Well. You know that #NotAllMen hashtag? Somebody quantified it to find out exactly how many men, and the results are not encouraging.
The research group asked over 1,000 Americans “What do you think counts as sexual harassment?” in an online survey. They were told to select all that apply.
The survey found that 91 percent of women and 83 percent of men thought “being forced to do something sexual” fit the bill.
If that doesn’t count as sexual harassment, what does? Who are the 17 percent of men and 9 percent of women who don’t agree?
Men were even less likely to characterize behaviors that didn’t involve physical touch as sexual harassment. Twenty-four percent thought flashing someone doesn’t count and 30 percent thought making sexual comments about someone’s body isn’t harassment.
So…1 in 6 of your male friends think they can find an excuse for forcing themselves sexually on a woman, and 1 in 4 think that sending a dick pic is not harassment. So it’s true, it’s not all men, but it’s also not just a couple of nasty felons hanging out in a dark alley — it could be 80 million ordinary, ignorant, selfish American men.
I would have thought being forced to do something sexual against your will is sexual assault — harassment is too light a label. Chiling nonetheless.
Here’s the follow-up question: how many of the 76% who do believe that it’s harassment also believe that “you shouldn’t ruin a good man’s career over it”?
Giliell, #2
I don’t know the exact number but one of them should be showing up in here soon.
I’m trying to figure out how the 80 million was calculated. With about 120 million adult men in the U.S., that would be 67% of them. Looking at the results in the survey at Barna.com, that would be at the level of making a sexual joke (46% of women, 32% of men).
I believe that a sexual joke could be harassment, depending on the circumstances and the joke. But I find it reasonable that only 32% of men would decide to categorize it as harassment in a survey.
The levels are deplorable, but 80 million seems high.
I wondered if perhaps the total population was the basis, rather than adult men.
I’m not in the least surprised. I doubt most women would be surprised, either.
I am reminded that in the legal system of Ankh-Morpork, the phrase “he needed killing” sometimes counted as a valid defence.
This is pretty consistent with my experiences talking to some men, too. If anything, I think it might underestimate the number.
That said, I also question what the survey is really measuring. Do these men really not understand, or do they just perform “not understanding” because they know people will believe the excuse and let them get away with bad behaviour? (Or, relatedly, do they genuinely not understand but also deliberately avoid learning, and block out any information which might contradict their perspective?)
Lili Loofbourow’s piece on “the myth of the male bumbler” from a short while ago is relevant:
http://theweek.com/articles/737056/myth-male-bumbler
@1
Same. I would hope that would account for the discrepancy, but somehow I doubt it.
The numbers might be true but I personally make it habit to not believe research published by evangelical Christians
Assuming the survey was done well and folks responded honestly. I bet this is an underestimation. Depressing to say the least.
I think the disconnect for men stems in part from the fact that men and women like different things. A man thinks, “If someone sent me a naked picture, that would be a turn on for me,” so he assumes that women feel the same way. So it may be more a matter of being tone-deaf than evil. It goes back to Oscar Wilde’s commentary on the Golden Rule: “Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, because they may have different tastes.”
Part of that problem, though, is men not bothering to take the time to find out how women actually do feel, rather than projecting themselves onto what they assume women feel. Fix that problem, and a huge chunk of the other problems go away.
@thirdmill
Might be true in some cases (“I was paying you a compliment!” is so painfully common, but I can’t tell if they genuinely think it’s complimentary or if it’s just a backpedal), but a lot of time I doubt they have any consideration for the other person in mind at all. I’m more inclined to believe that, at best, they associate women with sex, more specifically as sex objects put there for their enjoyment, and act out in ways that they think will get them the kind of sexual attention that they desire from their point of interest.
That’s being extremely charitable, though, and doesn’t take into account that it’s also an act of intimidation and assertion of power.
In other words, at best it’s seeing women as a means to an end that they can use as they please, and they don’t see anything wrong with it because they’ve been socialized to think that it’s acceptable for men to treat women that way.
Except…people send me naked pictures all the time. Usually it’s stuff from gay porn, but I’ve also received pictures of naked women, sometimes with the faces of friends crudely pasted on. I don’t see it as a turn-on at all, nor is it intended to be — it’s aggressive and hostile. That kind of rips the fun right out of it.
It wouldn’t be better if someone I knew and liked sent me naked pictures of themselves. It would make me uncomfortable and leave me wondering how I’m supposed to act if I meet them in real life. Even if it is intended as an invitation to sexy fun times, I’m in a monogamous relationship with no desire to get out of it, so it just sets up stressful conflicts and a worry that all I can do is hurt the feelings of someone who seems to really like me.
I’ve been sent dick pics in response to saying that I don’t want to see dick pics. That’s just low-level aggression, not an attempt to titillate me.
A couple of thoughts. First, does the ratio truly surprise you? I would say that easily 20-25 percent of the adolescent boys and later young men and even now middle-aged men I know can be real pigs about a lot of this stuff. Some of it can be parsed into political ideology (WAY more rightwingers use the C-word, for example), but there are plenty of Dems who have no social filter, or are irredeemable horndogs. 16 percent was almost surprisingly low, considering what I expected the figure to be.
As for some grey areas such as jokes, context is everything (refer back to my social filters comment above). I remember after the Lorena Bobbitt incident, some women in my office asked a few of their drinking buddy co-worker men to go buy the Penthouse they saw on all the news stands with photos of the re-attachment surgery. It was after hours, the floor was empty but for the 60-hour-per week young go-getters, but a Penthouse was brought into a conference room and 6 women and four men looked at the gruesome details. De facto inappropriate, at one level. But the VP of the department was a sleazeball, and every Monday morning he would come out into the area where all the attractive young single women he had hired were working, and peer over their cubicle walls and ask: “Did you go out this weekend? Any fun bars or dance clubs? Did you meet any handsome men?” And it would make your skin crawl.
