Oh, Reddit! Need another reminder that on Reddit, whiny lady-hating man-babies can be found outside the Men’s Rights and Red Pill subreddits? Take a look at this lovely comment from occasional Red Pill commenter purple4th in Change My Views, which (the last I checked) had garnered nearly 150 net upvotes from the crowd there. Here’s the money quote:
[S]ocietal laws are so filled with misandry that in 99% of societal contexts such as going to office, going to the supermarket, going to the movies, etc;, it is men who have to be continually afraid of women.
That’s right, fellas. Women who worry about men harming them are all a bunch of big sillies. It’s MEN who should be worried Oh, sure those gals may look innocent, but don’t let your guard down for a minute lest one of them misander you with a false accusation of being too much of a dude! con
Purple4th continues:
As my investment banks’ Sexual Harassment presentation says, “It is harassment if she says so”. Period.
Really? I decided to look online to see if I could find any Sexual Harassment literature making that argument. A search for “It is harassment if she says so” in quotes returns only one hit on Google: Purple4th’s comment on Reddit.
In fact, the legal standard for sexual harassment — in the US at least — is not “whatever the hell a random woman wants to call harassment.” It’s whether or not a “reasonable person” would see the behavior as harassment.
But that’s how it works in the real world. MRAs and the MRA-adjacent don’t live in the real world.
—
Thanks, AMRthroaway on Reddit for pointing me to this lovely quote.
Thanks for the kindness, LBT. I don’t know your entire backstory, but I’ve seen enough from lurking to know that you’ve been through A LOT. I’m glad you have a great husband and awesome system members, I think you deserve them 🙂
Emotional abuse is tricky, isn’t it? You can’t pinpoint exactly what’s wrong while you’re in it, and usually even the outside people who’re telling you “this isn’t right” don’t classify all the shredded self-esteem and manipulation as abuse. It took me a few years of distance to go from “that guy and I were awful together, he scared me towards the end” to “holy crap, he was an abusive jerk.” Part of the reason I set loose that teal deer above was in case anyone else happened to be going through something similar and having their doubts. Sometimes seeing someone else’s story helps you pick out the flaws in your situation.
Hey now, it’s not the abuse olympics. Anyone getting out of a shit situation deserves kudos, so many kudos to you Flying Mouse (and LBT and Winter Walker too, that shit sounds hardcore). Actually it’s kind of funny you say my situation was worse, so many people seem to think I got off easy or argue that it wasn’t that bad because the guy never hit me (misplaced MRA ‘well I never hit you so it’s not abuse’. Sidenote: he always ranted on about how he would go to jail if he ever hit me but I could hit him whenever I wanted and nothing would happen, which was weird because I never raised a hand to him). Because of that I didn’t even realise he was abusive or that he had raped me until maybe 2 years after it ended, I thought it was just a horrible relationship and bad sex that I didn’t want but he did. I have similar experiences of shit happening in public and people not doing anything about it though, the guy sexually assaulted me in public several times while I was telling him to stop. When we were around people he knew they just laughed, and strangers usually alarmed at first but backed right off with a laugh when he told them it was OK because we were dating. The problem there may have been that we were in our late teens- early twenties so people were more likely to brush it off as kids being kids.
With harassment, I’m white and maybe it’s just the areas I’ve lived in but I’ve generally found white guys to be the main and most persistent harassers. I can only recall a handful of times where anyone from any other ethnicity has harassed me, and even then it’s not much more than catcalling or a few persistent approaches at the pub. The times where it’s crossed the line so that I’ve been genuinely afraid for my safety have all been white guys except for one.
Kittehserf: Angry isn’t even that big for an adult male, he’s actually quite stunted as his previous owner neglected to treat his health issues and fed him crappy food. I have another boy who is already 50% heavier than him and is still growing!
Hugs to anyone who wants them, and I’ll pet my cats for you as well.
Nobody who has gone through shit has deserved it. Shit is tough to deal with. Saying things like “well at least [he/she] never raped me” or “at least [he/she] never hit me” is an insidious way of minimising the actual abuse that DID happen.
And no fucking way was any of it your fault. You MATTER, you’re a great person, you have great personality/personalities, you’re interesting, you have great stories to tell, you have skills and talents, and ONLY you can be you (although you can pick who should act you when they make a movie of your life).
