Abigail Thorn. Fair play on that video.

This ep of Trashfuture is good 'pon the above. Britain has a fairly unique TERF problem.

Among women aged 18-24, 97% said they had been sexually harassed, while 80% of women of all ages said they had experienced sexual harassment in public spaces.

Well there's some depressingly high statistics for ya...

I think it’s our responsibility to shift the window along as far as we can. Try and reduce the section of ‘men who think it’s okay to hurt women’ further and further until in an ideal world it’s only ever that tiny percentage of men who are genuinely disturbed and unwell. Attempting to prevent those few from being able to act on their impulses is a wholly separate mission and one for professionals to tackle.

That’s a massively oversimplified take, but it’s an attempt to answer the spirit of your question without digressing into chat about what is and isn’t ‘men’s fault’.

Spoiler: most things are our fault.

Maybe I live in weird little bubble, but surely most people, men and women, know that you shouldn't hurt people, physically or mentally.

Lord_Griff wrote:

MattyJ wrote:

Yar. And also ensuring the conversation isn't all 'she was wearing a short skirt/she was on her own/she shouldn't be out at night', but actually 'that guy is a cunt'. The conversation has gone on too long with framing sexual assault as somehow partly the victims fault.

The 97% stat is all that people look at. Further scrutiny then yields that asking someone out for a drink is harassment.

It depends entirely on how it is done, and the circumstances it's done in.

How many of the worse offenders are immigrants? I know this is a loaded question but you do hear, and occasionally see, say, Arab kids or Turkish kids. I can tell you with high confidence that those kids will have grown up in circumstances where that talk, those expectations, of kindness and respect will have been hammered onto them. Vouched mostly in terms of cultural norms like family, reputation, religion and so on.

Maybe those norms aren't universal enough so they think "doesn't apply to nightbus, not my neighbourhood". Years ago, for example, this wiry lanky kid, barely 16, backed up onto me in Blackstock Road. I'd seen him coming, didn't exactly take full evasive action, just popped my shoulder and sent him rocking back to his mates. He was all in my face like, you starting bro, fuck this and fuck that. Little multi ethnic rudeboy, only I knew they were all Algerian and this was he Algerian bit of Blackstock road.

I answered him immediately, "ouch bik?" IE what's wrong with you? Are you crazy? And he did a 180. "Sorry brother I thought you were English", something like that. I asked who his father was, told him that he was giving us all a bad rep if he starts on English people, we'd all suffer cos of him etc etc.

Anyhoo, I wanted to give this example of the "boundary" issue
Kid is taught respect, he is shit scared I might be a member of the community (I'm not, I'm just addicted to merguez and deglet nour dates). But he is acting out.

On the whole, my own tuppence is, that isn't the case. This kid is going to an English vomp school, he is acting like a rudeboy. He won't dare do it in his community (fast forward 20-30 years or so when the Algerian community is as fully integrated as Jamaicans and Africans, and it won't be quite the same, but I'd you know some older Jamaicans you will also know the young uns are still scared of them)

If this kid is disrespectful to women, forward and so on, I'm gonna guess it comes from.an innate aggressive impulse in young men. I'd hazard to say the hypersexualisation of our age, our culture - music, online, etc - does not help. It's not mainly about upbringing or repression (though, one wonders if that had a role to play in those grooming cases up north, with essentially organised abusers all stemming from one community in Kashmir or whatever)

In my opinion education does matter. But experience matters more. Social disapprobation matters even more. Eg group of mates catcalling doesn't work as soon as one of them signals disapproval.

Is our experience, really, telling us women aren't at least *in part* sexual objects for men? I know our discourse, what we say, tells us otherwise. But is our experience, what we see and do, the same?

Answer this question honestly.

My thoughts are that anyone can talk to anyone, as long as it is in a civil manner.

Lord_Griff wrote:

My thoughts are that anyone can talk to anyone, as long as it is in a civil manner.

Okay that's great but you are a man, so being civil probably just means acting in a manner that is not aggressive, or outwardly rude or prejudiced. 

Imagine if you are a woman, and a man comes up to you and says whatever you are wearing looks nice and would you like to go get a drink, and you politely decline. Later, you are walking home and by pure chance the same guy from earlier is walking towards you in the park on your way home and there is no one around. How do you think you would feel about that?

Roujin wrote:

Lord_Griff wrote:

My thoughts are that anyone can talk to anyone, as long as it is in a civil manner.

Okay that's great but you are a man, so being civil probably just means acting in a manner that is not aggressive, or outwardly rude or prejudiced. 

Imagine if you are a woman, and a man comes up to you and says whatever you are wearing looks nice and would you like to go get a drink, and you politely decline. Later, you are walking home and by pure chance the same guy from earlier is walking towards you in the park on your way home and there is no one around. How do you think you would feel about that?

Valid point.

There are times when someone can be pretty clearly signalling that they aren’t looking for engagement (headphones in, head in a book). Trying to strike up a conversation with that individual, even if done civilly, seems off to me.

Sorry, but fuck that attitude right into the bin.

Next time someone behaves like a shit around me, I’m calling them out on it. You should do the same.

Letting it slide is not a mistake I’m willing to ever make again, whether it’s out of fear or shame or whatever.

wrote:

I think this will just keep happening and maybe we’re at peak “good” and rotten stuff is impossible to fully stop.

Edit: By which I mean, the quantity of rotten stuff is not currently so minor that one could consider it to just be the people left in society who are medically incapable of controlling themselves.

Dave, that example is a complete whataboutery. Are men sexually assaulted (or worse) by other men because they refuse to give them a cigarette? No they are not.

A big problem with the discussions we NEED to have as men, come from this "not all men" narrative, which appears every time something like this happens. It derails the conversation and diverts attention from the problem. The problem is that because men grow up in a patriarchy, we have a level of privilege (uh oh I said the P word) that women do not enjoy and that bestows upon us both a confidence, and a lack of a need to think about our actions, because of that position. 

The issue is not that you can't ask someone out for a drink. The issue is that men do not need to think about their consequences of their actions, because the consequences frequently don't happen to them, they happen to the other person. It's quite easy for example, to know if it's okay to approach someone in public, if the other person is minding their own business and is not dropping huge social cues your way like extended eye contact, then they are minding their own business. I don't expect randoms to approach me when I'm out and talk to me about anything (beggars etc notwithstanding, but that's a different societal problem for another day), so why would I expect women who are minding their own business, even if they are in a bar to want me to start talking to them about anything if they haven't made any kind of hint towards it?

I think this video here, starting from the timestamp at 14:22, sums up the problem we have really well. Men, have a responsibility to stop the unacceptable behaviour of other men, just allowing the behaviour to slide because you know the guy, isn't enough, why don't more men want to solve our problem?