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Son, we need to have a serious talk!
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Not entirely. It's also because men have historically been bad about telling creepy and misogynistic men to back off and shut the fuck up.
I would sooner see men step up and call out the bad actors -- and I say that as a man who's done so. Don't teach your daughters that they need to be wary about what they wear, teach your sons to respect and not rape women.
And I would be happy to join you in doing this, but this is not the company I keep. In my life I can barely count the number of times I have, or could have, on one hand. Meanwhile, when talking to women about this sort of thing, everyone has awful stories but they all involve people that simply are not a part of their social sphere (and by extension mine) anymore.
I fear that we, as a society, have done such a good job of pushing bad actors out to the margins that we no longer have eyes on the problem.
It's not even just that they're at the margins, it's also a math problem. One bad actor can sexually harass hundreds, perhaps even thousands of women over the course of many years. Now make that thousands of men, and see how it's very reasonable that 1 in 2 women or whatever it is have been sexually harassed or assaulted - and that can still be less than 1% of the male population doing it. Anyone who doubts women get harassed or even assaulted often needs to have their head examined. There is a guy in my neighborhood currently who has not been caught who is following women while in his car. The neighborhood listservs are awash with women who have noticed this guy. There was another guy who was groping women on the trail who affected multiple women before they caught him.
And this is not just sex crimes. Recently, they arrested a group of car thieves/car jackers in my area. The four of them were responsible for over two hundred car thefts, and possibly up to three hundred additional unaccounted for crimes. And that's for a very visible crime like stealing a car - imagine the numbers for something like groping someone on a crowded train or bus.
This is why people who say stuff like, "just teach men not to rape" are as insane as saying "just teach minorities not to steal cars". It is a tiny portion of the population having an outsized influence because they can harm multiple people. When you start blaming a group for the actions of a tiny portion of that group, you're just lost.
I mean sure, call out crime in general when you see it, but I have seen this type of harassment probably a dozen times in my life. And it happens all around, dozens of times a day.
This is also the same kind of unintuitive math that makes it likely that your friends will be more popular than you..... because popular friends are more likely to know you than unpopular friends.
Your neighborhood has a listserv? I haven't seen one in ages.
You know I didn't think about it like this. It does make sense though. I think as well it's good to point out that the main recipients of violence and murder are other men, not women. Therefore I am suspicious when women talk about these things and being afraid but men don't. It seems like a double standard.
Part of the problem is that men are simply not on alert for bad behavior. They have the luxury of being unaware. When my friend's dad groped me at a party, I was in a conversation circle with him and 3 of my male friends. None of them noticed him doing it, none of them noticed me going stiff and pale. None of them questioned why I suddenly felt sick and immediately called an Uber to leave.
The dad felt totally comfortable to do that literally less than 2 feet from three other men because you guys aren't looking out for it in a way that women are. Alternatively, I've had stranger women come up to me in public to ask me if I'm uncomfortable because a guy at a gas station is talking to me while I pump my gas. We're looking out for each other.
"We all a society" have absolutely not pushed out bad actors. If anything, women have closed ranks, but in my experience the men have not, without explicit instruction, called out bad behavior.
This is not the good thing you think it is. Women shouldn't be hyper-alert about all men, and should use words when being made uncomfortable (or literally sexually assaulted).
If I see a woman go pale and then leave a party, I will assume "oof, must have really had to poop". I refuse to assume every facial tick on a woman is a sign of sexual assault. That's a toxic, paranoid way to live.
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.
Thank you for this insight. We all really need more of this kind of dialogue to build awareness around what to look for.
Men expect you to communicate if you have an issue, that is how we communicate. We're busy looking for the next tough guy, suckerpuncher, or knife-wielding psycho because those are the kinds of scars we bear. We're not going to be looking at subtle changes in the color of your skin in a dark bar.
That's a really good point. The men who could call out this behavior are usually in exclusive circles from the bad actors.
As I think about it, I really haven't had many opportunities either. There's only one that really stands out to me, and it's when I was out with some friends drinking and we were getting some food to end the night. A stranger was moving to grope a friend of mine, and I shut that down quickly.
But that's it. This is actually a bit of a difficult question. How exactly do we chastise the bad actors? Maybe the best we can do is teach the next generation, and just call it out when we do see it.