>>31683
Define sexual harassment. Is asking a girl for a snog while drinking tinnies down the canal sexual harassment if she says no, or does it need to be more sinister.

Polls like these never reveal their methodology so there is no way to really figure out what these people consider to be harassment or if that is even a fair definition of what's happening.

>>31684
Found the office creep.

>>31684

It's disturbing enough that 97% would define the experiences they've had as sexual harassment, but I'm also inclined to agree; without being provided with the definition or methodology used in the survey, it's impossible to know what action (if any) would be an appropriate response.

I'm glad we've moved into an era when even the most soulless of corporate entities will generally get HR to take action if they get a serious complaint like this. At the same time, it's hard to do this in public -- you can't police every interaction. The perception in the survey that most harassment won't be taken up by the authorities is probably correct.

It might not be conducive to getting to a real solution about helping women not experience shitty things, but I do feel compelled to bring up the fact that I've been "sexually assaulted" as a man in public spaces as well, experiencing everything on the spectrum from inappropriate comments from colleagues to having my arse and crotch outright grabbed by women. I've also been violently assaulted by both men and women, and there seems to be a shocking lack of attention sometimes on the fact that most violent assault is a gendered issue of almost exclusively men bashing the shit out of eachother.

I kind of wonder whether this might just be people behaving dysfunctionally within a dysfunctional society, and the remedy might be something more akin to better mental health generally, so that we're not abusing eachother for kicks.

>>31685

This is a conversational cul-de-sac. Otherlad is right, studies and surveys are almost useless without also publishing the definitions and population/data collection methods.

You can email the UN and ask them for the data.

https://www.unwomenuk.org/safe-spaces-now

>>31686
>It's disturbing enough that 97% would define the experiences they've had as sexual harassment, but I'm also inclined to agree; without being provided with the definition or methodology used in the survey, it's impossible to know what action (if any) would be an appropriate response.
"Their bar for sexual harassment might be too low" is certainly an interesting line to take.

>>31688
Different lad but 97% is a figure that stretches credulity. I believe that there's a massive issue, I could believe 80% of women are harassed but 97%? I would be surprised if 97% of the population own a television.

>>31689

I don't know, I believe it. I have quite literally not met a woman who hasn't been harassed in some way, but there's certainly types of harassment that men get too but probably welcome. I have been catcalled by a woman and it made my day, because it was novel and also I didn't feel threatened - reverse the roles and the story is different.

My point is that I really don't think any of us really understand how relentless it can be for women. I'd not rule out that I've had interactions with women that they could viably consider harassment, simply because I didn't apply enough empathy to a situation to realise I was being inappropriate. I can't think of an example, but that's sort of the point.

>>31688

That's a wilful misreading. What I'm saying is that sexual harassment takes many forms, and it's hard to think of a realistic catch-all solution that would make all of them disappear. The thing that makes blokes stop wolf-whistling in the street is not likely to be the same thing that makes a colleague stop making inappropriate passes or touching at work, for example.

It might be a poor analogy, but if you want to solve road accidents, it's not only about sticking signs up saying "be safer" (though not an inherently bad idea). It's more that it's one part of a broader set of solutions including setting speed limits, enforcing drink-driving laws, getting car manufacturers to adhere to safety standards, etc..

A survey like this can't tell us much without saying what the experiences of sexual harassment actually are with a bit more nuance.

>>31691

Exactly, and it's also worth noting that you can identify that you've been sexually harassed regardless of how you feel about it. Someone self aware enough can know that Big Gary giving them a backrub, unprompted, at work, is harassment, even if ultimately they quite liked it. And when the line is that thin, it does become difficult to know what to do.

(I did work with a guy who would do this, though he did not discriminate on gender)

>>31689
>97% is a figure that stretches credulity
Why and how? Think through that argument carefully. Don't bother with "they can't do maths".

>>31692

I would think that any incident that someone would describe as harassment is unwanted by definition. Even if what you say does hold any water at all, I don't think this would be enough to meaningfully affect the data.

>>31691
>The thing that makes blokes stop wolf-whistling in the street is not likely to be the same thing that makes a colleague stop making inappropriate passes or touching at work, for example.
Well, no, the thing that makes blokes stop doing both of those is the same thing: social pressure. If you were going to say "HR policies", know that HR is frequently complicit in the abuse and that even if they did act the abuser would just cry foul and play the victim.

>At the root of all this is the normalisation of the idea that a woman’s body in a public place is simply public property and young women just have to put up with it. We have to shatter that normalisation through policy and in the press if we want to change the picture
Sorry, but this is total fucking wank. Nobody thinks that women's bodies are public property.

>Should we, as a gender, be doing more to tackle sexual harassment?
I dunno, maybe. What are you suggesting? Confronting cat callers on behalf of random women? I've never actually seen cat calling happen IRL.

>>31695

I completely agree with you about HR, and I'm aware much of sexual harassment policy is based on very primitive power politics (i.e. "would it be more damaging to the organisation to sack them or do nothing?" type of reasoning). That said, I do also think that the threat of being dismissed is one potentially useful tool among many.

I disagree somewhat about "social pressure", though. Yes, cultural change is the goal, but there's loads of mechanisms by which you can do that. Legislation can be a good idea, where applicable. Enforced social guidelines in other contexts, maybe not -- even worse, it might cause some backlash and people deliberately bucking the change.

As I say, it's hard to even talk about the right way to exert "social pressure" without knowing what kind of harassment we're talking about. It reminds me of the way people will publish vague social media messages about "normalising (behaviour x)". Fine, maybe behaviour x should be normalised, but perhaps it would be more useful to address the reasons why behaviour x is stigmatised, ideally with specific examples of how this presents itself in real world events?

>>31696
>Sorry, but this is total fucking wank. Nobody thinks that women's bodies are public property.

It's poor phrasing, but I think there is something to be said for the idea that all bodies are treated as "public property"; we all have expectations and prejudices about appropriate behaviours and attitudes towards our bodies imposed on us based on our characteristics, it's just this tends to take the form of sexualisation for (young) women.

>>31693
It's simply intuition based on spending an unreasonable amount of time looking at polls and surveys.
I accept I could simply be wrong, but these two things can't be reconciled in my head:
1. Roughly as many young women must be harassed as have a washing machine, or any other near-universal household item. For an alternative comparison, a young woman who hasn't been harassed would be about as rare as a genuine flat earther.
2. All of these women are willing to let a survey taker know about the harassment. All of them, even the deeply conservative ones, the ones who're trying to pretend it didn't happen, the ones who fear retribution for speaking out, and so on.
Now I'm quite prepared to accept that the first one is the case despite my skepticism. It seems unlikely, , but I'm open to the fact I could be underestimating the scale of a truly gigantic problem. The second is the real source of my suspicion. It simply does not seem likely that reporting would be so universal in a society so at peace with harassment.

I don't know, I think at least part of that statistic is the result of men being expected to be the active one in any courtship and a shifting perception of what is and isn't considered appropriate. It reminds me of a gay lassm8 angrily complaining to me that she couldn't have a drink after work without being bothered by lads trying to talk to her, I saw her point but she seemed to hold it against the men despite them doing what society expects them to do.

Suppose I can look forward to sexual harassment being a topic at the next work stand-up at any rate. Zoom bothering - the act of being unusually flirty with a colleague in a morning phone call because you just awoke from an awkward sex dream.

>>31695
>I would think that any incident that someone would describe as harassment is unwanted by definition.

When I was a teenage call-centre drone I had a female manager sneak up on me when I was working and tickle me to wake me up. I don't know if it strictly counts as sexual in my book as I'm not sure of her intent but I didn't like it. She was a bit wrong, the term 'mutton-dressed-as-lamb' came to mind because she was in her late 30s but dressed like a teenager and clearly had a thing for the young meat.

Still would've but it was clearly inappropriate touching for an office environment as defined by society. On the flip-side there's plenty of times I've felt more like I'm taking one for the team in bed* but you wouldn't call it sexual harassment because I was expected to and didn't want to cause a fuss.

*don't roll your eyes at me, I'm just making a point.

I remember once when I was younger, I think I was at uni, there was a woman walking ahead of me in the street, she looked back a couple of times but I thought nothing of it. Then I tripped on a paving stone and made a stumbling noise, at which I heard her audibly gasp. I had an impulse to explain that I wasn't following her but realised that would just have made it worse, so I crossed the street and sped up so I was in front of her so she could see me. I know it wasn't remotely my fault that she felt threatened or like she was being followed by me, but I still felt fucking awful and it's stuck with me. It was probably the first time I really thought about it from a woman's perspective.

If I had felt like I was being followed, I would have been preparing to fight - she seemed like she was just preparing to be attacked. My response is likely just as sad, that I feel like I'm expected by society to do violence to remain safe, but at least for me it changed a little bit about how I thought about how men and women are treated.

>>31698
The problem with the two points you raise is that:
1. If this weren't the case, then that would require that either the bar for what constitutes harassment is too low, or they're simply lying. Neither of these assertions is a particularly good look.
2. It's an anonymous confidential survey. There is no retribution for speaking out. Nobody that cares will know that they answered the survey and reported being harassed.

