Nice Tits!

[gaggiagirl]

Dont know if I'm posting this in the right place, just wanted to share and vent.
Walking into the main gates of a big hospital today I hear a car engine very close to me and a horn beep. I turn around to see a car with four lads in it about 17 or 18 years old. Windows wound down. Driver shouts "NICE TITS" then toots and speeds off.
I was walking holding the hand of my four year old daughter and I'm 35 weeks pregnant. How dare they? I'm just a bit horrified really and wanted to get it out.

Sometimes they'll pull a "ooh, I'd love if a woman said nice arse to me."

They never make the true parallel of it being someone stronger and scarier than them who they had no attraction to, and that it wasn't one woman in a pub but month after month, year after year, in the street, at work, I front of our kids etc and sometimes with escalation into insults and threats if the call was ignored, or sometimes starting with insults (fat cow etc) if we are not fuckable enough.

So no, it's not a compliment, sonny jim.

"sexual assaults often aren't seen as assaults. "

Yy to this. Which the "women are as bad as men at DV" brigade usually ignore.

Completely agree.

A friend of mine was once out with a group of local lads, she was friends with all of them but not best friends iyswim. She was a bit tipsy and a bit flirty with them all, no harm in that of course. But then a couple of them thought that gave them permission to be funny and grope her a bit and pretend to bend her over the pool table etc. she was mortified and disgusted of course yet the bar staff and landlord who was watching just said it was a bit of fun and they didn't think there was any harm done.

They would have had a completely different response if they had started slapping her round the face or getting aggressive with her I'm sure!

They were aggressive with her - just socially acceptably aggressive.

What a horrible experience for your friend and it's worse when it's blokes you know and like and are out with sometimes as you don't feel so able to tell them to fuck off and you don't understand why your "friends" are doing this.

And of course this stuff sticks with you and each time it happens, and especially from people you had not expected it from, it erodes your faith in the male sex just a little bit.

The people who suggest that women and girls should always give each and every man the benefit of the doubt in any and all situations, they should believe he is kind and gentle and nice right up until the point where he shows he is not - this is asking women and girls to ignore all their personal experiences and ignore all of their instincts about people they meet, for the benefit of any old random man. It's shit.

If I want to treat men who approach me unsolicited with suspicion then I will. If I want to be scared of some of them then I will. I don't have to talk to them, I don't have to be polite to them. I am going to teach my daughters this. It is important.

Oh, men's perpetual perceived entitlement to women's bodies pisses me right off.

I'm a big lass. I once went to the pub with some friends, who started chatting to these other folks. One bloke in particular didn't even bother talking to me all evening, but, when we were all leaving, came up from behind me, put his arms around me and dribbled 'shall we go back to mine, then?' in my ear like it was a done deal. I raised an eyebrow and showed him my engagement ring. He was so surprised he actually took a step back and stuttered 'well aren't...aren't you a lucky girl then?'.

So a) big lasses are so desperate for sex you don't even need to talk to them, b) being previously claimed by another man automatically trumps other men's right to 'hit that' and c) what an entitled dick (literally). I think he was actually trying to say 'he's a lucky man' but Freudian slipped his way into being a knob due to the pure shock of a fat chick already being 'claimed'. Oh how I laughed after several hours of fuming.

What a cockferret, niño.

Whirlpool, have you read The Gift of Fear?

Urgh what a wanker NiNo

I ought to really. There are loads of things I ought to read from here! I've not even read delusions of gender

Total wanker indeed (and quite literally that night ). But it does throw some interesting light on how some men think women are constantly up for it, regardless of whether they've said so or signaled it in some way. The root of some 'consent issues', I should think.

These men, what are they even thinking?

They are thinking that women and girls have literally no say in who they have sex with? That if they aren't already owned then they have to have sex with whoever approaches them? These are attitudes from the bible or something aren't they. We are aghast at the taleban and isis but the underpinning attitudes are exactly the same.

It does make me worry how much of women's gains are a veneer, and given some kind of crisis we'd be swiftly shut down and shut up and shut away again.

But then I think I'm being paranoid because NAMALT but BUT human beings are capable if awful things aren't they and they behave as is acceptable in their societies. Remove some of the moderating forces and do we slip back to square 1. I don't know.

Something like that Whirlpool. And yet they get to discrimate, to say who's fuckable or not. At the extreme end, you get those men like that Californian dickdrip who shot all those people because hot chicks wouldn't fuck him and non-hot chicks weren't worth bothering with (I can't remember his name and wouldn't give him the respect of using it if I did). At the more moderate yet still dickish end, you get idiots who think they're so entitled to women's bodies they can shout at them, touch them, stake a claim to them. It's all about power, really, and domination.

And yes, the crisis thought makes the Handmaiden's Tale a frighteningly realistic possibility, doesn't it?

"I've not even read delusions of gender"

"That if they aren't already owned then they have to have sex with whoever approaches them?"

