Mansplaining

[jlaw172364]

I'll boil my view down for you: what appears to be a campaign of day-to-day harassment by the entire male gender against one woman on the train, may in fact be: some guys trying to ask her out, some guys who are bored and want to talk to someone, some guys who want to proposition her (not necessarily for sex), some guys who want to rape and or kill her. Taken all together, from her perspective, maybe it appears like harassment because maybe she's had several traumatic experiences, that began as casual conversations, and escalated into "Nice shoes, wanna fuck," thereby causing her to alter her behavior to preempt any conversations from taking place for fear of a repeat occurence. Her altered behavior then frustrates and upsets people who just want to ask her out or talk to her, or pose a legitimate proposition to her, but have not experienced her traumas, and therefore don't understand her reaction, because they feel they've done nothing wrong.

The guys that just want to talk or ask her out should not be lumped in with the creeps and psychos. But she has no way of knowing in advance, so all the guys are suspect, so she treats them all like potential criminals, which people do NOT like, and will abreact to, even if the person treating them that way is a cop.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they were ALL creeps, like in Death Wish 3.

The bicycle guy was obviously a creep.

The teenagers were more likely just being immature because she didn't want to talk to them. Kids that age do that stuff all the time. Sure, maybe they've seen the school propaganda on how to behave, but just makes a lot of them want to rebel against it. I know from my own experience that assertive tactics can backfire, and then the whole thing turns into people ganging up on you trying to get a rise out of you.

[compared2what?]

In my opinion, part of the reason some people on here seem to write to me as if I'm some sort of misogynist, is that we're discussing "mansplaining," and a woman approached on a train who complains of male abreactions to her rejections of their advances or perceived advances.

No. It's more because you're calling a woman's description of her encounter with a sexually violent stranger a complaint about how someone responded to her strategically ineffective rejection of his advances, while also repeatedly calling the advances just something that happens when women go out in public, like -- presumably -- weather.

IOW: You're saying that it was her fault.

Not every guy that starts talking to a woman reading a book is a would-be rapist deserving of condemnation.

Not every guy that starts talking to a woman reading a book is being condemned as a would-be rapist. I'm not even sure that it would be fair to say that any is.

Furthermore, you're the one who's consistently conflating the social and the antisocial, not the other way around.

@Compared

My reading comprehension? Overstating Texan legal educations on gun rights? I merely speculated.

I was too. You misunderstood me. My point was that it wouldn't surprise me if the Second Amendment wasn't mentioned much in law schools anywhere, until very recently.

They didn't even MENTION the 2nd Amendment at my law school, which just happens to be in a city that had a facially unconstitutional ordinance for DECADES. If I recall correctly, there was no caselaw in our case-book mentioning it, and it was in none of the assigned readings, and therefore, none of the class conversations.

Right. Because they can't teach important case law that doesn't exist, and have no reason to focus on issues that never arise. And until the gun lobby bought McDonald v. Chicago, there hadn't been much significant Second-Amendment related action going on for decades. That's why it doesn't surprise me that it didn't come up. My guess would be that if it wasn't mentioned in connection with due process, it wouldn't have, most places.

Also: Virtually nobody who wasn't motivated by political considerations would say that it was facially unconstitutional, even in the present. You're talking about a ruling written by Antonin Scalia, not the fucking Federalist Papers.

I distinctly recall my constitutional law professor exclaiming "You can't mean that!" in disbelief when I merely suggested that the "War on Drugs" was actually Jim Crow 2.0. Now it's almost "conventional wisdom," even though it was obvious decades ago to anyone whose salary didn't depend on not understanding such things.

Well....When viewed from a legal perspective, it's not only not Jim Crow 2.0, but so entirely unrelated to it that I can see how someone who was under the impression that was the perspective being discussed might wonder whether you were serious. Actually.

That might be partly out of sympathy, though. Because I myself wonder what the hell that has to do with the Second Amendment.

You can't mean that!

I guess you must be one of those coincidence theories Jeff mentioned awhile back.

