Almost all young women in the UK have been sexually harassed, survey finds
Virtually all young women in the UK have been subjected to sexual harassment, according to a survey from UN Women UK, which warns that most women have lost faith that the abuse will be dealt with. Among women aged 18-24, 97% said they had been sexually harassed, while 80% of women of all ages said they had experienced sexual harassment in public spaces.
>>42408 Yeah, they're really dragging his good name through the mud.
>>42404 We need to look a bit deeper than "someone is killed by an NHS mental health patient every week". Being a "mental health patient" could mean anything from fits of anxiety to full blown psychotic delerium. I've been through CBT for depression half-a-dozen times, meaning I have a "long history of poor mental health", but that wouldn't be an adequate explanation of my actions if I went all GTA on the highstreet, and it wouldn't be fair to make out that my therapist let down my victims because I told her about what a patronising tosser I think my dad is. You see what I'm saying?
In this context, "NHS mental health patient" means someone being treated by a specialist secondary service, not just someone being managed by their GP. The vast majority of them suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and would be sent to a secure hospital rather than a prison.
My point isn't that everyone who kills is mentally ill, my point is that we aren't doing enough to prevent the huge number of entirely preventable homicides that are perpetrated by seriously mentally ill people. I cannot count the number of serious case reviews, domestic homicide reviews and independent enquiries I've read where someone literally told a medical professional "I'm going to kill someone and I need to be sectioned" in the days or weeks before killing someone.
Our public services are so utterly broken that you can in fact publicly announce your plans to murder someone and it's likely that nothing will be done to stop you. Two years later there'll be some form of inquiry or review, vague platitudes will be uttered about "lessons being learned", but nothing will actually change to prevent the next death, and the next one, and the next one.
>>42412 In the mean time you get people apparently 'arrested for offensive memes'. The funding is clearly there to look out for specific online content (unless it relies on a public report system, in which case more people should get into nationalism or whatever to dilute the nutters).
These people must have outlets to regular society within their network. Who was in his friends list or at work that could have noticed something was wrong?
So, was he attempting to do a Yank style "shoot a dozen people before turning the gun on yourself" thing, but with the tools to his disposal he was only able to injure a couple of people and put himself in hospital? At least he managed the bit where you kill yourself, but only just.
From Headingley though wasn't he. A lad from Gipton wouldn't have cocked it up like this. Or Beeston, for that matter. Never forget.
>>42411 >Yeah, they're really dragging his good name through the mud.
My point was more that the editorial choice (and it is a deliberate choice) reflects poorly on the news outlet, not that it's besmirching the individual.
Society may have overestimated risk of the ‘manosphere’, UK researchers say
Men who engage in the online “manosphere” and the content of Andrew Tate are often able to express a “strong commitment to equal treatment and fairness”, according to research commissioned by Ofcom.
Prompted by growing concerns about internet misogyny, researchers for the UK communications regulator followed the journeys of dozens of men through online content ranging from the US podcaster Joe Rogan to forums for “chronic masturbators” (involuntary celibates). They found that while a minority encountered “extremely misogynistic content”, many users of the manosphere were critically engaged, selective and capable of discarding messages that did not resonate with their values.
They found it was far from a unified community: many participants felt the various subcultures under the manosphere umbrella were misunderstood, with extreme misogyny being grouped with benign self-improvement content. Several participants were drawn to it by its perceived humour, open debate and irreverence as well as connecting with views they found about traditional gender roles and family dynamics.
There's certainly something to that. Maybe this article misses a lot of nuance but there's a kernel of truth it touches on maybe.
I have been seeing a lot of stuff like this popping up lately, and I reckon perhaps these people are waking up to the idea it might not have been a great idea to effectively alienate anything masculine coded. Especially when they might actually want those men on their side to fight against the very real looming possibility of a tyrannical police state trampling their civil liberties.
>>42509 It kind of reminds me of the immigration debate in this country.
