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Notes -
This is frankly Wellness-Wednesday adjacent.
Does anyone else remember when the internet was full of Women (capitalization intentional) complaining that men hit on them? My perception as a guy in the early 2010s was that the list of places/contexts where you weren't "allowed" to speak to a woman was growing every day. It started with the gym/bus/grocery store, but then came to encompass every possible social context where men and women might come into contact with eachother. It reached a point where I was expecting to see an article titled "We Need To Talk About The Serious Problem of Women being Flirted With at Singles Events."
It's just that, now in the current year, I can't seem to actually find any solid examples; aren't all these important feminist essays archived somewhere? I remember them being inescapable.
Here's a pithy summary: When I hear women complaining that men don't approach them in public anymore, I want to link a 2010s feminism article and say "This is why." But...where are the articles? Did I imagine them?
If you imagined them, you and I were part of a shared imagination. I don't recall there being mountains of such articles, but there certainly were a bunch.
Within the new atheist movement, there was a major hubbub where a semi-famous figure in the sphere, Rebecca Watson (a founder of Skepchick, IIRC, and also a then-member of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast) wrote some essay complaining about being propositioned at some convention by a male attendee at 2AM in a hotel elevator as being something terrible and probably misogynistic and patriarchal or something.
I don't have any links to primary sources off-hand, because these aren't pleasant things that I wanted to remind myself of.
I remember that, I just also remember the vibes coming from normie sources, or as normie as anything on the 2010 internet could be.
I associate Elevatorgate more with the rise of prominent "geek girls" that didn't seem to like geeks or geeky things.
One of the most normie things in that era associated with that is a letter that the Obama administration sent to publicly funded universities telling them that they should use a "preponderance of evidence" standard (generally described as 50.00001% certainty of guilt) to find students guilty of sexual assault in their internal, non-legally-related justice and discipline system. This, combined with the general notion and meme that "false rape accusations are vanishingly rare as measured by court cases and convictions, therefore any verbally stated accusation of any sexual impropriety ought to be considered true by default until proven otherwise" which was never official policy but was certainly the attitude of most of the feminist left that tended to dominate university administration meant that students were aware that if they weren't 100% sure that they'd receive a positive response, hitting on someone carried a real risk of putting their schooling and sunk tuition costs in the hands of a stranger's whims. And, unsurprisingly, people who went to college tended to be overrepresented among the people with power and loudspeakers.
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