What?

Black people aren't arrested for owning a gun while being black? Really? It's not true exactly. I guess they must not be arrested for driving while black, voting while black, walking down the street while black, being in the wrong place at the wrong time while black, carrying cash while black, etc. etc. etc. And this definitely never happens in Chicago, because hey, Obama's from Chicago!

Well, I guess I can now reasonably conclude you to be a berobed, cross-burning white supremacist.

Reading comprehension.

Gee, I sure do regret the error of not bothering to google the exact date of the Supreme Court opinion, or spend hours analyzing the implications of its holdings for this forum's exclusive benefit.

It would probably be more fruitful to regret saying that the ordinance was ruled facially unconstitutional as if that wasn't something that took hours of analyzing the implications of various holdings to establish, if you're looking for something to regret along those lines. IMHO.

Maybe its because I know that the Justices, who don't actually write any of their own opinions,

NO!

Do they even read them, do you think? Or do their clerks just do all the work while they're out having cocktails?

don't even believe the opinions they attach their names to. The Supreme Court can issue opinions to the cows come home, but it lacks effective means to enforce them.

That's like saying that they lack effective means for declaring war. I mean, it's true. But what's your point?

I think, again, of your constitutional law professor, I guess.

[compared2what?]

jlaw, let's try this:

I've had women...grab my genitals (socially, at a bar, with no pretext)

My real response to that is that if you experienced that as an assault, it was one, just for me-talking-to-you purposes. By my standards. So if that's how you experienced it, you have both my sympathy and my empathy.

But assuming that the word "socially" means that you were (let's say) both there celebrating the engagement of a common acquaintance, and not that you were talking socially to a stranger in a bar?

Then I too have had men grab my genitals (socially, at a bar, with no pretext). On any number of occasions. Sometimes it was upsetting. And sometimes not. And sometimes it was genuinely an assault. But usually it was just a pass that also met the technical standards for assault.

So. If I used your standards, I'd be standing on very solid ground if I said that you were complaining about something that was just a run-of-the-mill social experience for virtually all adults, called it a poodle complaint, accused you of not caring about the poor, suggested that you develop better strategies for responding to have your genitals grabbed in a social situation before you started accusing women of all kinds of crimes that you never mentioned, et cetera.

But if you can't see what I'd gain by it that made insulting you by telling you how to feel about having your genitals grabbed worthwhile, you wouldn't be the only one.

[compared2what?]

Or let's try this:

I personally think this thread is whistling in the graveyard, as they say.

As for the woman in transit story. Same fucking shit happens to me and probably to us all.

Last March I get off the light rail in the downtown tunnel. Ascend stairs. Get on sidewalk and light cigarette.

Girl asks me for a smoke and money and I said nope. Fuck, they're motherfucking 10 bucks a pack.

Well she and some dude start following me. Dude says, "yeah you fucking do." "You got smokes and you got money, motherfucker."

They followed me for about two blocks and at a certain corner I said to them, "If you need some fucking smokes, bro, there's a cigarette store right fucking there." They basically left me alone after that.

However, I don't doubt how frightened I was was any more or less than the woman in the tale. I literally did not know what to do if it escalated. Should I run? Should I fight? Was I about to get shot? I didn't fucking know. It happens to us all. You can't fix crazy.

Just don't be a lone woman who smokes downtown!

Hey, jlaw!

I always give a cigarette to anyone who asks for one, although they cost more than $10 a pack where I live and I'm poor. And I've never had any frightening experiences as a result of refusing, therefore. So whose strategy would you say was more effective? Mine? Or 82_28's?

I mean, given that you think it's your business to opine on such things, I wonder that you didn't weigh in on the subject as soon as 82_28 posted, really.

[compared2what?]

Also: Virtually nobody who wasn't motivated by political considerations would say that it was facially unconstitutional, even in the present. You're talking about a ruling written by Antonin Scalia, not the fucking Federalist Papers.

Except that it was Alito.

I regret the error.

