Is it me or men (the hassle type) getting worse?

[KittenKong]

Standing outside a shop minding my own business and getting hassled by some weird man.

Stands close and stares - just states, I ignore
Steps closer, staring, I ignore
Starts yelling hello helloooo HELO at me, I ignore
Gets even closer - I text DS ‘call me now’ and have a conversation with a puzzled DS ‘ok I’m coming now- oh I can see you’ and sprint off and he yells after me that he only wanted a kiss.

Now on a normal day I’d have told him to piss off but why should I have to?

Bumped into a friend and told her. ‘Was it the guy who screams at women (always the women) walking with men that that bagel to get married? Or the angry man who shouts at the female shop assistants that he is going to get them the sack? Or the big man who stands outside the flats screaming at women passing by?

For the love of god…

No men have always been like this. Ranges from "smile darling" at you, to chucking stuff out of the car window at you while shouting stuff at you, to actually raping you. All of which have happened to me. Almost 20 years ago too.

I think it’s actually getting worse - I’ve lived here for pushing 30 years and haven’t had so much hassle. I go along this row of shops on the main road once a week and every week there’s some man creeping women out.

I don’t remember this since I left school (yuk, theses something about a school uniform isn’t there?) and even when I was on my 20s and 30s. I don’t think I’d be dealing with angry women haters (it seems more like hate than sexual harassment).

IMO its getting worse, and they are becoming openly more aggressive.

Jean Hatchet recently tweeted about a man hassling her daughter at a bus stop, and the police have asked her to delete the tweet as its upsetting him.

I haven't noticed this where I live, but I know my mum who lives in a city has complained about being bothered near the shops, or at least she did until the weather turned really cold.

But it's has a fairly clear cause there, it's related to a very significant problem with homeless camps and indigent persons that has become an issue since last Spring. The majority are male (I'd say about 70%) and those tend to be the ones panhandling. Some clearly have mh issues.

Well on my trip to the shops yesterday (yes grocery shopping) there was the large man screaming at a shop assistant (she had told him that they didn’t have the thing he wanted), following her up the aisle telling her how horrible she was and that he would ‘have her job’ (then telling other assistant how horrible she was) - she wasn’t, she was perfectly polite (asp small and young).

The man who usually yells at women walking with men that they (the women - never the men) are sinful and need to get married). He was just handing out leaflets (I had my headphones on then so didn’t hear what he was saying).

And me ‘I’m creepily standing in your face’ who was wafting around later - I was with my husband then and he looked at me and scurried off when I looked over at him.

The man who stands outside a block of flats bellowing at passing woman wasn’t there yesterday.

I used to work for a charity next to the shops there and we worked with a few others (homeless, addiction, mental health, teens etc) so I knew the local ‘characters’- but this is different. This is just angry men having a go at women (haven’t seen men getting grief but other women I have spoken to have mentioned that it’s getting worse locally and some days are worse than others).

Hmm, are you seeing new behaviours among women, too? Not necessarily the same ones? There are a lot of people very stressed out these days but men and women often express that differently.

I can't quite see you noticing this in the last few months as some kind of new thing where men have become nastier all of a sudden, it's difficult to see what could have created a change like that so quickly among one group.

Women tend not to be harassing people and yelling at them on the street! Maybe the area has changed a bit.

Wow, that last sentence doesn't make sense - I mean, I can't really see men having suddenly changed in that short period of time, separate from something happening where you are seeing that. Most real cultural change tends to be slower.

@KittenKong

Women tend not to be harassing people and yelling at them on the street! Maybe the area has changed a bit.

Yes, they don't usually, women tend to be less confrontational. But what are they doing?

If people are behaving differently all of a sudden, there will be a reason. A different demographic is in the area, people are short of money, people are freaking out after two years of covid, something like that. It might be something that just affects men, but what, so suddenly?

Yes, they don't usually, women tend to be less confrontational. But what are they doing?

If people are behaving differently all of a sudden, there will be a reason. A different demographic is in the area, people are short of money, people are freaking out after two years of covid, something like that. It might be something that just affects men, but what, so suddenly?

Who the fuck cares? It’s not women’s problem to work out why men are behaving this way or to study women to find out if their behaviours have changed, it’s up to men to act like decent human beings and stop taking their issues out on random women.