My best boss ever once asked me, when I was the second one into an early morning meeting she had called: “what do you call that useless piece of flesh at the end of a penis?” “The foreskin”, I replied. “No, I was referring to the other end — a man is the correct answer.” Had the roles been reversed, and I used the “life-support system for a vagina” version of that joke with a woman subordinate, I would and should have been hung by the balls from the highest yard-arm in the land. But she was a scathingly funny little wrong-side of the tracks woman from Brooklyn who had heard a joke that weekend, and knew she could tell it to me.
Whereas I’ve had other women bosses vamp on the edge of my desk, nothing inappropriate, just the little shimmies and smiles, as we discussed the algorithms to be embedded in the next generation’s release…..making me very uncomfortable indeed.
The Potter Stewart test is always a good one — I know it when I see it. The power relationship, the historical inequalities, the degree of friendship, etc. A lot of women I know refer to it as “the ICK Factor.” If a woman thinks it’s sexual harassment, even if it was just an offhand remark from the guy’s perspective, then he almost certainly crossed the Ick Factor boundary.
Sometimes being tone-deaf is the evil.
Strike “sometimes”. I meant to say virtually always. Adding “virtually” only out of prudence – you might want to strike that too.
thirdmill:
No. This sort of thinking insists on painting men as innocent and rather stupid; part and parcel of the “boys will be boys” excuse. While I wouldn’t rule out a few men thinking that way, there’s no way in hell it would apply to most men. Most men aren’t stupid, they know exactly what they are doing, and what they are doing is playing an aggressive power game. Too many women are in a position where they cannot speak out or do anything in the face of such acts, and men are aware of that too.*
*I’d really prefer to use people/person, because women are capable of playing aggressive power games too, and can sexually harass underlings. Restricting this to binary also leaves out the mass amount of aggression against transgender and non-binary persons. The aggressive games against those who identify as lesbian or gay is often much more intense, too, especially when it comes to the whole corrective rape business.
I think dudes sending naked pictures is about control. It’s on the same spectrum as the mentality behind rape. It’s an “I have a right to do this to you” thing.
I don’t think it’s like coming across a clip of a cute puppy trying to climb stairs and forwarding it to another person with the innocent assumption that they don’t hate puppies.
Adult men are clueless about plenty of things regarding women, but whether it’s appropriate to send a stranger a photo of your penis can’t be one of them.
Here’s a radical thought. What if, instead of treating adults with jobs and mortgages like little children making boo-boos because they just don’t know any better*, we stop accepting the male bumbler excuse and treat them like grownups who know what they are doing and can be expected to behave themselves? How would social dynamics change?
*yet should still somehow be in charge of companies, the press, the government, families, academia, et al
From the link:
“The research group didn’t provide detailed explanations on why its respondents may have chosen as they did, but it’s possible to imagine a few complications with the survey’s wording. For example, some may have thought behaviors like following someone or staring should be defined as harassment, not necessarily sexual harassment.
“It’s also possible that in some cases, respondents thought the categorization of “sexual harassment” was not harsh enough, and that some behavior should be identified as “sexual assault.”
“It’s not clear whether respondents were provided with a definition of sexual harassment before participating in the survey.”
—
These all seem like important points. …not saying that sexual harassment isn’t normalized to a disturbing degree in our culture… but there could be problems with the study.
@mcbender #7:
Sort of. They know it’s bad, but nobody’s ever really called them out on it so it becomes one of those “just don’t talk about it” things.
Personally, I think a lot of the conflating incompetent flirting and harassment is done for 2 reasons:
1. They think anything they do in the pursuit of sex is fair game. Perfect example: Chris Rock’s bit “sexual harassment is when an ugly guy wants some”. It’s kind of a subsection of “boys will be boys”. I also call it the “safe space” theory.
2. They want men who are otherwise baffled by how anybody could masturbate in front of somebody as a come on (outside of a colossal abuse of power) to think that their own incompetent flirting would get caught up in any attempt to stop it. I’ve had to point out a few times now how none of the accusations are “he tried to kiss me while we were talking at the bar, which I didn’t want” without it being followed up by “then he shoved his tongue in my mouth as I tried to get away” (or some such). If such a thing happens: stop, apologize, and try to do better in the future (the last part being very important, randomly kissing women ‘just in case’ is harassment).
PZ, anyone who sends gay porn to a straight man knows full well that the recipient isn’t going to be appreciative and is doing it to be aggressive. Lindsey, the same goes for anyone who sends a dick picture in response to a request not to send dick pictures. On those facts, I agree with you. And I also agree that some of the time, it is about power.
That said, as a generalization, I think men and women do view sex differently. Men are far more likely to be interested in casual, anonymous sex than women are. Men are far more likely to enjoy pornography than women are. Men are far more willing to have sex with strangers than women are. Since men don’t get pregnant, men are far less likely to think about the ramifications of sex. The old joke – women need a reason for sex, men just need a place – has a basis in reality. Not all men, and not all women, but those generalizations are true often enough.
And when a man says, “Can’t she take a compliment,” a lot of the time he’s honestly baffled. Because he doesn’t understand that a compliment in her ear sounds far different than a compliment in his ear. If a woman told him that he was handsome, and obviously works out, and his butt looks good in those jeans, his reaction would be to be pleased with himself (and probably to ask her out for a drink). So, he asks himself, why doesn’t she respond the same if he tells her that she’s pretty, and looks nice in those clothes.
And I’m not saying men shouldn’t change their behavior. They should. Basic courtesy requires finding out what someone else considers appropriate. It’s the same reason I would not send ham as a gift to an Orthodox Jewish friend, even though I like ham myself. What I am suggesting is that change is more likely to come through patience and education than simply by writing off men as pigs.
@thirdmill
It’d be nice if they actually listened, instead of getting pissed off that someone told them not to do the thing
and then go on a harassment campaign for the next decade.The ones that care will listen, regardless. The ones that don’t… are pigs.
thirdmill
I could follow you until here. Even if the compliment was sincere, there is no reason to be baffled. Men do understand context, don’t they? It’s been told to us since like forever.
