Emma Watson and equality

[Essence_Smith]

There are always going to be exceptions... I think I mentioned a while back that the same is true with grad students dating undergrads or professors dating grad students... it's a really bad idea that sometimes works out positively. But that doesn't stop it from being a bad idea in general. Obviously your case worked out. But that doesn't mean it should be normal or acceptable. Lots of arranged marriages work out, but those probably shouldn't be acceptable, in general, either.

I dunno what to say at this point...I definitely understand how it is for women out there...I have four sisters and two daughters...I've seen the full spectrum of how it can go when guys approach women randomly on the street...everything from guys exchanging numbers with women and it leading to relationships to dudes cursing at and even throwing objects at women for not responding...that stuff is disgusting but I don't think it counts for what's going on in a guy's head every time it happens. I get what you're saying about the proper setting and context, I just think one scenario is as good as any other provided the person initiating has some respect for both themselves and the person they're attempting to approach.

[perkana]

It's easy, if someone doesn't give you a smile or looks at you in an inviting, friendly way and they're just walking, minding their own business. It's as easy as that
And I agree with everything you've said ES. It's just damn uncomfortable, it's been ages since I've been in that situation. But it's still awful when people who don't know you tell you how to behave.

I definitely understand what most women are saying here. I think I have a problem with it kind of being filed under harassment. I talk to strangers on the street CONSTANTLY...and I grew up with some pretty smooth dudes who instead of actually telling a girl they should smile would say something like "excuse me, I don't mean to sound funny but it would make my day if you could just smile"...if the girl smiled they would thank them, wish them a good day and everyone went on about their business...chances are they'd see the girl again in the neighborhood and THEN they'd try and get their phone number or something. These were respectful dudes who knew exactly how to approach someone and they weren't demanding anything, they were always polite as hell and I learned a lot from them...no offense to her, but farrellgirl and some others here give off this vibe that there's no room for a guy to approach a woman they don't know on the street at all. I know no one's said as much but it seems that any approach is a bad thing to hear them tell it...

That's the thing, you have to know when it's right. If the woman is approachable and friendly, go ahead. Last time a guy told me why I should date him. A total strange jackass. His argument was that I was too hard on myself and that I should give us a chance. Like wtf?. I was a bit tipsy and he made me angrier the moment he said more shit like that. He asked my number and guess what? I had to give him a fake one because he couldn't believe that I didn't have my cell phone with me. I just had to give him anything for him to leave me the fuck alone.
I myself talk to strangers a lot. People seem to like to tell me the story of their lives. It's not like I'm against talking to strangers, just the cat calling and what happened to me.

[LJF]

but christ how do you meet people at that point?

As a character on The Simpsons once said, paraphrased: "through a mutual friend like a normal person."

The whole concept of hitting on women randomly on the street without any other context doesn't make sense to me unless you see women as receptive vessels waiting to be "picked up" (hence: pickup lines?) rather than people who have lives they're trying to live independently. The line you mention above really just seems like it assumes that making that dude happy is what a woman, any woman, should want to do... which is odd unless you don't think women are entitled to not have to deal with the expectations of random men on the street.

There are so many contexts in which trying to "meet people" is possible, and maybe even desirable... through friends, bars, through hobbies...



So how does someone meet someone that they find attractive and would like to get to know if they don't have a mutual friend? This is a serious question, have you ever seen someone that you wanted to get to know and just walked up and tried to start a conversation with them? I get where you are coming from with some of the things you've said, but I'm just wondering where we would all be if we just waiting for in intro vs sometimes just walking up and starting a conversation.

[perkana]

My problem is not actually meeting people, my problem is becoming friends or hanging out with them. I know it's an excuse, but I live in a very big city. So it's easier if you meet someone who lives near you or who goes to work around the same area.
I've had very positive experiences meeting guys at bars, but that one time. However, I've just noticed that it isn't as easy as it was in my 20's.

