So there’s a giant, growing, and extremely creepy megathread up on Reddit at the moment, and for once, the creepiness isn’t coming from inside the Reddit. Well, less of the creepiness is coming from Reddit than you might expect.
Yesterday, you see, a Redditor known as BA_Baracus posted a couple of simple questions to AskReddit: Women of Reddit, when did you first notice that men were looking at you in a sexual way? How old were you and how did it make you feel?
This wasn’t the first time he’d posted a question to his fellow Redditors; he’s posted a bunch, including “People of reddit with eyes that point in different directions, which one of them is usually looking at me?” and, er, “Recent rape victims of Reddit, how did it happen, and what the hell were you doing in India?” None of these questions got much of a response.
But this time, well, thousands of “women of Reddit” stepped forward to tell the horrifying yet in most cases completely unsurprising stories of the first time men started perving on them, in many cases before they were even teenagers.
Here’s a sampling of some of their stories. TRIGGER WARNING for extreme fucking creepiness.
Age 8, followed to a department store changing room
Age 8, molested by a landlord
Age 12, at a bus stop
11 or 12, walking to and from school
Age 12, waiting for carryout
Age 11, creepy step-grandfather
Age 12, creepy step-uncle
Age 10, wearing a Lion King backpack and light-up shoes
Age 12, creepy cell phone salesman
Age 11, walking home from the beach
Age 12, in Blockbuster (with bonus Reddit creepiness)
14, eating a lollipop
Age 12, eating a banana
Naturally, some Redditors decided to add to the creepiness:
And all this makes pretty clear just why we need age of consent laws:
Of course, many of these creepy guys are well aware that the targets of their creepiness are a long way away from being “legal.”
Check out the thread for countless more stories like this.
H/T — u/Iwillpixiecutyou on Reddit
When did it start happening to me? As soon as my breasts began to grow. I was just turning 10. (Hips came the following year.) As soon as my nipples started to look like something other than flat little mosquito bites, boom! The unpleasant, uncomfortable feeling that everyone with a penis was staring at my chest. Which of course they were.
And then there was the rapid realization that V-necks, close-fitting T-shirts, tube tops, and anything even a little bit translucent was to be avoided. Because boobie-gawkers were also boobie-grabbers, more often than not. And not all of them were bratty boys my own age or thereabouts.
At this point there wasn’t a single incident that I could say “Yeah, that’s the precise moment when it started to happen”; it was just this generalized creepy weirdness that as an undeveloped child I’d been blissfully unaware even existed. It was depressing, too, because it made me want to go back to being that happy, innocent, little, little kid. And I couldn’t. So that pissed me off and contributed greatly to my pre-adolescent surliness and squeamishness and general standoffishness.
At 12 I had a science teacher who noticed that I was very good at science, so he let me borrow the books he kept in the shelves behind his desk. At least, I thought that was all it was. Other girls said he tried to peek down their tops. I was, by then, already in full cover-up and baggy-sweaters mode, so of course that didn’t happen to me. But I have to look back on it with a lot of side-eye and wonder if I was being somehow “groomed” and just never realized it, because the following year, a girl in my class DID have what some would have euphemistically called an inappropriate relationship with him, and it was really blatant. She even called him by his nickname, sat on his knee, flirted with him like an idiot (which she was, but he was a grown man and most definitely not stupid, so there was no excuse for him doing what he did with her.) I came to the conclusion that he HAD tried to “groom” me and failed, because I had strict personal boundaries and didn’t let anyone get too close. (And also, I suspect, because I had not only a father who was very much in the picture, but also a grandfather living in the same house, and two hot-headed uncles who were liable to beat the shit out of any teacher who pushed his luck with 12-year-old me.)
As for incidents of actual harassment that stick out: I was 14. A truck driver honked the horn at me. I was wearing a puffy bomber jacket, but it was only waist length. And tight jeans. And knee-high boots with a two-inch heel. The clothes were armor against being branded an uncool prude, ironically enough. (They didn’t work. I still got shit from the other kids.) I was under no illusion by then that these guys saw very young but plausibly “developed”-looking girls as anything other than easy prey to be intimidated. And I was very timid and shy, so of course it scared the shit out of me. I went to school scared shitless every day, of guys like that and of harassers on the school bus, too. Invariably, all older and much bigger than me.