Also, the actual wording “Can’t she take a compliment” shows that the compliment was not sincere in the first place.
thirdmill
Really, please stop it. The same men claim that women are riddles wrapped in enigmas (we aren’t), so they don’t get to claim they were just extrapolating from their own experience.
The “she can’t take a compliment” thing is so damn transparent. If you make a compliment, and you mean it as a compliment, you want to make people feel better. If it makes them uncomfortable then you missed your goal. To blame it on the person on the other end of that conversation shows that it was never actually about her and her feelings, but about the person making the compliment.
thirdmill:
Generalisations are like assumptions, they tend to make asses out of people. The above is a whole lot of shit, not bonnacon level, but close. All you’re doing is upholding and perpetuating stereotypes, along with making excuses for the poor men, gosh they are so innocent and stupid, and their brains are simply overtaken by those all powerful penises!
No. Throughout history, misogyny has been firmly entrenched, and no matter how much changes, the excuses for men being assholes and committing criminal acts continue. If someone tries to dodge saying “well, y’know, women, they just don’t understand” and other assorted crap, they come up with the stuff you just did. Binary bullshit.
The people who are most able to bring about change in men are men. The homosocial sphere is of utmost importance to men; they derive much of their self esteem from what other men think about them. If men speak up, rather than just jamming their hands in their pockets and going silent, you’d see change a whole lot more. How many men listen to misogynistic ‘jokes’ and don’t say anything? How many men know another man is into sexual harassment, and don’t say one word, let alone stand up for whoever is being targeted? And on it goes.
Men need to stop thinking and behaving like they are entitled to every damn thing, including other people. You all need to take responsibility, not make up one excuse after another.
I am 62 years old and have been a feminist of some kind or other for about 56 of those years.
I gave up on … so long ago I don’t remember.
@thirdmill:
So.. so long as there’s any guys in existence who can plausibly deny they ever got the memo, women need to carry the burdens of both being on the receiving end of men’s bad behavior as well as doing all the emotional labor of changing men against their wills. Also, saying “men are adults and should be treated as such even when it comes the way they perceive and behave towards women” is the same thing as saying “men are pigs,” but making claims that men are just so much more sexual than women that they can’t teach themselves not to be so sexist somehow isn’t. Did I get that right?
I think that this behavior is merely enabled by the power differential, and not something fundamentally different in men. All people can sometimes act like insensitive assholes with no sense of social boundaries. The thing is that people with little power learn very quickly to take a conservative approach, while those with power learn that there are no real consequences to crossing these boundaries.
I’m not sure this could be solved through equality. As long as some people have more power than others, some people will act like (and be rewarded for acting like) jerks. Clearly all those in a situation with more power have a moral responsibility to take a more conservative view of social boundaries.
Though I guess in our society “Men have got some learning to do” would be a rough approximation.
Who left the time machine unlocked?
the ■■■■ing idiot:
Yes, of course, because everyone knows that men who have no social power never, ever harass, sexually assault, rape, or beat women. Nope, just not possible without that special powah.
You chose your nym well, I’ll give you that.
I think psychologists (and much of the comments here) overgeneralize. They see a case where a 24 year old man rapes an 80 year old woman, and decide rape is about power, not sex. Maybe so in that instance, but when a frat party gets out of hand, it’s about sex. Intermediate cases are intermediate.
If you want to equate sex with power, then it becomes a truism. Think about THAT next time you have sex with your husband/wife.
wcorvi:
Here we go again with the excuses. “Boys will be horny! What are ya gonna do?”
*snarl*
What in the fuck is it going to take to get through? If a frat boy decides that being horny is the most important thing ever, and he’s going to just help himself to another person, that’s got a whole lot to do with power, and entitlement, and domination. There isn’t one thing more important than him. Men do that sort of thing because they have a nasty habit of thinking they are entitled to whatever they want. They’ll go ahead and rape at a frat party that “gets out of hand” because it’s what they want to do, and y’know, those women are just sluts and teases anyway, who cares if they say no? Who cares if they are unconscious? If it was all about sex, and nothing else, then there’s Rosy Palm to take care of matters.
Jesus fucking Christ, stop making fucking excuses for this shit.
I’m skeptical. It’s not that guys don’t understand it, it’s that they (often) don’t bother to.
No, he doesn’t. If he did, he’d figure it out and stop doing it. It’s not difficult
re: IX-103, the ■■■■ing idiot
déjà vu
wcorvi, #34
Surely doing something to someone when they don’t want it done to them has a lot to do with the desire to exert one’s power over the person.
Caine, No. 28, does it occur to you that your post relies just as much on generalizations as mine did? What is “throughout history, misogyny has been firmly entrenched” if not a generalization? What is “The homosocial sphere is of utmost importance to men; they derive much of their self esteem from what other men think about them” if not a generalization? What is “The homosocial sphere is of utmost importance to men; they derive much of their self esteem from what other men think about them” if not a generalization?
And the thing with generalizations is that they don’t need to be true 100% of the time — mine aren’t, and neither are yours — to still be a useful tool for having a *general* understanding of why things often work the way they do. And if you’re looking for statements that are true 100% of the time, there aren’t that many, not even in the hard sciences, and certainly not when you start classifying things and talking about how they behave.
And I’m not making excuses. I already said it’s bad behavior on the part of men and they should stop it. But I think that understanding *why* men sometimes behave badly is useful in helping to get them to stop.
thirdmill:
An observation. Its why Lysistrata bites (was gonna say ‘mordant’, but…).
There’s a difference between observation and speculation.
You’re justifying, but badly.
40 million. The US has ~320M people, and 1/4 of that number is 80M. If half are men, then 1/4 of those are 40 million.
Quantitative pedantry is pointless here; it is a significant minority of men.
[addendum]
And the silent majority here is the enabling majority.
(I too am guilty, though less so as I grow older and more confident)
John, No 40, since no one’s reading comprehension is as bad as you’re pretending yours is, I’m going to assume you’re just yanking my chain. Have a pleasant evening.
The rules are changing.
When the rules change in the middle of the game, those losing their advantage(s) will feel cheated.
