In various countries around the world, women and teenage girls are regularly groped while riding commuter trains. This, I suspect, is not news to most of you; indeed, I know one reader of this blog who’s had this happen to her. In Japan, one survey found that two-thirds of female passengers in their twenties and thirties had been groped. Because the problem is so prevalent in that country — and the authorities are so ineffective at controlling it – some train lines have instituted women-only train cars in an attempt to cut down on groping (and on false accusations of groping as well). “Women-only” train cars have also introduced, in a limited way, in India, where harassment of women in public – known as “Eve teasing” – is distressingly common.
So what’s more appalling – the fact that groping on trains is so common in Japan that two-thirds of young women commuters have had to endure it themselves, or the fact that a small number of train cars have been set aside for women in a fairly half-assed attempt to curtail some of this groping?
For a lot of MRAs, the latter. The subject came up on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit recently, inspiring some of the regulars to fulminate against this allegedly misandrist outrage. Fatalistic pulled out the n-word and this facile comparision:
Here’s what I’m seeing here: “At least we let you in the back of the bus, nigger.”
ExpendableOne, meanwhile, managed to work in a staggering number of standard-issue MRA complaints into this one sentence:
I think it’s discrimination and subjugation entirely based on misandry, negative male type-casting/stereotyping and anti-male heterophobia.
Ztakn seemed to suggest that it was all part of some oddly indirect money-making scheme on the part of, I guess, women:
To keep it short they exploit and propagate fears not only demonizing men in society but also terrorizing women and scaring the shit out of them making them more paranoid than they need to be.
And then they do it for money.
How would that work exactly?
1) Get groped
2) Set up women-only train cars
3) ???
4) Profit?
Given that the Men’s Rights subreddit is one of the few Men’s Rights forums online that is not completely overrun with misogynist fanatics, there were others who responded more reasonably. Alienblonde noted:
In Japan it’s a massive problem where school girls get groped by older males on trains in peak hour.
Happened to me in Europe too when I was back packing. Some old Spanish guy sat beside me and decided to feel me up.
Women shouldn’t have to deal with this and unfortunately, until it stops happening, I think [women only train cars are] justified.
Naturally, this being a Men’s Rights forum, she quickly found herself the focus of a game of “blame the victim.” Fatalistic accused her of “[j]ustifying discrimination with this all men are potential criminals feminist dogma.” When she pointed out that she was not, in fact, doing this, he moved on to castigating her for not making a public scene when she was groped:
You should out the people who actually do these things rather than treat the rest of us as criminals by default with disgusting bigoted policies and the back of the bus mentality.
When she pointed out that this could have put her in more serious danger, he merely scoffed:
You would have to be paranoid and spoonfed the most egregious of feminist women are helpless, men are unstoppable beasts that need other men with guns to drag them away dogma to believe that all but the most psychopathic would persist or try to harm you if you outed them to a crowd for their actions.
Easy for you to say.
Of course, when women DO confront sexual harassers on trains, as I noted in a post on the infamous New York Subway flasher last November, they get reactions like this sarcastic Reddit comment from one member of the men-are-oppressed club.
Yes, because obviously her heterophobia needs to be glorified… Penises are so disgusting and scary, obviously women should totally be justified in fearing them and there couldn’t possibly be any kind of misandry involved with such contempt, befuddlement or “helplessness/horror” to the mere sigh[t] of male anatomy. /s
Yep, if you’re a woman on a train, not wanting to have some random dude pull his penis out and rub it on you is “heterophobia.” Who knew?
In the case of the subway flasher, the alleged perp did indeed flee when confronted. (He was later arrested.) That’s pretty much the best-case scenario. But it’s hardly the only possible result, and it’s understandable why a woman riding the train to work (much less one backpacking alone in a foreign country) would hesitate to publicly accuse a groper of groping her. Having women-only train cars cuts down on the number of times women are put in this difficult situation.
Yes, in an ideal world, there would be no need for women-only train cars. In an ideal world, men wouldn’t grope women on trains.
Ami: He did mention heightism.
I know… xD But he didn’t mention the greek system.. or even that taller guys were beating out high GPA guys for jobs… he talked about how the GIRL was taller than him… I just found it interesting :3
MRAL wouldn’t know real hardship if it jumped up and bit him on the ass.
