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.
MRAL: I’m a man, in this “misandrist” society, and you know what.
I don’t believe you. Why? Because all the “abuse” you say you’ve gotten… never happens to me when I go to Boston. Heck, I have women look at me all the time. Some of them even say hello when I pass them on the street.
There was a woman who was mean to me in New York. She actually changed her direction and tried to knock me out of the way while I was standing out of the flow of traffic near Madison Sq. Garden, but I just let her bounce off of me and told her off when she told me I was an asshole.
But that’s one event in 44 years, so I can ignore it. But I’m only an inch taller than you are. I’m “skinny”. I don’t wear fancy clothes. I don’t make a lot of money. So women, according to you, ought to be treating me like a piece of “shit on their shoes”.
But they don’t. I get smiled at, and flirted with, and propositioned. So guess what. I think all the abuse you talk about? All the women who “treat you like shit,” and won’t even say hello… you’re making it up.
No one is doing any of that. You are just telling stories to get reactions. If it was really happening it would happen to me too.
I think the term you are embodying right now MRAL is “myopic.”
What does that mean? It means that you are only paying attention to your limited experience and basing all of your comments on that limited experience.
It is typical for a 20 year old in where adolescence is extended to quite a late age at this point in history.
I think chocomintlipwax breaks things down quite nicely. And the thing is, once enough guys first make eye contact, then say “Excuse me,” and then wag their dick at you, you begin to become suspicious of men who make eye contact and say “Excuse me,” because you have learned through experience that dick-wagging is likely to follow.
Pecunium, I don’t know. Maybe you’re so used to being treated like shit you don’t notice it. Maybe you’re better looking than you think. Maybe (speculation, because I don’t know), when you get older women (and people in general) become more deferent, this ties back to my assertion that the Greek system is for younger people. Or maybe it’s JUST the eye thing that causes this treatment, that’s something I haven’t considered…
MRAL, please explain to me, with your no-doubt infinite wisdom, why anyone, anyone at all, would choose you as a person to confide in? You reek of hostility, you denigrate women whenever possible, you consider yourself the center of the universe, you consider all of your problems to be enormously important but the concerns of others are things that you easily dismiss with a wave of your hand. OF COURSE no one has ever told you a real life story. YOU SUCK as a confidant.
Shorter MRAL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8qcccZy03s
min0u, so dick wagging is a regularly occurence? I think even most fymynysts would disagree with that.
wytchfinde555:
“I wonder what you would do if you were male for a day.
“You probably end up killing yourself.”
You’ve never met anyone queer, have you? Never gone to a drag king show? Know any FTM transpeople? No butch lesbians?
MRAL:
“Choco, why the fuck should I believe you? My experience says different.”
Just because your personal experience isn’t the same as others doesn’t mean their experience doesn’t exist. I went years not being catcalled during my daily commute until I moved to a different neighborhood, and then it happened almost daily.
“No one has ever complained to me personally, in real life, about harassment… because that would require, you know, verifying it.”
Wait, aren’t all your friends male betas? Why would they come to you about harassment?
“I keep coming back here for, well, I don’t know why, why does anybody?”
In a perverse way, I find it fun. 😛
MRAL: Reasonable? Do you really think calling people liars is reasonable?
If you do… well it’s not.
As to your claim that since no women have told you, in the flesh, about this… How many women do you have as close friends again?
Right… you’ve said you have three friends, and they are all guys. That might have some bearing on the lack of personal stories you’ve been told.
As to the violence you say you don’t have much of… this is another thread where you’ve mentioned some very specific attacks you might make on a woman.
I point this out because the women here; who have been groped, or otherwise assaulted, haven’t said boo about hitting the men who attacked them. Ponder that when you blather on about how you aren’t violent, but “women spit on you.”
Ponder also what would happen in this matriarchally inclined/misandrist world you say we live in if they had actually engaged in physical response.
It’s interesting that the only place this pandemic of harassment is made public is internet feminist blogs
And academic studies. And newspaper and magazine articles about those studies. And thousands of places of employment and college campuses. I know I’m not the only employee at a company that has a policy against harassment that requires us to take annual anti-harassment training – I believe this is VERY COMMON.
“I point this out because the women here; who have been groped, or otherwise assaulted, haven’t said boo about hitting the men who attacked them.”
In all fairness, I did assault the testicles of one of them. I was more violent in my mis-spent youth.
Anyway, I was thinking about this thread in the shower just now, and I came up with an interesting idea. The definition of bigotry is choice, with the oppressed having none. Why not separate women and men entirely; ie, have “women-only” and “men-only” cars? That would completely solve the issue of groping, and would not be morally objectionable in really any way. I would not have a problem with it. The reason is because the privileged class (women) would be excluded from something, and they can’t stand that. Thus, the oppressed (men) are excluded from one car, while the other is mixed. Women have choice, men have none, paralleling the whites-only thing from the civil rights era.
Pecunium:
“I point this out because the women here; who have been groped, or otherwise assaulted, haven’t said boo about hitting the men who attacked them. Ponder that when you blather on about how you aren’t violent, but ‘women spit on you.’”