But we need the rules to change, both for the damage done to women and the warpage done to men.
And we have no way to do a clean restart into a fresh, differently-regulated game, nor a way to run the older rules for the older players in parallel with the newer (and not yet clearly defined) rules for the younger ones: those of us previously holding social/behavioral privileges will just have to lose them, period.
So it goes. Such a pity so many men forget the part of the macho code about taking your lumps without whining, and about making sacrifices for others without compensation or complaint – or anybody even noticing. “Chivalry” overlaps with feminism in requiring ceaseless self-control – we also call it civilization, and maturity.
ManGrow up, guys.I will admit that at times I’ve been a “bumbler” in the sense that I didn’t understand that what I said to someone was wrong. I didn’t say anything half as bad as most of these men are accused of (and probably guilty of). And when I was told that I said something in appropriate or wrong, I always apologized and tried to do better the next time.
I’m not saying this to try and get any sort of kudos or pat on the back. I say this as the bare minimum any man needs to do when they do something wrong. I’m sure I could have done something more in some situations, but I was lazy, just like these men. They are lazy with their explanations and everything because they know it will be accepted by the majority of other men.
I’ve grown up since then and am less of a bumbler, but I still get things wrong. The difference is I want to get things right, and I want to listen when I get things wrong. I don’t understand women, but I don’t understand men, either. Hell, sometimes I don’t understand myself. But I don’t think I have all the answers. Even if I were to hold political office, I wouldn’t think I’m the only one with a good idea about how an economy should be run. I’m not an economist and don’t pretend to be one like so many politicians do. I’m also a man and can be sexist, but I try not to be and want to correct anything I do wrong.
Why can’t these men who actually have power use it to help others and themselves at the same time rather than hurt others while helping themselves, and in the end helping themselves less than if they just tried to do good?
thirdmill @44:
Poor assumption, and false. This is the Word of God.
I’m not yanking anyone’s chain, rather, expressing myself.
Thank you for the sentiment.
But I see an evasion — you did respond, but you evaded the issue.
(Have a pleasant time)
This is a little coy and cute when you started out by ‘splaining that aggressive, predatory, and intrusive male behavior is natural and entrenched, and that it is women who are “different” and require “different” handling.
I don’t know a lot about the culture of sending unsolicited x-rated photos of oneself among straight people. I’ve certainly never heard of any instance where one was gratefully received though.
I expect it is very different from the culture of sending unsolicited x-rated photos of oneself among gay men. Or, at least, on gay men’s dating and sex-meet sites. There it is completely ubiquitous, normal and for the most part accepted. A lot of people on such sites will have said photos as their public profile pictures, only sending more normal photos of their face when others have shown interest. A good number of others will initiate a conversation by sending or requesting such photos. And some take pains to put “please send photos of your face rather than your groin if you send them at all” or “not interested in xxx photos” or some such on their profile to mark diversion from the accepted norms of the culture. For the most part there is no sense of offense taken at receiving such pictures in such a context without asking – the ones you like you keep, the ones you don’t you delete. At most the response might be “I’d really rather this ugly old man didn’t think I’d be interested in him, but hey, we all get horny – delete and move on”. The ones who get the most flak tend to be the ones who ask for such pictures but don’t send any of their own in return – people who just want the pictures, rather than using them as an advertising tool for negotiating real-life sex. There is a general assumption that sending pictures and getting compliments for them is a positive and ego-boosting thing, and an important tool in securing sex partners.
Thing is, this is all part of a well-defined and highly sexualised subculture that everyone present has opted into and can opt out of at any time. I think it makes the people who participate in it considerably more inured to naked photos of others, which is not bad in and of itself, but at the same time gay men have always had to be much more circumspect about keeping their dating and sexual behaviours separate from the main drag of social life, so they tend to know implicitly that the rules about nude photos only apply to the spaces set aside specifically for gay sexual negotiations.
I don’t know whether straight men have such spaces available to them for showing off in a sexual way and indulging in the same behaviours among people who will respond positively. I expect they probably do – there are online communities for everything these days – but it seems that such spaces are not nearly as well known or well appreciated as places like gaydar and grindr are among gay men. In the absence of such a forum in which to develop a healthy attitude towards sexual display, it seems almost inevitable that the sending naked photographs should develop a much more problematic place in mainstream straight society – caught up in all the venerable misogyny that permeates it, and that horrible introduction of power dynamics into sex that is the cause of so many of the world’s erotic problems.
Thirdmill:
It’s a fact. That you’re unaware of misogyny throughout the ages only means you’re willfully ignorant. You could try learning. You could try learning about the foundations of sexism; you could try learning about the patriarchal system, and the legacy we’re still dealing with. You could do that instead of pulling shit from your ass and presenting it as truth.
I’ll give you one small start, read A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice by Jack Holland.
Snuffcurry, No.. 48, aggressive, predatory and intrusive *human* behavior is natural and entrenched, albeit generally expressed differently in men than in women. Yes, men are by nature aggressive predatory and intrusive, but so are women, just in different ways. We’re animals who evolved from other animals. We have lizard brains. Nature is not known for being moral or ethical; it’s survival of the fittest and kill or be killed. And it’s frankly laughable to come to a blog about evolution and biology and find people who are shocked — shocked! — that animals behave like animals.
None of which is to imply that people can’t change. Unlike other animals, we have brains that allow us to think about the nature and consequences of our behavior. The fact that we live in a society in which these issues are even discussed is a good thing because it indicates an awareness that there is a problem. Society has, with mixed success, sought to control some of the worst aspects of human nature. The election of Trump is a step backward that I hope will be a blip on the screen rather than the start of a new trend, but we’ll have to wait and see. If you look at where we are compared to where we were a thousand years ago, though, we have made great strides. You’re not going to see that process continue, though, without an acceptance of the reality of where we started.
By the way, mansplaining is a sexist term and I don’t take seriously anyone who uses it. If I were to dismissively say of a woman’s argument, “Oh she’s just womansplaining” everyone would see that that’s a sexist comment, and respect is a two way street. If you think I have a bad argument, explain why, but my gender tells us nothing about whether it’s a good or a bad argument.