[Hype]

I didn't mean to rule out starting conversations with people you don't know. Of course there are lots of cases where this will just happen naturally, or where you just go for it. It's easy to imagine standing at a bus stop waiting for a bus and being blown away by some good looking human, and therefore deciding to strike up a conversation with the hope that maybe somehow it will turn into something else (especially if they get on the same bus and sit with you). I think ES and I aren't that far off... there's a line, and it's not clear exactly where it is, but it's somewhere between not talking to anyone you don't already know and sticking your hand up the dress of every woman you see... More seriously, I don't think any common sense view about treating other human beings with respect (which does not mean doing what you want in a "respectful" way, but treating them, as Kant would say, as "ends in themselves", i.e., as autonomous agents whose lives are independent of yours) would ever result in people being unable to find other people to mate with...

So yeah, there are lots of cases where you'll get lucky and meet someone randomly. But I think it's clear that it's both unwanted and unacceptable to think that it's just fine to think trying to pick up random women on the street, without any other kind of context that might make it an exception (like small-talk waiting for a bus...)

If you're not careful, I guess this could happen:

[Hype]

...

[Essence_Smith]

That Seinfeld was crazy...I have a confession... I was quite the pickup guy when I was single which is partly why I feel strongly about this. Lots of crazy incidents and stories but they're mostly positive...I once accidentally pulled a chair out from underneath a girl and still managed to get her number. I think there's a whole culture of guys who pickup girls and girls who go out looking for attention, but it's a whole different conversation...but let's be straight, aside from typically places like bars I know there are plenty of other places like the supermarket or the laundromat where women go with some intention of possibly meeting someone that aren't traditional settings...to quote George Costanza its all about "signals"...before I even approached a woman I didn't know I would have to have some sort of signal to go for...eye contact, a smile, something to let me know I wasn't going to play myself...again I think there are cultural aspects involved here...I have met MANY women on buses, trains, you name it and I never got a scowl or negative reply...even if they weren't interested they were as polite as I was...I know EXACTLY where that line is...and unfortunately I have never stuck my hand up a woman's dress but I did have a strange woman stick her hand down my pants...the world is crazy...

[Hype]

I have met MANY women on buses, trains, you name it and I never got a scowl or negative reply...even if they weren't interested they were as polite as I was

I think this is tricky. A lot of the recent conversation has been about how women don't feel safe NOT being polite, or being negative... In your case, well, from your internet persona we could assume that you wouldn't have harmed a woman if she did give you a response you didn't like, but there are too many stories of this for it not to be troubling anyway. When you say you know exactly where the line is, I wonder whether this might be overconfident... but again, it's one case, so even if we take your word for it, there's still the fact that many people don't know there's a line, or don't care.

Someone's boss might think it's okay to be jokey with employees, even about sexual topics, and they might be utterly confident that they have common sense and know exactly where the line is, because no one has ever complained, but then one person complains, and all of a sudden a number of other women might turn up who say that they never said anything because they were worried about negative repercussions.

This discussion really started somewhere around 40 years ago, but it seems to have gone relatively quiet for the Gen-X years, and surged back up again recently... (I take it that Third-Wave feminism is the current form, and that this began with Gen-X, but it's also been a pretty tricky form to get a handle on... the post-structuralist influence puts it at odds with the older forms... in ways that some academics and many non-academics find difficult to interact with....)

[Essence_Smith]

...

This is awesome...

[perkana]

I liked George better than Seinfeld, if you made me choose. I would choose George (my favorite episode is when he eats an eclair from the waste basket and he gets caught. Then there's some fire alarm and he tramples on the girl's poor grandma )

[Hype]

I liked George better than Seinfeld, if you made me choose. I would choose George (my favorite episode is when he eats an eclair from the waste basket and he gets caught. Then there's some fire alarm and he tramples on the girl's poor grandma )

He's the perfect example for this thread. Here's another one, about ES's "signals".

[perkana]

I prefer complete honesty too.

[Essence_Smith]

I prefer complete honesty too.

