So this little screenshot is making the rounds on the internet. It’s from 4chan, so who knows if the guy posting it is sincere. But I’ve seen similar, albeit less histrionic, complaints from other would-be pickup artistes in the past.
Guess what, dude. Some of those women wearing earbuds aren’t even listening to music. They just wear them to avoid creepy dudes like you.
Kitties are never off topic!
J.J, that is never off topic!
@Ally
🙁 what an asshole. Hugs from me, if you want them.
@EffieLou
Hi and welcome :3
Oh wow. That super sucks 🙁
I”m glad you were able to get him away from you. He sounds like such a creep. Jedi hugs from me, if wanted.
@Ally
No good advice, sorry 🙁 I know my last gut reaction when a dude invaded my personal space was to punch him, but that’s kind of illegal and could get in a bigger fight.
Oh then my suggestion won’t help :/ I don’t have a better one, since my second suggestion would be cussing, and neither of those help if you freeze.
@Ken L
Ah, one of my least favorite people here. Lets try this.
Nope. YOu don’t get to decide what is creepy or not.
Nope. Plenty of people who have mental illnesses or are mentally disabled who aren’t creeps. Even if he is (which I don’t think he is) it’s creepy.
GOod. fucking. god. Stop being an ableist fuckhead. Downs syndrome does not make one act like a creepy asshole. Stop trying to shove of the behavior of usually NEUROTYPICAL men onto people with mental disabilities.
Cute. Can you just leave? YOu’ve been setting off my troll bells since I saw you.
Another thing about ‘what if he’s disabled?’ seems to ignore that girls can be disabled, too. It’s another setting up about how everything women do has to be around men.
@J.J
Yay! You are a cute kitty 😀
There’s a guy who I think has Downs Syndrome who we see around all the time, who Mr. C refers to as “the music fan” because he’s always singing and dancing (he almost always has earbuds in – so much misandry!). Can’t say he’s ever set off my creep radar at all. He has tried to get me to sing along a few times, which was fine because, for the eleventy billionth time, women can tell the difference between “this behavior is a little out of the ordinary” and “this behavior indicates potential danger”.
I have never seen anyone with Downs who’s set off my creepdar.
I have seen plenty of people who had something going on – drugs, mental illness, I don’t know – who were behaving oddly enough to make me a little apprehensive, but only once did that go into creep territory, and that was only when the guy reached out to paw schoolgirls who’d got on the tram. He went from “person with a problem” to “creep” solely because of that behaviour.
@historophilia
yeah. and they don’t care if the woman they harrass is neurodivergent or disabled (hello that can make it harder to respond to creepers!). they only “care” about the disabled when they can use us for their excuses of bigotry; otherwise we don’t exist.
tl;dr: don’t be “but what about disabilities” to excuse creepy behavior 90% of the time that’s not on us and when it is we’re adults who can hurt people and also understand not to hurt people.
@marie
yes maximum this
So true.
[CN: sexual abuse, transmisogyny]
I just want to add that the heightened ability to discern threats is a trait that nearly all trans women have – and a lot of other AMAB* trans people, too. Even in my early childhood I was very afraid of predators. I remember I used to read all sorts of resources for children on how to stay safe from sex offenders, and at one point I even started looking up the sex offender registry. (Big mistake for a easily frightened 10-year-old.) I felt like I was a walking target for abuse and feared the possibility of even trusted neighbors luring me into their homes and doing “bad things” to me. It didn’t help that I had family members who literally joked about me being raped by a man breaking into our house.
And here’s the most important thing: I was like this all before the age of 12, which was the actual first time I was sexually abused. Like a lot of cis girls, I internalized the fear of male aggression and saw myself as its target. This kind of thing is one of the aspects of transmisogyny that TERFs always ignore or attempt to cissplain to trans women and assert that trans women’s experiences were consequences of mere “gender policing”. The same kind of gender policing that men face. But men’s experiences with gender policing are nothing like trans women’s experiences with transmisogyny.
*Assigned Male At Birth
Oh man, this brings me back. I once dated a guy who had this weird issue where he thought everyone needed to be available to listen to him talk at any time, all day. And he talked a lot. About everything. I didn’t notice it at first, because I am a fairly quiet person and I don’t mind listening, but after a while it got exhausting.
After I broke up with him, I heard through the grapevine that he had run into a mutual coworker (we worked in the same company, different departments) at the gym. The two had a short, friendly chat, and then the coworker put in some earbuds and went about his gym activities. My ex walked up to him and pulled his earbuds out so that he could talk at him some more. I don’t remember how the coworker reacted, except with bewilderment.
Dude wouldn’t even let me wear earbuds any time we were in the same building. I could be folding laundry and he’d get upset if I was listening to earbuds because “what if I want to talk to you?!” Yeah, that was probably my… second stupidest relationship.
The other thing about the “but poor men with bad social skills, waaah” or “poor men on the spectrum, waaaah” claims is that these creep-enablers would have us believe that there are one HELL of a lot of men who have poor social skills – like, every dude who wanted to hit on a woman, ever – and an awful lot of men on the spectrum. (No women, of course, as has been pointed out above, and many times elsewhere.)
Funny how it’s always men who’re the great intellects, the makers of the world, the heroes, the ones mere womenthings should defer to at all times – and at the same time it’s always men who’re socially incompetent, or painfully shy, or on the spectrum, unable to help themselves, innocently going around wanting ROMAAAANCE or just to shove their dicks into us, and we’re the cruel hateful b*tches who oppress them all the time.
magnesium – wow, dude had an attitude problem, all right. If that was your second stupidest relationship, I cringe at the thought of the first.