@thirdmill
???
A lot of men certainly are aggressive, predatory, and intrusive, but saying that we’re by nature that way gives men way less credit than I’d say many folks critical of sexist behavior would give men. I’d say they’re that way because they’ve been taught that this is how men should behave and what they should feel they’re entitled to, not some immutable facet of their manly man genes.
Maybe instead of throwing up our hands and dismissing the lot of us as slaves of our beastly man nature, we… take responsibility for our actions and try to do better?
Seriously?
Mansplaining is when a man explains something to a woman in a patronizing tone on the assumption that he knows better than she does about it, regardless of her actual experience or expertise in the subject. Usually because, as men, we are used to our voices being taken seriously simply by virtue of being men’s voices. A complaint about “womansplaining” makes no fucking sense. Though it does make a pretty convenient tell that someone is clueless.
Great satire! A complaint about ignorance of evolution and biology directly after two sentences epitomising such ignorance! Of course, thirdmill is actually well aware that humans are not descended from lizards, and that “survival of the fittest and kill or be killed” is a ridiculous caricature of natural selection, common among creationists and other ignorant bigots such as self-styled “race-realists”, but regarded with scorn by the great majority of evolutionary biologists.
Thirdmill: nothing but idiotic bonnaconshit sprayed all over as one excuse after another for the poor, poor menz. They’re animals! They can’t help themselves! Men, learn? Nonsense, they aren’t capable!
As well as being a sprayer of shit, thirdmill, your “excuses” are nothing but stone insults to every man on the planet.
Also, you dumbfuck, all humans are animals, that includes women and non-binary people. Just amazin’ that we aren’t running around clubbing and raping people, ennit?
Also, I realize this would tax the hell out of what passes for your brain, but try to take a bit of anatomy on board.
Being afab, I was a woman for a over twice as long as I’ve been a man, and yet despite being a victim of it in one life, it wasn’t very hard at all to fall into some of the same ol’ sexist bullshit* that cis men do, something I work to do better about nowadays but still sometimes struggle with unconsciously.
I wonder how that squares with the notion that sexism is just how men naturally do men things.
Interesting to discover that the school boys who used to paw at me and lift my skirts and follow me singing insulting songs just couldn’t be expected to know any better despite me telling them to stop and sometimes bursting into tears. Interesting to discover that the boss of mine who repeatedly stuffed his hands into my pants pockets after being told not to and then fired me when I protested loudly rather than quietly has full plausible deniability due to it being his nature. Interesting to be told, effectively, that the 24 year old who raped me when I was 13 just couldn’t be expected due to his gender to understand that you don’t have sex with pubescent children, and all that was needed was a little patience and attempt at education on my part. So fascinating to hear that if I’d just flagged down all the men who have yelled sexually charged insults or made revolting gestures at me from passing cars and super patiently explained to them why that was bad they’d probably have listened. Or maybe the guy who called my friends over to his car so they’d see him jerking off at them just needed to have it carefully explained to him what it’s like being a girl in the world.
That would have changed his behavior just like explaining why @thirdmill is wrong will change their behavior in the here and now, right?
Caine@33:
I’m not talking about isolated instances. I’m talking about a system that enables and encourages such behavior.
Wcorvi@34:
I never said it wasn’t about sex. When sex is involved people are more likely to rush through the social negotiations needed to further the relationship (even casual sex requires some level of social intimacy). Like most times when people rush through something they skip steps. Wishful thinking takes the place of actual information in their modelling. So they can get to a place where “no” means “yes” because their modelling is wrong and they are not taking the time or care to notice their modelling is wrong.
What should happen is people should suffer negative consequences from skipping steps. People with social power are less likely to be corrected for minor social breaches, and move on to more serious violations. Other people imitate the powerful and the behaviors become more socially acceptable, which reduces the rate that minor violations are corrected, creating a positive feedback loop that sustains rape culture. If we solve the power differential issue and everyone gets corrected regardless of position, then this culture is will disappear.
There are 120 million adult men in the U.S. 1/4 of that is 30 million. I have no idea where 80 million came from. Very sloppy.
Love how every time someone attempts to refocus a conversation about the way men treat women on women’s perspectives, experiences, and needs, a bunch of (usually) dudes will fall over themselves to recenter menfeels, deny the gendered component, or talk about math.
Onamission@60:
Denying the gendered component? Sure. I think if gender roles were reversed we would see the same problems. I would also expect them to occur in a homonormative society.
The thing is, I don’t have sufficient evidence to believe that women are intrinsically different than men. There are measurable behavioral and psychological differences between women and men in our society, but environmental effects appear to have such a large impact that intrinsic differences are too small to measure (we’d need prohibitively large sample sizes from more diverse cultures than presently exist to separate it out).
But that doesn’t give men a free pass. “It’s not them it’s society” is a useless excuse since you cannot change society without changing individuals. We must hold everyone accountable for their actions, whether committing or enabling toxic behaviors. When I say men are no different from women I am saying we should expect more of them. Men can act better than they are and should act better. That’s the only real way I see to fix this cesspool of a society.
Sometimes I wonder about the connection between atheism and feminism and whether it’s a good idea.
Then I read something like this.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-42209755
I really despair for the future -.-
Wow, did anybody read this? French president Emmanuel Macron to ban gender-based insults
IX-103, the ■■■■ing idiot:
See, when someone says something like “Anyone can be an asshole to anyone else” in a conversation about sexism, it’s a bit like when (white) people claim colorblindness in order to deny that a racist act was actually racist, and was instead a generic jerk just being a jerk. Nevermind that the jerk in question who happened to be white was “being a jerk” to someone who happened to be of color, in a manner that happened to reinforce a race-based social hierarchy that happened to be in the white person’s favor.
If we lived in some magic mirror dimension where women were lording over men the way that men do here? It would still be based on gender. Either way, we don’t live in such a world, and so it’s doesn’t matter a lick to the conversation.