If you tell people that the likes of Andrew Tate are toxic and then someone watches one of his videos and reach the conclusion he isn't the caricature they've painted him out to be then they won't believe what you have to say.
Don't get me wrong, he's almost certainly a massive dickhead, but overreacting to him or making sweeping statements that are possible to debunk are counterintuitive.
You see it on both sides of the spectrum, but I just think it's especially problematic for the left when we are supposed to be the ones who are like, universalist, co-operative, for everyone, you know? It's entirely contradictory with what should be our goals.
The modern liberal left is rife with it. Because so much of the in-group cohesion relies on demonising out-group figures, it has ended up being the only thing they are good at. They do a very good job of making their own supporters more radical, at the expense of making it ever harder for anyone who isn't already in the club to align with their views, because their consensus has drifted so far from the baseline.
Which is another key to understanding it, I think. I don't think the "thought leaders" amongst progressives genuinely see Tate and his ilk as the huge threat to society they paint him as, it's just the sermon they preach to keep their mob fired up. Their Two Minutes Hate.
As you say, much like the right does with immigrants and benefit scroungers etc.
>>42505 What if most people are just reasonable folk and it's just a small collection of nutters that ruin it for everyone?
Like I'm pulling numbers out of my arse but I can see 95% of blocks as mostly alright but just want to get on with their own life and might at worst imitate something that they see on telly. 2% of blokes are utter monsters and there's 3% of blokes would actively step in if they saw something going on. You have a minority of arseholes but that's a very visible minority and a lot of women will feel uneasy lest they bump into one when they're walking home at night.
>>42512 The trouble with "not all men" is that you never know which men are the "not all". I've seen exemplary behaviour (even if occasionally cringy) from plenty of men. But the 2% you mention blend in, there is no telling who is part of it. So you quickly learn to be wary of everyone, just in case.
Imagine 2-3% of people will punch you in the face. How would you deal with strangers, be friendly or on guard?
>>42513 I might be talking bollocks, but I've always gone through life with the impression 2% of all people will punch me in the face. What catches me off guard is the way women's advocacy talks about this like it's gendered and it's not normal, like you can talk the problem away rather than just taking your chances and cautiously getting on with life.
Not in a wannabe hard-man way either. If someone wants to punch me in the face I think of myself as basically defenseless. It is what it is.
It's becoming a cliché but I've never heard a decent counter-argument against it: how is this any different from the argument that outright racists make when they point out that x% of criminal offenders are brown-eyed people?
It's straightforward prejudice to base threat perception on immutable characteristics like race or sex. Violence is quite well understood, sociologically, and to hone in on a physical feature like sex that also sweeps in half of the population is bigotry, pure and simple.
>What catches me off guard is the way women's advocacy talks about this like it's gendered and it's not normal, like you can talk the problem away rather than just taking your chances and cautiously getting on with life.
From the word go, one of the more pernicious tenets of fishing has been that all men are potential rapists. And I'm not sure that assertion has really died down over the years. When the truth is, if a bottom dregs of 1-2% percent of men are either actual rapists or a ticking time bomb in that respect, then that's arguably bad enough, but being a "potential" rapist is then no more likely than being a potential burglar, arsonist, or common thief. And yet, you don't really hear anybody incessantly blabbering that we're all potential burglars.
In truth, there have been repeated studies where almost the entirety of men, in any case significantly more than 90 percent, have said that rape or any other sexual harrassment is completely unacceptable behaviour. There is no "condoning" rape among men. Rape isn't normalised. And rightly so. But the problem for feminism that this presents is that if almost all men are demonstrably against rape, then it at least makes the claim very dubious that all men are potential rapists.
The way out of this dilemma has for decades been to expand the definitions of sexual harrassment, and of moving the goal posts of where rape begins. To the point that we now have countries like Sweden where you can probably still be done for rape if you've got in writing that your sexual partner consented.
>>42516 There’s an unfortunate cycle with the definition of rape, where two conflicting arguments both make perfect sense until everything is rape. So now everything is rape.
