Male violence and harassment of women

[nezumi]

And yes, I've been harassed and sexually assaulted in the past and I try to keep my male relatives on the right path.

[Opti]

It's great that some of the men here are thinking about how they behaved in the past. Can they now have the same conversations with male friends and relatives in real life? That's what will make the change.

I've had quite a few of those conversations over, I dunno, maybe 20 years. Some of them have been mostly fruitful. But a fair number of 'friends' have not been so responsive to criticism. Consequently my social circle has narrowed.

As I've got older I've got more confident about calling out bad behaviour in public.
Might be a senile notion of getting away with stuff because I come across as just another grumpy old f.ck.
Of course, it doesn't make me any safer it just makes me feel like I have Old Age Privilege.
Obviously doesn't act as an invulnerable shield, but I've got to the point where I don't care anymore.

edit: Mostly, ddb is with me when I do. That gives me courage. She's f.cking fierce.

[Grumble]

It's great that some of the men here are thinking about how they behaved in the past. Can they now have the same conversations with male friends and relatives in real life? That's what will make the change.

It will, and I think it probably already has from what it used to be. Not far enough, clearly.

An anecdote - not of mine but one I heard from a boss. A sales director at a company I used to work for was attending a works function. Big meal attended by all the managers and directors and their spouses. The man in question at some point called his wife a stupid bitch, grabbed her hair and slammed her face into the table. Then they left and the next day he was fired. There was no mention of what the company may have done to make her safe. I suspect they got rid of him and washed their hands of the whole affair, which probably left her more vulnerable rather than less. I’d like to think that that wouldn’t be the end of it these days, certainly it won’t be if I have anything to do with it.

Another anecdote, this one I have personal knowledge of (in a junior non decision making role). A member of staff was shown to have been watching p.rn on non-networked work computers. He was dismissed for gross misconduct. The titles, visible in the recent files logs, suggested the videos were of an extreme violent nature, possibly to the point of illegality. (The reason he was caught was because these non-networked pcs were acquiring viruses, he wasn’t downloading these videos from anywhere close to reputable.) The barrister spouse of a colleague suggested strongly that he should have been referred to the police, but I don’t think he was. If something happened like that now in my current work and I had knowledge of it I would be insisting that he was referred to the police, and damn the fact I used to go for a drink with him on a Friday lunchtime.

[nezumi]

Just to break the deep, dark nature of this whole thread, Grumble, you've reminded me of an anecdote.

So I was having a vape in the smoking shelter one day, messing about on my phone when my manager and a friend of his came over. J, my manager, said "I hope you're not watching p.rn on the company wifi."

Without missing a beat I replied "it's not on the company wifi."

... as you were.

[Vertigowooyay]

When I was about 20, my then girlfriend (my first) and I were breaking up and it was horrible. No momentous soap opera style plot about it, she just fell out of love and I hadn’t. A mundane thing that happens in relationships all over.

We’d had another argument about it because I just couldn’t - wouldn’t? - accept it. That’s the first stupid, sh.tty thing. The second was when, in frustration, I slammed my fist on the table. And then saw her face, because she looked at me with fear. And it doesn’t matter what was going on in my head, that it wasn’t directed at her, that it was a welling up of stupid, selfish, appallingly expressed frustration, I suddenly realised she saw me, in that second, as a threat. And I f.cking hated myself for it, and even the memory of it 30 years later makes me profoundly ashamed of myself.

Even in the midst of a breakup, that was a betrayal of trust. And since then I’ve tried to be a better person to women, to be aware of what I’m doing and what I’m saying. Because nothing has made me more ashamed of myself than that.

[jimbob]

I know my son did instigate similar conversations with some of his friends when he was at school (around Y9 and Y10). He's close to his sisters - 2-years either side of him. I know that he mentioned respect.

[Tessa K]

Mr Johnson tweeted that he will "be thinking of her family and friends" when lighting a candle, adding: "I will do everything I can to make sure the streets are safe."

