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.
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.
No, it’s not. Show me where I’ve said 1: it is, and 2: that you have done it?
But it’s a pattern of thought. You keep saying women are hateful creatures who “spit on you”. But you know what, they don’t, and you admit they aren’t actually, you know, spitting on you.
But you’re, repeated, fantasies of hurting women who offend you; by, ‘spitting on you’ are supposed to be what… ignored; in they way you don’t ignore the way they don’t spit on you?
Sauce, goose, gander.
Every time you take the time to type it up, and then post it (from eye-gouging to breast punching, and, “box-kicking”) you then say, “oh that was inappropriate, I shouldn’t have done that.”
Dude… don’t do it. It’s not like this is a situation where a sudden outburst of emotional speech is escaping you. It’s not like this is the first time you’ve done it. A adult recognises patterns, learns from past mistakes.
If you don’t want people pointing out how violent your ideas about women are… don’t share those violent ideas.
re physical reaction: I missed that. One case. All in all, I’d say more of that needed to happen.
That would reduce some of the incidence.
MRAL, you’ve said that the women recounting their stories here are basically too stupid to know what’s actually happening. Remember, when you said it’s not lying exactly, it’s that they have too much “privilege” to be able to tell harassment from mere rudeness?
That’s not reasonable. That’s being a fucking entitled asshole who thinks he has the right to interpret other people’s experiences for them and explain to them that he knows better than they do what they feel and why.
As far as violence goes, when I got groped in a movie theater in India (breasts and ass at the same time! And ambitious guy, or two guys at once? I’ll never know), I turned around and shoved my groper away from me, hard.
I left quickly, shaking. That sort of thing hasn’t happened to me personally all that much, apart from my trip to India, mostly because I’ve spent very little time in urban areas. But I have experienced it enough to know that it is profoundly unsettling and upsetting.
Frankly, MRAL disgusts me because he has been shown so much courtesy, given so much benefit of the doubt regarding his trumped-up stories of public humiliation, yet he is unable to extend that same courtesy to others. Like I said, he is the epitome of entitlement.
FYI, the only inappropriate violent thing I’ve said is the elevator thing, because that was pretty extreme. Everything else was reasonable, IMO, given the situation.
“Frankly, MRAL disgusts me because he has been shown so much courtesy, given so much benefit of the doubt regarding his trumped-up stories of public humiliation, yet he is unable to extend that same courtesy to others. Like I said, he is the epitome of entitlement.”
So true. He cries at length about that ‘crazy eye’ that most of us couldn’t even see from that picture, and all the ‘spitting’, yet when someone comes up with real stories of harassment and physical abuse he says bullshit.
WTF? Every single person on this blog has told me that my stories were basically bullshit, or that I’m delusional, or whatever. How is it any more out of line when I do it?
MRAL: You say you just want things to be equal. For women to not be in the “privileged” state you think they presently occupy.
So why can’t they spit on you? I mean it. If you think you are being reasonable when you think about how horrid they are; why can’t they do the same?
If you won’t think of, “fucking a fatty”, why can’t they refuse to think of fucking a short, deformed, Omega like you?
Seems only fair.
*Trigger warning*
MRAL, imagine you are trapped in a train car with a couple of 300 lbs. dudes who keep coming on to you in spite of your repeated efforts to express disinterest. Either of them could break you in half like a twig, so resistance is really not an option. One of them starts feeling up your junk while the other talks about all the things he’d like to do to you. Meanwhile, NO ONE ELSE IN THE TRAIN IS HELPING YOU. People are, in fact, looking the other way, because no one wants to get involved or make a scene.
OK, let’s say you are fortunate in this situation–and by “fortunate,” I mean your harassers eventually get off the train without carrying the attack any farther (maybe one blows you a kiss as they leave, laughing). So, you tell a friend of yours about the incident, and the first thing the friend says is “what were you wearing?” You tell the police, and they ask the same thing (or they laugh at you). You write about it on the internet, and some other commenter dismisses it as a lie or an “uncommon” occurrence.
How would that make you feel?
Because that’s the kind of crap women have to deal with–especially in places like Japan, which is extremely patriarchal and where no one wants to make a scene in public by helping a victim of harassment or assault.