“I’ll give you a pass on this if and ONLY if you can explain to me WHY we, as fellow travellers on the internet, should bow down to the “obvious” truth of your sketchy single person anecdotes of how the world is, but why you, travelling alongside, refuse to accept our multiple, detail laden ones.”
Because most of these multiple, detail laden anecdotes about harrassment, etc. generally come from females so gross that most dudes wouldn’t approach them for the time of day much less to ‘feel the goods’.
Chances are you are one of them.
Just go right on whining and moaning about fictional encounters with dirty old men, etc. who just couldn’t leave you alone. Someday maybe one of those dudes you like at work will take an interest in you because of it.
NOT!
EWME is what happens when the kid who got dropped on his head a lot as an infant grows up and gets behind a keyboard.
The question remains though, was the woman who had the misfortune of being this guy’s mother dropping him on purpose?
Bee, you left out: Because Mr. Al is too weak-minded to come up with his own standard of feminine beauty, and instead lets a NO FAT CHICKS bumper sticker do his thinking for him.
Though I suppose this fall under the “stupid” category.
EWME…what evidence do you have that all the women talking about harassment are ugly? Last I checked we were on the interwebs. You can’t know what people look like, for sure, here.
Also, the idea that so-called ugly women (I say so-called because beauty is in the eye of the beholder) just make up stories about harassment to comfort themselves about rejection is certainly an interesting* way to discount their stories.
*By interesting I mean misogynist and fucked up.
Lyn, this is pretty much evilumpire’s whole shtick: “Feminists are ugly! Blar-har-har”.
You won’t get anything else out of him.
EWME’s a fucking coward. He just makes douchy comments and then runs away. Pathetic.
I’d just like to point out that once he was called on saying women who’d been groped/harassed were liars, he then said they exaggerated. Then, when presented with multiple specific, detailed stories of groping and harassment in public from myself and others, he decided it was “just not that big a deal” and that we should all “get over it.”
Aside from noting the overt goal-post moving on MRAL’s part, I would like to say that these incidents (only the most memorable, definitely not the only times) made a lasting impression on me and the other women who experienced similar abuse, such a strong impression that we can still recall it years later. How big of a deal does it have to be before you’ll concede that this might be a problem? Bruises? Oh, no, you dismissed that as well. We shouldn’t have to “get over” getting groped: MEN SHOULDN’T GROPE. Period.
Everyone here has shown you endless compassion and sympathy regarding your (perceived) eye-symmetry issue and your lack of success with women. You’ve been offered advice, both general and specific, people have pointed out alternative interpretations of the problems you’ve had with women, and you dismiss all that and cling to your self-pity. Yet you cannot even summon up enough human decency to acknowledge the very real, very traumatic experiences of others. It’s been said before, but you are a self-centered, perspective-less spoiled brat. Grow up.
As a man, I feel sick that there are others with my physical attributes who participate in the type of hand-waving of other people’s real suffering that EWME and MRAL do, while displaying the type of rage that would make The Hulk go, “Dude, calm yourself.”
redlocker: I take your pain seriously. But I must assure you that absolutely no one thinks that MRAL and EWME are representative of anything other than trollkind. If I felt personally bad for my gender every time Ann Coulter said something offensive or callous, I’d have slumped into a deep, nonresponsive depression long ago.
I don’t think MRAL is a troll. I think he is lacking in perspective. He’s got some sort of raw deal; largely, I think, self-inflicted, and it’s become/is becoming the focus of his worldview.
Which is saddening, and sometimes infuriating.
EWME is just a pathetic little bastard. A one trick pony, happy to laugh at his own “jokes”, but only when he inflicts them on others.
If any of these minor events made a “lasting impression” on anyone, then they are weak and this is simply more evidence of the privilege of women, unused to hardship.
Nice to see you back in the thread MRAL. Can you please answer the questions I posed above? specifically:
also. Honestly… have you never been bruised in your life? ’cause it’s an experience that you should really experience (barring blood clotting conditions) at least once. try it out…. see how much force it takes to get black bruises on senstive skin… like say upper inner thighs… esp. when it’s from pressure, not sudden impact.