For some reason that doesn't make me feel any safer.


(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56384758)

[Boustrophedon]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

[Fishnut]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

We've done this one before, back in the old place.

[Grumble]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

The problem is that it might not be all men, but to a first approximation it is all women. If it was a vanishingly small minority of men and a few women then we might be able to say it was something like a controlled problem. But it’s endemic and commonly experienced and witnessed - and even committed unwittingly.

[bagpuss]

Honestly I suspect a lot of the anger right now is because we know that nothing's going to change. We can scream and shout and protest and write long articles on what should be done and some men will hand-wring and promise to do better and others will downplay everything we've said and blame us for walking unchaperoned after dark but life goes on (for those lucky enough) and the hand-wringers will forget their promises, and the downplayers will stop even bothering to downplay, and women will continue to do all the things we do to try and stay safe, in the certain knowledge that if anything does happen people will scrape through our actions to find any excuse to blame us, and nothing will actually change.

I think you're absolutely right. It's years of frustration built up after talking about this over and over again and still seeing women blamed for having the temerity to be out in public by themselves, still hearing the surprise that it's this bad as if we've never mentioned it before and, while individual men are definitely standing up to be counted (thanks to everyone on this thread who has done so) the powers-that-be are still effectively just patting us on the head and saying "there there, we'll make it all ok for you" without actually doing anything, or even having a clue as to what they might actually do.


And just to add into evidence one more "normal" part of a woman's everyday life:

Just on Friday I was called a ‘C**t’ in the street coming away from a patient visit in Berkhamsted of all places.
Immediately in survival mode, thinking how to react, wondering if it’s because I forgot to take off my NHS ID which we know can make you a target and how much of a bad day was the guy having that might end up having an impact on me. Then thinking about how far I was from my car and did I have my keys in hand (stupidly no).
It’s death by a thousand cuts that most men never see.

[Fishnut]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

I'm probably going to regret wasting time on this and may give up part way through but let's take a look at that article.

Myths and legends about monsters have excited the human imagination for hundreds of years.

This is a great start when discussing an analogy with the aim of trying to get people to understand male violence against women. They're just making it up!!! If the author is trying to show they have a complete lack of disregard for the seriousness of the problem being described by the analogy then well done, they've succeeded.

This article will examine one such monster known as the the “poisonous M&Ms analogy”. It is often deployed as a way to prop up indefensible stereotypes by taking advantage of human ignorance about base rates, risk assessment and criminology.

If it is "often deployed" in a way the author disagrees with, that suggests it is "sometimes" or "occasionally" deployed in a way that makes it useful in explaining how women feel they have to conduct their lives. In other words, it is a valid analogy, the author just disagrees with how some people use it. But they'll never acknowledge that in the piece.

Why is the poisonous M&Ms analogy monstrous?

Because it can be used to prop up any kind of harmful stereotype about groups such genders, ethnicities, religious and political communities without having to engage the objections to unfair generalizations.

It can be, but is it? Could it be that people can recognise when and where to use an analogy effectively? This feels like nothing but a slippery slope fallacy.

Why is the poisonous M&Ms analogy flawed?
...
Little to no specificity: because the argument has essentially no specificity, we can revert the argument back to the group making it. If white supremacists use it to support their indefensible stereotype of African-Americans as criminals, we can apply it back to white supremacists. If conservatives make the argument against liberals, the argument can be sent back with the corresponding stereotype of conservatives. Here is how it would look when it is reverted back against white supremacists: “You say that I am overgeneralizing about white supremacists being criminals? Imagine a bowl of M&Ms. 10% of them are poisoned. Go ahead, eat a handful of them. After all, they are not all poisonous!” No white supremacist would accept that argument as reasonable, which means they cannot reasonably deploy it against ethnic minorities either.

I had to quote the whole thing because I honestly can't understand what the author is trying to say here. If anyone has any clue please let me know. Because right now it sounds like "this analogy doesn't work in other situations" to which I'd reply "yes, and, that differs from other analogies how exactly?".

