harass us on the street” is offensive to non-harassers.
But mate, saying that men harass us is NOT the same as saying ALL men harass us. If you read it that way, that’s your issue. Because it’s true – men DO harass us. Sorry, but it’s true, no matter how much it makes you uncomfortable. Hell, it makes ME uncomfortable. But it’s still true. Men still harass us. Period.
I don’t think that statement “hurts exactly the men who are closest to being on your side.” In fact I know it doesn’t. I’ve been in the position of hearing people complain of the treatment they receive at the hands of my demographic, and I don’t take offence – because I know they’re not talking about me personally. They don’t have to spell it out. And if I feel uncomfortably like they may be talking about me, I examine my actions and see if the shoe fits. When it does, I take responsibility for it.
The only men I know who are hurt when I talk about this stuff are the ones who think that my pandering to their feelings and keeping them comfortable is more important than anything else, the ones who are so wedded to their ideals and their privilege that they don’t want to think about what it feels like to be on the other side, the ones who don’t like uncomfortable conversations that may force them to change their behaviours or challenge the status quo.
If you don’t like the fact that men harass us, you could help us. How? Yes, by not harassing women. But also, by calling out men who harass women. You won’t see them do it to a woman you are with – but you may just be walking down the street when some random man harasses some random woman. You may be out with your mates when one of them harasses a woman. You can call them on it and tell them to stop. I know that “it’s really hard for friends to accuse other friends to acting badly”. But that’s what it takes to be an ally. The system is designed so that you can ignore it in comfort – being an ally means not ignoring it and stepping out of your comfort zone.
Also, the fact that some of your female friends SOMETIMES want to talk to men on the street, doesn’t actually signify anything. I quite often enjoy talking to people on the street, both men and women. That doesn’t mean I don’t get harassed, and it doesn’t mean I invite harassment. Like I said earlier, eye contact is the key. Just because I sometimes want to talk to men, doesn’t mean I’m available for all men’s pleasure at any time, and unfortunately it doesn’t mean I won’t get harassed when I’m not in the mood for talking.
And this: “The assumption that all women get harassed actually hurts women who don’t experience harassment, since they seem to assume (incorrectly) it’s because of something wrong with them.” makes it look like you have NO IDEA of what we’re talking about. Do you really think there are women out there who *crave* harassment and think there’s something wrong with them if they’re not harassed? I call bullshit on that one. Again, harassment is fundamentally different to ‘desired attention’ – in fact, it’s the OPPOSITE.
If it’s genuine compliments your female friends are missing, that may have something to do with the patriarchal structure which defines women’s value by their attractiveness and usefulness to men. Women who don’t fit the male standard and ideal tend to become invisible in a society which values the gratification of men above all else. It would be nice if your friends didn’t feel they need to judge their worth by how sexually attractive they are to random men; but unfortunately that ideal is indoctrinated in women from the time they are children.
Perhaps, next time they tell you they think something is wrong with them, you could tell them that there’s actually something wrong with our society which values them on their looks and the amount of attention they get from men more than for their own character and achievements.
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I don’t want you to feel like you can never comment again. But this whole conversation on the blogosphere just got started, and it exploded pretty hard (turns out, it’s a pretty sensitive topic). Over on SP, it was just a monstrous thread of doom because women were explaining over and over again their experiences to men who, in one way or another, refused to get why what they were saying was so important and/or couldn’t be kinda just “gotten over”. It was a long and contentious thing, and I think the only people who were willing to have a happy conversation about it dropped out, because it stopped being happy. It’s a drain of energy to tussle that hard for that long. So by the time you got here, the only people willing to still tussle are the kind of people with energy for it. Which means you kind of just did the equivalent of seeing a big fat screaming argument, and walking into the middle of it going, “Hey, guys, what’s up?”
I get that your experience is also shitty, and I think you deserve your own space to talk about it. But I don’t think that space is on a feminist blog run by a woman and mostly read and participated in by women. Men should have more places where they can discuss feminist issues and their privilege and problems in a 101 way without having to worry about offending women or ranking experiences. There are a few male feminist blogs out there (you could also start your own), and I think that’s really the place for this, since one big fat stinking feminist issue is men horning in our space to discuss their issues. It’s not that our issues aren’t interconnected like whoa, but after dealing with the SP thread full of “I don’t think this is as big a deal as you say it is and also it makes me feel bad so stop it,” people tend to get less benefit of the doubt-y to any dude coming in saying “it’s not fair.” It’s not fair that you have to deal with the other end of this sexist shit, but I’m not sure you’re hitting the right forum or the right time to talk about it.
