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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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As I was reading the thread below started by @pointsandcorsi, regarding whether or not progressive women’s political values are motivated by unconscious psychological instincts which may not be legible even to those same women, I found myself reflecting on a particularly vexing conversation which I’ve had with a number of young women, and which has always perplexed me. (For the record, I believe that Points’ original comment was underdeveloped and poorly argued, even if it’s obvious that I share his essential politics and worldview.)

For some background: I’m in my thirties and have never owned a car. I live in a major U.S. city, with a (by American standards) extensive public transit network that can get me pretty much anywhere in the city with minimal difficulty. I’ve had a full-time job for over a decade, I have a number of hobbies and activities in which I participate regularly, and I have a healthy social life, all of which I’ve been able to manage without the use of a personal vehicle. Unlike in a city like, say, NYC, though, the vast majority of people living in this city own cars, and it is definitely considered very strange and eyebrow-raising for an adult to not drive. However, many people here do use public transit on occasion, especially to commute to and from sporting events or concerts. As an avid advocate of public transit during my twenties - I’ve soured on that advocacy post-COVID, as the transit network in my city has been thoroughly colonized by homeless drug addicts, and ridership has still not rebounded to pre-COVID levels - I’ve had many conversations with people in which I tried to pick their brains about why they don’t take transit more often.

When talking to men, especially non-leftist men, they have usually been very frank and unfiltered about their reasoning: transit often smells like piss, there are too many bums, it’s inconvenient and they bristle at the lack of control and autonomy which they would have if driving their own cars. All very good and understandable reasons. When talking to women, though - and I don’t think I’ve ever had this conversation with a woman (other than my mother) who wasn’t left-of-center) - one issue is nearly always brought up to justify their aversion to public transit. Nearly every young woman I’ve talked to has told me that they have been harassed, catcalled, ogled, or even stalked - literally followed! - by one or more “creepy” men when they’ve taken the trolley. (For non-Americans, when we say “trolley” in the U.S. we are generally referring to urban rail transit.)

The ubiquity of this story, told to me in nearly every conversation I’ve had with young women about this subject, has never sat right with me. I have ridden the trolley nearly every day of my adult life, normally multiple times a day. I’ve spent literally thousands of hours on public transit. I’ve taken it at every imaginable hour of the day, through every neighborhood of the city adjacent to the trolley lines. I’m a reasonably observant person, and have gotten into verbal (and in one case physical) confrontations with people acting antisocially on transit - it’s not like I usually have my eyes buried in my phone, avoiding taking in my surroundings. If anybody in this city would have a good idea of what things are like on public transit in this city, it would be me. I can count on two hands the number of times I have ever seen a man sexually harass or proposition a woman on the trolley. Supposedly it is happening to every young woman I’ve ever spoken to about public transit, yet it is so vanishingly rare in anything I’ve personally observed that I am always left absolutely baffled at how this could be happening right under my nose, all around me, escaping my notice. It strikes me as… well, frankly, as somewhat unlikely. Now, it would make sense, just as a matter of probability, for a woman who takes the trolley every day to tell me that at some point she has experienced harassment. However, these women I’m talking to usually say that they’ve taken transit maybe five to ten times in their entire lives - sometimes less! - yet every one has a harassment anecdote (usually lacking in specific details, although to be fair I haven’t generally solicited them) ready to go when asked why they don’t take transit more often, despite the fact that most of these progressive women could be expected to take seriously pro-transit arguments such as climate impact.

Since it strikes me as more than a bit implausible that every one of these women has truly experienced what they say they’re experiencing, I’ve tried to reason out what’s happening here. If my skepticism is unjustified, and sexual harassment of random women on public transit truly is this rampant despite my almost complete lack of perception of it, I’m happy to content myself with that! I don’t want to assume that all of these women are lying or otherwise telling me something untrue/exaggerated. That’s what it genuinely seems like to me, though. So, I’ve asked myself many times: Why? Why lie? Why not just say, like the men do, “I just think public transit is gross and low-status, full of misfits and losers, and honestly I’m just more comfortable driving because it’s what I’m used to and I’ve built my lifestyle around it, just like the vast majority of other normal adults that I know”? This is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. In my idealistic leftist days I used to chafe hard at the open contempt for the underclass, but that idealism has long since burned away and I’ve become acutely cognizant of just how sensible these complaints are. Why do these women feel the need to concoct a narrative of personal victimization and endangerment in order to justify their decisions? What is motivating their discomfort and deflection about discussing their true reasons - and, if those reasons are in fact different from their stated ones, what are their true reasons?

I want to throw out a theory, and I’m sincerely soliciting feedback on it, because I don’t know how plausible it is and I have a number of reservations about it. I’m cognizant of my own biases, and unlike a lot of commenters here I’m generally quite positively disposed toward women - even leftist women, a category which encompasses most of my female relatives and nearly all of my female friends. My theory is this: Riding public transit is a daily exercise in Noticing™️ the true diversity of humans, and frankly of different human groups. I don’t know how things are in Europe, but here in America it is impossible to ride public transit with any frequency without observing consistent patterns of behavior that correlate strongly with specific identity groups. The behavior of black Americans on public transit is notorious and would take willful blindness not to notice - blasting loud music from portable speakers, having boisterous and vulgar conversations with no consideration of volume, sometimes speaking/acting aggressively toward other riders (I’ve told the story here about my public assault on the trolley by a black guy) and a number of other unsavory aspects. Not all black riders are like this - in fact, probably most aren’t! - and not all the people who act like this are black. But, if we’re reasoning probabilistically about people, and noticing patterns, the correlations are unmistakable.

Similarly, you see the worst of mental illness, degenerate behavior by obvious drug addicts, and a variety of unsavory realities that threaten the liberal dream of egalitarian universalism. You see people who have no hope of ever being anything other than the underclass, and whose plight seems difficult to credibly blame entirely on external systemic factors. And I think that for a lot of young women, they just can’t handle this. It’s too much of an epistemic injury. It produces far too much cognitive dissonance. And so they can’t be honest - maybe not even to themselves - about it. Maybe they’ve truly convinced themselves that they’ve been personally harassed! Maybe they had a friend or relative who experienced this, and they incorporated that anecdote into their own internal narratives about their own lives. Human cognition is certainly malleable enough for this, and I wouldn’t even guess that this is a characteristically female phenomenon, although it’s plausible to me that it would be.

Am I missing something here? Do other people believe that all of these women (I’ve probably had this conversation with roughly two dozen of them) have been individually harassed on public transit, and I just have never noticed it? Despite being here every day of my life for over a decade? What is going on?

Regarding Europe, I spent a period of time living in Munich once during which the perpetual Berlin-versus-Munich debate of German city preferences got fuel for several months by an incident where a woman was, if I remember correctly, actually raped on a subway train in the presence of other riders who decided to not involve themselves with the affair in any capacity. At the time the tenor of the anti-Munich crowd was that this sort of sociopathy would never have been observed in Berlin, and who knows (in my time in the latter, I did observe one fistfight between two guys that was broken apart by the other passengers, who subsequently called the police... leading to the fistfighters overcoming their differences and making an escape together), but this does tell me that a lot of people must have a strong "this is none of my business, most likely nothing out of the usual is happening, and what if I interceded and it actually turned out that they agree that I am being the pest" prior that is active in public situations, and perhaps in hindsight turns into a full-blown memory filter.

That being said, none of those stories actually turned any women I knew off of using public transport, and this didn't change with the influx of refugees (who I'm sure in your theory would be a source of ample things to Notice) that happened since then either. At this point I should also point out that while I never really lived there, I was a frequent visitor and prolific user of the public transport system (including both the subway and the substantially grimier bus system) of NYC for a while, and (capital or lowercase) upon review of my memories notice very little of the patterns you are pointing out there. I therefore think that your belief that it is impossible to use public transport without capital-n Noticing might be an inaccurate generalisation from personal experience - if the things to Notice already weigh heavy on your mind most of the time, then, yes, further exposure will probably have a great emotional impact on you, much like a dyed-in-the-wool feminist can't watch TV or read ads for 10 minutes without being induced to Rorschach-style ranting about the sexualisation and objectification of women that permeates it, but most people read magazines and skip over the slim underwear model without a thought, and most people ride transit and ignore the noisy group of black youths with a portable radio.

I'm going to keep it real with you. You say that you're cognizant of your own biases and that you're even positively disposed towards women. You also say that a diverse cast of women have almost exclusively given you the same answer to your question for years.