>>31697
>I do also think that the threat of being dismissed is one potentially useful tool among many.
Only if it's a credible threat. You only need look at the news from Google where it's the people that report issues and make noise that are the ones getting dismissed or referred for mental health issues.

>>31701
For 1 that isn't quite correct, there are other possibilities: It could be an unrepresentative sample or some other questionable structural decision, which isn't quite the same thing as lying. It's entirely possible to set up a poll in a less-than-ideal fashion by accident while acting in good faith.
I would never say that the bar for what constitutes harassment is too low. I would consider it a plausible explanation for the high figure that it's much lower than what most people would consider harassment. That is a bad look (because it looks too similar to "too low"), but I don't think most people are right. If we could see the survey's definition it would be easier to decide if the figure is plausible without having to make any judgement on whether that definition is appropriate.
For 2, remember that you're dealing with a figure as high as 97%. Assuming a representative sample, that includes the paranoid, the ignorant, and the completely crazy. Unless you go further and imagine they're in the 3% and the actual figure is 100%, I suppose.

I suppose I should make clear I'm interested here because I'm the sort of sad individual who's interested in surveys, not because I'm the kind of bad-faith dickhead who wants to demonstrate that "actually only 80% of women are harassed. The remaining 17% are merely made to feel very uncomfortable which isn't harassment, so actually there's no problem." I take as read that the problem actually exists.

97% of women report sexual harassment, but it doesn't say what that harassment entailed. Are they being groped, touched, verbally harassed or is simply being unattractive enough for a women to think you speaking to them is harassment? We need to know where the bar is do something about it.

The survey doesn't say and we'll never know because they never publish their data and methodology properly so it can be peer reviewed. Sociology is a fucking tinpot science and I wash my hands of this weirdness.

>>31702
>It could be an unrepresentative sample or some other questionable structural decision
Ah, so you're going with "leading market research company didn't do their job properly"? Yeah, no.

>Assuming a representative sample, that includes the paranoid, the ignorant, and the completely crazy.
I'd think the 3% covers those with plenty of room to spare. Plus the error bars on 1000 young women (about 4.2m) are themselves around 3%.

To anyone doubting the numbers, ask the women in your life about their experiences. The world is full of awful perverts who mostly get away with it. Being wanked at in the street or having an erection rubbed against your arse on the Tube or getting a hand up your skirt in a nightclub is just a normal part of life for women.

I've never done any of those things, but I do know that I've been a little bit too persistent when chatting someone up, I've made female friends feel uncomfortable with jokes that were a little bit too near the knuckle, I've slept with women who were probably a little bit too pissed, a little bit too vulnerable. There's a massive grey area of stuff that's not necessarily criminal, but is definitely unethical - stuff that you justify to yourself at the time, but that you know deep down is a bit predatory. I think that men tend to diminish the experiences of women partly out of ignorance, but partly as a defence mechanism against having to examine their own behaviour.

We shouldn't just uncritically accept any possible allegation as true, but we do need to recognise that women are perpetually under threat in a way that makes them justifiably fearful and hyper-vigilant. Like >>31700 crossing the street, we need to make a conscious effort to help women feel safe whenever we can. We need to examine our own actions and we need to have honest conversations with other men about how we can all be better.

>>31707
I think the level of disbelief itt is quite naive. Basically every woman I've spoken to for long enough has a story about some bloke taking photos of them, grabbing them, talking to them like shit, all sorts. Now, you might say "ah, but you've only ever spoken to three women, you big saddo", but the point stands. These are situations that men basically don't have to deal with.

>>31700
When I was at university I was walking about 20 metres behind a female student on a quiet road on a very foggy day. The only noise was our footsteps and I could tell she quickened her pace when she realised I was behind her. She then decided to cross the road, but almost exactly where my car was parked so I had to follow her across. I don't think I've ever felt more like a sex pest.

I must look a bit like a wrong 'un because in my younger days middle aged women would shield their handbags from me as we walked past each other.

Women in the Western world are amongst the most privileged and least endangered demographics out of the entire human population. First world feminism is nothing but petit bourgeois power politics.

I won't try to claim there exists perfect gender equality in Britain today, but I won't be taking shite like the OP's article seriously until western women start fighting in wars, becoming homeless or committing suicide at the same rate as men. Until then they can deal with the fact somebody wolf whistled at them six years ago.

>>31710

Solid logic there, ignore women being sexually harassed because they don't fight enough wars. Just such brilliance on display there.

>>31709
I think the point at which I realised she was trying to get away from me I would have waited for her to leave the area before following her across the street... well, do better next time.

>>31711

Cuts to the point mind.

97% of women have been sexually harassed is a useless statistic. I bet 97% of men can say they've had a woman misinterpret an entirely innocent attempt at flirtation. Neither of those would help anyone or contribute anything towards solving whatever is wrong here.

There needs to be a line drawn between proper sexual assault and the delicate sensitivities of middle class Guardian fisherpersons. We can't tackle everything at once, and the list of things more important than being looked ot funny on the tube or getting inappropriate messages on Tinder is about as long as a Dostoyevesky novel, it's as simple as that.

You can call that a relative privation fallacy if you like but I'll be saying I told you so when we're all underwater and you realise we should have spent more time talking about that.

>>31713

"Climate change exists, so we shouldn't talk about sexual harassment".

10/10.

>>31711

The point of the other post was that, in a just world, the problems of a relatively highly protected class of people are not the first priority.

By all means, argue about whether these things should be prioritised, or whether it's a fallacy to try and pit one social ill against another, or whether they're wrong in their assessment of privilege and danger, or whatever else, but it's the laziest thing to just mischaracterise an argument and then dismiss it.

Observation of people has taught me that people label it as sexual harassment when a sexual advancement is rejected that they would have been fine or even fantasised about had it been a person they were into. If you believed everything you read about what is sexual harassment. You would never be able to procreate. This is perhaps why internet porn has turned to incest because they are the only women young men are taught they can engage without volatile rejection.

As long that is the bar of entry I am dubious about such statements about prevalence in society being meaningful. I've also read too many online journalist treat it like it was one step away from rape when a guy took the intitive to talk to them, that is clearly not the bar for sexual harassment but there seems to be a lot of people who think it should be.

I've also been in a organisation that had to deal with the bullshit of people using innuendo to try play the system to sabotage people they didn't like, you get a lot of mileage just from floating the concept of sexual harassment, as from an institutions perspective it really must be handled seriously and you can't be dismissive. it is like a cheat code for a special kind of cunt and the more you feel it must always be taken and you must believe the victim seriously the more power they have.

I am sure this post will be inevitably strawmanned into condoning what are quite self evidently crimes or hand waving away all sexual harassment as non existent.

>>31715

It's a totally flippant argument. By definition, anyone participating in this conversation isn't prioritising the most serious problems in the world. Most of us aren't aid workers in the D.R. Congo, most of us don't live in poverty so we can give every penny we can to the World Food Programme. Unless you really are living that hyper-utilitarian life of service to the very poorest, then saying "it isn't the worst problem in the world so I don't have to care about it" is functionally equivalent to the defining statement of privilege - "it doesn't affect me, so no-one should care about it".

We've got a mix of priorities based only very weakly on pure utilitarianism, which is fine. Sexual harassment isn't the worst problem in the world, but it's a serious problem nonetheless.
It might be uncomfortable to admit, but it's a problem we're all complicit in; the upside is that we are all able to combat it in some way.

>>31716

I believe the argument is that entitlement masks it self in victimhood, especially to the entitled themselves, and it is the privilege that complain the loudest and the most when they don't get something they want.

>>31717

>anyone participating in this conversation isn't prioritising the most serious problems in the world. Most of us aren't aid workers in the D.R. Congo

Selective reductionism isn't a counterargument to that point. Maybe we're not all in UN development thinktanks, but it's reasonable to believe plenty of people here work for the NHS or campaign for their political cause, attend protests, and so on.

>Sexual harassment isn't the worst problem in the world, but it's a serious problem nonetheless.

Which is what ties into the previous point- It's not the most serious problem, but it can be serious, except here we're talking about a survey where a majority of the instances were fairly inarguably in the not at all serious camp. It is not only slightly offensive to people who belong to the group who have been involved in serious sexual assault, but it's counter-productive as a whole.

At the end of the day this is the kind of tripe pushed by very comfortable people with very comfortable lives, who want in on a bit of that "life is hard because of factors preordained before my birth" political currency, doing a disservice to people who have legitimate claims to that currency.

>>31717
>the upside is that we are all able to combat it in some way.
Combat WHAT mate? "Sexual harassment" in the context of the OP is entirely nebulous. I have never stuck my hands up a women's skirt unsolicited, but I have been shot down in flames when trying to chat one up. Was I harassing her? Is any women I've tried it on with who didn't like me a victim of harassment?

We have no answers, only a statistic which makes no sense to any of us because we're not wrong uns. So where do we go from here?

>>31720
Do you think women aren't able to tell when they're being harassed? Maybe because you have to be as clever as a man to be capable of making the distinction?

So what sexual harassment stats do you lads actually believe then?

This is all just a smokescreen for the anti-protesting laws they're planning to pass.