Everybody agrees that kidnapping a woman off the street and forcibly fucking her is a terrible thing to do. For many people, that’s what rape is. But what if you just keep pestering someone, or manipulating them, or blackmailing them into having sex with you? Or even, what if she’s just drunk? What if she’s just feeling a bit sad in a way that she will make a decision she wouldn’t normally make? If someone goes out specifically looking for women in that situation, that’s pretty seedy too. All these things are times when a woman might know she doesn’t want to have sex, but she just goes along with it for an easy life. Men can be very insistent and quite intimidating, you know.
For me, from the male perspective, that’s still a terrible thing to do, but what happened to that Indian woman on that bus that time is still massively worse. However: society is full of people who try to downplay sexual crimes, and say that various monstrous indiscretions “don’t count”. If you’re a woman who has had a man threaten you into consenting, you’re still going to feel like you’ve been raped. And the only way to make sure that those acts are taken seriously too, is to make it very clear that there are no “minor rapes”. Rape is rape.
So at this point, pestering a woman is exactly the same as abducting a woman and keeping her as your sex slave chained to the wall in your evil abuse dungeon. And that’s obviously bollocks, and yet, also, it’s true at the same time.
>And that’s obviously bollocks, and yet, also, it’s true at the same time.
No, it is just bollocks, you will find.
The danger in treating the whole gamut of sexual offences or harrassment as one and the same thing is that there is then no more scope in how a particular offence is dealt with. There is no more discretion for courts and authorities to treat cases differently based on severity.
Will a woman feel violated if you unsolicitedly put your hand up her skirt on the bus? Absolutely, most definitely. And she has every right to feel violated. And we've very much got laws against that already which serve their purpose. But is it rape? Should the same punishment be administered for feeling up a woman's skirt as for forcible penetrative rape?
Richard Dawkins, as insufferable as he is, drew a lot of flak a few years ago by saying that he, too, was touched indecently by a Catholic priest as a young boy, but that all he could remember was that it felt very "icky", and that he would never call what that priest did with him "rape" or severe sexual abuse. It's still rightly illegal nowadays. But those comments didn't sit right with a whole host of victim's advocates. When in reality, he had a point.
>Imagine 2-3% of people will punch you in the face. How would you deal with strangers, be friendly or on guard?
This is really at the root of it. You are raising this as a hypothetical here, but we all know the implication is that the "be on guard" answer is supposed to be understandable and rational. But it isn't. It's irrational. My job requires meeting dozens of complete strangers every day- If I went about my life with the "on guard" assumption that at least one of them every two or three days is going to physically assault me, I'd be a mess. If everybody went about their life that way, nothing would get done.
That's what needs to be acknowledged.
Those people who hold that view are irrational, and their viewpoint is, in my opinion, something more akin to a trauma induced phobia, and it isn't healthy. I sympathise with them, of course, I understand why you might feel that way when you have gone through something awful, but the correct course of action isn't to re-mould the rest of society around them. It's to help those individuals. They need help, or they are not going to have healthy interpersonal relationships, let alone intimate ones, going forward.
This goes back to something I tried to talk about earlier, but couldn't quite word it properly. There's been a gradual but steady shift towards avoidant behaviour, when it comes to anything uncomfortable or unpleasant, in liberal left circles. With a great number of things the answer is to look from the top down at society and how we are individually beholden to powers greater than ourselves. But there are other things where excusing the individual and expecting society to adapt to them is both wrong and harmful to the individual.
It's most obvious in the way some will act like you have committed a hate crime if you suggest a fatty could, perhaps, if they really want to, put down the crisps and go for a jog. But you see how that sort of principle has infected basically everything in liberal politics.
>It's most obvious in the way some will act like you have committed a hate crime if you suggest a fatty could, perhaps, if they really want to, put down the crisps and go for a jog. But you see how that sort of principle has infected basically everything in liberal politics.
... And, to link back to the post about "manosphere" stuff that sparked this discussion, that's how we ended up in the situation that going to the gym or doing basically any self improvement is a right wing coded Tate adjacent red flag.