Why would you think that they might not be telling the truth? I'm not saying that people can't lie, but you, like most of us, have consistently heard the same answer to the same question with little variance. I find it odd that you would question their answer so much as to write a long internet post about it. I understand that you personally have never experienced said phenomenon. But given that you're of an above average intelligence, there are probably hundreds of things you believe without having personally experienced them. Granted, you came to this discussion with an open mind and i credit you with that.

I'm a man and my experience on public transportation has included several instances of being menaced by the crazies that have colonized the system. Never been physically attacked but was definitely planning my counter moves on multiple occasions. I have zero doubt that had I been a woman, 'come on, fight me' would have instead been 'come on, fuck me.' I'm secure in the knowledge that I can handle myself in a fight, but if I wasn't, I can see how you'd feel unsafe.

Also consider bystanders. When I see a crazy acting out on the train, yes I'm figuring out exactly the best angle to approach them from if I need to surprise them. But I'm not doing it loudly. I'm not drawing attention to myself. If he's being gross to someone, unfortunately from that person's perspective they're all alone. Imagine how that feels.

I'm glad you haven't had unpleasant encounters with the scum that plagues public spaces, but I wouldn't be so quick to doubt others when they say they have. Is it possible that the type of things they pick up on are things you're tuning out?

I'm glad you haven't had unpleasant encounters with the scum that plagues public spaces, but I wouldn't be so quick to doubt others when they say they have. Is it possible that the type of things they pick up on are things you're tuning out?

As I noted, though, I have had numerous extremely unpleasant encounters with the bottom-dwellers of mass transit; my claim is that the encounters which I’ve observed, either directed at me or happening in my vicinity, have very rarely taken the particular form these women are talking about. I’ve seen countless people acting like assholes on transit, but I’ve seen very few of them specifically menace women in a specialized fashion. It’s that claim, and not a more general claim of bad behavior on transit, which I’m disputing.

I'm going to throw out a related hypothetical that I originally argued about in 1L Crim Law, during the pointless* two weeks we spent learning the law around rape and sexual assault.

I'm on my way home from collecting rent at different properties, I stop at a bar, I meet a woman, we talk, we hit it off, we don't talk about politics because that would be weird, she invites me back to her place for another drink. She's into me, but not super into me, she's not sure if she really wants to sleep with me tonight or just wants to make out a bit then send me home. I'm into her, I'm going to take a shot at getting into her pants while I'm here, but if she pushed my hand back I'd accept it with grace and maybe try again on the weekend, life is long and we'll have many chances to do this.

We get to her place, she goes to get a bottle of wine after settling me down on her couch and tells me to make myself comfortable. I take my jacket off, and then take my shoulder holster off and put my pistol on the coffee table next to my jacket. I always carry when I collect rent, and obviously I'm not about to make out with her with a revolver poking me in the ribs.

She returns with the wine, and sees the gun. Unbeknownst to me, she's very very blue tribe suburban Connecticut, this is the closest she's ever been to a gun, and she's very anxious and easily frightened by nature (made worse by constant exposure to blue tribe propaganda equating guns and gunowners with violence and a steady diet of true crime podcasts). She can only assume that I carry a gun because I'm a violent man, that I put it on her coffee table as an implicit threat to her, that I went to the bar that night with the intention of finding a woman to rape or murder, that my current calm and natural friendly demeanor means that I'm not just a violent man but a total sociopath who enjoys violence, she calculates quickly that her best chance of getting out of this alive is to do whatever I want, to overperform and hope I spare her life.

I know none of this, I just see her return with the wine. She pours two glasses and sits down, slightly stiff but still smiling nervously. We drink the wine, I compliment her taste (which she interprets as more evidence of sociopathy), I begin kissing her and she does not pull away, as my hands wander she kisses me harder hoping that if she cooperates I won't kill her, I just think I'm getting lucky. We make love, several times, I say goodbye and pick up my jacket and my gun and kiss her once more before I leave. I get in my truck thinking I've just made a lovely new friend.

She calls 911 to report that she's just been raped by a stranger who threatened her with a gun.

Now, for those of you keeping score at home, by modern rape law (assuming all the above text could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in court) I did not commit rape, I lacked the requisite Mens Rea for the crime because I had no intent to force her to fuck me, even if she did fuck me because she felt forced to do so by a threat of violence. One can argue about whether putting my gun on the coffee table is merely gauche or irrationally and unusually stupid enough thata reasonable person would know that by doing so I am communicating a threat, but it isn't clear that would affect the legal analysis.

On the other hand, she one hundred percent mentally experienced what happened as a rape, as sex she had while under a threat of violence against her life.

Obviously this is an extreme example, but consider that in outline it resembles the way many women experience subway harassment vs how men perceive it. Women (and many men) often experience threats more vividly than I do, being by nature much more concerned about physical security and much less confident in their ability to deal with a situation. Not only will women pick up on threats that you would brush off, they probably pick up on threats from you that you don't think you're putting out. You don't even notice the other people getting off at your stop, she says a dude stalked her. You brush up against people, she gets groped. You look at her for a few seconds because you think you recognize the patch on her jacket, she gets ogled. That's just how it works.**

*Pointless because everyone knew the prof wouldn't put rape on the final, too much risk of some girl saying it was traumatic for her because it was too close to her own experience, and too culture war-y if you start getting into tough legal analysis of consent, so during that two weeks there was no real accountability if you didn't get cold called. Of course, I chose to do all the reading and argue about it in class anyway.

**Or, a less wholesome explanation more in line with what you're saying, consider that women might be aware of a general meme that women get harassed on the trolly, and some women that do not get harassed on the trolly worry that it would say something negative about them, their attractiveness or their femininity, to say they don't get harassed on the trolly. So they desire to amplify any experience of threat to avoid the idea that they are too ugly to harass or too bitchy to bother with. To quote an old econ professor of mine, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.

I have a slightly related tangent story from my days at a psychological clinic. To cut a long story short, one patient was convinced she was being gang stalked by her family (and associates). Whether or not she was actually being gang stalked or not, I don't know. The evidence I saw is consistent with both confabulation and reality.

In any case, this (17-year old girl) patient was terrified to go to school. So she arranged an escort to accompany her there and back. Cue me and another (female) friend of hers, a highly schizotypal, spiritual person who believes in quantum healing and homeopathy, and so on. On our way to pick her up from school, we noticed a man standing outside and smoking (in the no-smoking area). He could have been watching us, or he could have been not. (Having gone to the same school, it was certainly not unusual for older middle-aged teachers to be chain smoking during the breaks.) Our reports to the clinic staff?

"She was being stalked by a man who gave off a menacingly evil aura! He did not fit the setting at all, I'm sure he was up to no good"

vs

"Uh, what I saw was a man standing next to a door. He didn't do anything of note, and I'm not sure if he even looked in our direction. The end."

tl;dr, different people can interpret radically different things into the same observations. Women are generally leaning towards the schizophrenic, neurotic end of the spectrum, and also generally more receptive to propaganda. So it does not surprise me one bit that a world filled with feminist "women are victims!" messaging has women end up hallucinating terrifying delusions of persecution into completely benign events.

Related: I once went to a trade show in Baltimore, and went to a bar to meet a friend of mine with a redneck-y guy from West Virgina from the trade show. The redneck kept telling me I was "lucky [he] came with" every time a black guy walked by. Perception of danger is relative.

Totally unrelated but I did cringe at the implication that the storyman conceal carried in a bar while drinking. Legality varies but that's a big no-no from every concealed carrier I know.

While it's generally bad to like, get drunk while carrying, I think the implication was that it was like one after work beer. I don't think most CCWers I know would, in reality, skip a beer because they were carrying. But hey, hypothetical characters aren't perfect, that's how they get themselves into these intellectually complex messes.

Women (and many men) often experience threats more vividly than I do, being by nature much more concerned about physical security and much less confident in their ability to deal with a situation.

OP, this is the answer you're looking for. Like most things in life, men harassing women isn't what we think it is. It could be a man staring for longer than necessary but never making eye contact. It could be a man moving to sit a few seats closer to the girl. It could be an offhand physical compliment that would only put up blinders while riding in a confined space with a stranger.

It's hard for us men to put ourselves in the place of woman. Best I can offer is to think of every man as a 6'10'' jacked football player who wants to fuck you. I wouldn't be thrilled to sit alone in a metal tube next to Aaron Donald after he tells me that he likes my shirt and gives me a wink lol.

