this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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I agree that women shouldn't have to be hyper alert, but with our culture the way it is, we have to be to keep ourselves safe.
How about instead of saying I should have spoken up about a man groping me, you say, "he shouldn't have groped you." There's no reason my friend's old married father should have thought I would be comfortable with his hands on me in a bathing suit area.
I'm saying men with opinions like yours put the entire onus of safety solely on women's shoulders forcing us to live that toxic paranoid way, as you put it. If you guys would start doing your part to police one another, women wouldn't have to be so scared all the time.
What makes you think me speaking up would have stopped that man? He clearly had no respect for my personal space, my autonomy, or my comfort. He has already proven he is willing to break social rules and norms. The safest thing for me to do was get away, because confronting a person who does not respect or care about you, who is not bound by the social contract will more likely lead to them hurting you.
How about both? It's infantilizing for you to suggest I don't understand a basic principle like "assault is bad". Of course he shouldn't have groped you. That was bad. That's just a baseline, floor-level understanding that we should both agree on.
Well, for one thing, we don't know which guys are doing this. Even if, as you suggest, the burden should fall solely on men to stop other men (a bit of a problematic viewpoint in itself), we can't stop it if we don't know it's happening. Guys don't brag to each other about sexual assault. We just don't talk about sex in general. "Locker room talk" is and always has been a myth. Women talk with each other. Men don't.
We cannot read your mind and know that any particular guy has done anything bad to you. You have to say something. And if you don't, the only other option is for everyone to constantly be asking every woman if they're being assaulted. Like that old Verizon commercial: "are you being assaulted now? Are you being assaulted now?" which is just toxic and awful and paranoid and massively damaging to everyone's mental health.
I can 100% understand just not wanting to deal with it. Running away and then never speaking about it, and avoiding that guy for the rest of your life is much easier than opening a can of worms.
But if you do that, you have to take responsibility for doing that. Don't pretend "not my problem, Men should be fixing everything".
I never said I think this should be a men fix it problem, I just think both sexes should be working on noticing it, calling out behavior, and fixing it. I'm my experience, women are constantly vigilant, and men are inconsistently vigilant, and much much more likely to give other men the benefit of the doubt regardless of what women say.
I'm not asking anyone to read my mind. If you think men don't talk about their minor sexual assaults because men don't talk period, I guess you just have a very quiet friend group. I have absolutely heard men talk about this stuff at multiple work places, not even to necessarily brag, just because they don't Even realize what they're doing is wrong. The number of stories I heard at college alone is gross and frightening.
I'd like men to call out other men/ their friends, because women fear physical retaliation for calling out this behavior: any man exhibiting this behavior has already proven they don't believe women should be treated with respect, care, or boundaries. If men call out their friends, likely the consequence is a strained relationship.
I don't know what to tell you, I've never seen or heard of guys talking about that stuff outside of a few isolated incidents. (except college, which is its own fucked up thing)
Maybe you live in a very conservative, misogynistic area. But even when I lived in the deep south, that kind of talk was rare.
Like I think some girls think there's this whole hidden world of guy talk as soon as women aren't around to hear. That doesn't happen.
It does happen, though I'm glad to learn it doesn't happen in your circles. As a former receptionist who could hear in the conference room of my office though the people inside didn't realize, the men absolutely did say much worse things when no women were in the room.
I went to a liberal arts college full of progressive and Democrats who openly disparaged conservatives. I witnessed often reprehensible behavior.
One time my husband called out a misogynistic comment in a friend group chat. He found out a year later calling out that behavior once is why he was never added to the males only chat. They didn't want to have to "watch what they say" around him. Men definitely do speak differently in situations where women are not present. Not all men, but plenty.
Fair enough, I guess we just have wildly different personal experiences. Maybe mine is the abnormal one.