sexual advances - the big question

[BramshawHill]

BBC the big question is currently discussing whether sexual advances should be accepted as a part of life.

The first speaker has said it weakens men and women if women complain about it every time, and that it IS a part of life.

Anyone else watching? Thoughts?

First time posting, hello btw!

No prom, I was addressing the reporter.

Ahem.

Personally I think its brilliant that we have so many men on MN who are all so interested in discussing feminism and womens rights. I mean, in general life, most gents I've met don't put it at the top of their list of conversation topics, so we're just super-lucky to have some here who are keen to discuss it whenever they can, even to the exclusion of anything else. Super lucky. I think it lends an importance to a subject that may otherwise be overlooked.

True, baby, very true.

Totally agree Babyheave. What would we do without the men telling us how we SHOULD feel after being inappropriately touched up at work or elsewhere?

We have to "man up" of course.

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

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.

Ewww.

That is proper creepy.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.