>>31717
>Unless you really are living that hyper-utilitarian life of service to the very poorest, then saying "it isn't the worst problem in the world so I don't have to care about it" is functionally equivalent to the defining statement of privilege - "it doesn't affect me, so no-one should care about it".

Agreed, and I also don't think that the existence of worse things precludes devoting attention to less-severe-but-still-bad things.

At the same time, what if we're also complicit in several other bad things that aren't "the worst problem in the world", but still deserve more attention than sexual harassment? For example, I think it is valid to point out that if we're concerned about gender equality, it is justified to have conversations about violence committed among and to men, about the near-universal gender differences in suicide, about the relatively shorter lifespans of men in wealthy countries, and so on.

Those conversations seem to be few and far between, and when they occur they're often presented in conspicuously shallow and non-gendered terms, or even in ways that push the burden of seeking care back onto men ("suicidal men just need to seek help more", etc.). So I think there's some fairness in pushing back against research like this. I'm with you that "but what about x?" is an unproductive reaction, but it might also be that this is an unproductive survey, or at the very least an unproductive way of presenting the survey findings.

>>31721
>Do you think women aren't able to tell when they're being harassed?
No, I'm asking what women define as harassment and if I've been complicit in it. No one has been able to define what harassment is so how can we combat it?

>>31725
Have you ever been sexually harassed?

>>31726
How would the people responsible know what constitutes harassment if all I said was "yes"? You're deflecting.

How can we define that which is completely arbitrary and unique to each individual? What I consider harassment might not even register on another person's radar.

I have been made to feel uncomfortable by the advances of men and women on 100s of occasions, but is that harassment because I say it is or only once it passes an arbitrary threshold? Does my gender or sexual orientation affect this threshold?

>>31721

I think women will decide if it's harassment entirely based upon how much they liked your face and if you looked high enough in status to meet their requirements.

At the end of the day human interaction is just too flawed for us to allow wishy washy self-definition on these kinds of things. There needs to be something concrete, because no matter how much awareness and sensitivity you promote in men, you can't teach people not to be socially awkward fuck ups.

Aren't there also statistics suggesting gen Z simply isn't having sex? They're practically celibate compared to the generations before them and is it any wonder why.

Open question lads: Have any of you ever turned down a female's advances on you? How did she react?

I don't want to be presumptuous, but I think the very fact I can ask that question, knowing it's rare enough that it might never have even happened to some of you, has a lot to answer for.

>>31721

Fuck it I will bite. Yes some women can't tell, there are the Beatrice and Alice Grants of the world who assume that if someone doesn't give them what they want when they asked nicely that person was unreasonable. And that they can ask any man in a bar to buy them a drink and when they man tries to talk to them afterwards assuming they are interested cause a scene of it being harassment and walk off with their free drink.

I've met these people I've met the BBC journalists daughters who were taught and believed male sexuality defacto disgusting and men were only after one thing. I've met the child of Barristers who would lecture me on how I am privileged so I wouldn't know.
I've met the lady who doth protest too much who ended up marrying their 'harasser' who I had been expected to defend her from. I've seen the girl get too drunk in a bar hit on someone and when they sobered up decide it was the other people’s fault. I've had the girl who couldn't take no for an answer take rejection as me being cruel. And I have meant the person who wielded sexual harassment as a weapon in HR to sabotage someone else.

All of this is more of an insult to the multiple women I have loved who have been raped than me, what again is quite telling is that these women were very quiet about their abuse, deenying it or tried to rationalise it (so ironically by your point they didn't know they were harassed), being a victim has very different behaviour from being entitled belief that you are one, powerlessness runs through a victims behavour.

Life has taught me that the worse just of anything is a person involved in a situation.

>>31730

Yes. If you date someone for a while and it will happen.

>>31730
Is my answer invalid if I'm gay? I went through a period in my 20s where I would only go to pubs with a beard I could use as a shield so I wouldn't get chatted up by women, I never considered it harassment though, just annoying; people are horny and pubs are where they go to meet other horny people. I was there to meet horny men though, so they were out of luck.

I have been inappropriately touched by men and women though and I would consider that harassment, but I feel like they knew that already and didn't care so me telling them that probably wouldn't have made much difference to their behaviour.

>>31731

>worse just of anything

Judge. Autocorrect got me.

>>31728
I'm deflecting? You're prevaricating. What point are you making? That we can't effectively fight harassment, because some of the 97% of responses might not be 'as bad' as you, a man, think is bad? Does that mean we shouldn't try? If we should try, then why is this important?

>>31735
>as bad' as you, a man, think is bad
Projection, no one has said this. Every single response has been consistent in their confusion over what defines harassment and how to effectively combat it when we don't even know where the line is or what 97% of women consider harassment to be.

How do we combat a nebulous, arbitrary concept? It's futile by definition, so we need to crystallise the debate so we can have a consistent and non-confusing idea of what we're fighting. Which is what we're all asking and you continue to dance around.

>>31735

The point they are making is that sexual harassment is entirely subjective, it is defined by the reaction of the victim, and that is a nebulous bench mark. If we tried to codify it and took it by the broadest definition we would have to lock up all society, it we took it by the narrowest rapists would walk free.
Sexual harassment therefore is an entirely unhelpful catch all term, it is too broad to be useful and any statistics about it is meaningless.
It would be like if we got rid of all the different categories of assault and just called it all 'non-consensual physical contact' then we wouldn't be able to have a sensible conversation about that either, because discussion about murder and fist fights would be equivocated with aggressive football tackling and being too close on public transport.

>>31738
Oh, good, someone said something silly I now longer have to care about this issue.

>>31738
If you're being banned for posting links to the DM, posting excerpts without the links isn't any better. It's not a technicality you'll be allowed to get away with. Just fucking stop.

>>31740

Thanks modlad, I almost got riled up at the story without realising it was DM nonsense.

>>31736
>>31737
So you're confused about what sexual harassment is? Tell your employer, maybe they'll send you on a training course.

>>31740
Are we blanket banned for DM links or just where not relevant? I'm wondering about exclusives. I think I've posted links before without issue but that might just be because I'm a quality poster and/or sensitivity-lad forgot to whinge.

>>31744
I think it depends what mood the mods are in, but almost any DM link will result in a ban and deletion even if it is an exclusive or it's something written for them, like when they had exclusives about Prince Andrew or the article Are Nige penned at the weekend about him leaving politics "for good".

>>31743
She must think she's making some kind of statement but I do wonder about Patel's comment that more will be done to make women feel safer walking home.

I mean, 'feeling safer' sets me on edge a bit. A few years back I remember reading a farcical story of an American college campus running courses on rape awareness that spooked the women up -and then they handed them tasers at the end with predictable results.

>>31706
>Ah, so you're going with "leading market research company didn't do their job properly"?
It's hardly beyond credibility. How do you properly weight a survey like this? You can't exactly cross reference it with how people voted last time, income, likelihood of turnout, etc.

>>31743
Oh The Sun! Much better than The Daily Mail.

https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/qepiqi9xaf/YouGov%20Sexual%20harassment.pdf
There we go. Some figures and some definitions. I don't see a breakdown by age, however, and I'm not sure where the figure of 80% comes from (on the first page it says 52%.) so if anyone can explain that to me I'd be grateful.

>>31744
Around last August, the Daily Mail's url was wordfiltered to "If I post a link to this website again I will be banned". A month or two after that, we started banning people for posting it. Same goes for The Sun.

>>31746
You can't make women feel safer coming home.

If you take the case that's in the news of Sarah Everard then she is in bright clothing, she was in well lit areas, she was on the phone to her boyfriend whilst she was walking home. You can take all the precautions there are in the world but if some psychopath decides he wants to kidnap and murder someone then he's going to try and kidnap and murder someone once he has the opportunity.

>>31751
I feel very sad about this case; how are any of us safe if there are policeperson sexbeasts out there on the prowl.

>>31752

It's OK, Cressida Dick has promised extra police patrols in the area.

Oh.

>>31753
These ones?
https://www.victoriajones.uk/met-police

>>31749

Pinched or grabbed arse by a not friend/ partner is much higher than I would have imagined (34-37%) in Britian.

>>31755
I think a better thing to find out would be what proportion of men have pinched someone's arse.

Do a significant number of men do it or is it just a small number of serial bum gropers giving all of us a bad name? Is one man pinching 50 bums worse than 50 men pinching one bum?

>>31749
>looked at your breasts
>winked at you
>asked you out for a drink

Hang on..

>>31749
>Looked at your breasts
>Winked at you
>Asked you out for a drink
>Commented on your attractiveness

Hang on...

>>31758

Well done, you've found a way to ignore the problem.

>>31757

Yes it is a survey of general sexual behaviour, not exclusively sexual harassment.

>>31749

Not wanting to defend abusive behaviour, at all, but a good number of these definitions are dogshit.

It's the typical strategy of such charities, trying to gain attention to their cause by stretching definitions and presenting studies with quite vague research designs. In the end, it's always about money, and about agenda setting.

I have no problem at all believing that a large amount of abuse happens every day that no upstanding person could possibly defend, but that's not the game these charities are playing.

You could now say that the means justify the ends. But I wonder.