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Jeffrey, your comments highlight how sexism hurts everyone, and in that you are right on. The thing is, and I’m saying this in the most supportive way, not as an accusation but as a ‘friend’ keeping it real, they also show that there are a few things you could use a little more clarity and understanding with in order to be the ally it seems you’d like to be.
If you lived with the threat of constant harassment and physical danger from a group of people, and only that group of people, every day of your life, you would HAVE TO generalize for the sake of your safety. Women cannot afford to not generalize, because it might cost us our lives, or life as we know it. So criticizing women for that is basically saying “well sure your life is at stake, but it hurts my feelings when you protect your life.”
It also puts the blame on women who are only doing what they need to in order to survive a reality that they have not created and don’t want. I don’t WANT to be suspicious of every single guy I don’t know super well. I HAVE to be. And I have to be honest and say I think I suffer far more than you over this generalization because I actually have to curtail my daily life around this. I can’t hang out with people, do group activities, get a tutor, etc. etc. etc. freely the way you can – because I have to make sure I won’t be alone with guys I do not know beyond the shadow of a doubt will not assault me. So you need a little perspective on how the effects of generalization on you fit into a much larger picture.
And you also need to put the blame on the MEN and the culture that creates this reality. Where any guy, even many of those a women thinks she knows, can be a serious danger to her life. THIS is the problem that causes you to be hurt by generalizations. Not the women who HAVE TO generalize.
I think you might also appreciate this article. It addresses both why its normal for women to generalize, and has great pointers for men about the whole topic of approaching women.
http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/
And I hope you can walk away from Harriet’s post and all of these comments having learned some really important things that help you to be an ally, understanding that this was really helpful to you, appreciating that people are willing to explain and inform you, and using the information to engage MORE, and do so more informedly and productively. Rather than leaving pessimistically thinking you should avoid engagement because you don’t always know what’s right and wrong to say, and it sucks to be told that you’re wrong. The former is the positive, open, courageous kind of thing that will help. The latter would be negative, closed, cowardly and basically anti-feminist.
And Harriet you are the bees’ knees!
(please post this one and not the one where I just accidentally hit submit before finishing the last sentence
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It’s like that bad old joke, where a guy tells a doctor that it hurts every time he raises his arm, and the doctor tells him to stop raising his arm. All well and good, unless you, you know, actually need your arm to accomplish the basic tasks of daily living.
When a lady says, “I feel unsafe in public due to the behaviors of men,” the bad old joke goes, “Stop doing that, then.” Stop feeling unsafe, stop being in public, stop being in public with men, stop feeling unsafe with men, stop feeling unsafe in public with men, or whatever fancy permutation you can come up with. Which is all well and good, unless you, you know, actually need to be in public with men in order to accomplish the basic tasks of daily living.
Eliminating or suppressing visible effects and results of problems is not the same thing as eliminating, decreasing, or solving the problem. Likewise, vocalizing and making visible the effects of a problem is not the same thing as creating a problem, or contributing to a problem, or scuttling solutions to a problem.
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So, “dealing with feeling offended/whatnot” is certainly something men can go off and do on our own, and – uh – probably shouldn’t be asking ladies for help for (at least, in this context). But I think I understand it all (and react to it all) not like that, but as Cinnamon Girl notes “If you don’t like the fact that men harass us, you could help us. How? Yes, by not harassing women.” – she goes on from there, as if that’s a given and obvious and straightforward, and maybe it should be, but it ain’t necessarily, and I certainly read a lot of (but certainly not all! Some are pretty obviously disingenuous) of the “explosion” as men who are looking to do right or whatnot but are clearly dumb as a sack of hair as asking:
“How do I differentiate harassment from not harassment?”
Maybe that sounds like a dumb question. But, of course, I got a fairly usual male socialisation, which included a pretty strict drilling of “all nonplatonic attention from men is unwanted attention”. And I’ve been street harassed by ladies, well, once, and had women have expressed interest in some appropriate way zero times, so what’s an obvious distinction to those with lots of experience at both isn’t an obvious distinction to me, and a lot of guys. (and the usual “desperation to be lusted after, because no one ever has, or at least, no one has ever told us about it” can make us pretty dumb. Privilege, maybe, but it fucks up pretty bad any intuitive understanding, which leads right back to the main question.)