In that situation, wouldn’t you want your own train car? I’m not saying it’s the ideal solution, but it is a solution. I can’t see it being adopted in the US, where it would probably be illegal in any event. But Japan, a nation with no tradition of egalitarianism, has chosen it as a partial solution to a very real social problem. If the women don’t object, who are we to say they are wrong?
And before you talk about prison rape: yes, that’s very, extremely wrong and should not be tolerated. The fact that so many men are assaulted in our prisons is disgraceful and must be stopped.
“WTF? Every single person on this blog has told me that my stories were basically bullshit, or that I’m delusional, or whatever. How is it any more out of line when I do it?”
Because your stories consist of “she didn’t say hi to me pleasantly enough, and I wanted to rip her left eye out”. We never said she didn’t say hi to you. At worst most of us said “she may have had a perfectly good reason to not be pleasant”. You are simply wholeheartedly dismissing these claims as bullshit. And these are claims that aren’t as open to interpretation as ‘pleasantness’. This is physical contact, or flashing, or something that has been obvious to many others at the time.
I think my posts in this thread have been very reasonable
No, actually, they haven’t. Other people have talked about your violence, so that’s covered. Apart from that, you regularly dismiss what people (women and men who disagree with you) have to say. You react with exceptionally strong emotion, consistently. Your assertion that you have been ‘spat upon’ your whole life is, at its heart, unreasonable.
Here’s a clue: Me, at a party, hanging out with some friends. I’m a gamer, my friends are gamers, we talk about games. Another woman in the group mentions it can be hard to be a woman in a gaming environment. A guy in the group, barely known to either of us, says that we’re overreacting, much the same way you just did.
Neither one of us talked to him much for the rest of the night.
You have this idea that women should be punished for being women. You might not use just those words, but your entire attitude towards women is geared towards taking them down a peg or two. In your mind, women are so privileged, and you’re one of the few who can actually see it, and so its your job (or right) to deny them privilege in a ‘see how you like it’ kind of revenge when the opportunity comes up.
Something like 75%-90% of human communication is nonverbal, which means that even though you might only be saying, ‘hi’, your body language, tone, presentation, posture and facial expressions are all conveying something else – and women are usually tuned in enough to pick up when the guy saying ‘hi’ has a thinly disguised hostility towards them. So they ignore you, not because you’re an ‘omega’, but because they can tell that talking to you won’t be pleasant for them.
MRAL: It’s out of line when you do it because you aren’t saying, “look this is what happens to me, how do I fix it.”
It’s not even you saying, “This is what happens to me, why am I so unfortunate”.
It’s you saying, “this is what happens to me, and the whole world is built so that I get fucked.”
Then you explain how it’s built to screw you over; how the women “spit” on you every day, and we look at our lives, and the lives of the people we know, and the “system ” you propose as being the one which runs the world we live in… and it doesn’t match.
That’s confirmation bias, and hasty generalisation. That there is a lot of data which contradicts your opinions, you discount. It harms your credibility.
Bathrobe, that doesn’t happen, that’s not even consistent with the stories here, if you believe them. What supposedly happens is some guy cups a woman’s ass or tit and runs, if he started fondling her, people would stop him. Again, color me unimpressed, given my life.
OMFG Prison Rape! That one really crawls under my finger nails. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO HAPPEN. It SHOULDN’T happen. NO ONE should be raped because they broke the law. THIS IS WRONG WRONG WRONG. NO cops should break someone by threatening them with rape. This is still happening every day! It’s like I live in Omelas! AUGUHGHAHG!
And it wouldn’t even cost that much to stop it! The biggest problem is the institutionalized attitude that this is just the way it is, and prisoners don’t deserve rights anyway: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/25/the-way-to-stop-prison-rape/
Also, to MRAL: You don’t read carefully; or you choose to not respond to things that don’t support you in ways you can just handwave away (like my eyes/glasses).
That’s annoying, but then you bitch that no on is responding to you. That looks like a bad faith way of arguing.
Anit complained that I was too responsive. One of the reasons I am so responsive is that it’s only polite to respond to people who respond to you. It’s also not fair to not respond, and then act as if they ignored you.
Once again, MYOPIC:
lacking tolerance or understanding; narrow-minded.
Okay, the eye thing is totally not comparable, a shit ton of people have weird glasses. I assumed you knew that and it wasn’t meant as a comparable situation, just a matter of fact, description of yourself. That’s why I didn’t respond.