She can only assume that I carry a gun because I'm a violent man, that I put it on her coffee table as an implicit threat to her, that I went to the bar that night with the intention of finding a woman to rape or murder, that my current calm and natural friendly demeanor means that I'm not just a violent man but a total sociopath who enjoys violence, she calculates quickly that her best chance of getting out of this alive is to do whatever I want, to overperform and hope I spare her life.

This is basically just Dennis's implication process right? Only unintentional. There is an implication of danger (the gun, or being on the open ocean with no way to escape). Given that men are generally bigger and stronger than women, an interpretation would be, that the implication is always there, the nowhere to run or possession of a gun just makes it more text and less subtext, perhaps.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE

Dennis: We’ve gotta pop by the department store, pick up the mattress. I’m gonna get a nice one too.

Mac: The what? The mattress? What do we need a mattress for?

Dennis: What do you mean what do we need a mattress for? Why in the hell do you think we just spent all that money on a boat? The whole point of buying a boat in the first place is to get the ladies nice and tipsy topside, so we can take em to a nice comfortable place below deck, and you know… they can’t refuse. Because of the implication.

Mac: Oh, uh… okay. You had me going there for the first part. The second half kind of threw me.

Dennis: Dude, dude, think about it. She’s out in the middle of nowhere with some dude she barely knows. She looks around and what does she see? Nothing but open ocean. “Ahhh, there’s nowhere for me to run. What am I going to do? Say no?”

Mac: Okay… that seems really dark.

Dennis: Nah, it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me bro.

Mac: I think I am.

Dennis: Yeah, you are. Because if the girl said no, then the answer is obviously no.

Mac: No. Right.

Dennis: But the thing is she’s not going to say no. She would never say no. Because of the implication.

Mac: Now… you’ve said that word, “implication” a couple of times. What implication?

Dennis: The implication that things might go wrong for her if she refuses to sleep with me. Not that things are going to go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will.

Mac: But it sounds like she doesn’t want to have sex.

Dennis: Why aren’t you understanding this?

Mac: I don’t…

Dennis: She doesn’t know whether she wants to have sex with me. That’s not the issue.

Mac: Are you going to hurt women?

Dennis: I’m not going to hurt these women!

Mac: Oh okay.

Dennis: Why would I ever hurt these women?

Mac: I don’t know.

Dennis: I feel like you’re not getting this at all.

Mac: I’m not getting it.

Dennis: God damn... (looks over at woman shopping nearby) well don’t you look at me like that. You certainly wouldn’t be in any danger.

Mac: So they are in danger!

Dennis: No one’s in any danger! How could I make that any more clear to you? Okay. It’s an implication of danger.

Mac: (Stares silently at Dennis in response)

It's subtly different. In the implications gag, it could never be proved that Dennis raped anyone, but if in our hypothetical omniscient court all his intentions were known perfectly, he intended to rape her by threat of force even if he had no intention of following through with the threat, the modern law does not expect women to test the seriousness of threats before submitting to them.

In my hypothetical, our oblivious man does not realize that any threat of force is involved. Taking off his gun is no more a threat of force than taking a wallet out of his pocket would be an offer of payment or taking his phone out is an offer to order a pizza. Of course, in other circumstances, those things can be true threats and offers. You read intent by context, which can be (mis)read differently by different people.

But the takeaway is the same either way if you assume Mac to be oblivious to the implications when he sleeps with a woman on the boat. A woman experiences a rape, but no man committed rape because he did not intend to.

But the takeaway is the same either way if you assume Mac to be oblivious to the implications when he sleeps with a woman on the boat. A woman experiences a rape, but no man committed rape because he did not intend to.

Right, Dennis and Mac could do exactly the same things on the boat, the woman experiences exactly the same things but Mac is clueless and Dennis is not. How much does that change the scenario? probably depends on how you would expect a reasonable person to understand. Pointing a gun at the woman, even if you were some idiot and weren't trying to intimidate her into sleeping with you would probably count because a reasonable person should have known that would be a threat. Waving a gun? Just showing it? Just putting it down? Mentioning it? Where exactly the line would be is likely to be blurry.

I always see people, even on the Motte, talk about how women are constantly fearing that they're at risk of getting the killed if they don't comply with men. Then they go along and do everything they think the men wanted them to do (based on no concrete evidence), and then blame men for their own stupid, interpolated to the nth degree, actions. Often, they even blame individual men who didn't intend anything in the first place.

I can't stand this. Men are not mind readers, and most men are not bad people who would take advantage of women like this. At some point, we have to say that the woman was irrational, and wrong to blame innocent men for her own decisions. If someone is terrified about something with no evidence, and they act based on their fear, they don't get to blame random people that they've projected their fears onto.

Eh, the behavior is mostly fine, I'll never criticize a woman for avoiding a situation in which their relative weakness can be abused. The errant step is when the heuristic becomes an accusation, it is wise to avoid being alone with strange men, it is irrational to confuse the lone strange man's latent threat with induced threat.

Agreed.

If someone is terrified about something with no evidence, and they act based on their fear, they don't get to blame random people that they've projected their fears onto.

Is there no evidence? I would suggest that the OP and Dennis are correct. There is an implication, always. And if you are weaker than the other person then it likely behooves you to consider that at all times. They cannot know if the person will act on said implication or not, but it should be factored in to the assessment. Social behaviors are not decided on an individual basis but a group one. No point in pretending that isn't true I feel.

You cannot blame someone else for something they aren't even cognizant of.

"sorry officer I didn't know I was speeding"

At the end of the day, "making a woman uncomfortable" is verboten and human society has long shaped itself around sexual differences like this. The topic under conversation is just way #109.

Could it be you just don't think women's comfort is all that important? That could be discussed for a millennia and still be unresolved.

I hold a similar stance to haroldbkny, and here's my reasoning. Note, this is coming from someone who is small and short in stature and would absolutely be crushed by most other men around me in combat - no one has any obligation to be continuously cognisant of themselves around me or anyone physically weaker than them, as long as their behaviour isn't actively intended to be intimidating. People need to come to terms with their fears and manage them appropriately, they cannot continuously walk around expecting to be coddled by others. Especially when what makes people intimidated and uncomfortable is poorly defined and basically requires people to do mind-reading in order to reliably avoid these situations. You can't use other people's feelings as a yardstick for socially acceptable behaviour because feelings are inherently by their nature irrational, mercurial and difficult to predict, and if these are the standards which are to govern male-female interactions the only reliable way of avoiding accusations of wrongdoing is to stay away from women.

I believe that female baseline greater neuroticism, rather than any rational risk assessment about their probability of being physically victimised, is a bigger driver of the difference in reactions between men and women, especially considering that women are no more likely to be violently victimised than men (if anything, the reality is the polar opposite of women's feelings). I also think that our reactions to this are related to a protectiveness of women that we simply do not have for men. There are intra-sexual strength differentials too, but it's not very common to see this logic invoked in a scenario of physical power disparity between men. Virtually all discussion about physical strength differences are forever about how men can accommodate women and how men are to blame if women do something idiotic out of fear, it's never applied in an impartial manner.

And perhaps I would be less annoyed with this expectation if our ideas surrounding women in our current society were full traditionalist, which would make it at least consistent. But they're not. I have to act in line with the modern progressive ethos of women being just as Strong and Powerful and Capable as men in contexts where it would benefit them, then accept "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want" in contexts where this reasoning could be used to justify special favours for women. Our modern attitudes surrounding women are this incongruent mish-mash of "Women Can Do Everything A Man Can Do" ideology as well as traditionalist ideas that prioritise their protection and require men to defer to their sensibilities, and these beliefs are selectively invoked to benefit women. It allows women to capitalise on the upsides of both strength and weakness, and avoid the downsides that these perceptions would normally entail.

Thanks, I agree with this largely, just one minor nitpick:

I have to act in line with the modern progressive ethos of women being just as Strong and Powerful and Capable as men in contexts where it would benefit them, then accept "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want" in contexts where this reasoning could be used to justify special favours for women.

On more traditionalist, or traditionalist-friendly places like the Motte, they may say "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want". But when it comes to actually dealing with progressives and feminists, it's even more insidious. For 100 years, people were pushing towards women having more rights along with responsibilities like men. Then the 3rd wave feminists came along and started to push back on this. They started insisting on special privileges for women. They claim that this is not because "women are so weak and scared" but because "men are evil and privileged" or "society uniquely hates women". I cannot abide this explanation, because I still see so many privileges for women, where women are already elevated over men.