@rietpluim:
The fact that it’s 2017 and that isn’t a thing is disgraceful.
This sounds like a great start, though. I hope it sticks.
Yes, progress goes slowly. Let’s hope that it carries through.
Caine, No. 55, no, women don’t generally run around raping and clubbing people, but the exquisite cruelty with which women sometimes treat each other is every bit as predatory as the raping and clubbing men do. Did you miss the part where I said that men and women tend to express their predatory behavior differently from each other? And by the way, thanks for the link to the wiki article on brains, but you’d have done better to find out that “lizard brain” is a literary metaphor used in a book of that title to explain why humans behave the way they do, and not a literal statement that we descended from lizards or anatomically actually have lizard brains. Google “lizard brain” and you can find out for yourself. I guess I assumed you’d be better read than you apparently are.
And speaking of memes, the unfriendly reaction I’m getting has far more to do with me disrupting the meme that whenever something goes badly for women, cultural misogyny must be the culprit, and biology couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it. That’s the product you’re selling, so of course any alternative theories must be anathematized as heresy rather than dealt with on their own merits. And a lot of the time you’re right; cultural misogyny does have a lot to do with it. Just not always.
And to everyone accusing me of claiming that men can’t change, I said quite the opposite. But if you want that change to come, it helps to understand how men got to be as they are in the first place. Just like it’s helpful to understand that smoking causes cancer and obesity causes heart disease if you want to do something about cancer and heart disease.
thirdmill:
<snicker>
You made the claim that there is an innate and intrinsic attitudinal gender difference, aka “gender essentialism”. So yeah, that implies that men can overcome their nature, but will always be fighting their essential instincts thereby.
(BTW, did you even note #56 in this very thread?)
I googled “lizard brain”.
Everyone should try, it’s good for some laffs.
Do they mean the brainstem or the basal ganglia when it comes to the lizard brain? The metaphor never makes it monkey shaped enough to be useful.
I’m impressed that thirdmill refuses to see that the fact that people afab, and are raised as girls, are taught from toddlerhood that we are not allowed to express anger, much less anger physically. And that people raised as boys are absolutely allowed to express anger and do so in a way that’s physical and is immediately excused as ‘boys will be boys’. No, instead of clear cultural and conditioned reasons for the differences in how men and women express aggression, the answer is oooooobviouslyyyyyy biological in nature. Can’t possibly be that a great many cultures have millenia of history of oppressing women, giving them no say in their lives. Has to be because penis and fluffy pink lady brains.
thirdmill:
From your first comment above:
This doesn’t help me understand anything about how men got to be as they are. To me, it doesn’t even look like it’s trying to give explanations like that. They’re just assertions, and I got nothing out of it. Is it supposed to be a statement about biological differences?
Like others, I’ve seen lots of naked people (directly and in pictures) who don’t turn me on. If I had to guess, a minority do; but whatever the proportion is, it’s not everybody (or all women, since I’m a straight guy). So it’d be awfully dumb of me to make that inference, if I were basing it off my own experience. I also don’t think that consenting to such things is unimportant (or not even worth mentioning), even if I would be physically attracted to the person, because that shit is wrong — not the tone-deaf sort of wrong, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but the evil sort of wrong.
As purportedly “biological” explanations go, this one’s really fucking pathetic. That’s basically my assessment of its merits — it has none.
@IX-103, the ■■■■ing idiot
As far as my understanding goes, this is the best argument against gender essentialism.
Men are different from women mostly because of socialisation. Change socialization, you change men. A part of that is for men learning to do some thingsa and not do others. Which means men should listen to women more.
Cartomancer
Really?
Heterosexual men literally lurk in the bushes to jump out at schoolgirls to show them their dicks because society allows them no healthy outlet?
Can you excuse that sort of thing a bit more?
You have not made a case for men of any orientation actually needing that sort of thing. You have given evidence of one specific cultural custom in one specific subculture at one specific place in time and you extrapolate from that?
When will men ever be held responsible for their actions and not have it excused on the basis of “society oppresses their needs”?
+++
Men, I’m sick and tired of you. Do your fucking homework. Learn something for once. Stop explaining and excusing misogynist behaviour from flashing your dicks to murdering wives.
Also, Cartomancer, what makes you think that gay men are exempt from that kind of misogynist behaviour? I once had my dress unzipped in the middle of the English faculty against my will by a gay man. Gay men full well know the cultural scripts of misogyny and sexual harassment and how to wield their social privilege over women. And then, knowing that people love to conflate sexual harassment and sexual assault with sexuality, they will claim innocence based on the fact that they don’t fuck women.
Consciousness razor, but we’re talking about the subset of men that is inclined to send naked pictures of themselves, which is not most men (probably; I haven’t seen any numbers so I’m speculating). The question is why do they do what they do, and not why other men don’t.
And I agree with you that deliberate, intentional, sexual harassment is evil, in which he knows full well it’s not welcome and does it anyway. But that’s not always what happens. And the type of man who is inclined to send naked pictures of himself more often than not thinks he would like to see naked pictures of her. That’s tone-deaf, not evil.
Giliell:
Loudly seconded.
You can’t make that shit up.
Really, poor men. They’re just poorly educated and misunderstood people. Really, when Matt Lauer locked the door and dropped his pants in front of non-consenting women, what he really thought was “wouldn’t it be nice if some hot woman simply got undressed in front of me, I bet I’m doing her a huge favour by showing her my dick?”
And CK Louis, really, he would find it totally hot if a woman masturbated in front of him, so he was just mistakenly assuming that the women would like that, too!
And let’s not even talk about poor Weinstein!
thirdmill, that’s not tone deaf. That’s not giving a flying fuck what the other person might actually want. Only what the man wants in that situation is important and even when such men are blatantly told to their faces that their duck is not wanted they’ll literally say things like “suck it” or “you know you want it”.
Fuck of with your excuses. They’re wrong.
lolno.
“More often than not”? Do you have stats for that?
