sexual advances - the big question

No, LRD, no shit! S'true. It's a filtering out process, that's fairly effective, and so gives licence to come out with all sorts of rubbish.

Yes, that's true, they need to be taught that we know it's wrong and that someone will pick them up on it.

I think there are some who persuade themselves they don't know it's wrong.

It's a little bit like those questionaries about rape, isn't it? You know - if you ask men if it's acceptable to rape a woman, you get a lot of 'no's, but if you ask if they think it's ok to force a woman to have sex, you get a higher number of 'yes' answers. I think it might be the same thing here - they know that the behaviour called 'sexual harrassment' is wrong. But they also don't label their actions like that, consciously or unconsciously.

I don't think all these men need to be taught that it's inappropriate and wrong tbh.

I think they already know it is.

But they calculate that they will get away with it and 99.9 recurring % of the time, their calculations are correct.

And part of the kick, is knowing it's wrong but that they can get away with it.

Am not sure what split it would be between that type and the type who genuinely can't see anything wrong with it because they're so entitled that they don't recognise they're doing something wrong.

No shit. It never ceases to amaze me how blind people can be to the way they are behaving and their own experiences.

Great anecdote, duchesse.

duchesse - that's pretty strong example, and fairly clear. When working with abusers the very notion of them being 'victims' at some stage in their lives can be very alien to them. They are good at 'compartmentalising' stuff and failing to see, at all, how their abused status has any reference to anything they are doing. It's that cognitive dissonance between experiences.

For borderline behaviour, I prefer to use the old school thing of raising an eyebrow and saying "That's a bit inappropriate."

I saw this recently. It resonated a lot:

^ We were discussing homosexuality because of an allusion to it in the book we were reading, and several boys made comments such as, ?That?s disgusting.? We got into the debate and eventually a boy admitted that he was terrified/disgusted when he was once sharing a taxi and the other male passenger made a pass at him.

The lightbulb went off. ?Oh,? I said. ?I get it. See, you are afraid, because for the first time in your life you have found yourself a victim of unwanted sexual advances by someone who has the physical ability to use force against you.? The boy nodded and shuddered visibly.

?But,? I continued. ?As a woman, you learn to live with that from the time you are fourteen, and it never stops. We live with that fear every day of our lives. Every man walking through the parking garage the same time you are is either just a harmless stranger or a potential rapist. Every time.?

The girls in the room nodded, agreeing. The boys seemed genuinely shocked. 

?So think about that the next time you hit on a girl. Maybe, like you in the taxi, she doesn?t actually want you to.?^

That is horrible, duchesse - and I agree with porto and with the way you've put it in your last post - the men who do this need to know it's not on. Women shouldn't need strategies to deal with it - and frankly, I think such strategies will never really work.

Yikes, Porto (re the hair).

The adulting link upthread was a good response to personal space invasion in a work context (at least, I think it's on this thread - dodgy wifi so don't want to scroll up).

If it's on the borderline, why don't we say, "Stop that, it makes me uncomfortable"? Oh yeah, in case the bloke in question is one of the shouty insulty ones.

Porto You'll have to explain re pot,kettle,black?

re the 'advances', the protaganist isn't concerned about a skills deficit. They know on some level it's wrong. But they don't really care about the morality of it.

An odd advance I've had was from a bloke on a bus, when I was about 12, who thought it okay to rub my knee and ask about any fantasies I had experienced, about men. I was fairly scared, despite being in a public place.

It's true, duchesse... just as we wouldn't hesitate in shouting at someone who was trying to pinch our wallet.

But of course, if groping and perving was seen as unacceptable as stealing, many fewer men would do it.

But most men wouldn't dream of doing that either! And the ones who do need to experience swift pain to know it's not on.

I mean I work in a dynamic IT environment. There are some lovely looking young guys that I work with on a daily basis. I might think in my head that xxx looks particularly gorgeous and tanned after his holiday, but I would NEVER dream of touching his leg or ruffling his hair to show my appreciativeness of his gorgeousness. Because that would be assault.

All those things happened to me in my teens and early 20s by the way. It's disconcerting and angering to be honest. Especially when it comes from people who have power over you, often professionally.

But if there are fucktards who do it and want to do it (and i suspect that might always be), then we ought to be able to tell them to f*ck off- eventually they'd get the message that it was socially unacceptable. The vast majority of men don't go around groping, exposing themselves, rubbing themselves inappropriately against women in rush hour trains, call out lewd things, make suggestive comments randomly etc etc... But we've all had this happen, so clearly a significant minority of men who not socialised enough to realise it's crass and unacceptable. And we ought to be able to knee them in the nuts tell them to fuck off in no uncertain terms.

Duchesse - to me the point is that you should not need "skills" - they shouldn't fecking do it the first place. How hard IS that to understand?

I had a driving instructor touching me inappropriately too. Aged 17 and I looked like a 12 yo. I was angry but had no tools to deal with it.

Yeah, it's when it's just at the boundary of what's acceptable, isn't it, it's really hard to know what to do and I think it's deliberate. I had a driving instructor who demonstrated how to 'squeeze and release' the clutch on my thigh. Obviously I could have reported that, but it's also not quite as obvious as anything else and you have a moment of being unsure how to pick them up on it.

I think a lot of what we are discussing boils down to how to say no, assertively and in a way that gets the message across unequivocally. If I think back to all the times in my life I've been subjected to unwelcome attention, what riles the most is my inability to deal with it. I don't know about anybody else, but I was brought up conditioned to do what I was told and be a people-pleaser. Whereas what girls in particular really need is to be taught how to be assertive, how to get what they want and how to say no. And not try to please people all the damned time.

We ought to be able to tell someone to leave us alone in an utterly unequivocal way. The woman who was complaining about Lord Rennard ought to have been able to tell him she was not interested and to leave her alone, instead of using subterfuges to get rid of him.

It is isn't it. If he touched my tits I would have slapped him and marched to HR.
But my hair...it would have sounded silly. It made me SO uncomfortable though. Still gives me the shivers now.

Ewww.

That is proper creepy.

Yes LRD. I remember 20 years ago, my boss stroking my long hair as it was "so beautiful". The fact that it made me freeze with fear and uncertainty and rendered me incapable of speech, decries the fact of how flattered I should have been that he liked my hair.

If only we had more of a sense of humour about it all.