Sage for double post, but I wish imageboard posts could be edited, fuck sake.
>>42519 I have started wondering over the past year or so if the massive increase in openness around discussing sexual assault might have actually had a downside here. All this #MeToo stuff was great for letting people know they aren’t alone, but if I was a woman, hearing stories about people like me getting raped literally multiple times a day, in every media source going, would probably make me a touch paranoid too.
I recall reading something about if it might even be a sort of social contagion. A meme in the sense Dawkins originally meant, like with how annorexia being in the news constantly made loads of lasses start starving themselves.
Obviously I'm not suggesting it was all made up, by any stretch, but it seems conceivable that when everyone else is sharing stories about how they got raped, and you hadn't been raped, wouldn't you feel a bit left out? You might not outright fabricate a rape story, but maybe you could embellish that one time where it got a bit awkward with that one bloke... Then you could join in...
Of course that is the very deepest and most heretical kind of wrongthink and cannot be entertained for a second as a line of empirical enquiry. But nevertheless. Kind of makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>... And, to link back to the post about "manosphere" stuff that sparked this discussion, that's how we ended up in the situation that going to the gym or doing basically any self improvement is a right wing coded Tate adjacent red flag.
Andrew Tate is a pompous cunt who has done nothing but damage. He has nothing even remotely in common with any regular, level headed bloke you'll ever meet.
That said, he is a very bad influence on the most gullible of lads who then actually want to be like him and emulate him. I'm well past the age group that he targets, but I can't imagine a whole lot of younglads actually being that stupid.
>>42515 If a racist can point to actual statistics then it's not racism, just math. I'm a bloke who has some gay leanings. I love tender loving and caring, I don't want a rogering as it were. You'd be surprised how many people are essentially rapists who want their dick stroked. I can hold my own, but for women it must be a mine field.
I don't mean to speak bad of people in general, but the wrong'uns tend to home in on those naive enough to not understand there are utter dickheads out there.
>If a racist can point to actual statistics then it's not racism, just math.
Okay, I won't say whether I personally agree with that, but just you try saying it to the sort of person who also supported the #metoo stuff. You won't be surprised they absolutely reject the idea. The part that rankles is the double standard.
Read a newspaper m8. Within the last 24 hours, the statement "grooming gang perpetrators are overwhelmingly laplanderstani, but the police are deliberately concealing that fact for fear of being called racist" has gone from being a "far-right conspiracy" to the accepted findings of a government inquiry. I could spend all day listing objective, verifiable facts that would at best have you denounced as racist and at worst lead to a conviction for inciting racial hatred.
>>42527 Pedantically, I saw it reported with the specific wording that suspects are disproportionately laplanderstani, which is a big difference from perpetrators being disproportionately laplanderstani. There's no evidence for what you've said (that's why the report wants the police to start recording ethnicity/nationality data).
A government report is a very poor source of facts in this country: We're a nation of policy-based evidence. Isn't it odd that at a time when the right were calling for it, when the government thinks that if it moves right it'll get those voters back and, cynically, because a decade has passed and many of the responsible people will have moved on, an inquiry has found exactly what the doctor ordered? Isn't it odd how this is always what happens here?
I'm not saying this specific inquiry is wrong, but a British newspaper covering the results of a government report that said newspapers demanded, by a government that said newspapers helped into office, which has basically reached the conclusion those newspapers want? That is about as reliable a source of information as gyromancy.
>Pedantically, I saw it reported with the specific wording that suspects are disproportionately laplanderstani, which is a big difference from perpetrators being disproportionately laplanderstani.
Racial profiling, innit.
Similar to predictive policing. Which, then again, is even worse, because it creates feedback loops where more police are sent to patrol what are thought to be more crime prone areas, which leads to more arrests, which then makes those areas look even more crime prone, and so on.
'They've never heard the word masculinity without the word toxic'
The Manchester Evening News observed a Progressive Masculinity workshop at Moorside High School, where boys are encouraged to explore who they want to be without judgement.