When I pulled the chair out from underneath that girl I pretty much had to come clean about the fact that I was trying to sit NEXT to her lol. We ended up dating for a few months :)
The truth is definitely the best route

[farrellgirl99]

i think the only way to solve this is to somehow have a random, but controlled experimental meeting set up between es and me on the streets where he's just being friendly and see what happens

but seriously, i said i wouldnt keep commenting on here but it's hard. every person is different in terms of how they feel comfortable. i am simply cautioning men who seem to think that any comment, innocuous or otherwise, is welcome. because some people, like myself, will probably not react well to it.

it's interesting to think about how meeting someone at a bar is different sometimes, and i think thats because you are in a public, controlled environment, usually surrounded by other people. bad things can happen at bars, of course, but maybe the fact that you are in a public space makes it less worrisome if someone tries to talk to you? i really dont know. i am more inclined to engage someone if i talk to them at a bar or other public area, and not on the street. yes, the street is public and people can be surrounding you too, but theres something very invasive about it. i dont like when i am approached when i am alone sitting in public plazas or trying to eat something, etc. because i do not want to be bothered and i wish people would respect that.

like whats been said, i do think it comes down to body language. is the girl sitting alone in the park busy? does she want to be bothered? is she on her phone? or does she initiate eye contact with you and smile? then go ahead. and if she does engage you but then isnt interested after talking to you, go on and leave her alone. i still think telling a woman to smile is bullshit because its related to thinking a woman's body is there to please you, but we will have to disagree on that.

i urge respect and caution when speaking with women you do not know. that is my main point. i would suggest not engaging strangers on the street. but if you are so inclined, engage with someone who seems to invite your conversation. it needs to be remembered and realized that you may be a perfectly nice guy who will respect a woman's wishes and space, but the next guy might not be such a nice guy. every man is a potential threat, and thats the sad truth. its not your fault, but thats the unfortunate truth. thats why women like me err on the side of caution most the time. its not because we are unfriendly or rude, its because we dont know who the nice guys are and thats why we might be reluctant to engage any random person on the street. instinct goes a long way, but the reality is you never know.

[LJF]

every man is a potential threat, and thats the sad truth. its not your fault, but thats the unfortunate truth. thats why women like me err on the side of caution most the time. its not because we are unfriendly or rude, its because we dont know who the nice guys are and thats why we might be reluctant to engage any random person on the street. instinct goes a long way, but the reality is you never know.[/quote]


I've been sitting on this comment since yesterday, but decided I had to say something. Sorry to hear that is how you choose to feel or believe. How would you feel if someone put, choose any ethnic or racial group, in place of "every man", or "guys" in your statement?

[Hype]

I think the point is about how women have to operate, which is totally distinct from racist beliefs... and you just fell right into the standard "not all men" line... which is obvious but beside the point.

[LJF]

I get why women might be leery, but the reality shows that it's more likely someone they know. Saying every man is a bit extreme.

https://www.rainn.org/get-information/s ... -offenders

[Essence_Smith]

i think the only way to solve this is to somehow have a random, but controlled experimental meeting set up between es and me on the streets where he's just being friendly and see what happens

I am charming yet very sincere...I think it'd be a polite brush off at worst...

I find it VERY sad that you view strangers as a threat...I am a life long NY guy and I completely understand the mentality but walking around with your guard up all the time isn't necessarily the best way either imho...I think trust is a funny thing to just hand out, but until someone gives me some subtle reason to be wary of them I HAVE to trust that the guy sitting next to me on the train is just trying to get home too. Anything other than that is just adding stress to an already stressful life in a major city.

I think the point is about how women have to operate, which is totally distinct from racist beliefs... and you just fell right into the standard "not all men" line... which is obvious but beside the point.

I don't think they're that far apart actually...again living in the same town I understand exactly where she's coming from, but I also know that this can pose a lot of problems...I remember growing up and seeing women pull their purses closer when they saw me coming closer to them in public. I had a BIG problem with this and it framed the way I looked at white women in some regards. It's not just about what women have to do to protect themselves, but also the way in which people now view them because they're on the defensive in some ways...I think the word threat bothers me...I find it pretty sad even I don't necessarily disagree with the thinking behind the statement.

