Entitled male refused access to female changing area (despite wearing skirt)

I think it does get across. It must be the point of the activity.
I remember years ago in the days of Spare Rib, though it may not have been there that I read it, and I did not wholly agree with it, that it was argued that all men have an interest in having a few perverts performing in society, to keep women in their place, excluded. Which is why it isn't stopped. One girl is flashed on one train, and it's like a vaccination. As a result many girls don't use many trains.

You’ve got right to the heart of it.

Ooh, that makes me so cross for the 16 year old you, @SamW98 !

It does not matter how lovely or safe a male person is: some women cannot use mixed sex spaces. They can't. A male walks in to live his best life and have his most comfortable choice from all the facilities and by doing so some women lose access to any facilities at all .

It’s quite astonishing really, isn’t it, how difficult it is to get this simple and fundamental message out.

I was on the bus one evening - aged about 16. A man sat the opposite side of the aisle and started masterbating furiously making sexual noises.
I didn’t look and the noises got louder and louder til I got up and went downstairs.

I went to the front and told the driver - his reaction ‘well what do you want me to do about it?’

I got off and waited 30 minutes for the next bus and I never said a word to my parents. Just tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.

When I was little, my mum chased a flasher out of the garden with her sword. It was one of her favourite stories to repeat later in life, always with a wistful regret that she hadn't chopped it right off him! She was formidable. Taught me all about male chauvinist pigs too, she didn't take any nonsense from any man.

I just got the shagging couple on a grassy ledge halfway down the cliff face on my mapping project area.

Not really the kind of exposure I’d been expecting 🤣

My great aunt (who must have been in her 90s at the time) was flashed while she was walking her dog. She told him to put it away.

My elderly grandmother, years ago now, once had someone flash her while she was working in her garden (and very much in a position of safety). She told me she squinted at him, and upon realising what he was doing, loudly told him that she wouldn't be showing that off if she were him. She used to teach, and was using her most scornful "what a silly child you are" tone. To her delight, he rapidly covered up and scuttled off. Guess that wasn't quite the response he was after...!

I know if you want to piss them off, you would laugh. But I gather that's quite dangerous.

What is the recommended response to that?

The men who flash know it's not a joke. They're not doing it to make us laugh and brighten up our day.

I was on the tube in the late 80s. Middle of the day, an almost empty carriage. He got on. A couple of stops later I looked up and he had his penis out.

That was the first time on public transport that I really remember. There were other times on buses.

I was on the last tube home one night in the 90s. Reading my book. Looked up to see a man exposing himself standing right in front of me so it was at eye level and very close. I was very scared. I’ve never forgotten it after 30 years. It was no laughing matter at all.

Maybe 25 years ago, on a sunny bank holiday, I was at a popular Peak District spot with my small child, and with very many other families. And through the crowd strutted an elderly man wearing nothing but a baggy turquoise G string. So he was not actually flashing but clearly was totally inappropriately undressed. You've got to wonder

Interesting. I had virtually the same experience in the middle of London early 2000s. Hot day, lots of people sunbathing in the park in their lunch hours, elderly bloke similarly attired walked through the crowds to find a space in the middle of the grass.

I just put it down to being uninhibited, but of course the audience might have been the whole point.

This is succinct and perfectly expressed.

Before it happened to me, I got to work one morning and one of the staff nurses was being interviewed by a copper. To my shame now, I laughed when she told me she’d been flashed on her way to work, and she made it very clear that it wasn’t a laughing matter.

One has to wonder what passes for thought in their minds. My lady brain doesn't have an equivalent.

yes, many of my uni friends thought it was quite a joke that I was flashed. But it happened on a dark cut-through in a small development of university accomodation, where he'd clearly waited for a passer-by, and was accompanied by some unintelligable words from the flasher. I couldn't tell what the words were, but I knew the tone and it scared me. It wasn't funny at all, despite what all the "lads" in my friendship circle seemed to think.

…I didn’t report it, couldn’t have identified him anyway, as I pretended I simply couldn’t see him standing next to where I was sitting with his cock in his hand.

As a child in the 70s, flashing was a bit of a joke, a bit Benny Hill, the subject of cartoons and postcards. It wasn’t until it happened to me - at an otherwise deserted railway platform after a late shift - that I really appreciated how scary and menacing it is. The boy who flashed me was no more than 16 (I was about 25 IIRC) and I wondered then and since what he might be doing by the time he was 20.

It made me move to within walking distance of work, so it effected a positive change, but from a place of fear.

If I were AC, I think I'd now give up on the wig, go back to wearing my bloke's jeans and try to pretend it all never happened and that AC was a VERY distant cousin with whom I had no contact.

Of course, I'm not AC and therefore have no idea how AC plans to brazen this one out.

And on the flasher front, I've seen several over the years. I reported one to the police and was surprised at how seriously they took it, and how supportive they were to me (and this was in the 1980s!) But the copper told me about the concept of escalation of sex-related (read, power-related) crimes. So it's been recognised for a long, long time.

Maybe 25 years ago, on a sunny bank holiday, I was at a popular Peak District spot with my small child, and with very many other families. And through the crowd strutted an elderly man wearing nothing but a baggy turquoise G string. So he was not actually flashing but clearly was totally inappropriately undressed. You've got to wonder.

Gah! Formatting fail again...

*Treaclemine" · Today 10:48

That triggers a memory. Geology field trip at Beachy Head.

Oh! A fellow rock fondler! Sorry to hear about your experience with the perv, I bet he would have stayed put, had you been in a mixed group.

Mine too.