It left a lasting enough impression that my friend could go to the cops and take pictures of the bruises fading for literally weeks. I’m not talking about emotional damage at all here since you discount that entirely. I’m talking about purely physical lasting impressions.
or is it not groping if it isn’t done with a knife in such a way that it leaves scars??
if you’re going to shift the goalposts can you at least try to notice the points that we’ve covered and are past already?
oh, and I’ve had teammates in various sports complain about bruises similar to the ones I saw on my friend for literally YEARS afterwards… “god, do you remember when John totally missed fielding that ball and it smacked me in my shins? I was bruised for WEEKS man, it hurt to run and coach was all over me for it, and it was totally not my fault!”
So don’t make out like it’s only femmes that talk about the times they were hurt. It’s simply not true.
(funny part of that story… the guy went into MMA for a while afterwards, and despite having waaaay more bruises/sprains/strains/rib-outs from that, the story he always came back to was the baseball one… go figure… musta made a lasting impression huh?)
MRAL: Care to list what you define as, “real hardship”.
Real hardship: being one inch below average height.
Real hardship: that which is experienced by MEAL.
Not real hardship: everything else.
Look kid, it’s possible that if incidents of harassment happened every once in a blue moon and were, perhaps, limited to verbal exchanges it would be easier to get over them. Some of them at any rate. Goodness knows I’ve had some stuff that started off verbally degenerate into ugliness right quick.
Which story to share? Having lived my entire life in major cities in the mid-Atlantic region there are just so many good ones.
How about the time a couple of months ago when I was walking with my father to a committee meeting downtown (we’d parked at a lot) and at an intersection a guy walking behind us tapped/pulled me on my shoulder to tell me that I have “…those good dick sucking lips. Mmmm!” I have to tell you, I felt really flattered and considered chasing after him to give him my phone number but my dad was too busy calling him a fucking asshole as he walked away, eaten up by the pedestrian traffic. Good times.
Or the time that I was standing outside of one of my favorite establishments having a cigarette and making a phone call when I was approached by the groom in a small bachelor party. He’d recognized me from the group of friends I’d been with inside and wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed my party hat. I thanked him as he approached me and began to get uncomfortably close. He went to reach for my hat and I started to move sideways, so my back wouldn’t be up against the wall, all the while telling him that he was a little too close. Only to have him literally press his entire body against me, pressing me into the wall while grabbing my boob. One of the two friends he was with laughed uproariously while the other tittered nervously looking up and down the sidewalk as if the whole thing wasn’t happening. I yelled “Get the fuck of me” and tried to shove him, which caused him to begin grinding his pelvis into me while continuing to hold on to my breast. At this point the door guy noticed the commotion and started to approach us but since the guy was getting more aggressive and his friends weren’t trying to pull him off me, I punched him in his fucking throat so he’d let go. Also, the way he was pressed against me, I had freedom of arm movement but not of my legs.
Hijinks ensued. For some reason, his friends blamed the whole thing on me and were furious that I’d throat punched their buddy. In retrospect, they were probably right. I should’ve just let the guy continue to molest me and waited quietly for the door guy to intervene. Maybe offered his friends a blow job or something. Another missed opportunity to turn positive and complimentary attention into something more meaningful.
You want more? Because I’ve got hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar tales and, unlike the other seriously patient people on this thread, I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not. Your bullshit spurts of violent language don’t personally offend me, so no worries there. Don’t get me wrong; they’re objectively offensive but so delusional and impotent that I usually laugh if I don’t just skip over them altogether.
All of these lovely people who are seem genuinely interested in offering you some perspective and possibly enlightenment. It’s kind of sweet if utterly wasted. Once again an interesting thread devolves into a discussion about your eye, and your hate, and your spoiled white boy whining. You don’t need therapy; you need a fucking spanking.
Me, I’m kind of a bitch and I know the only reason you come to this blog day after day is because it is the only place in the world where women pay any real attention to you.
Stupid block quote. [fixed. –DF]
Frankly, MRAL, I think you are the one who is weak.
To be honest, I think nobinayamu’s story is a crock of shit and did not happen.
I also think that fuck is a spoiled white girl and a fucking c word.