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I agree with all this. Most people learn pretty early that men approach, women get approached. Men take the risk of rejection and humiliation, because the risk for women is an entirely different calculation. You could say all the risk for men comes before they get a "yes," and all the risk for women comes after it.
There's nothing pernicious or oppressive about acknowledging that men are less choosy (for both social and biological reasons) and therefore any woman who wants to get laid probably can, much more easily than a man, but that comes with definite drawbacks on the female side of the equation.
The problem every time these threads get spawned is that the aggrieved men complain only about the disadvantage they perceive (namely, that they can't get laid as easily as they'd like while the women they desire get to pick and choose and aren't punished for it), and won't acknowledge the real risks (not just "feeling bad" or "offended that an ugly guy approached me") that women have to contend with. A lot of them will react to "heterosexual men have the obligation to learn to read the room" the way feminists react to "women should learn to have situational awareness and exercise good judgment in choosing partners" - both get really pissed off at being "victim blamed" for being told that some negative consequences are actually avoidable.
I'm not a fan of the Rebecca Watsons of the world making a big cause out of being approached in an uncomfortable way, or the "defectors" you refer to turning every approach into sexual harassment. But yeah, Elevator Guy should have "read the room" - it is pretty creepy to ask a woman you're alone in an elevator with late at night to "come back to your room for coffee" unless you have been given prior signals that she might be receptive to such a proposition.
I'd also make explicit that I mean here for defectors to include men as well: there's inevitably a guy, if put into a scenario where all the women give gentle negative reinforcement to bad approaches, who will then proceed to aggressively ignore all signs of discomfort and approach any and every woman, and if called out plead ignorance and good intention. Which itself doesn't approach the level of rape, but it makes the setup unsustainable.
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One potential issue here: what is the rate of violence women are intuitively expecting vs the rate at which nerdy tech dudes actually lash out? I would expect a very large discrepancy between "ancestral environment" or "feminist paranoid take" versus "low T nerd convention".
I think the actual physical threat presented by the average nerd hitting on a woman at a convention is very low. That said, while I don't think women should react to every creepy come-on as a rape threat, I don't think they should just be expected to put up with creepy come-ons without protest. Rebecca Watson arguably overreacted, but otoh, she wasn't even trying to get the guy punished, even informally - she just embarrassed him a little.
If women have to put up with ill-conceived come-ons, men can put up with embarrassment for an ill-conceived come-on.
Amadan,
I think that you are a bit obsessed by the question of fairness to the individual, where each side has to suffer equally.
This ignores issues like how inconsistent standards of different women cause an environment where there are no consistent rules for men to obey and they as a result will unavoidably face abuse, unless they abstain from making advances completely.
I'm much more in favor of a society where men and women find a reasonable common ground that they adhere to, even if it is not to the liking of each individual, rather than the false promise that everyone can have their own standards be met and people being taught that abuse is warranted if men do not magically know which standards a specific woman demands of them (where that standard may not even be consistent for that specific woman and certainly not for women as a whole).
First, no, I'm not, I don't think people are equal except morally.
Second, I am not a fan of calling people "obsessed" because they argue a position for more than one post. Reminds me of Twitter, where someone will make a claim, someone else will argue with them, and after a few rounds, the person contesting the claim says "Wow, you are really obsessed with this, aren't you?"
Sure.
This is an obvious straw man, and equally obviously, not what I want either.
I wasn't responding to the frequency, but to the way you approach the issue.
For me, mate selection is a rather complex challenge where people with different demands, different (sub)cultures, different skills, etc have to match up. This provides all kinds of challenges and any solution is going to have downsides and upsides. Simply pointing to a thing that is not optimal in some ways, without even recognizing that the very same behavior that produces a disadvantage also brings advantages, is in my view merely a demand for Utopia, which I see as very harmful, as well as not being helpful at all.
It is very far from a holistic view where you actually try to build a workable system and weigh advantages and disadvantages, compared to the alternatives.
For example, when you said that: "I don't think [women] should just be expected to put up with creepy come-ons without protest," I see no recognition at all that a protest may in fact be the wrong solution (at least for certain types of alleged creepiness). Why?