I dunno. I mean, I’d accept it as just if you said “That’s not our responsibility to tell you.” (In the vein Harriet Jacobs suggests above), or ignored (or deleted, whatever) my rambling. But I’m inclined to think it’s better to ask “How do I differentiate harassment from not harassment?” rather than continuing to putz around real life quite possibly fucking up on this issue.
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Here’s my answer:
Stop viewing romantic/sexual/relationship stuff as distinct, separate, and completely isolated from other stuff.
You can tell when you’re pissing off your boss, can’t you? Or when you’re bugging your mom? Or when your roommate is obviously kind of distracted and doesn’t really want to talk?
Alternatively, you can tell when you and your friends are having a great time at the bar, and want to keep hanging out till close. You can tell when your co-worker feels like goofing off instead of working. You can tell when your neighbor is feeling neighorly and wants to chat about the weather.
Part of what bothers me the most about street harassment — and men who profess to not be able to tell if they’re harassing me — is that these same men would be have NO difficulty reading my body language and social cues if the situation were not a come-on. I feel like it’s partially disingenous when men say they can’t “tell” when I do and don’t want to be bothered — because they’d be able to tell if they weren’t trying to hit on me — but I also feel like it’s an honest statement. I think men know how to deal with women when women are people; that is, in situations where their gender is not an overly present factor (I’ll leave aside the argument of whether or not gender is ever not a present factor). But in situations where gender is front-and-center, suddenly, a whole different set of rules apply. Suddenly, I am not a person with body language just like yours, and social cues just like yours, but a strange and alien creature from another planet who must be misunderstood, tricked, pressured, or otherwise manipulated to be understood. I’m not saying you like to think that way or want to think that way or start interactions with the intention of thinking that way; I think men have been taught to disregard the fundamental and basic humanity they share with women whenever their manhood is on the line. That is, I’m a person whose signals are entirely clear to read when I am your boss or your friend, but I am a perplexing strange mystery who must be poked at when I am capable of taking away your ability to prove your manhood with heterosexual displays.
I can’t edit this, I gotta run! Probably not my most cogent response, but my basic idea is: you have every ability to read the basic body language and social cues of women when you are not hitting on them; you don’t lose that ability when you are.
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Well, thanks for answering. You’re more or less right, of course. The reasons for men getting uppity over the situation probably is bad training, though I’m not sure it’s quite as straightforward as “well, apply your training from other areas.” Learning the different bits of body language is different (to some extent, obvious an absence of “anger” may be helpful in reading “bored”, for instance. I dunno.), but what’s really different (or at least, what’s been really different for me, and I gather is not uncommon among men) is that if you fail to read “interested” (in the non-platonic way), you never get corrected, and so you never learn. If I fail to notice people are angry, they tell me (well, often, anyhow, but it ain’t uncommon to hear “Jesus fuck, Brian, you’re pissing me right off.”), and I learn it. But if I fail to notice that some woman is interested in me, she doesn’t correct me (or at least, I’ve never been corrected on this point. Maybe nobody’s ever been interested?) and so I don’t learn. (At the very least, I don’t think my ability to read body language fails at (agreeable/disagreeable) interaction, but at (platonic/nonplatonic) interaction.) At least, I’ve historically figured I could read between “favourable interaction” and “unfavourable interaction” (usually, at least), but a lot of discussion about street harassment that I’ve read (and not necessarily just here) will impress upon the reader how women are expected to go along with it, not make a scene, and how the men involved with act oblivious to it’s unwanted nature. Now, whether they truly are or not, I dunno. But if they are, and if women are avoiding being confrontational, it’s certainly not unconceivable that I’ve fucked up reading signals. (Well, okay, with respect to street harassment specifically, maybe it is, because I don’t think I’ve ever tried to approach a strange women
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I personally try to rephrase myself often to focus on myself, and my behaviors, instead of other people’s actions. I do this because I cannot ever legitimately know what another person feels or thinks, but I can know what happens in my own head. A quick example of this would be to say, “I am annoyed by that person,” rather than to say, “That person is annoying.” I can’t judge what another person is or is not, good or bad; I can only say that I lack the abilities I need to cope with and enjoy that person’s company.
I bring that up here because, if it were me, I would try not to start from the position of, “Other people have failed to correct my actions.” I would instead start from the position of, “I have failed to notice other people’s attempts to correct my actions.” You can’t say for sure that women haven’t corrected you, in multiple times and places. You don’t know their experience, or thoughts. You only know your own experience, and you can only say that you never noticed any of them correcting you. That could mean that none of them ever have, but I doubt it — nobody’s perfect. I think it’s more likely that you lack the abilities you need to listen to corrections that don’t come verbally and explicitly, especially in the context of trying to pick up on women. But you can’t say any of that for sure — you can only say that, if women have corrected your behavior, you have failed to notice. And then you get to decide whether or not it’s important for you to know if women are correcting your behavior and you’re failing to notice.