Base rate neglect: a rational risk analysis must take base rates into account, not just the consequences. Even if the consequences of an event is large and negative, the probability of the event might be low.

We get to see the author's bias here quite clearly. Just because they think the risk is low, they assume the risk is actually low. They don't acknowledge that risks vary from person to person, place to place. I doubt there's many women who couldn't recount at least one story of a man making them feel vulnerable or unsafe. I've had a really boring life with respects to the opposite sex yet I've still got stories about checking I wasn't followed off a train by a creepy guy, having to leave a pub because a guy wouldn't stop hassling my friend, of having a senior colleague staring at my breasts while talking to me, of having to help a friend report unacceptable behaviour at a conference. It may all be low-grade sh.t, and for that I'm grateful, but it means that my "base rate" is already much higher than the author's. And if my experiences are low-grade, imagine what it's like for those women who haven't been so lucky.

Assumes that “risk-free” is possible: the analogy also tries to exploit the human tendency to think that it is possible for an event to be risk-free.

No-one using the analogy is saying that they expect life to be risk-free. This really makes me wonder what the author thinks analogies are for.

No-one who is using the analogy is saying that men are exactly like M&Ms, that 10% of them are deadly, or that the way to avoid their poison is to avoid men altogether. Analogies inherently simplify and often hyperbolise in an attempt to explain a concept in an easy-to-understand way. The concept being explained by the analogy is that some men are dangerous to woman and we don't know which ones, so we have to treat all of them with a care that we don't with other women.

Let's take the other examples the author uses of places where people take "acceptable" risks - walking across a street, travelling in a car and drinking a glass of water. We have public information campaigns about how to cross the road safely, we have pedestrian crossings, underpasses, bridges, to help people cross roads without getting hit by traffic. We have seatbelts and crumple zones and speed limits and rules on how to drive safely which, if broken, mean that you're no longer allowed to drive. We have water treatment plants and legislation that provides limits on what's allowed in water and when those limits are exceeded supply is cut off and alternative sources of water are provided until the water supply is safe again. In none of these cases are people just crossing the road at a whim, driving without any consideration of their surroundings, or drinking contaminated water.

So what exactly is the author's point here?

The analogy is pointing out that women are essentially living in a world where we don't know if drivers will heed the pedestrian crossing lights, if they will drive safely, or if our water supply will be contaminated, and so we have to be extra careful in our day to day lives. Rather than cross the road because we hear the crossing signal beeping we make sure that the cars have actually stopped first, rather than assume the car in front is going to drive safely we keep a good distance between us, rather than gulp down that glass of water we give it a sniff and a sip first.

Not poisonous to you: even if you happen to come across an individual from group X that fits with the stereotype does not mean that you are in danger... in the analogy, the poisonous M&Ms are obviously poisonous to humans in general.

Oh good god. The analogy is trying to show that women are at heightened risk from men and you say "well men aren't at risk from men so your analogy breaks". Yet again, the author fails to understand how analogies works.

It's also worth pointing out that men are also more at risk of violence and death from other men than they are from women but that's really beside the point.

Not a random sample: base rates apply to a random sample. Your friends, colleagues, dates or people you walk past in the night do not constitute a random sample from the underlying population.

The author seems to feel like there is some "class" of men who are perpetrators of violence against women and they all hang out or something, so just avoid their club and you'll be fine. That's not how it works. I'm pretty sure my male friends are good people, but I have no idea what they're like behind closed doors. We know that domestic abusers can do an excellent job of portraying happy family lives to even their close friends and family. And has the author not heard of date rape?!

Predictors exists: it is commonly believed that you cannot tell criminals apart from non-criminals. However, this is not true as there exists several predictors of criminal behavior... the analogy assumes that all M&Ms look the same whether or not they are poisonous or not. If there was a way to distinguish the two, it would not matter that a certain proportion are toxic as you could just not pick them.