The perception of what is creepy may be unreasonable. For example, some people seem to believe that this perception is heavily correlated with attractiveness, rather than just behavior, which if true, can be argued to be extremely discriminatory.
The perception of creepiness may vary so much between people (and possible even for the same person, depending on their mood or such) that saying it to a man may not be a helpful lesson to that person. And if a generic complaint is made, like in the elevator story, yielding to it may just mean that other women don't get come-ons that they desire. Either form of complaint may simply divide men into those who respond in a Pavlovian way (ignore the complaints, because doing so work often enough) and those who simply stop approaching women altogether (as there is no way not to offend some women, unless one stops approaching women altogether). The net effect may be negative for women, especially if the more neurotic men are less likely to be harmful, which is likely. It may even empower bad actors when women have less choice due to men checking out and have to lower their standards.
Accepting this may reinforce the current narcissistic and individualist culture where people demand that their own desires are met, which can be argued to have many downsides, including a lack of clarity of what both men and women should do and accept to make mate selection work out reasonably well.
Those are just a few examples of challenges that you could have addressed, but instead you merely state your opinion that you believe that a downside is unreasonable, without even arguing why you consider it unreasonable. As such, it is about as informative as 'I like fish.'
It is not at all obvious what you want, because your statements are so shallow. You argue that "it is pretty creepy to ask a woman you're alone in an elevator with late at night to "come back to your room for coffee" unless you have been given prior signals that she might be receptive to such a proposition." However, this is just your personal opinion on the matter. Do you believe that this should be the societal norm? Is it the societal norm? How do you even know to what extent the guy perceived prior signals?
There are scientific studies that argue that people are often very bad at both sending and perceiving subtle signals. Something you never address. You just assume. Perhaps she smiled at him and then put her hand through her hair, in the same way that some women do to signal. However, this time it was not intentional, but how could he know?
Do you want to standardize the signals or make them very explicit? If we do not, then shouldn't women accept that men will quite often misjudge?
What I see you do is merely empathizing with an individual woman, without seeing the larger picture, in so many different ways.
Look at what I've written and the heat you have put into what you have written. "Obsessed" looks like projection to me.
Because I was not taking the binary approach you are. I don't pad every statement with qualifiers and caveats and throat-clearing about not every situation being exactly the same, because I expect readers to be intelligent enough to understand that "I don't think [women] should just be expected to put up with creepy come-ons without protest" does not mean "I think any time a woman thinks she's being creeped on she should go on the attack and turn it into a scene and woman are always right about their perceptions."
That's your projection. No, I didn't write an essay to your satisfaction. I don't care if you think that's shallow because all your projections about what I "assume" and "didn't address" make it evident you are arguing with your personal issues on the topic, not with me.
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But at that point the "risk" to either party is actually quite symmetrical - some degree of potential unpleasant social experience, either embarrassment or having to awkwardly turn someone down. If we want a situation where men have to face public embarrassment in the form of a public rejection, and women have to endure the annoyance of publicly embarrassing men, well, I might agree to those conditions, but I'm probably not going to think the women are equal.
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Nope, there is no symmetry there. If Watson wanted to shoot the guy down that's entirely her right. People get pissed of at feminists acting like this is some great systemic injustice that Something Must Be Done About, not at women being afraid of being approached somewhere without a clear escape route.
This inverse of this was the many people saying at the time that they understood why he took his shot when in the elevator - it meant he didn’t have to get shot down and potentially embarassed in public. It's not likely that he chose the elevator because of the implication.
Well, but I also agree with that, it's perfectly understandable! But "understandable" doesn't mean it's not a mistake.
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I don't agree. Some men may have the more nuanced take you are proposing, but even in this thread there are men expressing resentment that they're expected to "read the room" and not intentionally put women in an uncomfortable position. Multiple people have denied Watson had any reason at all to be unhappy or uncomfortable; she should have just said "no thanks" and thought nothing more about it. A more stoic mindset would certainly have produced that response, but there aren't many men who are that stoic about being put in uncomfortable situations either.
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