If you want to make sure you are not being creepy at women, that’s a problem you have that you have to fix. It’s not the responsibility of women to correct you in exactly the right way, and that’s a pretty shitty responsibility to haul off onto somebody else. You’re basically saying, “I will ignore every other way you show disinterest in me, unless you hit upon the one method of displaying how personally uncomfortable I am making you that I consider valid, and also that way is a secret: you have to guess until you get it right, and until that time, I will continue invading your personal space, making you more and more uncomfortable, because you have not won the secret guessing game of mystery yet.”
You are creating an unreasonably high standard for women to reach before they get to avoid the invasive attention of you, an uninvited stranger. Since you have made the decision to invade somebody else’s space, the onus is on you to be sure your attention is wanted. Sexism is assuming that women are approachable for flirting unless they say, clearly and explicitly and out loud, “no.” That assumes that at all times women are in a state of “yes please come and talk to me.” That also assumes that it’s a woman’s responsibility to correct your behavior, rather than your responsibility to behave appropriately.
If this standard is fair for women — that they all are open for invasive attention unless they have said “no” out loud — then it should be fair for you. Perhaps you should start from the assumption that women don’t want to talk to you until they’ve said, clearly and explicitly and out loud, “Yes, come and talk to me.” That probably seems excessive and unfair — I mean, what chance will you have to speak to women now, if they have to explicitly invite you first? Well, welcome to how excessive and unfair what you said is. If your standard here — that a woman has to state out loud, “Go away” before you will go away — is a fair standard, then it’s just as fair to apply the same kind of standard to you. If women don’t get to have daily personal experiences in public that don’t involve having to continually fend off invasive strangers on an individual basis by issuing verbal commands at every interaction, then you do not have the right to interact in casual, appropriate, non-offensive ways without explicit verbal commands from every individual woman.
What I am saying is, assuming that other people have the responsibility to correct your behavior is a pretty bogus proposition from the start. You have the reponsibility to correct your behavior, and you have the responsibility to find out if your behavior is appropriate when you’re not sure. That is nobody else’s job, ever, not even a little. On the practical side, you can shift your thinking from “a woman has to say no if she doesn’t want my attention” to “a woman has to say yes if she wants my attention.” Don’t invade a woman’s space unless she looks interested in you; do this instead of setting some unreasonable standard of just how disinterested she has to look before you stop invading her space. An absence of disinterest is not an invitation to continue; an absence of any reaction at all is, itself, a woman attempting to correct your behavior. A presence of interest is an invitation, but a woman not disliking you hard enough by your secret internal and non-explicitly expressed scale does not mean she has failed to correct your behavior; it means she’s corrected it and you ignored her, and dismissed her disinterest as invalid because it wasn’t expressed perfectly. If you start from the assumption that you have no right to speak to a woman unless she’s given you a yes, you’ll probably be more interested in her body language than you are when you’re trying to avoid a no. It’s a lot easier to “misread” the ways in which a woman has corrected you if you don’t want to hear what she has to say.
Secondly, you have female friends, right? Why don’t you try asking them the signals they give to men they aren’t interested in? Have them illustrate them for you. It’s a lot easier (and much more fair) to ask somebody who is not trying to escape your unwanted and stifling attention to be clear and explicit, and it’s a lot more fair to ask for somebody who isn’t under pressure if they would mind correcting your behavior, because you admit you have a deficit. Expecting women who don’t want to talk to you to talk to you more in order to explain that they don’t want to talk to you is really unfair and manipulative; they don’t talk to you about this because they didn’t want to talk to you in the first place. So ask somebody that you do know wants to talk to you to explain and show what corrective behavior looks like.
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Oh, Jeez, I think I’ve misexplained myself.
Perhaps you should start from the assumption that women don’t want to talk to you until they’ve said, clearly and explicitly and out loud, “Yes, come and talk to me.” That probably seems excessive and unfair — I mean, what chance will you have to speak to women now, if they have to explicitly invite you first?