>>31761

The fact that one in eight women have been flashed, one in five have been asked for sexual favours and one in three have been groped on the arse should at least give us pause for thought.

>>31761

You're responding to a yougov survey.

What happened to flashing anyway? It seemed to be all the rage in the 00s but these days there's not a sausage outside of naked protests. I'm not saying I've seen any blokes in trench coats but there were plenty more tits back in my day.

You would think it would be a consequence of global warming if anything.

>>31763
Who commissioned YouGov to conduct the survey?

>>31765
Unless the Guardian is being very sneaky, I believe it was UN Women UK.
(Although it's possible that was a different survey that happened to be published around the same time. I can't imagine how else the figures from YouGov differ so widely from those quoted by The Guardian.)

>>31765

Not me guv.

Ah, here we go.
https://www.unwomenuk.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/APPG-UN-Women_Sexual-Harassment-Report_2021.pdf
The high figures come from this, which seemingly uses a different YouGov survey to >>31749 with similar questions. (Although the headline figures differ from those in The Guardian, with 71% of women being harassed and 86% among women 18-25. Possibly they're assuming a non-reporting %? I've only skimread the figures rather than reading the whole thing.)

>>31756
The arse grabbing percentage is a lot higher than the self reported harassment percentage. More women are getting unrequested arse grabbings than being asked out for drinks. That can't be right.

>>31762

Don't get me wrong, I think not even the most scrutinising look at the study's details will be able to absolve men, that is those men who harrass women, of any and all wrongdoing.

But if you indiscriminately class comments on somebody's physical attractiveness as harrassment, then the gamut is going to be quite wide. From somebody shouting "OI !!! GREAT TITS!!!" after a lass to somebody saying "I say, Ms. Brown, you look quite dashing in your outfit today!".

Also, asking somebody for a drink, I mean, come on. Really? Are you telling us that from now on, any lad who musters up the courage to ask a lass to go for a drink is going to be seen as some sort of sex pervert?

To be true to itself, the study would then also have to class it as harrassment when somebody looks at a woman's ankles.

>>31769
Different times, but just over 10 years ago I knew a lad whose pulling technique in clubs was to go behind women and feel their arse. It was surprisingly successful; if she turned around and smiled then he was in there, if not then he just moved on. No need to try and chat them up or waste time on smalltalk, a quick cop of their arse was enough of a barometer to quickly know whether he was in there or not. It probably helped that was about 6'5" and reasonably attractive.

I do also have female friends who bemoan the fact that #metoo means they're far less likely to receive an unsolicited grope in clubs; even if the person doing it is a complete creep they said it's nice to feel wanted. You can't win.

>>31771

>I do also have female friends who bemoan the fact that #metoo means they're far less likely to receive an unsolicited grope in clubs; even if the person doing it is a complete creep they said it's nice to feel wanted.

Am I really the only person who has always thought that grabbing a random lass's arse is wrong on a good number of levels?

I don't think I've ever heard any lass say that an arse grope by a stranger in a club is a reassuring sign that she's wanted.

I'm all for not overblowing the whole issue, I think there has been more than enough veering off into the muddy waters of "all men are rapists", but it's one thing to ask a lass to go have a drink, and quite another to make uninvited physical contact. The latter is a boundary that you have no right to cross unless you're given unmistakable permission that it's okay.

>>31742
You're still deflecting.

>>31773
And you're still being a massively disingenuous bellend, even by .gs standards.

>>31772

I know discovering women wanted to be treated the way society has told you should under no circumstances ever treat them is a head fuck. Makes you feel tricked.

>>31771
>>31772
My brother is a good few years older than me and it blew my mind going clubbing with him before and seeing him do this. I always just assumed he was particularly uncouth rather than out of touch until now. Sign of the times but he had his own mindfuck that I was screwing women of different races like it was nothing.

Time moves fast, I wonder what we do now that will be unthinkable in the future. Aside from owning a home.

>>31775

>I know discovering women wanted to be treated the way society has told you should under no circumstances ever treat them is a head fuck


I guess then there'll never be an explanation why one of my female friends when we were all about 20 nearly reported another friend to the police after he massively groped her in the back of a Renault Clio in a dark car park. She obviously wanted it, never mind that they were both waiting for her boyfriend to come back to the car, so whatever got into her pretty little head that she then nearly went to the coppers the next day was beyond everybody's reasoning. Women, eh.

I honestly couldn't believe she didn't go to the police. Our gropey friend was well known for that sort of thing after three or four beers, it wasn't the first time that he'd tried something like that. She apparently didn't even tell her boyfriend till the next day.

Can you maybe take a break from arguing about this pointless distraction to sign this petition please?
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/protect-the-freedom-to-protest

>>31777

Some women want it. Evidently not all, and not from everyone or all the time. From what I can tell half of women want the Christopher Grey experience, the other half are appalled by the idea women would want that, and they need to be protected from their own desires.

Not that it particularly matters, but are there any women in this thread?

I honestly quite like that roughly 2/3 of the posts have been querying the statistics and picking over the definition of sexual harassment, which does incline me to believe it's mostly men, and sperglad(s)

>>31751
My partner asked me if I could have a conversation with my male friends about the treatment of women following the abductorapurder. I'm honestly not sure what it will achieve, my male friends are all progressives who either don't care about the specifics and just want people to be happy, or they're already vocal proponents. I imagine we'd agree on saying it's our fault if we chose to make a decision that led to our demise, knowing it was the unsafe choice. But that doesn't mean we deserved it etc.

>>31780
The only person who has brought it up with me is a female work colleague, who told me that she used to live in that part of London and had far more sense than to walk around there alone at night because it wasn't safe.

When the Ched Evans rape case was in the news I only ever heard victim blaming from other women, saying things like it was her fault for having so much to drink and getting herself in that position.

I don't know, maybe it's a generational thing as these were all from women in their late forties and early fifties.

>>31781

>When the Ched Evans rape case was in the news I only ever heard victim blaming from other women, saying things like it was her fault for having so much to drink and getting herself in that position.

My mum makes occasional remarks whenever there is a new rape case in the news that young women these days are asking for trouble by wearing all that revealing clothing.

I'm not sure if it's age related amnesia, but I know for a fact that pictures of my mum from her partying days in the 70s exist in a shoe box somewhere at her house where she's wearing disturbingly skimpy mini dresses.

So I'm not sure if her comments should really be understood as "I've been there", or if she has actually forgotten what she got up to in her day.

>>31782

>I'm not sure if her comments should really be understood as "I've been there", or if she has actually forgotten what she got up to in her day.
Alternately, your mum wanted it.

>>31780
>Not that it particularly matters, but are there any women in this thread?

Don't answer him ladets! All this time reputable academic journals such as the Daily Mail have warned us of a PC gone mad and now he's come to abduct all of us.

>>31784
>A Met police officer arrested after the disappearance of Sarah Everard was taken to hospital with a head injury he suffered while in custody.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56331950

He's either tried to kill himself by running head first into a wall, tried to prove he's a mentalist by injuring himself or other rozzers have fucked him up.

As a side point, when they say "human remains" have been found do they mean body parts rather than a full corpse?

>>31785

>As a side point, when they say "human remains" have been found do they mean body parts rather than a full corpse?

I think "human remains" always kind of indicates that the body was probably in a bit of a jumble. A leg here, a head there.

>>31785
I hope he's okay.

>>31785

They haven't been able to make a positive identification that it's her yet, so presumably some important bits are missing.

Green Party peer calls for 6pm curfew for men after the disappearance of Sarah Everard

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/green-party-peer-6pm-curfew-men-disappearance-of-sarah-everard-b923587.html

This seems to have sailed over a lot of people's heads, but she was quite clearly taking the piss out of the police telling women to stay at home to protect themselves.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-london-police-telling-women-to-stay-at-home-

>>31789
Allow me to piss you off: If there's a potential lady-slayer still on the loose it might make sense to advise women to stay indoors. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that on a situational basis. Perhaps you could avoid hurt feeling by saying everyone should stay indoors?

The argument that the police should focus on deterring men doesn't apply in this situation, it's a murderer on the loose.

>>31789

>Green Party peer calls for 6pm curfew for men after the disappearance of Sarah Everard

Fuck off. I don't go around raping women, and teh guvmint has no right to assume that I do.

>>31790
So why not a curfew for men in the local area because there's a lady-slayer on the loose? He can't kidnap anyone if he'll be arrested for leaving his home after dark now can he?

>>31791
Does anyone else get a faint whiff of hammers off this lad?

>>31792
They'll cower in their abode until the curfew is over.

There's plenty of places you won't find me walking around at night. Common sense that, and it's only sheltered middle class dickheads who bring out the "victim blaming" line about that.

Doesn't even have to be about gender or race or special treatment for anyone over anyone else. There's just this weird naive, studenty idealism that if only we tried a little harder to not all be awful bastards, nobody would get raped or mugged or have an awkward conversation on the tube; and somehow it's entered the political mainstream. I have to be honest. I think there's just a level of middle class comfort where you just lose all touch with reality, and you start believing in the fairytale land Guardian op ed writers live in.