I don't think it's that, quite. But some do think that, if they are attractive 'on paper' - if they see themselves as an 8 and you as an 8 or below, to use shitty language - then the default state is 'yes' - hence the Ched Evans 'we're footballers, chicks love it' attitude, DSK and the 30 years younger journalist ('I am rich and powerful, of course she will want me although my wife is friends with her mother'), the guy who approached Nino etc etc.

And if they are turned down, often they start to insult your appearance - what, my appearance, the only thing you know about me and the thing that made you want to fuck me in the first place? Find some logic, please.

Ah yes, the indomitable 'ugly bitch' comeback.

I think it goes: I think you're hot or sufficiently equal or below my hotness level to fuck me. If I shout Fuck Me! at you, you might fuck me. You don't want to fuck me? My fuckability has obviously just taken a downwards turn therefore I'm going to tell you yours has too and hope it hurts you just as much as it hurts me You Ugly Bitch.

It's all really quite playground, isn't it? You may as well counter with my dad's bigger than your dad.

Aha! And if you are already "owned", obviously you would've fucked that Fuck Me charmer otherwise, so no slur on his fuckability, he can apologise to your owner (if present) for presuming and go away with intact ego.

I think the motivations are interesting aren't they

For a lot of men - the ones who are in a group or with their mates or whatever, it's about male bonding. The female is an object over which they bond. Her feelings on being treated however it is, literally don't come into it, they aren't considered, they don't even cross their mind, because it's nothing actually to do with her, it's to do with the men's relationships with each other.

I mean that's one, there are lots of others obviously. Many of them come back to it being all about the bloke or blokes and the object of their whatever it is they are doing is not even sort of seen as a person, just a collection of body parts to leer at, shout at, touch, whatever. I think this is part of the reason the reaction is so strong when the female tries to assert her personhood and have an opinion about it - it's like he's just admiring a nice table lamp and WHAT THE FUCK IT'S TALKING TO ME and what the fuck IT'S NOT BEING NICE.

Sort of thing.

Others though actively enjoy upsetting and scaring and so on (they are the basic bullies) and the added sexual component just makes it all the scarier and nastier.

"t's like he's just admiring a nice table lamp and WHAT THE FUCK IT'S TALKING TO ME and what the fuck IT'S NOT BEING NICE."

Yup. That's the basic 'wolf whistling is a compliment' mentality.

Yes, my owner wasn't present though, so he was doubly surprised! But prior ownership is Not A Slight On My Manhood, as I was only rejecting him due to said ownership, he had chosen a woman who was deemed so fuckable she was ownable, therefore manliness untainted, so he displayed shock and immediate backing-off but not YUB. If I'd just gone 'no thanks, you skinny fucknut, I'd break you' (which was my second thought after 'ewwwshudderewww'), his reaction may have been different and a lot more aggressive. Which is why a lot of women react to unwelcome propositions with the I've Already Got a Boyfriend (prior ownership) defence. It's ridiculous and only solves the immediate problem, as opposed to long term social change, but it works.

Poor manfeelz.

"Which is why a lot of women react to unwelcome propositions with the I've Already Got a Boyfriend (prior ownership) defence. It's ridiculous and only solves the immediate problem, as opposed to long term social change, but it works."

Yup squared.

The thing for me about those comments on the street is that there is a spatial element to it. It's about a group of men together exerting a kind of dominance and power over a woman to make her feel like she is running some kind of gauntlet just by being a shared space. And I think it affects the way that all of us use public space as women. We can't be 'out there' in any kind of gender-neutral way. When we walk on the street, we always walk as women.

Until we get older and then it starts to go away and it is LOVELY

I feel so much more confident and happy going around the place now I haven't got the eyes on me all the time, and the other stuff. Not that I'm gorgeous or anything but I think that all young women are watched and assessed and looked over in a not subtle way by so many men when they go about their business that even when you aren't actively aware of it your brain knows it's happening, we are all animals after all we know when we're being watched, when we are attracting the attention of others when we would rather not be noticed while we're just doing our stuff. I think it makes a lot of females feel self-conscious and uncomfortable even if we don't realise why we're feeling that way. You see a lot of women going around adjusting their clothes, adjusting their hair, often they aren't doing it consciously, and they often look uncomfortable. I know I used to do that and I think it is a consequence of not being able to relax properly when we're out and about.

I didn't even realise until 2 situations. The first was when I was very heavily pregnant and it stopped and it took me a while to work out what was so nice. And then on the tube a bloke looked at me and I turned and he stopped and I realised that was it, I didn't have all these eyes on me any more and it was lovely.

The second time was when I went to a feminism conference which happened to be pretty much all female there were only a couple of blokes there dotted around and again I wondered why I felt so comfortable and then I realised that was it.

Now I am in my early 40s and it's stopping, I feel so much more comfortable and confident walking around the place, it's lovely.

These are just my thoughts on how I've felt and what I've noticed, not saying these are definite "things" but for me, they feel right.