I really don't know what to say in response to this. If the author can go through a line-up of men and pick which ones have harassed and assaulted women, and which ones haven't, on sight, then they could make an absolute fortune teaching their skills to women.

The whole point of the analogy is that we cannot tell. How many men stood up in support of Harvey Weinstein, or Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Epstein to say the accusations against them were baseless? How many men have been told their friend raped or assaulted women and refused to believe it? How many men have hurt women and downplayed their actions - it wasn't that bad, it was only a slap, she deserved it?

Conclusion
The piece completely misses the point of the analogy. It downplays the risk women feel and dismisses as unreasonable their reasons or feeling that way. It is a very long-winded post that essentially says "women exaggerate".

No. We. Don't.

[Tessa K]

I'm feeling a pretty overwhelmed and upset by all this. This helped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzg4rJJNX30

[El Pollo Diablo]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

There's reading the room, and then there's this. Posting a link to a sh.tty article describing an argument made seven years ago when people are quite reasonably and deeply upset about something specific and what that something specific says about us as a society, and about what the implications are, is poorly done.

[Boustrophedon]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

There's reading the room, and then there's this. Posting a link to a sh.tty article describing an argument made seven years ago when people are quite reasonably and deeply upset about something specific and what that something specific says about us as a society, and about what the implications are, is poorly done.

OK point taken, I didn't know it had been done to death previously. As for "reading the room" I am bad at that sorry.

[Boustrophedon]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

I'm probably going to regret wasting time on this and may give up part way through but let's take a look at that article.

Myths and legends about monsters have excited the human imagination for hundreds of years.

This is a great start when discussing an analogy with the aim of trying to get people to understand male violence against women. They're just making it up!!! If the author is trying to show they have a complete lack of disregard for the seriousness of the problem being described by the analogy then well done, they've succeeded.

This article will examine one such monster known as the the “poisonous M&Ms analogy”. It is often deployed as a way to prop up indefensible stereotypes by taking advantage of human ignorance about base rates, risk assessment and criminology.

If it is "often deployed" in a way the author disagrees with, that suggests it is "sometimes" or "occasionally" deployed in a way that makes it useful in explaining how women feel they have to conduct their lives. In other words, it is a valid analogy, the author just disagrees with how some people use it. But they'll never acknowledge that in the piece.

Why is the poisonous M&Ms analogy monstrous?

Because it can be used to prop up any kind of harmful stereotype about groups such genders, ethnicities, religious and political communities without having to engage the objections to unfair generalizations.

It can be, but is it? Could it be that people can recognise when and where to use an analogy effectively? This feels like nothing but a slippery slope fallacy.

Why is the poisonous M&Ms analogy flawed?
...
Little to no specificity: because the argument has essentially no specificity, we can revert the argument back to the group making it. If white supremacists use it to support their indefensible stereotype of African-Americans as criminals, we can apply it back to white supremacists. If conservatives make the argument against liberals, the argument can be sent back with the corresponding stereotype of conservatives. Here is how it would look when it is reverted back against white supremacists: “You say that I am overgeneralizing about white supremacists being criminals? Imagine a bowl of M&Ms. 10% of them are poisoned. Go ahead, eat a handful of them. After all, they are not all poisonous!” No white supremacist would accept that argument as reasonable, which means they cannot reasonably deploy it against ethnic minorities either.

I had to quote the whole thing because I honestly can't understand what the author is trying to say here. If anyone has any clue please let me know. Because right now it sounds like "this analogy doesn't work in other situations" to which I'd reply "yes, and, that differs from other analogies how exactly?".

Base rate neglect: a rational risk analysis must take base rates into account, not just the consequences. Even if the consequences of an event is large and negative, the probability of the event might be low.