Also, as I forgot to say earlier:

The white establishment never intended guns rights for non-whites, regardless of what the law says.

Neither did the framers of the constitution. Obviously. But the Second Amendment doesn't actually give anyone the individual right to keep and bear arms for private reasons of their own. That's more something that's generally consonant with the intentions explicitly stated elsewhere in the Bill of Rights than it is one of the fundamental, free-standing principles on which the country was founded.

Individual gun ownership as a legal right doesn't have much real practical value when it comes to keeping the government from infringing on the right of some, any, or all citizens to live free, when you get right down to it. I mean, having that right wasn't much of a protection against that kind of incursion even when there weren't drones. So it certainly isn't now.

I guess that what I'm saying is that I actually don't really see how law schools that mostly focus on the First and Fourteenth Amendments when they teach constitutional law are even compromising anybody's freedom to begin with. I mean, when it comes to battling oppression, First and Fourteenth Amendment rights are just fundamental. If you didn't have them, you'd be so severely handicapped that you might not even get as far as organizing the battle. And a non-organized battle just doesn't get you anywhere, whether you're armed or not.

So you'd be way better off having due process and free speech/association during the lead-up to eventual armed conflict with the state and buying your weapons illegally when you needed them than the other way around.

Speaking of poodle complaints.

[American Dream]

“If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you,”

— A REAL THING A JUDGE IN ARIZONA SAID TO A WOMAN WHO WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED BY A COP IN A BAR

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/0 ... to-change/

[Project Willow]

^^ Yeah, I heard about that. We've seen a bit of that in this thread, same profession too.

Seatown Slutwalk is tomorrow and confronting these attitudes is part of the agenda.

[JackRiddler]

So that woman should stop using her fancy book as a means of provoking innocent men on the subway into harassing and threatening her, and just pull out a righteously obtained gun and head-shoot them, already.

[brainpanhandler]

Maybe just a better choice of books. Or perhaps a newspaper for better coverage. She could always roll it up and swat them on the nose with it if need be.

[jlaw172364]

@Jack et. al. Re Tactics

I think about tactics a lot because I used to be in a position where I was physically vulnerable and was assaulted on a daily basis for three year, but you know, kids will be kids.

I actually think the book is a reasonably effective strategy. I'm sure it deters a fair number of people. But "LEAVE ME ALONE!" is practically a bully victim cliche that leads to the bully enjoying the reaction and escalating.

The wedding ring ploy would work if people had the tact to pay attention to it, and lying to strangers to get them off your case is practically a necessity in many situations.

Maybe a better tactic would something like this:

Guy: "Hey, what book you reading, there."

Girl: Blandly, "Oh, just something my husband got for me, checks title, it's Blah and Yak," Smiles blandly, goes back to reading.

or

Girl: Blandly, "It's Blah and Yak, my husband got it for me as a present. It's really good." Smiles blandly, goes back to reading.

This would deter a significant percentage of the subset of annoying dudes because it addresses their real intent directly, but without offending them.

If they start asking follow-up questions, another tactic would be to pretend you don't know why they're talking to you.

Guy: "I see, so is it like a romance book?" with suggestive smirk.

Girl: "No, actually its about blah blah blah . . ." drone on and on and on and on in a dry, monotone, boring voice until the guy looks confused or bored, and then smile vaguely, go back to reading.

I've actually done stuff like this with people who've tried to intimidate me. I just pretend like they're not doing what they're doing, and eventually they give up and decide I'm no fun. It's like the strategy of the black minister who constantly outsmarted the klansmen who kept harassing him: less satisfying than going Charles Bronson on them, but you stay alive and live to fight another day.

Will this ward off Death Wish 3 style rapists? No. Will it defuse creepers in most public, peopled and therefore semi-safe places. I think it would work better than "LEAVE ME ALONE," as well as "Leave me alone," or "I'm not interested in talking to you," or "Can't you see I'm reading and want to be left alone?" All of which aggravate the situation by letting the aggressor know that he is affecting your mental state, which lets him know that he has power over you.