You can't fix things just by talking about them more. If you could, perhaps 97% of women wouldn't still be getting sexually assaulted (according to whatever definition they used), because we've been having that conversation since about... What, 2008?

The sad thing is that you can tell men how to help women feel safer but the ones that are a danger aren't the ones that are going to implement or follow any of that advice.

As for intervening, it really depends on the situation doesn't it? Who wants to volunteer to become a beating target to help save some poor girl from being harassed? How do you weigh up your options in that situation?
Unless you catch some weird public masturbator at it in which case they're more likely to be a feebale sadsack you could beat in a fight according to my internal ranking of sex fiends.

>>31795

>we've been having that conversation since about... What, 2008?

1977, at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclaim_the_Night

>>31799

I once tried to intervene when a bloke was dragging a woman around by her hair outside Lime Street Station. She spat in my face.

People are complicated, but we have this overwhelming need to simplify everything into binaries. Erin Pizzey's story is absolutely wild:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey

>Street harassment is how men mark out public spaces as their own, making women into trespassers on male territory. Behavioural psychologists have observed how male pedestrians crowd women’s personal space at cashpoints and traffic lights, how all-male groups take up more pavement space, and how men make more antisocial noises in public than women, considering it more acceptable to speak on mobile phones at checkouts or in train carriages. Women are more distressed than men by such unwanted public noise, and by having to challenge its perpetrators. We don’t know how these encounters might escalate.

>This isn’t a new problem. In fact, men have long sought to exclude women from public spaces and make them feel uncomfortable. In the 19th century, pubs, saloons and restaurants in the UK and US were almost exclusively male spaces. State ordinances forbade women from entering, or segregated them off into “ladies’ snugs”. In 1941, one male British pub-goer refused to use the word “pub” to refer to a mixed-sex establishment: “pub” was short for “public house”, and he reasoned that women therefore didn’t belong in a “pub”, in the same way they didn’t belong in “public”.

>In formally segregated spaces, women were generally only tolerated if they were there to serve men: as prostitutes or waitresses. Men applied a similar logic to all public spaces: if they treated all women on the street in the way they treated servants or prostitutes, it marked out those spaces as male domains, and suggested that women entering them consented to their own abuse. As the zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester, the third director of the Natural History Museum, wrote, if women “really do wish to be left alone”, they should “avoid the haunts of men”. The haunts of men were all public spaces, and it would therefore be “comic” for a woman to “object being spoken to in the street”.

>Many men today still appear to believe in a similar social contract. By abusing and harassing women, men make public spaces their own – and by entering those spaces, they perceive that women acquiesce to their abuse. Frequently the onus to prevent these behaviours falls on women rather than men. Many women will be familiar with advice such as holding your keys when you walk home, avoiding listening to music, not getting drunk, travelling on well-lit roads, or shouting “fire” rather than “rape” in the case of assault, because the former is taken more seriously. Rather than taking boys and men aside and teaching them not to harass, assault or murder us, the responsibility for preventing male violence has been placed on women’s conduct.

>We know that it’s a minority of men who rape and murder women. But a great many engage in continual, low-level, unrecorded intimidation that hints towards assault and is threatening to women who they believe to have “strayed” into their territory. It is difficult to overstate the damage this has done to women. Is it any wonder that we are much more likely to suffer anxiety and agoraphobia than men? Fear of male abuse has led women to give up once-loved activities, or stop walking or running alone. Women’s experience of street harassment rockets during adolescence, when many teenage girls retreat to their bedrooms, as “the only place in the world [they] feel safe”, as one told a researcher in 2001. Too often, women feel unsupported by authorities who are supposed to protect us. It’s difficult to feel that much has changed since a US judge refused to prosecute street harassment in 1976, because it was “generally accepted behaviour [that is] too frequent for a justice system to handle”.

>What’s missing from discussions about women’s fears is a focus on men. Men’s harassment and assault of women is part of a sustained, long-term attempt to roll back advances in women’s rights and restrict our presence in public spaces. Some well-intentioned individual men ask how they can change their behaviours to make us feel calmer and safer, and are advised to cross the road to ensure they do not walk behind us at night. But we need solutions that rise above individual behaviour, and tackle men’s abuse and intimidation of women as a systemic problem. This is an urgent frontier for women’s rights.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/11/women-feel-safe-public-spaces-men-behaviour-change

>>31800

People aren't that complicated they just love certain myths. Women will always be seen as the victims of society regardless of circumstances and evidence their are just too many people who benefit from the idea.

>>31801

I was fully behind feminism until having read a similar (but academic) article in university. Where it made it abundantly clear that feminism was regularly on par with conspiracy theories about Jews controlling everything purporting the hidden deliberate controlling orchestrated agenda of men.

>>31799
>The sad thing is that you can tell men how to help women feel safer but the ones that are a danger aren't the ones that are going to implement or follow any of that advice.

There's been plenty of instances of men pretending to be 'allies' to women to get into their knickers and engaging in extremely predatory behaviour. I haven't seen any evidence that these courses telling men not to rape actually work.

>>31800
>I once tried to intervene when a bloke was dragging a woman around by her hair outside Lime Street Station. She spat in my face.

The "what men can do" posts floating about the social media ether at the moment are frighteningly naïve, and I genuinely worry for the people that attempt to follow the advice. This goes especially for the lads who are being pressured to intervene; statistics repeatedly show men are more frequently the victims of violence, and especially young men.

>>31805
Every time I've seen someone try and break up a domestic happening in public they've ended up getting turned on by both parties.

>>31806

The answer is obvious really, when things become so normal and routine they will do it in public, disrupting it is a violation of the norm.

>>31801

Is this being posted as a serious thing, or to laugh at? I can't quite tell. Stuff like "considering it more acceptable to speak on mobile phones at checkouts or in train carriages." You mean speaking in public spaces? This is just too silly.

>In 1941, one male British pub-goer refused to use the word “pub” to refer to a mixed-sex establishment: “pub” was short for “public house”, and he reasoned that women therefore didn’t belong in a “pub”, in the same way they didn’t belong in “public”.

This is crap.

>As the zoologist Edwin Ray Lankester, the third director of the Natural History Museum, wrote, if women “really do wish to be left alone”, they should “avoid the haunts of men”. The haunts of men were all public spaces, and it would therefore be “comic” for a woman to “object being spoken to in the street”.

This is absolute bollocks.

>>31804

I haven't seen any evidence to convince me that isn't true of every single man calling himself an ally or male fisherperson or what have you. Humans are simpler than we like to delude ourselves, and any bloke going along with this nonsense is ultimately doing it because he thinks it's a better mating strategy. We've constructed a hell of a lot of fancy shite to ponder over and navel gaze about, but ultimately human behaviour all boils down to the primal need to eat, and to fuck.

The reason I scoff at it is because life has taught me the far better route is to simply disregard any of it and treat women as you would any other person, instead of bending over backwards to show how much you claim to respect and value them. It's a crazy idea I know, but they actually like you better if you treat them with the indifference you'd treat any other person you aren't friends with. If you ask me that's much more actually respectful to begin with.

>>31801
>Women are more distressed than men by such unwanted public noise, and by having to challenge its perpetrators. We don’t know how these encounters might escalate.
Is testosterone supposed to have made me into a god? Am I not supposed to fear violence, or does it not matter much if I get beat up? I sense that I'm much more likely to get into a fight for telling groups of lads they're now allowed to answer their phones in Sainsbury's because it's mildly annoying to me.

I don't like the way she goes from this positing a sort of spectrum from men talking on the phone, to actual street harassment, to women getting murdered. These are different things and they don't all always spring from men wanting to control public space or whatever she's getting at.

>Rather than taking boys and men aside and teaching them not to harass, assault or murder us, the responsibility for preventing male violence has been placed on women’s conduct.
This isn't true. Harassment, assault, and murder are all crimes, everybody knows they're not allowed. Does she really, honestly believe that serial killers are the way they are because nobody told them murder was a crime?

Something I never see acknowledged in these articles is that one of the facets of yer patriarchy is the idea that women are stupid and weak and need to be protected for their own good. She doesn't even hint at what political solution does she wants. Armed woman's patrols? Harsher policing? A curfew for men? Segregation?

>>31810
This is making me quite angry tbh. It's hard to have a conversation about because of these bizarrely constructed opinions.

>treat women as you would any other person, instead of bending over backwards to show how much you claim to respect and value them. It's a crazy idea I know, but they actually like you better if you treat them with the indifference you'd treat any other person you aren't friends with. If you ask me that's much more actually respectful to begin with.

Same principle as colourblind racism? Tbh I agree, individuals aren't statistics. We need to establish a new normal, if we keep trying to make things fair then it's just going to be an escalating war of double standards.

The amount of times I've called someone a 'cunt' on rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk, and had a response of "How dare you call a woman a cunt" etc etc. Love, I had no idea of your gender before this, it's just that you were being a cunt. It's like women and men communicate completely differently online, and women expect men to communicate like women and then get offended when they don't.

>>31811
>This is making me quite angry tbh. It's hard to have a conversation about because of these bizarrely constructed opinions.

I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if the brain rot that the Guardian regularly churns out pushes more people towards the right than the Mail does.