We get to see the author's bias here quite clearly. Just because they think the risk is low, they assume the risk is actually low. They don't acknowledge that risks vary from person to person, place to place. I doubt there's many women who couldn't recount at least one story of a man making them feel vulnerable or unsafe. I've had a really boring life with respects to the opposite sex yet I've still got stories about checking I wasn't followed off a train by a creepy guy, having to leave a pub because a guy wouldn't stop hassling my friend, of having a senior colleague staring at my breasts while talking to me, of having to help a friend report unacceptable behaviour at a conference. It may all be low-grade sh.t, and for that I'm grateful, but it means that my "base rate" is already much higher than the author's. And if my experiences are low-grade, imagine what it's like for those women who haven't been so lucky.

Assumes that “risk-free” is possible: the analogy also tries to exploit the human tendency to think that it is possible for an event to be risk-free.

No-one using the analogy is saying that they expect life to be risk-free. This really makes me wonder what the author thinks analogies are for.

No-one who is using the analogy is saying that men are exactly like M&Ms, that 10% of them are deadly, or that the way to avoid their poison is to avoid men altogether. Analogies inherently simplify and often hyperbolise in an attempt to explain a concept in an easy-to-understand way. The concept being explained by the analogy is that some men are dangerous to woman and we don't know which ones, so we have to treat all of them with a care that we don't with other women.

Let's take the other examples the author uses of places where people take "acceptable" risks - walking across a street, travelling in a car and drinking a glass of water. We have public information campaigns about how to cross the road safely, we have pedestrian crossings, underpasses, bridges, to help people cross roads without getting hit by traffic. We have seatbelts and crumple zones and speed limits and rules on how to drive safely which, if broken, mean that you're no longer allowed to drive. We have water treatment plants and legislation that provides limits on what's allowed in water and when those limits are exceeded supply is cut off and alternative sources of water are provided until the water supply is safe again. In none of these cases are people just crossing the road at a whim, driving without any consideration of their surroundings, or drinking contaminated water.

So what exactly is the author's point here?

The analogy is pointing out that women are essentially living in a world where we don't know if drivers will heed the pedestrian crossing lights, if they will drive safely, or if our water supply will be contaminated, and so we have to be extra careful in our day to day lives. Rather than cross the road because we hear the crossing signal beeping we make sure that the cars have actually stopped first, rather than assume the car in front is going to drive safely we keep a good distance between us, rather than gulp down that glass of water we give it a sniff and a sip first.

Not poisonous to you: even if you happen to come across an individual from group X that fits with the stereotype does not mean that you are in danger... in the analogy, the poisonous M&Ms are obviously poisonous to humans in general.

Oh good god. The analogy is trying to show that women are at heightened risk from men and you say "well men aren't at risk from men so your analogy breaks". Yet again, the author fails to understand how analogies works.

It's also worth pointing out that men are also more at risk of violence and death from other men than they are from women but that's really beside the point.

Not a random sample: base rates apply to a random sample. Your friends, colleagues, dates or people you walk past in the night do not constitute a random sample from the underlying population.

The author seems to feel like there is some "class" of men who are perpetrators of violence against women and they all hang out or something, so just avoid their club and you'll be fine. That's not how it works. I'm pretty sure my male friends are good people, but I have no idea what they're like behind closed doors. We know that domestic abusers can do an excellent job of portraying happy family lives to even their close friends and family. And has the author not heard of date rape?!

Predictors exists: it is commonly believed that you cannot tell criminals apart from non-criminals. However, this is not true as there exists several predictors of criminal behavior... the analogy assumes that all M&Ms look the same whether or not they are poisonous or not. If there was a way to distinguish the two, it would not matter that a certain proportion are toxic as you could just not pick them.

I really don't know what to say in response to this. If the author can go through a line-up of men and pick which ones have harassed and assaulted women, and which ones haven't, on sight, then they could make an absolute fortune teaching their skills to women.

The whole point of the analogy is that we cannot tell. How many men stood up in support of Harvey Weinstein, or Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Epstein to say the accusations against them were baseless? How many men have been told their friend raped or assaulted women and refused to believe it? How many men have hurt women and downplayed their actions - it wasn't that bad, it was only a slap, she deserved it?