Just to get things straight, when MRAL says he’s “abused” and “spat on” by women, he means the following:
1. Strange women he passes on the street do not suddenly drop whatever they’re doing and beg to have sex with him.
2. This one time he said hi to a female classmate in an elevator and she didn’t say hi back.
He has never described any actual harassment, abuse, discrimination, or even rudeness.
MRAL, it’s a source of increasing fascination to me that you can see how systematic discrimination works when it affects you personally (height discrimination, basically, which you think you suffer from even though you’re of normal height), but when it’s a form of discrimination that affects anyone else, they’re lying or exaggerating and there’s no way that larger societal factors could be involved. Do you see the doublethink here?
Bathrobe, that doesn’t happen, that’s not even consistent with the stories here, if you believe them. What supposedly happens is some guy cups a woman’s ass or tit and runs, if he started fondling her, people would stop him. Again, color me unimpressed, given my life.
Actually, that sort of thing happens in Japan all the time. That’s why they have (a few) sex-segregated train cars there. Most women I talked to when I was there reported being felt up on the train, sometimes for extended periods of time, and no one intervened. I somehow doubt they were all lying.
@Shaenon Actually, she did say hi back as I recall. She just wasn’t nice enough.
MRA thinking reminds me of that line from Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” Only replace “comedy” with “unfair misandrist female privilege, oh god why don’t I get to die in a sewer like those lucky bitches,” I guess.
MRAL: Bathrobe, that doesn’t happen, that’s not even consistent with the stories here, if you believe them. What supposedly happens is some guy cups a woman’s ass or tit and runs, if he started fondling her, people would stop him.
Bullshit.
Go back and re-read the things said here. “Cup and run” isn’t the only thing mentioned. That it’s the only thing you saw, and that you dismiss it, is a huge part of the problem you are having.
If that’s all you recall, and you think it’s not important, well the first is a problem because a lot of things which aren’t a “quick squeeze” (and how many times has someone given your ass a pat, or cupped your balls, or tried to get a good idea of the size of your dick; when you didn’t invite them to?) have been talked about.
The second because it’s my body, damn it. If I want it touched, I decide to let it be touched. I get to choose who touches it.
You don’t get to tell me that it’s not a big deal if someone gropes me.
You don’t.
Christ, what a spoiled brat you are. Women don’t give you the attention you want, and you think it’s spitting on you. Women get upset when unwanted physical attention is forced on them, and (because you can’t get laid) you don’t care.
“Fatties” don’t deserve to have love, but you (a self-declared Omega, in a system which is inescapable) are upset the “Alpha and Beta Bitches” won’t give you so much as a polite glance, much less screw you.
Which is it? Are you an Omega… destined to an unavoidable life of abstinence? Is the “Greek System” changeable?
If it’s changeable why can’t you consider a “female omega” (you know someone with a BMI of 26)?
What, other than complaining that all the “Tall Facial/Social/Pure” Alphas are hogging the women you think you deserve, and looking down on all the ones you don’t think are hot enough to be worth your super-special time are you doing to make things better?
Nada, zip, nothing, zilch.
Spoiled brat. Whining that no one is giving him what he wants.
Women are people. They have dreams, and desires and fetishes. They aren’t cookie-cutter creatures who are “looking for Brad Pitt” and some 6’4″ guy with a perfect face, lots of money and an 8″ cock.
They like what they like. Some like skinny boys, some like chunky ones. Some like guys with flashy cars and lots of cash. Some like geeky guys who can program. Some like dressage riders and some like mountain bikers.
And there is no way to know what any of them like in the sack (and trust me, the variety in bed is wider than you can imagine. Rule 34 applies).
But what all of them like, to quote from a movie is, “someone to buy their chairs,”; someone to find out what it is they want/need, and try to provide it.
As life goes on, the “chairs” change, but you… you don’t see chairs. No… I take that back. The only chairs you can see are yours. Relationships are reciprocal.
You don’t seem to have an ounce of reciprocity in your body. You seem to think it’s not, “I offer, someone chooses to accept, or not.”
No, you think it’s quid pro quo. You offer and any rejection (no matter how slight), isn’t someone who isn’t interested, it’s someone who loathes you. Who is appalled by your deformity, hates you because you are short; “spits on you”.
Grow up. Stop being a spoiled little kid.
MRAL: Did you read the part where my eyes don’t point straight ahead
See what I mean about not paying attention?
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