>>31809

There are other possibilities, Internalised misandry, men are made to feel ashamed for being born and of their gender indirectly by being taught men have done everything bad in some circles, it isn't a shock if they hate themselves and other men.
The other I've seen is overcompensation (in the homophobes are closet homosexuals sense) I had a friend go fully righteous about treatment of women all over Facebook to the point that my stance of I don't need to treat women better, I need to measure them by the same standards as men, angered him, he decided I had some secret hatred of women he actually openly asked it once. Within a few years he had slipped into a cycle of physically assaulting his partners, it is a consistent pattern I have found if you scratch below the surface of a SJW motives you'll find an arsehole cloaking themselves with good intentions.

>>31792
How do we know that it's a man?

>>31795
>There's plenty of places you won't find me walking around at night. Common sense that, and it's only sheltered middle class dickheads who bring out the "victim blaming" line about that.

Nah, it's more mysterious than that - I walk all over the place at night and always have because I grew up on the outskirts of my hometown. I always wear headphones too and I've done this in multiple locations at all hours. Not once have I had a problem but some people do like they're magnets for nutters.

Admittedly I'm a bloke but you would think that, by now, I'd have been set upon by a gang of ruffians.

>>31814
It's not mysterious, it's just relatively very rare and you'll easily have some people experiencing multiple assaults, and others who've experienced none despite the exact same behaviour in similar locations. You're at the start of the bell curve, other people are at the end.

Like afaik, these people don't set up shop in the same place every day. It's simply random chance as to whether you get a negative interaction. The longer you're out, the higher than chance will be. But it's still a relatively low chance overall.

>I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if the brain rot that the Guardian regularly churns out pushes more people towards the right than the Mail does.

Can't say that, that's victim blaming. Those people were obviously all misogynist nazis before, if it takes this little to galvanize them. Imagine being annoyed at someone just because they're attacking your identity. Only racists do that.

Much as It's a given that nobody, man or woman, deserves to become a victim of any kind of physical violence at all, our streets are safe. Crime statistics show Britain as a safe place to live, and that includes women walking home at night. Women can't just feel safe, they are safe. And if you need any more convincing, look at figures of (sexual) physical violence in many third-world shitehole major cities. They have a problem with street violence. We, for all intents and purposes, do not.

I don't know what kind of utopian world you are living in where crime doesn't happen at all. But you are by several magnitudes more likely to be fatally hit by a car in traffic in the UK on any given day than to be dismembered by some crazed sex offender.

Does that make it ok, when there are still thousands of rape cases with female victims each year? No, absolutely not. Again, nobody deserves to become a victim, and ideally, there would be no victims at all. But that isn't how reality works. No amount of harsh sentencing and no violence prevention programmes will deter a certain residual number of violent offenders with a mind to it and the determination to hurt an innocent woman, or man.

I've had this conversation with a friend who's a dyed in the wool fisherperson, and she keeps saying that even if crime numbers are low compared to other countries, women just don't feel safe at night on the streets. But I'm sorry, if crime statistics not only prove Britain as a safe Western developed country to live but also show that men actually become victims of physical violence more than twice as often as women, then you can't hold half of the entire population hostage and mark all men as potential rapists by imposing a blanket curfew on them, just so that you get to keep ignoring reality.


Further reading:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/thenatureofviolentcrimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2018#which-groups-of-people-are-most-likely-to-be-victims-of-violent-crime

>>31818
>men actually become victims of physical violence more than twice as often as women

This often gets brushed aside during the debate; it is a lot more dangerous to be a man walking alone in public than it is for a woman. I suppose it's because you'll be accused of being a MRA loon if you bring it up.

>>31819

>I suppose it's because you'll be accused of being a MRA loon if you bring it up.

The problem with true MRAs is that some of them, at least the most vocal ones, have about the same amount of irrational problems with women as a good number of rad fems have with men.

I think gender equality is a very good idea, and women should have the same rights - and responsibilities - as men. And I think that it's great that women's rights have come such a long way. But I draw the line where the idea of gender equality turns itself on its head and openly, and sometimes more tacitly discriminates against men.

But I'm as little a fisherperson as I would accept the label MRA. Both don't accurately represent my actual way of thinking. I'm for true gender equality, and that means rejecting a good number of fisherperson standpoints when they veer into territory where it's no longer just about that, and where I as a lad feel discriminated against. Case in point: being put under a curfew that's ostensibly meant to protect women from rapists, when I would never in a million years have it in me to rape somebody.

>>31819
But it's men who are assaulting other men. Placing all men under curfew would be doubly effective in that it would both supress the demand for and supply of victims.

>>31819

How many of these men are being assaulted by women?

>>31822

Domestic abuse cases the majority of the time the women is the attacker, maybe these men wouldn't need to be out on the street at night if it was safe to go home.

>>31822
>But it's men who are assaulting other men

Then there should be campaigns telling men not to assault other men.

>>31825

Are there campaigns telling men not to assault women?

>>31826
Yes. Issues affecting men, such as the high suicide rate, don't get taken as seriously by society as issues affecting women.

>>31826
I remember one in particular which had a guy with brain damage in it who had been permanently quadraspazzed on a life glug by a single punch and how the guy who did it was in jail.

>>31818
Thinking aloud, is it not possible that you get into a cycle here where if women don't feel safe they're more inclined to support groups that advocate reducing violence against women. But the statements those charities put out about how much violence women experience will make women feel less safe, which will make more people inclined to support those charities, giving them greater resources and influence to highlight the problem, which might well make the problem of violence less of an issue - but by constantly raising awareness it's going to make the perception of the problem (and so the feeling of being unsafe) much greater.

(In the same way that the relationship between fear of crime has very little if any relationship to the actual level of crime being committed.)

>>31829

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

>>31818
>>31819
>I've had this conversation with a friend who's a dyed in the wool fisherperson, and she keeps saying that even if crime numbers are low compared to other countries, women just don't feel safe at night on the streets. But I'm sorry, if crime statistics not only prove Britain as a safe Western developed country to live but also show that men actually become victims of physical violence more than twice as often as women

I reckon you would be accused of gaslighting for saying this. A word that seemed to spring from nowhere into the public discourse a few years back.

I'm a man and I don't feel safe walking home, not everywhere. There are parts of my town I simply wouldn't go at night, places I probably wouldn't even drive through.

That doesn't mean women don't have it worse, though. I think this thread, and any like it, are really arguing two different points that run parallel enough to seem like the same thing - street crime happens, and women are harassed often. Both are real, both can often be linked, but they are two separate things with two separate societal root causes.

I know men and women who have been attacked on the street, I know men and women who have been gravely injured in fights, and I know men and women who have been sexually assaulted. I don't think it happens as often as domestic violence, or road traffic accidents, or suicide, but it's still something that happens often enough that we're all aware of it. And just because I've never been attacked in the street, doesn't mean I'm thick enough to think that means it doesn't happen.

Arguing about the exact degree of violence, about what counts as harassment and what doesn't, about which gender suffers the crime more, is really, really fucking missing the point. We're a country with more surveillance per head than nearly any other, with a reasonably well funded police system, so why do we not feel safer?

Obviously I get that because an attractive white woman died, we're going to be in hysterics about it for a couple of weeks, but it's as good a time as any to examine the violence that can and does happen to all of us.

>>31829

It's mean world syndrome.

If you ask the average person in the street off the top of their head if they think crime of all kinds has risen in the last couple of years, or really if any other marker of a disintegrating society has worsened, you will more than likely get a resounding "yes" from them. Except, that just isn't true. Violent crime is at one of its lowest levels that we've ever seen, just like property theft, juvenile delinquency, or even mass poverty and unemployment.

In fact, many indicators of overall quality of life in Britain are the best they've ever been.

It's a pretty muddy and ugly world that some of these charities operate in. On the one hand, you can't argue against the fact that at least in theory, they are dedicated to respectable causes that deserve support and attention. Women shouldn't have to fear violence, sexual or otherwise. Prostitutes or migrant workers shouldn't be subject to human trafficking. And children are among the weakest members of society, and need society's special protection.

The problem is, if we do a little thought experiment, then if those charities actually succeeded at eliminating all those social ills, then they would suddenly make themselves obsolete. Who needs a charity combatting violence against women, if women no longer experience any violence. And although charities often claim to be non-profit and driven by volunteer work, a good few paychecks still always depend on donations, subsidies, and grants.

And so the only way for a lot of those charities to ensure their own existence is by painting a picture of the particular problem they deal with continuedly getting worse. And they do that either by cooking up dodgy statistics, or by campaigning for changes in the law that make things rape by definition which really shouldn't be, even if they may (or may not) count as a separate offence against a person in their own right.

There's also a lot of ideological underpinning with these women's charities. For a small, but significant and vociferous number of radical fisherpersons, it's a way of channelling their anger against the male gender in general. And so, ideology becomes methodology. Because it's your deeply-held belief that all men are rapists, you do anything you can to influence public opinion so that the rest of the world starts thinking the same.

>>31832
Suicide's much rarer than you seem to think it is.

It's almost as if people feel like crimes that affect people like them are proportionally higher or need to be prioritised more.