Conclusion
The piece completely misses the point of the analogy. It downplays the risk women feel and dismisses as unreasonable their reasons or feeling that way. It is a very long-winded post that essentially says "women exaggerate".

No. We. Don't.

Thank you for that. Thank you for taking the time to explain.

[El Pollo Diablo]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

There's reading the room, and then there's this. Posting a link to a sh.tty article describing an argument made seven years ago when people are quite reasonably and deeply upset about something specific and what that something specific says about us as a society, and about what the implications are, is poorly done.

OK point taken, I didn't know it had been done to death previously. As for "reading the room" I am bad at that sorry.

No worries. Apologies if my reaction came as a surprise, but the "Not All Men" reaction that many men have to discussion of this sort is one which is much discussed. It's something which women find exhausting and men often really struggle to understand why. But it's worth putting in the effort

[Fishnut]

#notallM&Msarepoisonous.

https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/07/ ... 2zo_Nvn56Q

Comments?

There's reading the room, and then there's this. Posting a link to a sh.tty article describing an argument made seven years ago when people are quite reasonably and deeply upset about something specific and what that something specific says about us as a society, and about what the implications are, is poorly done.

OK point taken, I didn't know it had been done to death previously. As for "reading the room" I am bad at that sorry.

What was your intention in posting it? Did you think the piece made valid points? If so, what were they? If you didn't think it was a good piece why suggest we read it?

You were the first person to raise the M&M's analogy. The discussion at the time was about the vigil last night that was violently disrupted by the Met police and you decided a post made-up hastag* and a piece from 7 years ago asking for others to comment without bothering to do so yourself. Why?

* Spoiler:

Screenshot 2021-03-14 at 12.20.11.png (90.98 KiB) Viewed 3284 times

[Boustrophedon]

I thought the piece was interesting, the "not all M&Ms" seemed to me a indicative summary. As I say I'm sorry for misreading the room. I'm upset about the protest, I'm upset about the Met police once again being heavy handed and intolerant with double standards towards different protests. It's almost as if the response is in reciprocal ratio to the risk of violence. Surely not?

What I have trouble with is the language; why somethings are said and others aren't and the logic and reasoning behind it. I find it quite frankly impenetrable.

So not trying to stir. And thank you again for the reasoned explanation.

[Squeak]

I've only ever seen the m&ms analogy used in nasty ways that assume the targets of said analogy may be thrown in the bin with no further harm done. (E.g. an immigrant allegedly does something nasty; we have no possible tools to know which immigrants are the nasty ones, so we should ban all further immigration to keep ourselves safe. If immigrants have the same moral value as an m&m, then who cares about harm done to them by keeping them out of the country.)

What the f.ck it has to do with a very specific conversation about a specific protest, sparked by a specific murder, and a discussion about how to prevent future such attacks, I have no idea. Nobody here has suggested binning all men or excluding them from society or anything along those lines. Without someone reducing allmen to the moral weight of sweets, it reads to me as an irrelevant attempt to drag the conversation away from an immediate, serious, and uncomfortable topic with a specious argument.

I know you've admitted it was a misstep but please do reflect on why it doesn't belong here.

Maybe we can bring things back on topic by me regaling you with the story about the time a man w.nked off to me in public. I think I was six years old (maybe five or seven, I'm not sure) and walking home from school. He was driving his car past me with his trousers off and his window rolled down so I could see the sights. Or maybe I could tell you about the summer I needed to be chaperoned in my own lab to fend off the repeated requests for sex from the man who slept in the next cubicle to me on a field station. Neither my lab nor my bunk felt very safe that year. Or perhaps you'd like to hear about the man who wouldn't listen to the word "no" from a drunk young Squeak. Or perhaps the colleague who perched on my desk five centimetres away from me so he could tell me about his blue balls? Or the interviewee who wanted to know what colour my pubic hair is. Or the dance student who sent me nasty messages about me being bi, which turned out to be part of a weird campaign of harassment against a female student, and which she hadn't realised anyone could help her with. Big nasty things, little nasty things. All spaces where I needed to take extra care to keep myself safe. Shall I keep going? Because I can. And I can talk about the friends I've helped walk away from "nice men". And the men I've talked to about why their sexual harassment is inappropriate. Again, and again, and f.cking again.