So for this example, they'd claim that men need to be constantly cognizant of not making women uncomfortable, not because women deserve special consideration, but because women have historically been oppressed, and men and society don't care about women's feelings, and men need to correct this.

I think if women want to be treated like adults, and have the privileges of men in modern society, then they should have corresponding responsibilities, and they should not get to lean on antiquated notions that their comfort and dealing with whatever irrationality they have has to be prioritized over other people's interests. If women still want such consideration, we should not pretend like they're not being treated specially.

Note before people accuse me: That's not to say men don't have irrationality too. But IME, men don't usually expect the rest of society to make it their problem.

For the Dennis skit, he is relying on the woman modelling his behavior given the vulnerable position she is in. He won't do anything if she says no, but he understands that she doesn't know that and so counts on that to change her behavior. It's hard to prove as rape but it is certainly manipulative.

Now imagine Mac as FiveHourMarathon mentions below does exactly the same things as Dennis but cluelessly. Is he innocent of rape or attempting to manipulate? Absolutely. But should he have known of the implication and therefore taken steps to avoid putting the woman in that position? Maybe. It depends on whether a reasonable person should.

I think most men know that if you are sharing an empty subway station late at night with a woman, and you are the only two there, that walking up and standing right behind her, even innocently is likely to make her nervous. If you do it anyway, you're not breaking the law, you shouldn't be arrested, but you are probably being a bit of an asshole.

Learning the social conventions and being cognizant of them is a duty of members of society. For the obvious ones, failing to learn them certainly is blameworthy. It's pretty much the most important thing to learn. They are the rules of the road for society. Just as I shouldn't drive without learning the rules, and if I hit someone because I blow through a Stop sign because I didn't know what it means it is still on me.

Just as I shouldn't drive without learning the rules, and if I hit someone because I blow through a Stop sign because I didn't know what it means it is still on me.

That's a terrible analogy. The equivalent to the current situation would be if a pedestrian saw someone driving and assumed that they were going to blow through a stop sign and hit them. So the pedestrian then ran into the street in the opposite direction to avoid the car, because they were terrified of getting hit, and then they subsequently got hit by another car, or something.

And then blamed the first driver for driving like they were going to blow through the stop sign. And a big chunk of society then goes "yeah come on man, you should know better than to drive like you are going to blow through a stop sign!"

Also nobody actually explains how you avoid driving like you are going to blow through a stop sign - except for stuff like don't go too fast and start slowing down well before the stop sign - and when the first driver shows video proof he did that, that chunk of society offers sympathy but immediately forgets anything happened and insists the next driver who didn't blow through a stop sign is still somehow to blame.

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Sure there can be an over-reaction, no dispute there, but the driver still is (contra your point) at a minimum partially to blame if they do not make themselves cognizant of the rules of the road.

I'm not sure that this is a behavior exclusive to progressive women. I delivered pizza during college in a mixed Southern town where the local black population is fairly ghetto, and the amount of whining about how dangerous delivering to the hood is (from an almost exclusively male delivery staff) was off the charts compared to how dangerous it actually is. To be clear, the amount of danger is non-zero (probably more than more people realize, though the occasional reddit talking point that delivering pizza is more dangerous than being a cop is incorrect and stupid. Cops would die in droves if they tried to do their jobs unarmed like pizza drivers do.) and I have been robbed at gunpoint on the job (Once in five years of delivering in that area.) but objectively the driving part of the job is more dangerous than the local crime threat (Birmingham, Alabama, on the other hand? Fuck that and RIP Najeh ). The real problem is that delivering to these customers is a money loser (These customers don't tip.) and often profoundly unpleasant. You're going to get harassed by the local street presence and customers are constantly trying to scam and get shit for free. You're not allowed to say that though (Hilariously, black drivers will and are highly sensitive any perception that they're getting stuck with the hood deliveries.) while you're allowed to refuse deliveries that seem unsafe, so there's a culture of hyping relatively tame but not nice places as dangerous (while we redline places that are actually dangerous). I'd imagine that dealing with the local losers on public transit is somewhat similar. You're probably not in much outright danger but you're going to be dealing with a lot of unpleasantness.

With that, in my experience women are more sensitive to danger in general, especially middle class and up white women, and they do deal with annoying behavior from customers that our male drivers don't (Porn is lying; nobody wants to fuck the pizza guy.). I've goofed as a dispatcher and sent one of those to a mid-tier hood at night and she called the office flat out terrified and hyperventilating. Lower class women complain less about this, especially lower class butch lesbians from the hood.

Having delivered Amazon Flex throughout greater Birmingham for a few years(never as far as college town proper, but Brookwood/Vance one unlucky game day night), I'd say even the sketchiest areas are "merely uncomfortable" during daytime, but I hated taking runs to particular neighborhoods after dark. If I had a 4 hour run with 1 hour going after dark, I could adjust schedule to be less efficient but finish those areas early. My dad worked the 2010 census around here and hated the idea of going to some of those places at night. Only time I had a gun directly pointed at me was in Remlap, older guy thought only a meth-head would be driving to his trailer at night while raining, a not especially wrong belief. I just wish he had held it, safety off at his side and not stood in position with it levelled at me.

The few times people people aggressively approached me when outside my car and I just said "I don't carry cash and don't get tips. I'm pretty sure what's in my car is mostly books, dog food, and diapers." and they'd laugh or mutter and do something else.

Najeh getting murdered still pisses me off because I grew up within walking distance of that Domino's and Summit apartments.

and I have been robbed at gunpoint on the job

So your coworkers were entirely correct all along and not at all "whining about how dangerous delivering to the hood is". They were correctly stating the extreme danger.

One gunpoint robbery per 5 years makes the job incredibly unsafe and the drivers were right to complain.

They probably just think the truth is too rude to say openly. That's the simplest explanation in my opinion.

Uncharitably, this is just "Bitches be lyin'" written as a more tactful and polished effortpost.

More charitably, you are probably touching on some actual insight but casting it in an uncharitable light (as much as you tell yourself you are trying to be charitable - you don't want to believe women are all lying about being harassed, after all.)

(1) There probably is a lot of redaction in their own recollections going on here. Everyone is guilty of this, not just women. How many people have you known who will tell an exaggerated version of an incident you were witness to and are quite sure didn't actually go down the way they said it did? Are you quite confident that everything you remember, especially unpleasant incidents (like your confrontation with the black guy on the bus) happened exactly the way you remember it? That no one else might reasonably have a different version based on what they saw? And have you never been tempted, even a little, to throw an extra detail or two into a story which then became cemented in your mind as the true narrative?

Probably some of these women's "harassment" experiences were like that - a guy brushed against her, and she shuddered and in her mind, the dude was trying to grope her. Someone looked at her funny and she remembers it as being oggled. She got an uncomfortable vibe on a bus, even though no one actually said or did anything to her, and she felt unsafe which in her mind became "I was harassed."

That probably does explain some of it, but I doubt very much that every one of these women is just outright making things up to hide their true feelings ("Eww, people who take public transit are gross!")

(2) You may indeed be a perceptive person who pays attention to your surroundings, but "I watch what goes on on my buses and I've never seen any women get harassed" is still quite a failure of reasoning. I don't regularly ride public transit, but I have done so many times in my life. I can think of maybe one or two times I saw something I'd consider harassment (and it was very minor, like a whistle or a couple of lewd comments). Most people, most days, on most buses, don't harass people. But if you assume some people on some days will, a woman who rides the bus multiple times has pretty good odds of eventually having it happen to her, even if it's not on a bus you happen to be on. Or you might not notice it, because you didn't see the guy who was giving creepy stares to the woman across the aisle from him, or the guy who sat down next a woman and gave off creep vibes so she moved seats. (And you'd of course question why she thought he gave off "creep vibes" because women lie and make things up so she had no rational reason to think that, right?) So congratulations, you have never personally witnessed a literal sexual assault or a guy committing what you consider harassment. At the same time, you clearly have witnessed a lot of antisocial behavior. Is it possible women experience (and are subject to) antisocial behavior on a level and at a frequency you are not, and that you might not notice all the things that happen that aren't "He literally put hands on her or yelled things about what he wanted to do to her ass"?

Also, would it surprise you if I told you I have never gotten in a fight with a black guy on a bus? Maybe I think you are making that up because it fits your narrative about black people. I have ridden the bus with black people quite often and never seen anyone start a fight.