Some things that men do might be tone-deaf. Throwing someone a naked pic is basically flashing people. Which is illegal. For a reason. And it ain’t because of icky prudes getting in the way of innocent romance.
I don’t think I ever met anyone who sent naked pics that wasn’t trying to get a reaction out of the recipient. If they were, don’t you think they’d ask first?*
*It’s still gross and wrong even if they ask first, by the way, but even small children are taught to ask before imposing themselves on someone if they actually mean to be friendly, and the ones that aren’t figure it out really quick when nobody wants to be pals with them.
Story time!
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I gave a seemingly friendly and respectful dude my phone number under the proposal that we could be friends. Months of heavy breather/silent/hang up phone calls at all hours (some answered by my and my roommate’s young kids) wherein I told the caller to leave me the fuck alone, one two week long phone tap and several police visits to the locations from which the calls were being made later, the phone calls finally stopped. Within a week of the police visiting his, his friend’s, and his family member’s houses to track him down in order to tell him to stop harassing me and lose my number he called to ask me for a date and pretended the harassing calls hadn’t come from him. He’d only recently found my number, see, remembered our meeting, and thought he’d give me a call. Yeah, the police and I knew otherwise, but it sure made for a nice story: friendly innocent man and the horrible woman who totally overreacted to him asking her on a date after she gave him her phone number.
Was he cluelessly responding to his lizard brain and just in need of patient education?
Anyone want to hazard a guess how many people expressed that they felt sorry for him when I told them what he did? Aw, the poor clueless guy, he just liked me, maybe he was shy, maybe it’s hard for him to get a date, I must have crushed him aren’t I terrible, girls are so mean to boys who like them. No recognition whatsoever for the fact that this “poor guy” had created an environment for four other people where they were nervous to answer the phone, wondering if they were being watched or followed and if so what would happen, would the caller escalate. Very little recognition that our right to feel safe in our home overrode his desire to call day and night. No recognition that it went on so long, happened so often, that the police actually took my complaint seriously, which is not a common occurrence. People asked me “why did you give him your number” as if accepting an offer of friendship is the same thing as granting permission to be harassed. The asked “why didn’t you tell him to stop” as if that wouldn’t have occurred to me after getting repeat calls at 3 in the morning. “Why didn’t you just talk to him” as if it was my job to assume good intentions and draw out whomever had decided to call me day and night for months without speaking so that I might educate them as to proper manners, as if it was all simply a matter of a shy person with poor phone etiquette and the burden to stop the calls was on the recipient rather than the person making them. As if getting the cops involved was overreaction because he’d only made a minor social faux pas. Centering him and his feelings, ignoring us and ours.
But I’m sure that endless benefit of the doubt for him and placing the responsibility for emotional labor onto me would have been more effective in changing his behavior than bringing in the authorities. Maybe I just needed to understand him better and explain to him that women and children are real people who feel unsafe when they get unsettling phone calls at all hours of the night and day, and that’s not any fun, which is a thing he couldn’t possible be expected to just know. Think of how he must have felt about experiencing the consequences of his actions, how terrible that was for him. Poor, poor thing. /sarc
1. I’ve got a ton more stories like this; if anyone likes I could tell the one about the guy who kicked in my door in the middle of the night because I wouldn’t let him in to tell me about how mean I was for not wanting to date him any more. Terrifying the baby in the process was a nice touch.
2. Nothing I’ve gone through is particularly extraordinary as the life experiences of women go. Nothing.
But maybe the problem is we don’t understand men, rather than men being unwilling to take responsibility for understanding and managing their own emotions, or men being unwilling to consider women’s perspectives. It’s not like there’s a metric shit ton of media written by men, from men’s perspectives, with men as the focus, explaining and validating themselves over and over and over again. However would we learn what the poor misunderstood men are like. It’s a mystery.
Onamission
Oh shit, we really all got these stories.
In mine the dude pretended that another woman had given him that number (starting totes innocent with “Hi, here’s X (very common name, everybody knows at least one X), can I talk to Y (again, super common)? Oh sorry, must have misdialed…”) calling a few times trying to make sure that really, he was dialling the number she had given him, before complaining about how she should have just told him if she didn’t want to date him, they had met in the sauna, yadda yadda.
I was so angry with that woman who had just made up a number that happened to be mine, until he called again a few months later, trying that exact same shit again.
I’m pretty sure he was just some poor innocent guy, who didn’t have a healthy release for his sexual needs because horrible feminist society denies men to satisfy their biological urges and anyway, how could he have known that I wouldn’t like it?
It was actually me@53, not Caine@54,55 who mocked you for your “lizard brain” garbage – but Caine’s link @55 would indeed be helpful to you, if you weren’t too smug to realize just how ignorant you are. Of course I know, and I’ll bet Caine does, that “lizard brain” is not intended to be taken literally. Thing is, it’s a fucking stupid literary metaphor, deeply misleading – as you exemplify only too well. As Caine’s link points out, the idea that we and other primates have a “triune brain”, of which the “lizard brain” or “reptilian brain” is the oldest part (of the forebrain, strictly speaking), was based on early 20th century work, and has been abandoned by the majority of neuroscientists, because it has been shown not to correspond to the evidence available from paleontology and comparative neuroanatomy. It’s still useful to the likes of Seth Godin and Terence Burnham, who have marketing books to market, but it tells us nothing useful about the origins of human behaviour – I’m shocked to find the American Museum of Natural History still lazily peddling the notion.
Oh gods, do I ever have stories about phone numbers. Too many times, I found myself cornered by an aggressive and intimidating man wanting a phone number. I wouldn’t make up a number, or change one number, because all too often, that might end up being the number of a woman who ended up with an asshole bothering her when she didn’t do anything. After the first couple of times, I memorized the numbers to several local cop shops, and just handed those out.
It’s scary as fuck, being asked for your number, because a lot of men think if they get it, they are entitled to anything they want, when they want it. I suppose I should be thankful this was back in the pre-cell days. Now, no one gets my number.
KG:
I do indeed.