>>31834

Leading cause of death under the age of 45.

>>31823

I know you think you're being clever about which demographic does what, here, but you're playing with fire. You really won't like what happens if we bring race into that question.

>>31838

You're so close to getting my point.

>>31830
Are you really linking to alt-right bollocks in a thread about sexual harassment>

>>31840

Perhaps you should directly state the point so that it can be discussed, and to avoid any misinterpretation.

>>31852

You'd like that, wouldn't you. Slut.

>>31842
Is it? I just read the article and it seemed to be a perfectly reasoned musing about how controversy garners attention over more balanced stances.

>>31856
It's easier to dismiss something as 'alt-right' than it is to deconstruct what has actually been said.

>>31856
The author advocates for scientific racism, human biodiversity, inherent gender differences, and various other pseudoscientific bullshit.

>>31862

>inherent gender differences

Not him, and I've got no dog in this fight, but you really believe that inherent gender differences are "pseudoscientific bullshit'?

>>31862
I've skimmed it as it's a surprisingly large article, and couldn't find any of that stuff. Can you point me to the specific statements?

>>31869
"The author advocates for", not "The article advocates for".

>>31872

That's not what I asked you.

Do you believe there are no inherent, gender based differences between men and women?

>>31873

That's not what you asked him either. You asked him "Can you point me to the specific statements?" and I provided you with contextual information that rendered the question irrelevant.

>>31874
That was actually me asking about specifics, not him, or you.

I'm basically suspicious that they're saying not to trust a fair article because they don't like the source.

Also whichever one of us said "inherent gender difference" is pseudoscience, what on earth do you mean by that?

>>31875

Why did he complain about me not answering the question he asked someone else, then?

>I'm basically suspicious that they're saying not to trust a fair article because they don't like the source.
I don't know the source or why the other lad thinks it's all those things, whether or not it is (I have a sneaking suspicion I've seen it slated for being similar things in the past though) but if someone linked to an apparently reasonable argument made by Otis Eugene "Gene" Ray, that would itself be a reason to question how reasonable it really is.

>>31876
You're right, it's fair to consider the context, but if the points and argument are solid, then it's worth looking at? This is moot considering I can't be arsed to read the whole thing.

I'd definitely be loathe to take an argument from Otis Ray at face value, he's obviously quite mental. The earth is clearly hollow.

>>31879
*concave. It's somewhat different.

>>31879
>but if the points and argument are solid, then it's worth looking at?
I'll never know if they are because as far as I'm concerned, they're written by some nutbar so I don't care to find out. He doesn't believe in a concave earth, obviously his reasoning is generally spurious.

>>31875
>I'm basically suspicious that they're saying not to trust a fair article because they don't like the source.
I'm basically suspicious that you think a neoreactionary who thinks there's a biological basis for racism and sexism is capable of writing a "fair" article.

>>31884
You've still not given any direct quote demonstrating your accusations. Why would I just take your word for it? I obviously can't be arsed to read anything he's written, so if you want me to believe something, you can provide a quote.

Either way, a good point is a good point. If you don't trust the source, then it's good to find out *why* that source wanted you to learn that particular point and what it might have intentionally omitted or obfuscated. For that and other reasons, it's useful to bear the source in mind, but ignoring verifiable information because you don't like the source is wilful ignorance.

Now chad up and stop being disingenuous, I'm happy to hear you out if you've got a point to make.

>>31887
>You've still not given any direct quote demonstrating your accusations.
If only there were some way of finding information on the Web. That would be a cool idea, someone could make millions out of it.

>ignoring verifiable information
Yeah, I suspected you might be arguing in bad faith.

I mean, if you've got sone kind of stake in denying that races or sexism have actual biological differences, then I have to assume you're basically the same thing as a flat earther or anti-vaxxer, but woke.

>>31889
>sexism have actual biological differences
The bloody sexisms, there's loads of them these days, the sexisms.

God, fuck off you thick shit.

>>31889

>I mean, if you've got sone kind of stake in denying that races or sexism have actual biological differences, then I have to assume you're basically the same thing as a flat earther or anti-vaxxer


Thank you.

Even if genetic differences between the sexes and between ethnicities are a touchy issue, and acknowledging that they have been used in abundance throughout human history to separate humans with privilege from those who were denied it, you cannot honestly say that they don't exist.

Gender studies, for example, calls the insurmountable heap of evidence from bio and genetic science that men and women are different a "biologism". In other words, they see it as an ideologically motivated determinism that differences between the sexes should exist, when they feel they don't.

Fair enough, but the play rules are still that in order to debunk a scientific theory, even if it's one you so vehemently disagree with, you have to do so by coming up with scientifically solid evidence that debunks the original accepted standard of knowledge thus far.

Gender studies does not do that. And in terms of scientific proof to the contrary, it really always has been, and still is pretty empty handed. Instead, it decries every demand to produce solid, scientifically acceptable evidence for its claims as a hostile attack on itself. And it that sense, gender studies is no better than any garden-variety conspiracy theory.

>>31884
Identifying SSC as neoreactionary is slightly misplaced. (in the sort of way that getting your Stalinists and your Maoists mixed up) He's more of an insufferable rationalist type. If I remember correctly he lives in a polycule, which "actual" neoreactionaries mock him for, and his big thing is "effective altruism" (charity... but ~rational~!) which in theory leads to socially progressive ends, even if in practice and due to what sort of social grouping it's around, it's just Californian ideology nonsense that puts us on the same road to free market phrenology as Nick Land.

The article itself is basically fine. The thing about neoreactionaries, "rationalists" and all that crowd is that they're actually capable of writing some insightful things. They're some of the few people outside an academic concept willing to talk about social signalling, not simply in the sense of using "the shipping forecast" as a quick slur on someone's integrity, but looking at how it can have a systemic effect. In SSC's case this goes as far as the tediously self referential "As I am writing this, I could just be trying to signal that I am very smart and fair...". It's unfortunate that there's nobody on the left doing similar analysis, but that's what your stuck with. Just going "that's neoreactionary, neoreaction is bad, so I won't read any of it" seems like a dangerous mistake when neoreactionaries are (for all their wrongness and insanity) probably the smartest people on the right today and some of the best placed in the disproportionately socially influential tech sector. You've got to know your enemy to fight them - and if your enemy can teach you a few things about society while you're at it, so much the better.
(But don't go overboard, read neoreactionaries in moderation - not because you might become one, but because their chief export is insufferably long and often pointless essays. They're worse than bloody communists.)

Anyway, the article is fine as it goes. No reheated phrenology or any of that sort of thing. A bit insufferably intellectual in tone, but I would highly recommend reading it.

>>31894
>polycule

Who keeps inventing all these words and why are they drawing up these absurd trees, isn't sex supposed to be fun?

>>31893
>cannot honestly say that they don't exist.
We can honestly say they don't exist because science tells us they don't exist. There is no substantive "genetic difference" between races, and the "genetic difference" between men and women is one fucking chromosome. The idea that these somehow account for the different status afforded to them is the same debunked nonsense advanced by the likes of The Bell Curve and James Damore.

>>31894
>Identifying SSC as neoreactionary is slightly misplaced
It really isn't. Here he is literally embracing scientific racism.

>>31902

>the "genetic difference" between men and women is one fucking chromosome

So there is a difference.

How "substantiative" that difference is is beyond a pointless discussion- It's substantiative enough to give one a cock and the other a fanny, and thereby grant humans the ability to reproduce.

Nobody is trying to say men and women are a different species you thick fucking twat.

>>31907
Apart from John Gray, of course.

>>31907
>So there is a difference.
Nobody is saying there isn't a generic difference. What is being said is that these don't result in any inherent difference that makes men and women more or less suited to particular tasks.

That is Other Place-level shitposting, lad.

>>31909
> What is being said is that these don't result in any inherent difference that makes men and women more or less suited to particular tasks.
What about breastfeeding? Is there any inherit difference that makes one sex more suitable for that task?

How has someone being murdered ended up with me being told I should tell my mates off for looking at a girl's arse? That seems like a valid area for discussion in of itself but I'm not comfortable with the association.

>>31910
>That is Other Place-level shitposting, lad.

>>31910
He's being daft for the sake of it, lad. Go to bed.

>>31911
You ought to have a word with your Mrs, lad. It's not right that she's 'asking' you to police your friends for behaviour she doesn't like.

>>31904
Again, to my ears this is like saying "It's okay to call Maoists 'Stalinists' because they both embrace violent revolution".
For my money I think it's still more accurate to call him a "Rationalist", most "Rationalists" I've seen tend towards partaking in playground phrenology anyway.

>>31914
I'm not calling a Maoist Stalinist. I'm saying that this particular so-called Maoist seems to be saying an awful lot of Stalinist things, to the point of telling someone in an email to not reveal that he's actually a Stalinist.

>>31911

Those erotic femdom stories I sometimes read for a guilty wank where it's matriarchal society and all men have to wear chastity cages by law are coming true.

>>31917
When those Stalinist things are things that a lot of Maoists also say it seems more apt to suppose that both are Marxists, or where they differ from Marx, Marxist-Leninist(+/- Maoist)s.

In conclusion, Rationalists are racist.