The manosphere seems to be having a negative impact on mens attitude and behaviour, among other things they appear to be against the social contract.

Creepy blokes, angry blokes, pervy blokes, weird blokes - they are everywhere. Their behaviour is sadly normalised. If there were as many women behaving similarly everyone would say wtf is going on? But men? Well that's just men.

I would agree that overt aggression towards women is on the rise. We have serving police officers raping and murdering women, taking smiling selfies with the bodies of murdered women, assaulting women in custody during unnecessary stripsearches, secretly filming women undressing. That's the police!! What hope do we have that "civilians" will behave any better?

Men never harass me, getting fat helps!

Its shocking how soon you get used to the grief isn't it.

Just as I become old and invisible ( although not completely without incident) I seem to have passed on the torch to dd1 whisn15 and gets the grief when she's out with friends. On one occasion she ended up down the police station with a couple if her friends ( mixed sex group) in having to deal with sone drunk bloke refusing to fuck off when asked to leave them all alone.

Now if hed have a sticker perhaps nore would have been done about it

I thought I had got old, fat and invisible! I thought that was at least one of the benefits of getting older.

I've just started a thread in AIBU about this very thing.

A clip of a 17 year old girl just trying to shop in a thrift store and being approached.

The video gave me fucking chills, it's not outwardly "bad" but it's so so familiar to me.

I'll put the link on when I get back to the laptop.

I'd appreciate FWR opinions.

Here you go....

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4464949-How-many-of-you-have-had-an-encounter-like-this-with-a-man?watched=1&msgid=114590645#114590645

My 13 year old dressed in school tracksuit was verbally sexually harassed on a bus late afternoon recently. Her and another young woman reported him and driver threw him off. Fortunate in a way we are not allowed to carry guns because in my peri menopausal rage state I genuinely would blast creeps like this off the face of the earth sorry not sorry.

RozHuntleysLeftHand The man in that video is as creepy as fuck. That 'gentle pressure' is a tactic designed to make it difficult to say no because you end up sounding unreasonable, and its easy to miss how he ignored all of her polite boundaries and kept pushing.

@Thelnebriati

RozHuntleysLeftHand The man in that video is as creepy as fuck. That 'gentle pressure' is a tactic designed to make it difficult to say no because you end up sounding unreasonable, and its easy to miss how he ignored all of her polite boundaries and kept pushing.

Yeah all of this.

I just recognised the tactics soo much and it really triggered all the same feelings in me that 17 year old me would have experienced in that situation.

I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of men tbh.

How can we instigate a fight back? When even fucking stickers from women are verboten??

I just want to cut all their bollix off right now.

I’ve told mine that the rules of politeness do not apply to any man that approaches you. However sadly being rude to them often just leads to vile verbal abuse so it’s hard to know what to suggest and the placatory approach is probably safest.

Boys too. DS was on the bus with his gran when he was about ten (being a kid he was standing gawping out of the window and she was sitting down a bit further along) and some man started asking him questions (he wasn’t paying attention but the man was trying to get his attention) - which school he was at, how old he was, was he alone… When she heard she went mad and told him never to give a stranger personal details.

She told me that the mad had ‘creepy vibes’ - I’m sure we know how that feels.

@Naunet

Yes, they don't usually, women tend to be less confrontational. But what are they doing?

If people are behaving differently all of a sudden, there will be a reason. A different demographic is in the area, people are short of money, people are freaking out after two years of covid, something like that. It might be something that just affects men, but what, so suddenly?

Who the fuck cares? It’s not women’s problem to work out why men are behaving this way or to study women to find out if their behaviours have changed, it’s up to men to act like decent human beings and stop taking their issues out on random women.

The OP asked if people are seeing more men behaving this way. Presumably because she knows that it's quite difficult, as one person, to know if there is a general trend or just she happened to see some similar things recently by chance.

One way to think about that when we don't have any actual data is in terms of, is there something that might account for something like that? If there is a housing crises, for example, that could be significant.

But even apart from that, if there is such a change, lots of people might prefer to reverse it or be aware of the cause. The idea that you can somehow just tell people to stop being affected by the larger environment and they will seems likely to be ineffective.