(3) Yes, a lot of it is probably "vibes." Women know the kind of people who ride buses are also the kind of people likely to harass them or at least make them feel uncomfortable. There is probably a degree of exaggeration or remembering things that maybe didn't quite happen exactly as they tell it to justify the fact that they don't want to ride public transit with creepy gross guys who might harass them, but because of leftist ideology they can't state it in a such a racist/classist way.

So, you aren't 100% wrong here, but you're still reaching for a justification to believe bitches be lyin'.

One thing that may explain some difference between your experience and the OP's experience is that buses are very different to forms of public transportation that have more separation between the conductor/driver and passengers. A public transit train can easily leave someone much more isolated with a stranger than a bus can.

My experience isn't limited to buses. Subways, metro rail, Amtrak, trolleys, etc.

I saw a Black guy try to start a fight last week on the subway… does my anecdote beat yours?

I’ve also had multiple Black guys try to start fights on the bus with me for no reason - I think it really depends where you live and how often you take public transportation.

I never had issues on public transit living in Chicago but I only took it once or twice a week. In both Philly and NYC I take public transit every single day in both cases have run into people attempting to start fights, either with me or others.

I saw a Black guy try to start a fight last week on the subway… does my anecdote beat yours?

No, because I'm not claiming black guys never start fights on the subway. That wasn't even my point - I do not actually doubt Hoffmeister experienced what he experienced.

Uncharitably, this is just "Bitches be lyin'" written as a more tactful and polished effortpost.

Bro. If you know it's uncharitable, then by the very rules of this forum you shouldn't be saying it. Come on man, a moderator should know better than to make this kind of swipe (the second I've seen from you recently, at that).

Amadan: "I'm a mod, not a saint."

Let the mods have a little fun. It's perfectly fine to be a little jocular, this isn't SCOTUS arguments.

This isn't having fun, this is openly breaking the rules. That's my issue.

I don't feel like his statements crossed the line, especially in the context of the overall conversation on the platform. It was couched in a lot of engaging and complimentary verbiage, with a little jab at the end. That seems like something I would find acceptable when I did it myself.

The rule is that you should extend charity to someone's views (as I did to Hoffmeister by pointing out there are multiple ways in which his perspective can be viewed, and assuming he isn't just arguing that "Bitches be lyin'"), not that you can never suggest the less charitable interpretation might be true.

I would not mod someone for saying "What you said could charitably be read as A, and uncharitably as B" and proceeding to analyze both A and B.

I think you underestimate the variety of the human experience, both objectively (in terms of how other people might act differently around you vs your women friends) and subjectively (in terms of how those women friends may perceive the same actions differently than you). Just to take some examples from this thread, I'm sure in your thousands of hours riding transit you've seen people of all genders brush up against other people of all genders. If you mentally categorize all those incidents as "someone accidentally brushed someone else, no sexual harassment" but some fraction of the women brushed by men categorize some fraction of those incidents as "he deliberately groped me, sexual harassment" then the apparent gap between your perception and theirs is already explained. It doesn't even need to be that you aren't seeing these events, only that you mentally categorize them differently than the subject of them.

That aside, I think the underlying reasoning is not very good. As best I can tell the basis for thinking your friends are lying is just because their experiences don't match your observations. I perceive the underlying logic as something like

I have spent thousands of hours doing X. During my thousands of hours doing X I have never observed Y. Since I have never observed Y in my thousands of hours of doing X I have a prima facie case to disbelieve anyone who claims to have observed or experienced Y while doing X.

The only way this reasoning works is on the assumption that your experience of doing X is typical, that it is representative of what others experiences will be like. I think this is a bad assumption generally but is especially bad when applied across genders on the topic of sexual harassment.

I also wonder how far you take this logic. Do you believe any women have ever been harassed on the transit you frequently ride? The logic in your post doesn't just work for your friends accounts, after all, but would be applicable to any woman claiming to have been harassed. If you think women have been harassed despite your lack of observation, why can't your friends be in that group?

Finally I do not find your proposed explanations very convincing and expect you would be quite resistant to these explanations if someone tried to apply them to you. "You say you've had experience X, but I've never seen it. You're just telling yourself a lie so you can continue believing in your political ideology in the face of contrary evidence." How often would you say the foregoing sentence described you? Why do you think you know your women friends and their experiences better than they know themselves? On the basis of what evidence?

If you mentally categorize all those incidents as "someone accidentally brushed someone else, no sexual harassment" but some fraction of the women brushed by men categorize some fraction of those incidents as "he deliberately groped me, sexual harassment" then the apparent gap between your perception and theirs is already explained

Well, the 'why do they think random brushing is groping' still needs to be explained, because random brushing isn't groping.

Or maybe one doesn't notice actual groping if you're halfway across the subway car, because it just looks like someone moving slightly and the person next to them moving away a few seconds later, idk

You say you've had experience X, but I've never seen it. You're just telling yourself a lie so you can continue believing in your political ideology in the face of contrary evidence.

That particular claim is a weird psychoanalytic thing, but most people are very wrong about many aspects of their experiences, so it definitely can happen.

Well, the 'why do they think random brushing is groping' still needs to be explained, because random brushing isn't groping.

My point is that the distinction between "random brushing" and "groping" is, at least in part, dependent on an imputation of intention to the person making the contact. Whether some particular contact is brushing or groping can be underdetermined by observation of the occurrence.

I can count on two hands the number of times I have ever seen a man sexually harass or proposition a woman on the trolley. Supposedly it is happening to every young woman I’ve ever spoken to about public transit, yet it is so vanishingly rare in anything I’ve personally observed that I am always left absolutely baffled at how this could be happening right under my nose, all around me, escaping my notice.

Is it possible that you give off tough-guy vibes, and so men are less inclined to harass women around you? In general, I think that sexual harassment would be more prone to happen to a woman during a time when there are few people on the train, particularly no upstanding young man who might notice or be a possible a white knight. Or it might happen more quietly out of your view or noticing?

I can very, very confidently say that I do not give off tough-guy vibes. I’m 5’7”, about 130 pounds, and have never been in a fight in my life.

Mostly just duplicating what other posters have said, but it seems to me that there are several possibilities, any or all or none of which may apply in any particular case:

  1. you and your female interlocutors have different interpretive frameworks for what types of crappy interactions are sexualized. E.g., a vagrant staring aggressively at you gets interpreted as rude, but a woman in the same position might attribute the stare to her sex.

  2. superficially similar types of unhappy events really do impact women differently. E.g., same staring vagrant, but where he makes aggressive, unblinking eye contact with you, he would instead stare at a comparable woman's breasts.

  3. you are not as observant as you think you are, and miss subtle events which are obvious and discomfiting to the women who are victimized. E.g., /u/hooser's "grinding" story below, which seems like it would be very hard to spot.

  4. you are not taking the same public transit at the same time or in the same place as the offenders. We know that antisocial behavior is not evenly distributed across the population, or even across individual sub-populations. Even in a "bad" neighborhood, most of the criminal behavior will be committed by a small local minority. Thus your wide range of transit use does not mean you are necessarily-likely to have bumped into particular antisocial conduct, particularly when you are not the desired target demographic.

  5. the women are, either consciously or subconsciously using sexualized incidents, which are a politically/culturally-approved complaint, as a cover or justification for less-acceptible reasons.

Very well written post! I think this is a reasonable take and quite persuasive.

This is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. In my idealistic leftist days I used to chafe hard at the open contempt for the underclass, but that idealism has long since burned away and I’ve become acutely cognizant of just how sensible these complaints are.

Could you elaborate a bit more here as to why you now see contempt for the underclass as more sensible?

I used to use public transit in my city when I was a broke college kid. There were many daily commuters and I didn't really notice the issue of it being dirty or gross.

I personally witnessed plenty of women being hit on. Heck, I've hit on women myself, and been hit on / stalked home.

The one incident that stands out in my memory actually appeared to be semi-consensual. A very drunk man with a thick latino accent was hitting on a fat, possibly mentally retarded woman. They were having lots of trouble communicating due to their respective impairments. I had about a twenty minute bus trip, it started about 5 minutes into the trip and by the time I got off it sounded like they were working out the details of whose place they would go to. The drunk man didn't have much of a place, and the mentally retarded woman was worried that her guardian would stop any hanky panky if they went to her house. It was wild. I tried to look around the bus and see if anyone else was noticing this crazyness. Nope, they were all missing out due to headphones.

The time I hit on a woman I actually got a date out of it. I picked up a scrap of paper and wrote "You are cute :) text me [my number]" and dropped the paper on her lap as I left the train. She texted me back a few hours later and we ended up meeting for a date. It didn't go any further, I don't think she was romantically interested in me.