Yes, it's unfair that you are in that situation, but the world is not fair, and people are flawed, and have been so for thousands of years. Expecting fairness from other people is putting the power in their hands, and not yours where it belongs, even if this skews everything toward personal responsibility, many times, you simply don't have a choice because you don't have the time it takes to reform someone's bad behavior. Policy changes that may or may not effect future behavior won't help present or imminent victims.

[compared2what?]

Okay. Well. If all you'd ever said was that speaking from your own experience of harassment, you'd say...

I actually think the book is a reasonably effective strategy. I'm sure it deters a fair number of people. But "LEAVE ME ALONE!" is practically a bully victim cliche that leads to the bully enjoying the reaction and escalating.

The wedding ring ploy would work if people had the tact to pay attention to it, and lying to strangers to get them off your case is practically a necessity in many situations.

Maybe a better tactic would something like this:

Guy: "Hey, what book you reading, there."

Girl: Blandly, "Oh, just something my husband got for me, checks title, it's Blah and Yak," Smiles blandly, goes back to reading.

or

Girl: Blandly, "It's Blah and Yak, my husband got it for me as a present. It's really good." Smiles blandly, goes back to reading.

This would deter a significant percentage of the subset of annoying dudes because it addresses their real intent directly, but without offending them.

If they start asking follow-up questions, another tactic would be to pretend you don't know why they're talking to you.

Guy: "I see, so is it like a romance book?" with suggestive smirk.

Girl: "No, actually its about blah blah blah . . ." drone on and on and on and on in a dry, monotone, boring voice until the guy looks confused or bored, and then smile vaguely, go back to reading.

....

Will this ward off Death Wish 3 style rapists? No. Will it defuse creepers in most public, peopled and therefore semi-safe places. I think it would work better than "LEAVE ME ALONE," as well as "Leave me alone," or "I'm not interested in talking to you," or "Can't you see I'm reading and want to be left alone?" All of which aggravate the situation by letting the aggressor know that he is affecting your mental state, which lets him know that he has power over you.

...that wouldn't have been too different from the regular old mansplaining-esque route that people of both genders fairly frequently opt for -- aka "really talking about themselves in terms that are pleasing and/or reassuring to them, but with due consideration of the topic at hand, whatever it is" -- both here and elsewhere, when they're conversing socially. And I guess that some of it might have been challenged. Because some of it is open to challenge. But....Speaking only for myself, I definitely would have kept whatever problems I have with it to myself.

That's not what you did, though. Until just now, your contention wasn't that what she did was okay but could have been done better; it was that what she did (treat all guys like criminals without giving so much as a thought to how that would make them feel) caused the problem.

So. Are you now saying that was wrong?

[jlaw172364]

I don't know that there are binary right or wrong answers to these questions. I'm not omniscient, and neither is anyone on this board. We're all relying on unstated assumptions to advance our opinions. I wasn't on the train. I wasn't a witness. I only have one side of the story. I don't have the men's versions. I don't have a list of witness versions. There was no video surveillance of the events to give a dispassionate rendering of what actually happened. It's pretty apparent, that like everyone else on here, my experiences colour my opinions, which I now confirm by admitting what should be obvious.

All we have is the testimony of one person.

I once worked on post-conviction relief for one of two men convicted of a double-murder purely on the testimony of one woman, with no other evidence linking them to the crime. The woman, a local drunk, was basically a pawn being blackmailed by the authorities into being the star witness against the men because she had initially come forward trying to claim a reward by pretending like she was an eye-witness. Confidential police memos revealed she told the police three different stories before the police helped her settle on the one they used to convict the two men. The authorities never conducted a real investigation because they were in the pocket of an individual who was probably the real culprit. These facts were revealed by hundreds of hours of public and private investigation Lacking anyone else to pin the crime on, and not wanting a real investigation, the authorities selected two other local drunks and drug users, and pinned the crime on them, because they were easy to demonize. They weren't criminals or anything, just young, unfocused barflies who occasionally got high. The getting high part was key, because the motive to stab two people over fifty times each and burn their house down was supposedly a $100 drug debt, and drug-users were regularly demonized through the mass media. The testimony given by the lone witness was lurid, but was later contradicted by a re-examination of crime-scene photos, which indicated that the witness' testimony had been cooked to fit certain aspects of the photographs.