>>42615 This is the fourth or fifth time I've seen a link to this, and every time, it's phrased with barely-veiled terror that they've all been sent to ISIS's local hooligan rapist training camp to learn from R Kelly and Puff Daddy. I refuse to click the link, but I bet it's nothing like that, which makes it feel very intriguing how the only way to get people to click on such a thing is to say that men with over 9000 penises are being indoctrinated by our schools to reject feminism and despise women. It says a lot about who actually clicks these stories.
Quite the opposite actually. Well, not the exact opposite, but you know what I mean.
It's more like, they've realised how maybe they need for masculinity to be not completely the jack of all scapegoats satan devil, so they are trying to rehabilitate this idea of a positive masculinity; but which is more acceptable to the keepers of the faith. So they get a hard man macho army bloke to talk to young lads in that "how do you do fellow men" way, but gently nudge them away from Tate's dark side and towards being good women respecting jedi.
It's.... It's not all bad. It's a step in the right direction, frankly. But the trouble with it is the same as everything like this. Lads will see through it. They'll know it's not genuinely neutral or organic, they'll know it's just Big Ideology trying to push them towards the currently orthodoxy. And for that reason alone, regardless of the substance, a great many of them will reject it.
To me there's one frank and brutal fact I think needs acknowledging and, in some way, addressing or reconciling somehow. That fact is that whatever your definition of masculinity, whatever you think of as a positive or negative idea of how to be a man, the truth of the matter is that a lad's choices are still, and likely always will be, largely dictated by what women like. You can be any kind of man you want- As long as it's one women will find desirable. There's a lot of room to manoeuvre within that boundary, but you cannot step outside it. Otherwise you will end up alone and bitter and resentful. And that's basically just how it is.
There's no way of getting round that, you can even still blame the patriarchy for it if you want, fine. But just accept it and acknowledge it at least. Because otherwise you are teaching lads a dishonest lesson. It's the same way we told a generation of kids to go to uni and get a degree in media studies instead of learning a trade, it's idealistic more than useful, but once people realise they were lied to, you can't get them back on side.
At least, if we have the Secretary for Sex telling us we need to have more kids. Got to square that circle somehow.
>>42620 It reads like he's doing it on his own initiative actually and started it as a lunchtime club after boys kept coming to talk to him. And the kids liked it enough that he turned it into his thing.
I do admit that it's a weird story, yeah teenage boys come out with a lot of bollocks. I remember some motivational speaker coming to our school and he asked us what the meaning of life was to which some boy shouted 'pussy'. That was bravado back then but you could read a lot into what we came out with just as we do now.
Still I think it's true that boys follow role models and it can produce good results if they have a decent bloke they can talk to and learn how to be a man from.
>That fact is that whatever your definition of masculinity, whatever you think of as a positive or negative idea of how to be a man, the truth of the matter is that a lad's choices are still, and likely always will be, largely dictated by what women like. You can be any kind of man you want- As long as it's one women will find desirable. There's a lot of room to manoeuvre within that boundary, but you cannot step outside it. Otherwise you will end up alone and bitter and resentful. And that's basically just how it is.
Lad, there's a lot that I think you need to get a handle on. For starters men who do the more feminine hobbies like drama and art make out like bandits, the sensitive drama kid and Gaz down the pub might are polar opposites that still get their ends away. I'm sorry whatever woman burnt you when you opened up to her but that doesn't mean you should never talk to women again just as no woman should go down the 'all men are pigs' route because some lad didn't like her being a tomboy or what you think unwomanly behaviour is.
Lad, I didn't think it was a controversial statement to suggest that in order to get laid and therefore not end up a bitter chronic sperglord, you need to be appealing to the opposite sex. Do you disagree with that?
I don't even know what you are angry at. To me it's about as obvious as the sky being blue, but just saying it brings you out in histrionics somehow. I think that's pretty fucking illustrative of the wider issue here.