The time I was hit on I was coming back from a drinking event with co-workers. They all had to catch a different train, so I was left alone for a few minutes waiting for me train. I was pretty drunk and head was in my hands trying to rub some sobriety into my face. A drunk woman about a decade older than me was in the same situation, all her coworkers left on the earlier train and she had to wait for the later one. She chats me up on the platform, and then on the train. She lays out her worries and frustrations as a manager onto me. She tries to convince me to go to a bar with her, but I'm twenty and can't get into any bars (yes I was drinking illegally with co-workers). I tell her I just want to go home and sleep. She follows me all the way home. She sits on my couch talking to me for another 30 minutes while I drunkenly snack on something and semi-ignore her. Eventually I want to go to sleep and have to kick her out. She doesn't want to leave. I tell her I'll go to a bar with her, and that gets her moving. Once she is out of the apartment I close the door. She knocks on it for a few minutes and I kept telling her to go home. She finally leaves. This would have been near maximum level creepiness if the genders were reversed.

In summary just add me as another point of data to the growing pile that says "you are missing things".

A drunk woman about a decade older than me was in the same situation, all her coworkers left on the earlier train and she had to wait for the later one. She chats me up on the platform, and then on the train. She lays out her worries and frustrations as a manager onto me.

Okay, I’m pretty sure I’ve read this doujin...

Was it a slightly chubby, boobless, and not all that attractive woman in her thirties in the doujin?

I agree with your main thesis, and I have nothing to add. The only anecdote I can add is that I have taken public transit for all my life in one of the most dangerous European cities, with still their majority group as natives, without any problem at almost any hour.

I came to the US, in NYC, for a trip, and at the first public transport trip a black woman spit on the face of my mother, withouth any reason, before fleeing while laughing.

I have no idea how you guys can tolerate that.

You happened to get lucky and experience something weird that people don’t normally experience.

Congratulations / sorry.

I've also visited NYC for a trip and used the subway extensively and didn't get into any altercations, or witness them. When I was leaving some black guy said a few words in an angry tone for pressing against his face with my backpack (I think), but that was that.

I have ridden the NY subway every day for years, and I have never witnessed a crime, let alone someone spitting in someone's face. I can therefore assure you that there is no such "that" that people are tolerating.

I’ve lived in NYC three months now and had one Black woman purposefully roll her stroller on my foot for the temerity of attempting to nudging it slightly out of the way because I was attempting to walk past it to get to the back of the bus and last Saturday on the L train between 1st Ave and Bedford at 1:45am saw a homeless Black man swing his bag and almost hit a guy in the face for “looking at him”.

Perhaps people can have different experiences than you especially if they go out at night / not on the UWS?

I'm sure they can, and obviously such events do happen. But the OP implied that his experience was a normal experience (hence, his statement, "I have no idea how you guys can tolerate that."). It isn't. That was the point. And, btw, when I am on the subway, it is largely not on the UWS.

There are attractive women who say they've never been harassed by men in the street. There are attractive women who say it's a constant problem. I think Darwinism can explain why. If a woman causes a scene, she can cause a lot of problems for the harasser. Harassers that can't gauge the reaction well are selected out of the harassing pool, and only those who can reliably predict a woman's reaction remain.

This can explain why you see women riding the bus, but none of them are ever harassed. They are the ones that are not worth harassing, and the ones that are don't use public transport after several encounters.

I dunno, I’d expect the selection effect on harassers to be pretty weak. It’s not like the mutaween show up to beat offenders. Even causing a scene more or less caps out with throwing the dude off the bus rather than a long-term ban.

Vulnerable-looking women self-selecting off the bus seems more plausible. I think neither is as significant as “noticeability” of harassment, which is much higher for a young woman on edge than it is for a transit-experienced man.

If you do X (harassment) expecting to receive Y (feelings of power) and receive Z (verbal aggression) instead too often, then it's not worth doing X.

I see no reason to doubt the "aversion to creepers" reason. Creeping can involve something as simple as a guy staring at them for too long. The real question, as in my post, is why do the same women complaining about creepers advocate for them in the strongest possible terms?

Continuing in the theme of my post, women can't be explicit about what they want men to do. This is the case because the type of man that has to be explicitly told is not the type of man they are interested in. So I think in order of preference they would like to a) the men to completely eradicate bums/addicts in a brutal oppression campaign despite their protests, b) the bums/addicts/criminals to become dominant and return to honor culture (at least there is some vitality in public life), c) the good men to continue letting bums walk all over them and their women (least good option). Note that the women will continue to advocate for c the entire time, complaining more as it worsens.

So I think in order of preference they would like to a) the men to completely eradicate bums/addicts in a brutal oppression campaign despite their protests, b) the bums/addicts/criminals to become dominant and return to honor culture (at least there is some vitality in public life), c) the good men to continue letting bums walk all over them and their women (least good option)

Why don't men want those too? Your argument for women wanting those is just 'they are good', which - sure, but why does that mean women 'subconsciously' want them in a way men don't?

women can't be explicit about what they want men to do. This is the case because the type of man that has to be explicitly told is not the type of man they are interested in

Why is this the case? A lot of redpillers/manosphere people say this but I rarely find persuasive arguments that it's true. In general I find it tiresome when rationalists try and mental judo this idea of 'they say one thing but mean/want another.'

I've read a lot of erotica over the years. The ubiquitous trend in the women-perspective stuff is of a man who knows what she wants, no, needs, without her having to ever ask for it or admit it until well after the point where it's just stating the obvious. Conversely, a very common theme in the men-perspective stuff is a woman who is frank and open about what she wants.

I don't know exactly why these paradigms exist, but it seems very likely that they do.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean that modern women innately want neoreaction or trad morality in any way (op's claim), just have some desire for a man to lead, which is quite different

Because they both want what they can’t have.

I've read a lot of erotica over the years.

Why?

Aphantasia, being a voracious reader, easier to conceal, and being old enough to remember when pictures and especially video online was a frustrating pain in the ass.

Is this meme true? Do women admit this is true?

There are only two rules:

  1. Be attractive.

  2. Don't be unattractive.

I think you're conflating bums and creepers. I used to ride public transit a lot and there were definitely creeper types but I never pegged any of them as bums. The bums mostly kept to themselves.

Eh I doubt epistemic injury is a factor, I don’t think people think that deeply. Probably a combination of 1) deterrence when other men are around and 2) lies/imagination. As for 2, I’m sure some women are doing the whole “OMG that creeper was totally stalking me” thing. But several women I know not to be fabulists have related to me more instances of creepy behavior when they are alone and it is not unreasonable to assume male presence deters it.

Edit: Isn’t there any woman you trust completely to be honest and accurate on this? My wife hates minorities as much as any motte user but reports harrassment when on her own that I never see

Yes, absolutely; in fact, I would have no a priori reason to distrust any of the individual women that I’ve talked to about it. It’s when all of them are telling me the same somewhat fishy-sounding thing that I start to be suspicious.

Shouldn't that make you less suspicious? A worldview where the more people you trust tell you something makes you trust the claim less, seems a little odd surely?

I was a nerd growing up, but almost every nerd I speak to tells me tales of being bullied. I was never bullied nor have I ever seen a nerd being bullied (except in movies/TV shows) yet the more nerds who tell me they were bullied shouldn't be evidence against the claim, presumably. Especially if they are people I otherwise consider trustworthy.

I was the son of a feared teacher at my school, and then I was the father of my kids at a school and now I am a professor at a school, which means I am in all cases in a bubble, where people who bully are probably going to avoid doing it near me. While it is probable some of the people who claim to have been bullied are making it up, it seems unlikely they all are. So the more claims I am told should raise my belief in bullying not make me suspicious.

Now that is a separate issue as to whether it might be interesting to explore some of the claims, because perhaps what some say saw as bullying I just saw as fighting. And I was in a lot of fights as a kid. If a week went by when there wasn't a circle on the all-weather pitches with some kids throwing bad punches at each other then that was a slow week. Usually over something stupid which was forgotten by the next week. But I wouldn't call any of those kids either bullies or victims.

I think part of it must surely also be generational / geographic. For instance, I went to high school in the early 2000s and saw all of one fight, and it resulted in one kid suspended and the other expelled due to a zero tolerance of violence policy. I didn't see any bullying of nerds through my school years, but if there had been any there it's likely it did not take the form that is usually depicted in older TV / movies (definitely no swirlies or people being stuffed in lockers) since that specific form of bullying would be punished harshly. Other nerds around my age I met later in life who reported bullying during high school basically all reported it as taking the form of verbal abuse, things being stolen or online harassment rather than physical violence . It's possible their teachers at the time would have reported no bullying happening because the kind of bullying they were looking out for (and that they had grown up with) was different than the kind of bullying occurring.