Now, how is that anecdote relevant? The "story" that convicted the two men rang mostly true, but key facts were left out by the unreliable narrators, and all narrators are unreliable, in my opinion, no matter how well-meaning or well-intentioned, since we all see through a glass darkly, and a few key details, upon close examination, unraveled and reversed the entire story.

When I read the train lady's story, it rang mostly true to me, until she got to the part about how told people to stop bothering her. First, she describes her tone as loud and assertive for the teens, but then she describes her tone for the biker as being quiet but assertive, almost as if she realized that her tone may have provoked the biker to yell those obscenities at her, so she need to make herself look blameless in the eyes of the reader, but since the teens only made fun of her, she doesn't need to do that, since she's suffering less harm.

I know this may seem unfair to her, or that I'm siding with the men, but it just seems like I recognize a pattern where a woman overreacts to what could have been a mild annoyance, and makes it into something worse. And maybe the overreaction is grounded in legitimate frustration, but it still worsens things.

I think that because she's pretty and young, she gets hit on a lot, and it bothers her, because she doesn't like a lot of the attention, but she can't control other people from paying attention to her, and she's getting frustrated because she's tried various tactics, and none work perfectly. Some of her frustration came through in her behavior, and since people are so easily set off, it made her situation worse, and so she ventilated online about it, but she doesn't quite acknowledge that she shares some responsibility, maybe like 15%, by failing to control her temper with these jokers. I mean, they're mostly responsible for her suffering. They started it. They ignored her "leave me alone signals," however imperfect. They overreacted to her rejecting them. The biker assaulted her by causing her to fear for her safety. But if this were a court case where she's suing for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and if there were damages found, like she went to therapy afterward and was depressed for a week, I'd award damages, but would reduce them on account of her behavior which I believe to be contributorily negligent.

So she's still "right," but she's not 100% right, more like 85%.

But the universe can be far crueler than that. I mean, who cares about right or wrong. If a 400 lb gorilla mouths off to you, and you mouth off back, even if you're only 15% responsible, or even 0.00001% responsible for what happens next, it may cost you 100% of your life, and moral superiority is a cold comfort to your family and friends if you're dead. And that really sucks, but that happens all the time.

As for what I think of my own earlier comments, they may have been colored by emotion, and less articulate or thoughtful, but I don't think the point of view is entirely wrong, it just allows for different assumptions and possibilities. Like the possibility that her response to those guys channeled all the frustration she felt about all the other guys she said nothing to, or put up with. I think she kind of snapped a little, because her tactics weren't working. Hopefully, she comes up with something better, because people will not just stop hitting on her when she doesn't want them to, no matter how much we all get together and pray otherwise.

As for mansplaining, we're dealing a bunch of privileged rich white people and their poodle complaints about who should be able to hold court on what while others must sit in subdued silence. Plus she described "conspiracy theorists" pejoratively, and that's an automatic red flag to me.

[compared2what?]

All we have is the testimony of one person.

Stipulated. Anything's possible wrt what actually happened. But since neither you nor I nor anyone else here is in a position to say that it did, for the purposes of this discussion, the only basis any of us have for doubting what she says is that it sounds dubious to us, as you say the stuff here...

When I read the train lady's story, it rang mostly true to me, until she got to the part about how told people to stop bothering her. First, she describes her tone as loud and assertive for the teens, but then she describes her tone for the biker as being quiet but assertive, almost as if she realized that her tone may have provoked the biker to yell those obscenities at her, so she need to make herself look blameless in the eyes of the reader, but since the teens only made fun of her, she doesn't need to do that, since she's suffering less harm.