Ladies, find yourself someone who will defend you like dudes defend men they have never met against any criticism or responsibility, from literal wife-murder to flashing their dicks.
Giliell:
And there you have the impossible man.
This is an amazing idea, holy shit.
Mak, honestly, at the time, I couldn’t think of anyone else to inflict these guys on.
Back when lady!Mak still worked at McDonalds, I used to get plagued by this old man who insisted on hovering around me singing all sorts of praises while I was busy cleaning the lobby. Any time he came in, he’d walk over to me and talk about how pretty I was, and how I should come to his house so that he can “shower [me] with all sorts of pretties”, just all the pretties that I could ever want, while I bit my lip and withdrew into myself and tried to focus as hard as I could on the window I was scrubbing.
I might’ve been able to chalk it up as a well-intentioned but clueless old man trying to be nice (especially back then, when I was largely clueless about the more nuanced natures of sexism and didn’t know what my rights as a woman actually were, or when I was allowed to assert myself), except for when I finally worked up the nerve to say “No thank you,” at which point he got angry and bellowed, “Well, I’m not trying to kill ya if that’s what you mean!”
So like… number one, he knew that this was something I’d be concerned about, without my having to say so, and came immediately to that conclusion. And number two, he got angry at me for it.
And he didn’t take it as a clue that I wasn’t interested and go away. He’d come back again and again in the coming weeks, usually while I was stuck doing something that meant I couldn’t get away from him. It eventually got so bad that I’d decided that, the next time I see him, I was going to point him out to the manager so that they could ask him to leave me alone. (Keep in mind I’m a huge turtle when I’m stressed and tend to withdraw and hope that a conflict will pass, rather than call anyone’s attention to it, so deciding to ask for help from a superior was a big deal.) But I never saw him again. I don’t know if he croaked or what, but he never came back to our McDonalds, as far as I could tell.
I’d had trouble with other male customers besides that, but they were usually one-off visits. Dudes asking for my number in the drive thru, whistling in the speaker. That old guy is one reason why even nowadays I still get super nervous when a dude gets a little too interested in me. Especially since I’m pre-transition and don’t disclose my trans status in meatspace, and 99% of my interactions with folks involve a misgendering.
Some years back, my mom left a guy who I didn’t like the instant I saw him because of all the red flags he’d pinged in the hour or so I was around him. She finally left him when he destroyed her property in a fit of rage, and then threatened her with a gun. While my brother was there, even. She still–still–ten years later, occasionally gets a nasty text from him.
‘Cause that’s a great way to show how sorry you are and try to regain someone’s friendship.
Adult men know it’s inappropriate to expose your penis to people. It’s one of the general things that everyone just knows.
Stop trying to make it sound like it’s some gray area that they’re innocently clueless about.
Saad you re so right. Hence the reaction of the male train manager who politely asked the bloke who had been wanking at me if my accusation was true –
Wanker “Well I had a couple of pints at Kings Cross and I was feeling randy”
Train Manager “That’s no justification”
Trying to justify such behaviour is condoning it, just stop.
Also, when exactly is “I had totally no idea that she wouldn’t be delighted to receive unsolicited dick pics” going to expire as an excuse?
I mean, it’s only 2017, after all.
Giliell, there is a subset who would contend “what’s the big deal about a dick pic?”
(Beware of appealing to cultural norms whilst simultaneously decrying them)
Oh, dude, you seem to have missed the invention of easily available contraception.
You also seem to have missed the whole power imbalance that has been the subject of this thread: on average (mean, medium, whatever), women have far more to fear from horny strangers than men do.
You even missed the social pressures men apply to each other. If you’re a man and admit (!) that you aren’t “interested in casual, anonymous sex” or “enjoy pornography” or “willing to have sex with strangers”, your drinking buddies are not unlikely to ask what’s wrong with you as a man, and to turn into your bullies. Many a man has pretended to like these things when that isn’t the case, or even tried to engage in them (hurting other people in the process!) just to prove that nothing is “wrong”. As they say: patriarchy hurts men, too.
Conversely, a woman who admits (!) to liking these things will be asked by all sorts of people what’s wrong with her as a woman, because only men are supposed to be like that.
He wouldn’t be baffled if he thought about it. But he hasn’t, because he’s never had to. He has enough power that he can get away without ever bothering to think about it. Intellectual laziness is everywhere.
I don’t think there are many men with no social power over anyone. But of those that really don’t have any, some will still behave as if, because that’s what they’re used to. By default in this still patriarchal society, men behave as if they had more power than the women in the room, and women behave as if they had less, because that’s what their experience tells them before they even think about it. – And of those men who have believe they have no social power (whether that’s accurate or not), some no doubt want to take that power “back” so they can return to the “rightful” patriarchal default situation. What better way to assert power than to dominate someone, by voting for Trump or by direct assault?
=========================
cartomancer…
1) There’s no offense shown, because you’ve developed a cultural norm against that. (Just like how Western culture at large has a cultural norm that men are supposed to pay compliments to women around them, and that women are not supposed to show offense in response.) I submit you don’t know if there’s offense taken.
2) I can easily imagine, however, that there’s really no offense taken. After all, those websites are settings where people think of each other as harmless equals, right? You’re not going to run into each other at work and get into awkward situations, you can’t make each other’s lives miserable, and you aren’t used to being afraid of each other. Right? None of that is the case in the hetero world.
This does not compute. Please explain. Do you think showing off is healthy? Do you think not showing off is unhealthy? Do you think believing you’re God’s gift to $_sexual_orientation is healthy? These are honest questions, not rhetorical.
FIFM.
Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Everybody, men, women, non-binary, whatever. No one, regardless of gender, is a valid target for unwanted sexual conduct, be it words, acts or pictures. You do not have permission to offer unsolicited sexual commentary, touching or other forms of contact, including emails, calls, texts or shouting across the street. Unless that other person or persons specifically and clearly express a desire for sexual contact, just keep your damn hands to yourself, your mouth shut and your zipper zipped. This should not require deep thinking.