This whole drift reminded me of Chris Rock saying that its only sexual harassment if the guy is unattractive...

[Hype]

I think the key issue is that women are stuck having to be hyper-vigilant in public because genetics and culture and history have led men to tend to act toward women in ways that don't account for women as autonomous individuals, but, worst-case as 'prey' and more generally as pleasure-providers.

I agree that there's a way in which people react to black (male) strangers on the street that is related to this, but that's just because racist thoughts can provoke hyper-vigilant (or anxious) behaviour. The difference is that there's no good reason to associate black skin with threats, but there are many good reasons to associate maleness with potential threat (as farrellgirl put it). This is why LJF's attempt to equate the two fails. In the case of racial prejudice, the cause of hyper-vigilance is unconnected with an essential feature of the perceived threat; in the case of perceiving men as a potential threat (not just sexually, but socially), there are clear connections to the features associated with the possibility of danger.

The goal of the current emphasis on this in feminist arguments seems to me to be pretty clearly to press on the point that men seem to see invading a woman's mental and physical space in public as justifiable, normal, and even necessary -- in the ways you guys have brought up: what if the guy's attractive, what if you get a signal, what if you're suave, what if you're a nice guy, how else are people supposed to meet women, how could men find women to fuck without pursuing them on the streets???

The psychology of threat perception can be faulty, or it can be irrational, or it can be causal... and yes, it's sad that we can't all trust each other, but it should be sadder that men continue to try to justify failing to treat women as independent human beings while defending their own trustworthiness and niceness and good-intentions and politeness, and so on.

Think about the analogous case I've brought up a couple of times of other power-mismatches like boss-employee: the reason why it's wrong for bosses and employees to interact in certain ways isn't that these interactions always end badly, but because the built-in power differential necessarily means that the potential for mistreatment is far greater -- it is a locus of corruption.

As an employee of my university, I have to be cautious in my interactions with both my peers (who are fellow employees) and my superiors, even the ones that I consider friends. Not doing so means taking a huge risk with one's future, and even though there are exceptions, the downside is so stark that any clear-thinking person should see why it's just not worth it (see, e.g., the volume of Title IX cases that have arisen lately: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX#I ... l_violence ).

Unfortunately, men have had a historically privileged power-position relative to women in general, and this means that women who want to maintain some kind of control over their autonomy are reasonable to adopt a version of the cautious employee model when interacting with men. Otherwise, it's just luck if nothing bad happens.

One other way in which I agree with ES is that hyper-vigilance fucking SUCKS. I hate it. It's that feeling of hair on the back of your neck from a micro-manager at a bullshit job who spends all-day everyday concocting reasons to tell you what to do. And I think personality will play a huge role in the way people deal with that kind of stress. Some people just are able to be care-free, and for many of them, nothing bad will happen, but violence, and social mistreatment, of women is so exceedingly common that there's a disanalogy here. When you have a bad boss, you can go home and ignore the text-messages and phone-calls and relax (or drink yourself into a stupor to get away from it). When you are a woman, you have to be prepared to face that shit a lot more often. LJF's attempt to minimize this by appealing to statistics about rape misses the point, since the issue isn't just about whether a woman is likely to be raped in a given scenario, but about the way women are treated, and have to behave, unequally to men in many more situations -- not just extreme cases, but day-in day-out soul-crushing inequality. It's no wonder that some women react to this angrily, or irrationally, or man-hatingly, or hysterically, or whatever the epithet is that some people want to use to discredit the point. Lots of women won't react this way, or even agree that they are on edge all the time, because they aren't. But that was never the point anyway. There's a culture of normalcy around behaviours that many women experience and no men do.

[farrellgirl99]

i feel like AS understands what im trying to get across and encapsulates it best in this thread.