I've been awkward and hamfisted with people all my life but I don't think I've ever managed to force someone to find a chaperone or to leave a party because of my poor behaviour. I really hope I never did because I've been on the receiving end and it's really unpleasant.

Don, I'm pretty sure you've been present when similar sh.t happened to your female friends, though you may not have noticed. I'm pretty sure you've heard men joking about these sorts of things and maybe you're such an innocent that you thought they were only jokes. Or maybe you've spent your life keeping your female friends safe and reining in the men around you who make them unsafe. If you have, and you have wisdom to share, please do so.

[snoozeofreason]

Can we move the M&Ms discussion to a separate thread? I understand why people would say Don's post was out of place here, and I understand why people would want to respond to it, but if we are going to do both then it would be best to split it off.

[Boustrophedon]

Can we move the M&Ms discussion to a separate thread? I understand why people would say Don's post was out of place here, and I understand why people would want to respond to it, but if we are going to do both then it would be best to split it off.

Don't bother.

[Fishnut]

This is an excellent piece that I urge everyone to read. As I know you won't, I'll try and pick out some choice quotes, though please know the bits I'm leaving unpicked are just as insightful, if not more so. The piece is discussing "the idea that women, those irrational creatures, were ‘getting things out of proportion’."

the Met pivoted to insisting that there was no reason to feel unsafe, since, in the words of Commissioner Cressida Dick, ‘it is thankfully incredibly rare for a woman to be abducted from our streets’... if Dick’s real point was that it’s rare for women to be killed by strangers, well, it depends what you mean by ‘rare’... while their data show that most women victims are killed by men they know, around one in every twelve is killed by a stranger... That’s one every 5-6 weeks. With all due respect to any statisticians reading this, most people would not define something that happens every few weeks as ‘incredibly rare’.

This is a point that is often overlooked when people try and say that women are overreacting:

It is hardly irrational for women in this situation to err on the side of caution. Nor should we overlook a point made by Fiona Vera-Gray, who has researched women’s responses to male intrusion in public space—that there’s no way to measure how many potential crimes are averted by women’s evasive action. The mere fact that nothing ultimately happened does not license the conclusion that a woman ‘got things out of proportion’: it’s possible that she correctly assessed the risk, and did what she needed to do to prevent the worst from happening...

And the anger isn’t just about what some men do to some women, it’s also about the way that constrains all women’s lives. A woman who lives for 100 years without ever experiencing male violence directly will still have expended significant time and energy on the kind of ‘safety work’ Vera-Gray describes—knowing all the while that whatever happens, the consequences will be on her. [my emphasis]

The piece takes a look at the recent prosecution of a man who sexually assaulted a woman who was walking home (sound familiar?). It was argued that it was an "opportunistic" attack and therefore didn't warrant a custodial sentence.

‘Opportunistic’ is another linguistic formula which tells us something about our culture’s common-sense understanding of male violence. What was this ‘opportunity’ that a man spontaneously seized? It was simply finding himself in close proximity to a woman who was walking home alone. (What are the chances of that happening, eh?) While the lawyer did not condone his impulsive action, he presented the impulse itself as unremarkable, as if it were obvious that any man who found himself in this situation would see an ‘opportunity’, even if not all men would take it.

...there are reasons to question the absolute distinction between ‘opportunistic’ and ‘planned’ or ‘premeditated’ sexual violence. I find it hard to believe that a man would commit the kind of assault described above without ever having imagined or fantasised about doing it, or to put it another way, planned it in his head. Yet when we talk about sexual violence we seem remarkably uninterested in the contents of men’s heads—the heads we feel the need to rummage through are women’s.