>>42624 Because you can't define what this masculine spark is that women demand of us. I'm asking you to get out of Plato's cave and tell us what this essence of male sexuality actually is. What is this 'lynx effect' I've been hearing so much about?
>>42625 I'm not him, but I think your issue here is that you want universality, which you're never going to get. If there is a "masculine spark", then I would argue that it's independence; women want a man who is an entire life on his own that they can drop in and out of without pressure. They do not want a man who will be dependent on them; needy or clingy men make a relationship awkward and stressful and unenjoyable. So you need to create your entire life, with hobbies and friends and a career, and then women will look at that and decide if your life is a life they want to join in with. The bit that's causing issues for you, I think, is that once you live this free and independent life, some women will like it and some won't, and you have absolutely no way of predicting in advance which ones will like what. So you can do everything right, and if you're trying to impress a specific woman, it still might not work. But it'll work on other women, and they will fancy you instead. And if you want a happy relationship, I think he's right: I think you will have to just learn to focus your attention on the women who like you, because I'm not confident that it is at all possible to change a woman's mind about you if they don't already fancy you.
You full on don't understand the point you are arguing against.
The point is that that whatever it is, it's largely decided by women, not men. It's not men who decide what women fancy. Women decide what women fancy. So it's all well and good saying a healthy masculine role model is this or that, if women don't generally like whatever you decide that is, and instead tend to gravitate towards something else.
We're talking about straight men by and large here so while there's a multitude of things a man can be and not even have to worry about being attractive to women, if you want a lad not to be a chronic, then you do have to teach him at least the basics of what women like and want masculinity to be. Which means we better ask them.
The trouble is their answer might not be what you want it to be, and it might not even be what they are supposed to say. But either way they have a great deal of sway over the outcome.
>>42627 We're definitely talking at cross-purposes here, because I made it clear I was someone else and you ignored that, and then you repeated your points even though, from my perspective, I thought my post was explaining what you need to consider and it feels like you ignored that. But let's keep arguing a bit longer.
>It's not men who decide what women fancy. Women decide what women fancy.
Any woman decides what she herself fancies, yes, but she doesn't decide what all women everywhere fancy. Different women like different things. Some women love penniless scumbags, while other women love rich corporate dickheads. They don't fancy each other's men. If you focus on becoming Jeff Bezos to impress women, you will impress the women who like Jeff Bezos, but the women who fancy GG Allin will hate you. You won't be cucking Eddie Hall if you look like one of the Twilight characters. And while this admittedly makes it impossible to make yourself attractive to all women simultaneously, it has the upside that some woman, somewhere, probably fancies you just the way you are right now. You just need to meet her. That's the bit that chronic masturbators can't do.
Also, this event was not about "how to attract women"; it was about finding your own personal identity. If your entire identity consists of nothing more than meeting women, isn't that a little bit empty? A bit lame? Would you even go so far as to agree with me that telling teenage boys that their value in society is directly tied to the opinions of the teenage girls they know, would actually be a bad tactic?
And again, I will return to my previous point: if you want to teach teenage boys to appeal to society as universally as possible, my opinion is that the best thing you can teach them is how to carve out their own personal identity. Everything else will follow from there. But perhaps you disagree on this.
I actually quoted the wrong post, and none of that was aimed at you. Sorry.
I agree with most of what you are saying. Which is to say, most of what you are saying is a somewhat more refined way of trying to say what I am getting at.
The bit where it goes in circles for me is that you have to teach people how to be well rounded individuals, but you (not you personally, I mean the ambiguous hypothetical subject you) can't admit that the reason for that, indeed the reason for practically every endeavour in the entire of human history, is so that they have better chances of getting laid.
>Around one in eight women were victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking in the last year, according to new estimates.
>The figures have been published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as part of its Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year up to March 2025. The survey found 5.2 million people aged 16 and over (10.6%) were likely to have experienced one or more of these crime types - but the percentage was higher for women (12.8%) as opposed to 8.4% of men.