This is where I’m talking about coming from (certainly, it is already where I’m coming from). When I say “no one corrects you”, I’m really only talking about the “Interested in a woman -> assume she’s not interested -> say nothing -> she says nothing -> all evidence indicates the assumption of noninterest was right all along.” chain of events (here, if she was interested, she doesn’t correct my assumption of non-interest, is what I mean by non-correction. I’m not sure how I can correct myself in that chain. I guess it’s presumptuous to think that it might ever be the case that she’s interested, but that may be a digression?) Which is, I think, why a lot of men’ll react badly to the “always err on the side of caution” advice. I dunno; I could certainly be wrong about this and projecting my own experiences as too generic. But always err on the side of caution, translates identically to me as start from the assumption that women don’t want to talk to you until they’ve said, clearly and explicitly and out loud, “Yes, come and talk to me.” But – uh – if you can imagine why someone might balk at the latter, you should understand why some might balk at the former. (Or at least, why I did. Again, I may be genericising myself too much.) And a similar result exists with reading “I would be receptive to you proposing a romantic/sexual component to our relationship” versus reading “I would be uncomfortable if you proposed a romantic/sexual component to our relationship”. (Which really is where I think my own problems are, so it’s probably what I understand best. But unwanted interest probably translates pretty well to unwanted interest.)
Presumably if one were flawless in the assume no interest – express no interest cycle, they’d have no unaddressable concerns about harassing anyone. (You still have to be concerned about unintentional signals, whatnot, but you probably don’t really need any feedback to correct that.) But this probably isn’t really what most people want to be doing, right? (And few are probably flawless at it. Certainly when I’m single, I break down occasionally and end up asking someone out or whatnot, at least one of whom ended up declining, so please don’t imagine that I’m trying to proclaim my innocence or anything. I’m not.)
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Okay, two things:
1) Most of the anti-street-luv comments here are attempting to express why a woman might not be receptive to even the nicest guy trying to hit on them. Often the response to this is: “But I’m different! I’m a nice guy!” (which is not a nice guy response) instead of “Oh shit I didn’t realize you just didn’t want to put up with this today, because you put up with it so often. Sorry for bothering you” (which is a nice guy response). If you try to hit on a girl, and she shows no interest, and you back off completely with no hard feelings and full respect for her right to set a boundary, you’re doing okay. Sometimes you will still get a negative repsonse, but this is because women deal with a level of harassment that you never will, and sometimes even a nice guy invading her space is just one more guy who thought he could look at her tits today.
2) It might be better to look at the “assume she has no interest in you” standard as “assume she has no romantic interest in you.” That is, if you want to talk to a girl because you think she might be neat and you would like to know her as a person and find out how she thinks and feels, try it. Women love being treated like people. If you want to talk to a girl because you want to skip past the neat and get to know her as a person and thinking and feeling part and hit upon romantic attraction immediately, don’t assume she’s open to this unless she’s expressed an interest romantically. Women field pick-up attempts constantly from guys who — perhaps in their brains and perhaps in their pick-up lines — express an interest in them as people, but are obviously only interested in them as people if they are people who are also willing to fuck them. Once the no fucking part has been established, the ostensible interest in them as people goes away. So, try assuming that girls have an interest in meeting people for things other than romance, and approach them that way, assuming you have the same interest.
3) If in doubt, ask. Not me. You’ve asked me a lot. You’re not trying to date me. I don’t speak for women. I speak for myself. Ask the women you know who turned you down, if you’re on good terms. Ask the women you know who you aren’t interested in dating but whose opinions you respect. If you don’t have either of these things, those are problems you need to solve long before you solve the “hitting on women” problem.
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You’ve asked me a lot.
Yeah, sorry about that. Thanks for being chatty.
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I was walking home less than an hour ago, and said “‘scuse me” to two guys so I could get past them. One mimicked: “‘scuse me’ back at me, but did move enough for me to get past.
Then he called out after me: “Look at your bum, yoiur bum is fucked. Her (a woman walking ahead of me) bum is way better than yours!” and generally had a conversation with his friend about ‘bum and tits’.
I kept walking, rather wanted to give them the finger over my shoulder, but figured that engaging or even acknowledging I was hearing them ‘wasn’t wise’, whatever the hell that actually means.
They wandered off in another direction, but I kept aural tabs on them until they did, feeling sort of shaky, and faintly upset.
But I remembered your post, and that there was a process, and a rationale behind this shit, with three dot points, even! And trying to remember the specifics of your post kept me much calmer and in retrospect I didn’t even start the ‘what did I do?’ loop. I just wanted to say thank you for that, for the inadvertent helping keep me calm, and for being here still so I can tell someone about the whole (tiny/huge/still unnerving…) Thing. Thank you
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