Well, there was that one chick who kicked a groper in the nuts… ><
…can’t tell if trolling or just very stupid…
the women here; who have been groped, or otherwise assaulted, haven’t said boo about hitting the men who attacked them
I don’t think that’s strictly true – there was a comment about kicking a guy in the balls after she got her breast groped (kest? it’s back a page or so now so I’m not sure). Now I’m not saying that’s an unreasonable reaction, but I do think it DOES count as “hitting men who attacked them”.
Because men are not being groped by women but women *are* being groped by men…
It’s funny when people insinuate I’m trolling without actually responding to my very reasonable comments. This is a classic fymynyst and general idiot tactic when losing an argument, but since this community seems to be mostly uncensored, that won’t work. I can picture the shock as the femidiots realize this- they can’t hide behind the big bad feminist moderator this time.
Do you guys think if I got a job lifeguarding at the beach my chances of fucking somebody would go up?
“It’s funny when people insinuate I’m trolling without actually responding to my very reasonable comments.”
Me and Pecunium are just chopped liver?!? :'(
“Women have choice, men have none, paralleling the whites-only thing from the civil rights era.”
I am looking really hard and I do not see how this is reasonable. Or how much else you’ve said has been. 😛
Being reasonable does not include calling people liars, telling them their stories are crap, claiming they are “wymym” or whatever else you think is oh so clever, discounting anyone who disagrees with you’s stories, making stuff up, whining about not being worshiped for your maleness, telling us that you are “spit on” when you have nothing of the sort going on, and finally, IT IS NOT REASONABLE EVER TO THREATEN VIOLENCE TO SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT SAY HI BACK.
So, that is why you are considered to be unreasonable and quite frankly, an ass.
I think if you stopped hating women for not fucking you, the chances of a particular woman fucking you would indeed go up.
No MRAL. I think you should become a basement librarian who never sees the sun.
Oh and sorry, not just an ass but a trollish ass is what I should have said.
“Do you guys think if I got a job lifeguarding at the beach my chances of fucking somebody would go up?”
I don’t want to discourage you from getting out of your comfort zone, but for the love of god, learn about consent first!
OK, let’s get one thing straight. I’ve never threatened violence to anyone. I described a thought that when through my head, and thoughts are not a crime (I know some feminists would like to make it otherwise, but that’s too bad). I regret thinking that particular thing because as I’ve said it was out of line. But it’s not a crime.
Pecunium, I don’t know. Maybe you’re so used to being treated like shit you don’t notice it. Maybe you’re better looking than you think. Maybe (speculation, because I don’t know), when you get older women (and people in general) become more deferent, this ties back to my assertion that the Greek system is for younger people. Or maybe it’s JUST the eye thing that causes this treatment, that’s something I haven’t considered…
Um… here’s the thing. This isn’t something that just started. At 16, when I was about 97 lbs, and 5’7″, I wasn’t suffering from being “abused” the way you claim to be. I didn’t score with everyone I was interested in (hell, I was 16, I was interested in a lot of women), but I was getting attention. I wasn’t getting it from women my age; but rather women in their early 20s. It wasn’t until I was about your age that I was having any luck with women my age.
So there I was, a skinny kid, barely tall enough (as you tell me) to be noticable to women, wearing less than fashionable clothes, no money, glasses the size of dinner plates (because my eyes don’t point straight ahead) and not being treated badly by women.
The reason why? At a guess because I wasn’t hateful toward them. I treated them as people. You keep telling us how well you treat them; how you don’t do anything “creepy” but then you say that creepy things aren’t really creepy. That guys groping them didn’t happen; they just made it up, overreacted.
That, my friend, is the sort of thing that make people not want to spend time with someone. When someone starts to tell me what,”it’s really like” about something I experienced, and it’s at odds with what I experienced… I start to ignore them.
If they get pushy, I start to be nasty. Why? Because they’ve shown me they aren’t interested in me, they have an agenda. If I were a woman… I’d suspect that agenda could get unpleasant.
So, were I you, I’d take a step back, and try to figure out what I was doing… since so many people have reported things at odds with your understanding; people who’ve got a lot more experience at this than you do.
Think about it. You are 20. Using my numbers (first sex at 16, first girlfriend at 18.5 [and her mother thought I was 15… that’s how young I looked… see above about being slight… I’m 44 and a mustache is doable, a beard isn’t; I still get carded {though less than I did; it was regular until I was 36, and had been in a war}, so the whole, “old enough the Greek System ™ doesn’t apply is probably invalid] etc.) I have been at, “the game” for 28 years.
You’ve been at it for 4. That means I have 7 times the years at it than you do. 28 years, vs 4. I think, really, my understanding of how it works, is better.
Which is why, when you tell me, “how things work,” it’s not all that convincing. I’ve been playing the game a lot longer (and in a lot more places). I’ve seen a lot of friends playing the game. None of the things you say, map to any of that experience.
So maybe it’s not the “system”. Maybe, as Shakespeare said, “the problem lies not with our stars, but ourselves.”