ES, i dont walk around terrified and wary of everyone all the time. obviously, i would not be able to function in a place like nyc if i was afraid of every man thats near me. my point is more about people who approach me when i have not initiated contact or conversation. this has nothing to do with who approaches me, but how they do it.

i do not think any man can truly understand what it is like to walk down a street as a woman, just as i dont think any white person can truly understand what it is like to walk down a street as a black person. this is just my opinion. i just wish more people were open to trying to understand this perspective instead of becoming immediately defensive.

[creep]

BERLIN

British physicist Matt Taylor brimmed with excitement as the European Space Agency's Philae lander successfully separated from the Rosetta spacecraft, showing off a colorful tattoo on his thigh of both, while proclaiming "we're making history."

But it was his garish bowling shirt that attracted more attention than the unconventional Rosetta project scientist's words or ink — a collage of pinup girls in various states of undress.

Summarizing the firestorm, the Guardian proclaimed in a blog post: "ESA can land their robot on a comet. But they still can't see misogyny under their noses."

On Friday, Taylor — wearing a non-descript navy-blue ESA hoodie — offered an unsolicited apology.

"I made a big mistake and I offended many people," he said, breaking down in tears. "And I'm very sorry about this."

[Hype]

So I think I think it's okay to wear "offensive" shirts, though I think there are probably cases that wouldn't be work-appropriate, and might indicate that you're a misogynist or that there is something wrong with you, like depictions of rape, or something.

I have made some pretty strong and detailed arguments in defense of much of the current feminist push for equality, but I also think there are pretty clear reasons why these valiant motives should not be used as a cudgel to beat down everything one doesn't like or approve of, irrespective of its practical force. I said something similar about "mansplaining" -- it's a genuine phenomenon, and men ought to be concerned with the ways in which their historical dominance in academia and commerce can be easily used to simply silence women, but it can also be trotted out by anyone who simply doesn't like a person or what they are saying (and I've admitted that I think that's happened to me before, though I could be mistaken). So yeah, I think probably there's no good reason to go around trying to get everyone to stop wearing shirts that depict women in ways one doesn't like. Why should people be concerned with that when it's entirely possible it was a gift from the guy's mom, daughter, or girlfriend... This is what I meant by 'cudgel' -- insensitive and blunt use of a genuine and important motive to bash people indiscriminately.

[perkana]

My mom sent me this

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... -feminist/
And I thought this was important to read too
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... y-science/

[creep]

So I think I think it's okay to wear "offensive" shirts, though I think there are probably cases that wouldn't be work-appropriate, and might indicate that you're a misogynist or that there is something wrong with you, like depictions of rape, or something.

really going out on a limb there.

i have a problem with how ugly the shirt is not the women on it. i can't see the whole shirt but it doesn't look that offensive. the guy could have made a wiser choice since he was going to be on tv but all the outrage is silly and made the poor man cry.

[Hype]

So I think I think it's okay to wear "offensive" shirts, though I think there are probably cases that wouldn't be work-appropriate, and might indicate that you're a misogynist or that there is something wrong with you, like depictions of rape, or something.

really going out on a limb there.

i have a problem with how ugly the shirt is not the women on it. i can't see the whole shirt but it doesn't look that offensive. the guy could have made a wiser choice since he was going to be on tv but all the outrage is silly and made the poor man cry.

My view is that offensiveness has nothing to do with anything, as far as morality's concerned. You could wear a shirt that says "Hitler was right." or "Fuck Jews." and there wouldn't be anything necessarily wrong with it, even if it is universally accepted as highly offensive. There *would* be something wrong with wearing such a shirt as a boss in a workplace, as a government employee who deals directly with the public, teacher, or police officer, or even in a place where it's highly likely that someone might actually be hurt by it (not just offended but sincerely traumatized, as in, say, a Holocaust survivor whose memories are brought back by it). There's a vast difference between innocently offensive and insensitive, and there is no objective sense of 'offensive'.

In fact, it's just bad if feminists are conflating offensiveness with defenses of women's rights. Denials of rights to women are offensive, but they're also wrong, not because they're offensive, but because they're fucking wrong.

But I think it's hard to say exactly why people are calling this shirt out as offensive.