Women are indistinguishable biologically from men which is why I believe we should remove the outdated sexist segregation in sports.

>>31919
If you want to argue that the person who espouses alt-right positions, advances alt-right arguments, supports and is supported by alt-right types is somehow not alt-right, knock yourself out.

>>31921
I appreciate that dropping the explanatory metaphor for the comedy value of a conclusion that doesn't obviously follow unless you've understood the confusing metaphor perfectly wasn't the best way to convey my point, so I'll come out and say what I was getting at:
In this case "alt right" (or "racist") is analogous to "Marxist". Stalinists and Maoists both tend to be Marxists, Neoreactionaries and Rationalists both tend to be alt right or racist. The advantage of more specific terminology is that it lets you disentangle your Mao from your Rosa Luxemburg and your Hitler from your Moldbug - once you stop doing that the "neo" in "neoreactionary" exists only to waste a few bytes of RAM.

>>31922
You say that as if the distinction is somehow important or relevant here.

>>31923
When you start saying Stalin is a Maoist because he's saying Marxist things people who have a passing familiarity with the subject matter (and those who go off and skimread to develop their own understanding) might get it into their heads that you have no idea what you're talking about, even if you're broadly correct and simply don't care for the distinction.

Call a spade a spade, a trowel a trowel, and this thread "maintained by Railtrack Plc."

>>31902

We can't meaningfully discuss the issue of gender-based violence without acknowledging the huge sex disparity in the capacity for violence - not the propensity towards violent behaviour, but the simple physical ability to effect violence.

Men are much, much stronger than women. The average woman has about half of the upper body strength of the average man; elite female judo players have grip strengths that would put them in the bottom 25% of all men. That statement shouldn't be particularly controversial, but it is.

If we pretend there's no sex difference in strength, then why should women fear violence being inflicted upon them by men? The only logical answer would be that men (or at least some men) are intrinsically monstrous, while women (or at least most women) are so intrinsically virtuous to render them defenceless. This line of reasoning may sound familiar if you've been following the commentosphere over the past few days.

This fact becomes highly relevant when we start looking at domestic violence. There's very strong evidence to show that men are no more likely to initiate violent behaviour in an intimate partner relationship than women, but domestic violence is widely perceived as a gendered issue. Why? Again, we return to sex differences in strength and the denial thereof. Women are just as likely to hit men as vice-versa, but there's a huge asymmetry in the amount of damage that the sexes can inflict on each other.

There's no evidence to support the idea that "toxic masculinity" makes men believe that they have the right to hit their partners, because men aren't actually any more likely to hit their partners than women; domestic violence is at least as prevalent in lesbian relationships as heterosexual relationships. Many fisherperson academics attempt to explain these facts with tenuous arguments about internalised homophobia or the imitation of heteronormative behaviour, but there's a far more straightforward explanation - women aren't inherently less prone to perpetrating violence against their partners, they just tend to lack the physical capacity to inflict serious violent harms on men or to defend themselves against male violence.

If we cherry-pick the truths that we choose to acknowledge, we inevitably end up in a terrible muddle and inevitably degrade our ability to usefully act towards our shared aims. Men aren't monsters, but we are far more dangerous when we choose to behave monstrously for very straightforward biological reasons. All people deserve equal treatment in society, but that aspiration doesn't negate the reality of biological difference; pretending that we're all exactly the same just hampers our ability to work towards a more equal society.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00421-006-0351-1

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1991.71.2.644

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00235103

https://www.jstor.org/stable/584365

https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-2909.126.5.651

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J155v06n01_11

>>31925
>Men aren't monsters, but we are far more dangerous when we choose to behave monstrously for very straightforward biological reasons.

Otherlad here. I agree that there are innate biological differences between men and women at a population level, and I don't think anything I'll say here really diminishes your points, but feel I need to add something: I think physical capacity is only one of the contributing factors to how "monstrous" people can be when they're violent.

I haven't researched this and don't have any hard data, but for what my personal experience is worth, I think 1) willingness to commit violence and 2) capacity to "get away with it" are at least as important as your physical capacity when it comes to the kind of injuries you inflict on someone.

Or to put it more bluntly, the formula for physical capacity can be changed the moment someone picks up a heavy or sharp object, or if certain kinds of violence are accepted as "normal" (e.g. a woman slapping a man in the face). So as a complimentary point, I think it's probably true that our different physical capacities also lead to very strong kinds of social conditioning which determine how men and women express violence. There's a combination of biology and social expectations based on biology at play here.

There's something quite eerie about phone lights at vigils replacing candles and lighters.

Anyway, this thread seems to be well and truly in "All Lives Matter" territory. Not all men are violent or engage in sexual harassment, but there's no way of knowing which ones will and now you can't even trust the police to keep you safe; the theory with Sarah Everard is that copper used his badge to get her in his car.

>>31925
>We can't meaningfully discuss the issue of gender-based violence without acknowledging the huge sex disparity in the capacity for violence
I'm not entirely sure what any of this has to do with gender essentialism.

>>31928

There's a difference between essentialism and biological determinism lad, keep up.

I wonder if trans men inherit all the toxic masculinity and become woman beaters when they transition, but still hit like a wet noodle. Or does all the testosterone in their hormone therapy bridge the gap?

>>31929
Depends how young they start really. A trans man on T can gain a lot more muscle quickly than a woman, but starting out on it in your early 20s puts you at a big disadvantage and your bones will never be as strong.

>>31925
>this fact becomes highly relevant when we start looking at domestic violence. There's very strong evidence to show that men are no more likely to initiate violent behaviour in an intimate partner relationship than women, but domestic violence is widely perceived as a gendered issue.

That is a very weasel word way of saying women beat their partners far more than men do. Which is what the science universally says.

On the positive side, the police violence last night has brought some attention to the policing act that Patel's bringing in.

>>31932

I didn't see any police violence. I did see the police arrest a handful of people who were clearly acting in breach of the Coronavirus Act and the Public Order Act. The optics were terrible, but it strikes me as hypocritical that the same people who were decrying the anti-lockdown protests are now decrying the police for enforcing lockdown laws. It all reeks of tribalism over principle.

If we discuss gender differences, one mistake we must not make is to have our cake and eat it too when it comes to painting men as the defective, violence-prone gender.

What I mean is, it seems that in public debate about what it means to be a bloke, oftentimes you see a focus on negative things. Toxic masculinity, an alleged predisposition for violence, the assumption of male privilege, all that kind of thing. So that gender differences become acknowledged just enough to put men in a bad light while at the same time calling women the better gender, but not enough to allow the notion that there are actually things that men do better than women, and which are of value to society.

Toxic masculinity itself is a term invented by fisherpersons, and just for the obvious purpose of denigrating the male gender. While very few talk about toxic femininity. If you argue that harmful behaviours of men should all be subsumed under the umbrella term "toxic masculinity", then the same should go for women who show harmful behaviours. But when was the last time you actually read the words "toxic femininity" in a mainstream blog, magazine, or newspaper article admitting that it even exists.

It's that traditional blind spot many fisherpersons have, that women are inherently good and men are inherently bad, and even if a woman is bad, it's somehow a man's fault.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/14/sarah-everard-misogyny-men-violence-death-women

>Where are the online resources for boys struggling with low self-esteem and perceived societal expectations?

The thing is, as someone who was an awkward teenlad, pretty much nobody cares. The only place you can go to find any sort of support or camaraderie is online, where you'll find people like you, but more bitter. This is what chronic masturbators are. Maybe we should make a "what can we, as a gender do to help boys and men struggling with low self-esteem and perceived societal expectations" thread on mumsnet.

She ends with
>we need you to talk to your sons. Because in failing the boys of today, we are failing the women of tomorrow.

I'm a little bit worried that Guardian readers trying to talk to their sons about male violence is going to make everything worse. At the very least it's adding fuel to the neurotic teenlad > fully brainwormed internet misogynist pipeline.

>>31933
>The optics were terrible

Especially when you compare it with Glasgow last week.

>>31933
Shut the fuck up.

>>31929
>There's a difference between essentialism and biological determinism lad, keep up.
Indeed there is. So why do you keep bringing up the latter?

>>31888
You made a claim, now back it up. There's no need for this showboating, I'll listen. You'd be better off being cooperative here than assuming bad faith on behalf of others, it gets things moving faster.

>>31941
>I'll listen
Will you though?

>You'd be better off being cooperative here than assuming bad faith on behalf of others
I'll stop assuming bad faith when you stop demonstrating it.

>>31942

"I WAS GOING TO INTORODUCE YOU TO MY HOT OLDER BOYFRIEND WHO GOES TO ANOTHER SCHOOL BUT NOW I AM NOT GOING TO BECAUSE YOU ARE SOOOO DISGUSTING"

So you don't have proof then?

>>31933
>It all reeks of tribalism over principle.

Good luck making this argument when all the press photos consist of attractive middle-upper class white women.

>>31942
Yeah. Sock it to me.

>>31941
>>31943
Scott isn't going to sleep with you, m7.

>>31944
The more I see the pictures from this the more it looks like a BBC drama.

>>31948

It's helping import the whole "Crisis actor" thing.