Norms around school bullying are definitely changing. Here's a sample from Wall Street Journal: "When kids exclude peers from group chats and texts, is that bullying? (With lots of "yes" answers from various authorities.)

Anecdotal, but my GF, prior to changing employers during the pandemic, commuted on mass transit for a decade.

She was already uncomfortable at times prior to COVID accelerating remote work, and after the number of commuters declined significantly and the level of antisocial behavior increased, we went from a one-car to a two-car household.

She speaks a second language fluently and would often pretend not to speak English, because wearing headphones and burying her face in a book was insufficient to deter the kind of low class losers who shotgun advances while employing the Boomhauer method among commuters on mass transit. This happened to her probably a couple times a week on average.

But what only has to happen a few times to really sour a woman on using mass transit, is, the one or two times a year some creep got off at her stop just to follow her and talk at her after previous attempts to get her attention we’re not acknowledged.

When our metro’s mass transit became a collection of mobile homeless shelters and twice in a single week some mentally disturbed men got off at her stop and followed her for several blocks, we were visiting car dealerships the following Saturday.

I’ve had my ass pinched by women in bars. One, drunk, introduced herself to me by licking my forehead. But these things aren’t scary because I’m not worried about being overpowered by some woman with a lack of boundaries. But that’s different for nearly all women. Usually the creep bothering them is significantly stronger than they are, so when a strange guy follows them home from their stop, it’s very unnerving.

I think you may be underrating the level of harassment simply because it is either mitigated or becomes more subtle in your presence.

I too live in a neighbourhood that has over the past few years seen a massive increase in the number of mentally-addled homeless. For me it's not a big deal; I'm tall and strong and a man, all things which probably do wonders in decreasing the willingness of people (even the mentally ill) willing to talk shit. But certainly talking to women who live in my area they've anecdotally reported a marked increase in harassment. I think part of it is subconscious; when you're five foot nothing and 100 pounds what you perceive as a threat or provocation is quite different. But I also think it's much more likely for people to get harassed in general when they're less physically imposing, and you add in the gender/sexual dynamics and that tilts things further against women.

Am I missing something here? Do other people believe that all of these women (I’ve probably had this conversation with roughly two dozen of them) have been individually harassed on public transit, and I just have never noticed it? Despite being here every day of my life for over a decade? What is going on?

Thank you for considering the possibility that you are missing something. You are: most acts of public harassment are subtle and most women will not make a scene. (I am speaking from my experience and experience of women I know.)

Here's a specific example: I and my husband are riding a crowded train. We are standing, getting jostled around as people move around. My husband and I are facing each other, we are talking. Suddenly I feel the guy behind me grinding his clearly-erect penis into my butt.

I don't make a scene; I ask my husband to switch places with me, that's all. My husband doesn't notice a thing, nobody else noticed a thing. I look at the guy, and he just pivots away.

And, before anyone asks: yes, I firmly believe that not making a scene was the best option for me. I don't want to start a fight where I or my husband may get hurt; I don't want to report a harassment that has zero chance of prosecution.

And yes, almost all of my women friends who have lived in large metropolitan areas have at least one such story, and we are nothing special.

I'm going to offer up several counterpoints to what seems to be the consensus here and say I think the gap you're seeing between male and female reporting could very well be because 1: Women are higher in neuroticism and risk-aversion then men are, and 2: they're raised in a culture that tells them to fear unwanted sexual advances and that they are uniquely at risk of experiencing it, whereas men are not taught the same thing. This could definitely lead to them perceiving a greater variety of actions as "harassment" than men and causing women to have a greater fear of sexual harassment in public, even if they are in fact not uniquely at risk. Additionally, it's entirely plausible that due to this women are also more likely to remember and recall bad experiences that men would simply forget, widening the gulf between men and women on this topic. As a result I think a big part of what you're seeing doesn't necessarily have to reflect a difference in male and female experiences.

There's abundant evidence that males are less likely than females to conceptualise of sexual comments and experiences as abusive or harassing, and that they disclose less about these experiences. For example:

"Widom and Morris (1997) found men were much more reluctant to label child sexual experiences as ‘abuse’ than women (16% compared with 64%). Fondacaro, Holt and Powell’s (1999) study of male prison inmates also found that 41% of those who met the criteria for contact child sexual abuse did not consider their experiences as ‘abusive’ ... Other research that has linked men’s identification as a survivor of child sexual abuse to higher levels of psychological distress suggests that perceiving early sexual experiences as non-abusive may be a form of protective denial for men shielding them against painful memories (O’Leary and Gould 2010; Steever, Follette and Naugle 2001). This may mean that ‘nondisclosure is actually more adaptive for males than is disclosure’ (O’Leary and Barber 2008:135)."

And:

"The disclosure of child sexual abuse and the response the victim receives are integral to how a victim experiences the aftermath of abuse, and to their recovery (Lovett 2004). While there are some similarities in the patterns of disclosure for males and females, most notably a tendency towards non-disclosure and delayed and indirect disclosure, the research also points to some significant gender differences. The main differences are that males are less likely than females to disclose child sexual abuse at the time of abuse, and that when they do disclose, they take longer to do so, and make fewer and more selective disclosures (Gries, Goh and Cavanaugh 1996; Hébert et al 2009; Hunter 2011; O’Leary and Barber 2008; Priebe and Svedin 2008; Schoen et al 1998)."

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/CICrimJust/2014/14.pdf

Other sources seem to indicate a similar male unwillingness to report. This is a report investigating men who have been forced-to-penetrate women (through force or coercion). It notes that the vast majority of them did not tell the police, nor did they tell friends and family about it. "The majority of men did not report being compelled to penetrate a woman, either to the police or to friends and family. The reporting rate to the police of 1.7% is even lower than the reporting rate for women who have experienced serious sexual violence, which stands at around 15%. The extremely low reporting rate in compelled penetration cases suggests a clear lack of engagement by these men with the police and criminal justice process."

"The great majority (80%) of men did not disclose their experience to their family or friends."

https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/forced-to-penetrate-cases/files/2016/11/Project-Report-Final.pdf

Now, this one is simply an off the cuff Reddit post so make of it what you will, but this poll asked people "Do you consider dirty jokes that make you uncomfortable to be sexual harassment?" and it allowed people to specify their sex and their opinion on the topic. 21% of men said yes, as compared with 52% of women. Of course, this doesn't really specify the type of joke in question or the circumstances the joke was asked in, I'd wager that this poll actually understates the gender difference and that the men who answer the poll are likely thinking of more lewd and severe types of jokes than the women who answer the poll as it takes more to make them uncomfortable in the first place.

https://old.reddit.com/r/polls/comments/ravyfb/do_you_consider_dirty_jokes_that_make_you/

In other words, it's hard to know if what you're hearing actually represents a real difference in risk of sexual victimisation, or whether it simply reflects a difference in perception of events experienced and/or willingness to tell people about it. The problem is that there is a cultural phenomenon where it is increasingly encouraged for women to view their experiences with men as as harassment, assault or rape, whereas we do the exact opposite for men. Pair that with male baseline lower neuroticism and greater stoicism, and things start getting harder and harder to untangle. And while it's difficult to get reliable prevalence estimates because of the aforementioned litany of problems regarding measurement, reporting and recall, I will say that there's a lot of data we currently have which indicates that sexual victimisation isn't particularly gendered. Here is a Reddit post I previously made on the topic.

I take public transit a lot, often in New Zealand, but also a little bit back when I lived in Los Angeles. I have not been harassed as far as I can remember, although if the incident was minor then I might easily have forgotten it. There was quite a lot of street harassment in LA, and incidents from that context are thus more likely to have stuck in my memory than any small additional experiences during my less frequent public transit trips.

There are a number of possible explanations for the phenomenon that you outline. Without knowing more detail it's hard for me to guess which ones are more likely, but here are a few of them:

  • Some harassment is comparatively invisible. Groping can occur out of line of sight. Someone with astute social skills can box someone into a conversation out of politeness and then start quietly bringing up sexual topics after the rest of the car has got the impression that the conversation is polite chit-chat. And so on.