🙂
Cripes! Poor little dude.
Purple4th sounds like this guy I used to be friends with who tried to convince me that men really had it harder than women on online dating sites because, even though (by his own estimate) 50% of the messages that women got were “straight up perverted and unwanted,” the other 50% were perfectly legitimate dating options whereas men (i.e. him) only got, again by his own estimate, a 1% response rate and a few messages from (his words) messages from “ugly black girls” and the “clinically obese.” He literally compared his experiences going on online dating sites and not getting loads of messages from women he found attractive to self harm and thought that all women who signed up just got to sit around reading fan mail. He really thought that not receiving enough female attention was worse than receiving lots of negative male attention.
Not surprisingly, he also consistently failed to respect women’s boundaries or to acknowledge that anyone wasn’t actually interested in him if he’d practiced “attraction strategy” on her.
🙂 Yeah, I realize that there’s no gold medal for who puts up with the worst shit from a jerkface. I just felt like I was co-opting your story, and that was sitting badly with me. I still think you’re the greater badass, though, for getting out after being in for so long. And for having such awesome lap rats.
Also, I realize now that I kind of threw Winter Walker’s compliment back in her face. I’m sorry about that, Winter Walker, I didn’t mean to be rude. And give your kitty a cuddle as thanks for the sweet monitor nuzzles.
<blockquote. Actually it’s kind of funny you say my situation was worse, so many people seem to think I got off easy or argue that it wasn’t that bad because the guy never hit me
I never really talk about my crappy ex for that reason. He’d physically restrain me when I was trying to walk away, he’d grab my face if he didn’t think I was paying adequate attention to him, and he’d touch me anywhere he damned please, to hell with my objections. But he never hit or punched me. I was about five years out of that before I even classified all the grabbing, dragging, and holding-til-I-stopped-struggling as physical abuse. I bought into the idea that if I didn’t have scars, it couldn’t have been that bad.
You’re right, pallygirl. You are completely, totally right.
Damn. I know I closed that second blockquote. WordPress gods, why do you punish me?
You may’ve closed it, but you didn’t open it 🙂
WordPress apparently wanted a > for breakfast.
🙂
That Blockquote Mammoth is such a tease.
Yeah, I’m sensitive to people minimising abuse that occurred to them, because so often we’re told that we’re mistaken, or catastrophising, or attention seeking. It is so important to realise that if it feels like abuse, then it probably bloody well is. And not just the abuser does this. This is why it is so important to believe people who say “I think I’m experiencing abuse/bullying/harassment” because the situation is likely to have been bad for a long time before anyone comes to us and says something.
And no abuse is good. And all abuse has negative effects on the person experiencing it.
Once we realise abuse for what it is, then we can make decisions, and start healing. And start trusting our own judgements again – which is something that abusers are really good at, making us distrust our own feelings about something. This, I have found, is one of the hardest things to get back: start trusting ourselves (beliefs, feelings) again.
A family member that I told about the emotional/mental spousal abuse I was experiencing, for years, always minimized it – “you don’t have it so bad” and so forth. It took me years to realize that, in fact, that this family member was and always had been emotionally abusive to me. Outta there.
i love it when i’m at the grocery store and all the men are cowering in fear at my femininity! FEAR ME, MALE POPULATION!
“I remember just staring at him blankly and then asking him if he honestly did not understand why it might be a stupid idea for a 5’0″ woman to angrily confront a strange man who is following her after dark in a relatively deserted area?”
What an asshole. I don’t confront guys who behave badly on the bus/subway because they’re drunk or obviously unhinged and I didn’t want them to lash out. I certainly wouldn’t confront a guy if I was alone with him.
“When you guys are getting treated this way, what race is the perpetrator?”
White dudes, 98% of the time. I’m white and I live in a racially diverse city (Toronto). Almost all of it was while I was walking to and from my high school, or around other locations in my childhood neighborhood. I’d never experienced any harassment based on my gender until I grew breasts, and then it seemed to be open season. And what was really gross and upsetting was that most of it was coming from men old enough to be my dad. Except for my breasts, I looked really young for my age, and I always had a backpack and school books, so they must have known they were harassing an underage girl. Since I moved away from that neighborhood, I don’t get harassed more than once or twice a year.