*wants to hug Ally but will not hug unless hug is wanted*
So, this earbud thing is just more entitlement. Great. And now I’m just really offended. They act like they’re entitled to someone’s attention, use disability as an excuse, and screw how the woman feels about it.
In my case? I have pretty severe PTSD. If you, in an empty car, decide to sit down next to me and get into my space? That sets off ‘Danger’ in my head if you won’t go away. It can start a panic attack, which means I then have to get off the train and go hide in a coffee shop. Then I am late for wherever I’m going. So, yeah,
I want this on a t-shirt: My living my life is more important than your need to hit on me.
@kittehserf. For serious. You can either be completely inept or the most awesome to ever awesome. Those two things are mutually exclusive. But who needs to be correct when we can blame women, yaaaay. /Sarcasm.
Oh didn’t you know that all women are experts in social interaction and at no time can a stranger trigger a reaction to past trauma or an anxiety disorder in a woman. And autistic women don’t exist. No women are socially inept or vulnerable in any way ever!
Seriously, I hope Ken never comes back. My hackles get raised when I see people equating autism with creepers because I’m so protective of my brother and he doesn’t deserve people shitting on him and his lifelong efforts at mainstreaming in service of protecting neurotypical harassing. Fuck that noise.
I don’t have kids, but he brings out that same instinct with me. I know how mothers feel who are normally pretty mild mannered but will fuck you up if you mess with their kids.
I have a cousin who is pretty much dead to me and I will speak to again because she talked shit about my brother. Even my father, who is what the manosphere would classify as a total beta yelled at her for that.
Sorry for the rant. I had wine and it brings out the rantiness.
J.J – yeah, they always want it both ways, don’t they? Plus, blaming women, always, for everything.
WWTH – seconding the hope that Ken never comes back. He was hackle-raising enough without that personal rage-triggery connection. Ableist, mansplaining and whiney, what a combination.
Why are we getting an influx of awful people lately? :{
Yeah, absolutely this.
They also act like there aren’t thousands of websites and blogs dedicated to how much attention they’re entitled to and how to get it from any unlucky woman who walks by.
It was a lovely rant.
And since it’s Saturday night and I’m home being mom, I might get some champagne and do some ranting myself. (Cheers!)
PS: Brain bleach. Shark cat chases duck!!
Lids said: “I refuse to excuse someone’s shitty behavior because of Downs or another social disorder.”
I have Aspergers, and as I understand the issue has 2 sides: When someone with a social disorder makes a social mistake, the other person could certainly be angry, and don’t have to consider that this social mistake comes from someone who may, for all they know, be socially handicapped.
And we with such problems certainly have to learn from how others react.
But when we apologize to someone who knows about the Aspergers, explain that we did not know it was wrong and sincerely don’t want to do that again now we do, I sincerely hope that the average, decent person would be less angry about the faux pass. (People don’t have to get close to those of us who are prone to such faux passes, but they should be willing to not keep on blaming after knowing the mistake was made from lack of understanding and won’t happen again now it is explained.)
Troll spawning season?
Rea – absolutely. That actually encapsulates the difference between “decent person who has X disability” and “creep who may or may not have X disability”. Anyone can make a mistake, do the wrong thing, give the wrong impression – but if they then double down and insist on their right to do so, well, that’s got nothing to do with disability, that’s being an arsehole. None of these dudebros is saying, “Shit, I upset someone, I don’t really understand why. I won’t do it again, but can someone clarify what was distressing about it?” No, they’re only interested in being able to harass women. I sincerely doubt any of them has any sort of disability or social awkwardness or any of the other things they claim as excuses. They’re just out to deny women any possibility of saying NO in any way at all.
The “you’re standing on my foot” analogy covers it perfectly.
Again, though, this has nothing to do with people who’re actually on the spectrum, because you can tell from the way the offensive behavior is described that that’s not what’s going on. These guys use Aspies and other people who find social interaction challenging as a human shield whenever they’re asked to stop doing something obnoxious, and they know damn well that the behavior is obnoxious, they just don’t want to stop.
And of course never be called out, or apologize, or be interrupted.
“JUST BE OPEN AND RECEPTIVE TO COLD APPROACHES!”
Why? Why should we be open to *anything* coming from a screaming misogynist? Guess what? You’re not entitled to our attention, and we have the right to be unavailable. Maybe we have another boyfriend. Maybe we’re lesbian. Maybe we’re just confirmed spinsters, because we have had it up to HERE with entitled jerks like you. There are any number of reasons why women might not want to be approached by you, and we have the RIGHT to our privacy and to be left alone.
What if the woman had not been wearing earbuds, and you had approached her, and she had refused you? Would you have screamed about that, too? Because she wasn’t “OPEN” and “RECEPTIVE” to your approach?
Stop acting like a toddler.
@emma – “The entitlement in dating extends to entitlement in marriage — thus these same nice guys don’t believe that marital rape is a thing. Same mindset; it boils down to “I want to have sex with you and you have no right to refuse.””
Yeah, I actually had a guy say that to me, in HIGH SCHOOL. We’d never even gone on a date, but he told me I had no right to refuse him.
Arrggghhh.
Sorry, can I ask here? Someone on reddit asks me to give an example of GWW saying something not just wrong, but also disturbing, and since I’m on mobile with bad internet connection I’m having difficulty doing independent research and I thought someone here could refer me to a suitable post David made about her.