  • Harassment does not occur at random. If you are, in fact, an alert traveller, and this is visible to the people around you, and you look like someone who would intervene if you saw something, then you may be carrying a little anti-harassment field around with you. Thanks, if so! But this would mean that your experience would drastically undercount the level of harassment that occurs under other conditions.

  • Some of the women you are talking to may be conflating "I have heard stories of harassment on public transit" with "I have been harassed in public, although not on public transit, and do not wish to repeat the experience" and may therefore give replies like "I have experienced too much harassment to want to use public transit." This could be true, strictly speaking, even as it implies that they have been harassed on public transit when in fact they have not had that precise experience.

  • People often have a tendency to retell stories with themselves in the main role, even when they heard it from someone else. Think, like, urban legends, where people will retell it and swear it happened to them because that makes for a better story. This just seems to be a thing people do. Some people may therefore be telling you stories that are not, strictly speaking, their own.

Thank you, this is a quality reply and addresses a lot of my reservations in a very credible and cogent way. Much appreciated.

Some harassment is comparatively invisible. Groping can occur out of line of sight. Someone with astute social skills can box someone into a conversation out of politeness and then start quietly bringing up sexual topics after the rest of the car has got the impression that the conversation is polite chit-chat.

Both my mother, my sister and my wife have been stalked from the subway home. My mother was chased so she had to run and the pursuer pull the handle to her door and hit the window.

I'm not sure incidents like this could be noticed by someone just riding on the train.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The original comment way above concerns male-on-female harassment on public transit. You're talking about stalkers following and threatening women when they're alone. These are markedly different issues.

From OPs post:

Nearly every young woman I’ve talked to has told me that they have been harassed, catcalled, ogled, or even stalked - literally followed! - by one or more “creepy” men when they’ve taken the trolley.

People often have a tendency to retell stories with themselves in the main role, even when they heard it from someone else.

I wonder to what degree this explains statics femists cites regarding the prevalance of rape and domestic violence. Perhaps a closed loop is formed when stories with such themes are promoted by feminists, both true and fictional, as represetative of reality only to be then considered by women to have happened to then. False memories are real thing, harms of which have been pointed out by Sagan.

I would think that this sort of story appropriation would be more likely to happen in a conversational format than in a formal survey, but I don't know. Are there surveys of urban legends where people tick "yes this happened to me" in appreciable numbers?

Is it possible you're not accounting for the fact that men might be less likely to act creepy when there are other men around? If the moment every other man is off of a train, the last man starts acting creepy, it might seem to every other man that women never get stalked, harassed or ogled on the train.

It could also be the case that sexual harassment is rare, but the women who "win the lottery" and experience it after only a few train rides are more like to stop riding as a result. Sort of the opposite of the observation that most people who get addicted to gambling had beginners luck the first time they stepped into a casino. If you didn't have that pivotal first experience, you might continue riding the train as a woman.

Or it could just be that women aren't trustworthy judges of creepiness, prone to interpreting men's (particularly certain kinds of men's) behavior in the worst possible way because they are incentivized to do so.

Is it possible you're not accounting for the fact that men might be less likely to act creepy when there are other men around?

This is possible, but that would have to be a powerful deterrent effect that would be worth pulling out and studying on it's own. It would also necessitate some serious revamping of feminist talking points.

I have ridden the trolley nearly every day of my adult life, normally multiple times a day. I’ve spent literally thousands of hours on public transit. I’ve taken it at every imaginable hour of the day, through every neighborhood of the city adjacent to the trolley lines.

Sure, and I imagine a private in the US army undergoes training thousands of times over many months/years while being as observant as they can. I don't think this private can really tell me anything about conditions in the Russian army.

The assumption you're making when you say "I've never seen this happen" is that you're assuming a lot of things are equal/the same over all areas. For example, how do you know that you're not just on public transport with a semi-permanent cast of morally upright people, while these women are having a totally different experience?

It's entirely possible you've accounted for all these things. Maybe all these women really are situated in the same commuting climate that you are. But without knowing this to be the case, your post reads like you're asserting your experience as the universal experience in an effort to suggest that women are either consciously or unconsciously promoting "liberalism" over acknowledging "reality".

Again, as I mentioned, I’ve ridden the train thousands of times, at every possible hour (including after midnight) and in every neighborhood of the city. It’s laughable to suggest that I’m only seeing “the good side” of public transit, given that I was very explicit about my near-constant exposure to junkies and physically aggressive underclass types. Presumably those would be the same people harassing these young women, yes?

I'm sure you've seen the aggressive types. But you and the women you speak about can still experience things that don't necessarily carry over between the environments you each experience. This is why I gave the analogy that I did - you can simultaneously experience a wide array of things and still be unaware of another set of things for a variety of reasons.

So you do have experiences of being harassed non-sexually by junkies on public transit, but because it wasn't sexual you don't believe that junkie harassment might be sexual when directed at women?

The harassment and anti-social behavior I’m witnessing is, notably, not subtle, not hidden or surreptitious, and not something an observant person on the same trolley car would be likely to miss. Again, I’m fully aware that harassment of a specifically sexual/gendered nature does occur - I acknowledged that I’ve observed it probably less than a dozen times - but that it does not appear to happen with the type of frequency implied by the fact that every single one of the women I’ve talked to reported experiencing it.

I have no reason to doubt them, they aren't really woke at all and weren't big on MeToo

Are they anti woke? If not then maybe it's worth reconsidering if you should doubt them. Me Too captured the hearts and minds of women everywhere, except the anti woke. Everyone loves being told that they're a victim, that they're uniquely put upon. People will internalize this if it's a dominant message in society.

I think it's it a mistake to think they are lying and then say you know their true motives they themselves are unaware of.

A simpler explanation is this. You agree that a woman who uses public transit everyday will at some point experience harassment.

Some women will be unfortunate enough for this to occur in their first few rides.

Some of those women will then decide not to ride public transit anymore. This does not mean that the rate of harassment is high enough that every woman is likely to be harassed in 5 or 10 rides. But some will.

I also think it's perfectly plausible you just haven't noticed the harassment. You only see a small slice of the daily commute and not all forms of harassment are going catch your eye.

Ex, a woman gets off your train, to get the next, to avoid a man, and the man follows her. Your not going to see that, from your perspective it will just look like two people, among others getting off your train at the same station.

You agree that a woman who uses public transit everyday will at some point experience harassment.

No, I agree that it’s plausible, although again it strikes me as still a low-probability event.

I also think it's perfectly plausible you just haven't noticed the harassment. You only see a small slice of the daily commute and not all forms of harassment are going catch your eye.

This would make sense if I hadn’t ridden the train thousands of times, at every imaginable hour (including after midnight) and in every part of the city, no matter how sketchy. How am I not observing it if it is happening this often and to every women to whom I have spoken about it?

I mean, the reality at least, from my own experiences with women, is that they have stories about harassment and catcalling about anywhere they are, so their issues on transit to them, are likely due not to issues with mass transit, but rather, men. But they can avoid men via a car, and just get catcalled in the parking lot, instead of on the light rail and in the parking lot as well.

Also yes, they aren't going to harass or catcall a woman if there's anybody around they think will attempt to stop them.

To add to your point, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, and when all you hear about public transport is that it's full of bums and perverts you are going to be hyper aware of bums and perverts. So aware even the innocent look suspect - you might interpret an innocuous glance as leering, or a guy living in the same apartment as you as a stalker. This is why evidence is supposed to be a necessary component of an accusation - because without it everything is up to the beholder.

Counterpoint: in what other situation are regular people in a confined space with bums and perverts? I see them on the street and on public transit, that's it.

Maybe the DMV (or related government offices)?

Perverts...try Bars? Concerts?

When talking to women, though - and I don’t think I’ve ever had this conversation with a woman (other than my mother) who wasn’t left-of-center) - one issue is nearly always brought up to justify their aversion to public transit. Nearly every young woman I’ve talked to has told me that they have been harassed, catcalled, ogled, or even stalked - literally followed! - by one or more “creepy” men when they’ve taken the trolley.

My wife takes the train to work a lot. She has some stories like this. At least one I think is very true. But the remaining lie in a nebulous "touching" zone where her butt or breasts were contacted in an awkward way. And its hard to judge each one without more information on the man's POV. I myself have bungled into a fair amount of bum and boob on the train over the years. Its inevitable when the trains are herky jerky and have 50 people per car in standing room only.

BUUUTTT. I also know that had I been taking the train regularly in my early teens I might have been horny enough to try and seek out "accidents", and its plausible to me that many men never grow out of that phase.

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