...does to you. And if it does, I guess it does.

But I'd say that's an awful lot to be reading into her speaking "loudly but assertively" when addressing a group of teenagers in a car with other passengers in it and "assertively but calmly" when addressing a single, adult man in a nearly empty car. Personally.

And....I don't mean this in an oppositional way. Swear to god. But if I didn't live in such a gun-rights unfriendly city, that you locate her need to make herself look blameless in the eyes of the reader where you do would practically be enough to make me shoot myself. Because (as I read it), it couldn't be any clearer than it is that she does have one. But it's not about anything as superficial or transient as that. It's about....Hm. Well. It shows up the most clearly here:

As we board, the business man steps aside to let me go through the door first and asks me if those guys were bothering me. I say yes, that it happens all the time, and he tells he’ll beat them up for me if they come back. He is a nice person who talks to me like I’m a human being instead of a walking pair of tits, and I make a mental note: This is how a real man talks to a woman on a train

That makes me sadder than any other thing she wrote, because it's basically a defensive response to the part of herself that sounds exactly like your earlier posts about her -- ie, that tells her this stuff happens to her as a punishment for being bad, hostile and sexually cold to men, as the whole world and everyone in it, male and female, knows even if they also know it's wrong, true, and unfair. Which she does, clearly. But she still has to tell herself and readers that she doesn't hate men, she just hates being treated like a walking pair of tits before she tells them what happened.

And that's very depressing to me.

Anyway. Okay. You feel that her characterization of the way she spoke to the guy is protesting too much. If that's conclusive to you, it doesn't really matter that it isn't to me. Even to me!

As for mansplaining, we're dealing a bunch of privileged rich white people and their poodle complaints about who should be able to hold court on what while others must sit in subdued silence.

I swear to you that it's not only a real phenomenon that knows no race or class boundaries, but sometimes a very painful one. Like being erased. Or not even there to begin with, except insofar as it episodically pleases someone else to recognize your presence. Mostly not, though, at least for me. Mostly it's just the kind of frustration that I imagine everyone has, in my experience. Which probably isn't typical anyway. Or....My experiences might be. But I'm kind of an oddball. So I don't really know.

Plus she described "conspiracy theorists" pejoratively, and that's an automatic red flag to me.

Well, geez, jlaw. Would it have killed you to say that a little earlier? Because THAT's an explanation that makes perfect sense.

[Hammer of Los]

...

As for mansplaining, we're dealing a bunch of privileged rich white people and their poodle complaints about who should be able to hold court on what while others must sit in subdued silence. Plus she described "conspiracy theorists" pejoratively, and that's an automatic red flag to me.

Be fearless.

Ha ha ha.

I gotta say, I just gotta say, impeccably an' all, that there is at least some truth worth contemplating in the above.

I always remind myself to zip my lip.

I don't always take my own advice.

In most of the relationships I have known, the women had the upper hand.

I ain't complainin'.

As to a gender being judged, I've said before that since most world leaders are male, it does rather reflect badly upon the male sex. More women in power would be nice. But not the man aping sort of woman necessarily.

And then again, there is power, and there is Power.

Pack.

If you see what I mean.

Rambling alert!

...

[IanEye]

At AVN this year, a guy grabbed my forearm while I was walking from the elevators to Digital Playground's booth. He let go when I punched him in the testicle area. There's an average of three people per convention who try the more subtle approach of sliding their hand a bit too far down my back when I stand next to them for a photo. Every single one of them apologizes when I gently put their hand back where it belongs and ask them to remember that I am not a blow up doll.

The above paragraph is absolutely nothing, NOTHING, compared to what it's like to be a girl or woman walking around in public in broad daylight. With dirty hair up in a ponytail or bun, no makeup, and baggy clothing on. With headphones in, sitting in a coffee shop or on the subway with your nose in a book, or talking on the phone.

http://jezebel.com/5941068/im-a-porn-star-and-if-you-harass-me-i-will-punch-you-in-the-balls