The piece ends by distinguishing between safety and freedom and explaining that it is the latter we are really fighting for.

The focus on women’s safety, rather than their freedom, is what has allowed so much of this week’s discussion to revolve around the legitimacy of women’s feelings and their behaviour—are they overreacting, getting things ‘out of proportion’, being ‘hysterical’? It is possible to debate this because (as a million Reply Guys reminded us) most women will not become victims of violent crime. What is less debatable is that the fear induced by what happens to some women makes all women less free.

[Martin Y]

... I'm pretty sure you've been present when similar sh.t happened to your female friends, though you may not have noticed. I'm pretty sure you've heard men joking about these sorts of things and maybe you're such an innocent that you thought they were only jokes. Or maybe you've spent your life keeping your female friends safe and reining in the men around you who make them unsafe. If you have, and you have wisdom to share, please do so.

I feel I have hopelessly little of value to add to this thread but this one thing struck a chord.

Men don't talk about sex.

All necessarily in my experience, and I'm talking about decades past and to be honest the men I know don't talk about football either. Anyway, IME men did not talk about sex in any way that was not completely abstracted from personal experience, and it was a genuine shock to me to learn that women did. (In a minor argument when things were starting to go wrong with a relationship, she bolstered her argument with the reactions of her fellow nurses when she had read my letter out to them. (Yeah, that's how long ago it was. A letter.) I was flabbergasted. I can't now remember the contents, only that I would never in a million years have imagined sharing the similar stuff she had written with anyone, let alone using it to entertain work friends in their coffee break.)

Maybe a bigger surprise was that I had a girlfriend. A theme of my younger life was having no idea how to approach women* and a dread of saying or doing the wrong thing that left me frozen and doing nothing. I believe I'm quoting Billy Connolly: I'm not even going to tell you how old I was when I lost my virginity because you'll all just laugh. So the idea that I might admonish my younger self to pull my friends up when they brag about their inappropriate misbehaviour would probably be met with a request to explain WTF I was talking about.

*I don't mean in work or study. Absolutely no problem at all with friendships. Just anything-more-than-friends.

[Grumble]

... I'm pretty sure you've been present when similar sh.t happened to your female friends, though you may not have noticed. I'm pretty sure you've heard men joking about these sorts of things and maybe you're such an innocent that you thought they were only jokes. Or maybe you've spent your life keeping your female friends safe and reining in the men around you who make them unsafe. If you have, and you have wisdom to share, please do so.

I feel I have hopelessly little of value to add to this thread but this one thing struck a chord.

Men don't talk about sex.

All necessarily in my experience, and I'm talking about decades past and to be honest the men I know don't talk about football either. Anyway, IME men did not talk about sex in any way that was not completely abstracted from personal experience, and it was a genuine shock to me to learn that women did. (In a minor argument when things were starting to go wrong with a relationship, she bolstered her argument with the reactions of her fellow nurses when she had read my letter out to them. (Yeah, that's how long ago it was. A letter.) I was flabbergasted. I can't now remember the contents, only that I would never in a million years have imagined sharing the similar stuff she had written with anyone, let alone using it to entertain work friends in their coffee break.)

Maybe a bigger surprise was that I had a girlfriend. A theme of my younger life was having no idea how to approach women* and a dread of saying or doing the wrong thing that left me frozen and doing nothing. I believe I'm quoting Billy Connolly: I'm not even going to tell you how old I was when I lost my virginity because you'll all just laugh. So the idea that I might admonish my younger self to pull my friends up when they brag about their inappropriate misbehaviour would probably be met with a request to explain WTF I was talking about.

*I don't mean in work or study. Absolutely no problem at all with friendships. Just anything-more-than-friends.

Maybe there is such a thing as “locker room talk” but I’ve never spent any time in locker rooms. I’ve asked for advice once or twice from my closest friends, but I don’t think we’ve ever discussed sex in general terms. Far more likely to discuss sports or family concerns or make bad puns.