No, this shit’s not rare at all. It is depressingly all over the fucking place. It was the minefield I had to thread every day, from age 10 onwards. Even now, as an almost middle-aged woman and supposedly Sexually Invisible, I STILL have my head up, on the defensive for creepers. I suspect the only real reason I get fewer of them now isn’t my age, which I don’t look — it’s my attitude. I walk tall now, and am better at faking confidence even when I’m not feeling it. Oddly enough, they never pick the truly confident ones to mess with…
Davidnewton:: actually young boys get preyed on a lot. They just don’t get catcalled and harassed and often don’t know that the situation has taken a wrong turn until they’re right in the middle of it.
At least some girls, not all girls, get some kind of warning that this is something that they’ll have to deal with forvthe rest of their lives. My mother was very, very, vigilant about it and I still got harassed because I wasn’t with her twenty four/seven. But I could at least talk to her about what upset me and knew she had my back. I was very, very lucky.
Boys have absolutely no clue and as hard as it is for girls, we at least have systems and organizations set up to help some of us, if the adults around us give a damn. Most young boys don’t even have that option. If you’re a boy who has just been molested, because of the systems of patriarchy and toxic masculinity in place, you can’t even speak to anyone about it and often just have to suffer it in silence.
Boys are also going to be preyed on by both genders. If the person who molests them is female, they can forget about telling anyone about it. Those same systems that will castigate blame them for being molested by a man,(should any of them draw up the courage of telling anyone about it, after being acculturated at very young ages to believe that homosexuality makes them unmanly) will congratulate them for being molested by a woman and tell them its manly.
It’s true, boys don’t have to worry about harassment but in some cases being harassed is at least a sign that a situation might turn dangerous or has gone horribly wrong and a lot of girls are taught early to be hyper- aware of the men around them. They can at least talk to other women about it ( if they’re lucky.)
Not trying to derail by diverting attention to mens problems, just wanted to counter David’s post. These are systems that f*** it up for all children, both male and female. In the minds of some men, all children are prey. The only difference is that girls are taught to expect it. Boys never see it coming. And can’t even get any help afterwards.
@suffrajitsu, when I read “Lolita” it was very clear to me that Humbert Humperdink was written to be a total creepezoid predator. I’m not sure how anyone could get anything else but it’s amazing how much literary criticism does make Lolita out to be anything but an innocent child. No, it’s appalling.
I remember being 14 and walking down the street with my 13 year old best friend, some guy driving by yelling “hot legs” or something. Also walking alone at 14, some guy waited in his car at the end of the block leering at me as i walkyd towards him. I gave him the finger and he sped off angrily. Another time at 14 waiting at a bus stop with my friend some creep did a strip show between the buildings across the street. Two old ladies came to the bus stop after and we told them what happened but all they cared about was that we didn’t let them board the bus first. :/
Doh! Humbert Humbert. It’s been a while. Google first, then post – must remember.
Peristyle: Exactly. This is how society keeps women in check. All of our mental energy is spent thinking about our bodies, 24/7.
I had a mortifying experience when I was about twelve. I developed early too and I didn’t think much of it, nor had I connected it to my mother’s occasionally questioning me if some man had said or did anything funny.
I was walking home from school and two men, who had to be in their thirties were walking in the same direction,several feet behind me, when they begin to talk, very loudly, about my a**. I felt horrified, humiliated, and yes, scared. Up til then, I’d spent my entire life around boys and never gave it a thought. My cousins and uncles were kind, upstanding men that I never feared being with them.
After that encounter and a couple of others, I too became hyper-aware of any men who happened to be near me and hyper-sensitive to their attitudes towards me. I finally understood what my mother had been questioning me about. I put on weight too, in an effort to deflect attention, to be invisible. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. In the Af-Am community, there’s rarely anger about weight gain from men. They’ll ignore you instead.
I suspect this may be the reason behind a lot of female obesity, though.
“I suspect this may be the reason behind a lot of female obesity, though”
I think there are some contributors to this board who’ve had that experience for exactly that reason. I’ve heard also that some people with anorexia may develop it as a way of “not growing up”. Sometimes that’s just so as to not have to face the scary responsibilities of adulthood; but I wouldn’t be surprised if some girls are attempting to head off adult attention for traumatic reasons.
Bina: I think you’re right about the standoffishness and confidence. I definitely projected an attitude of “DONT YOU DARE TOUCH ME” or “you will not get that hand back.”
Even as a 45 year old woman, I still project this attitude. I can’t help it. I do not cozy up to men I don’t know. I won’t do it. I have to know a man for years and have to be introduced by a third party before I’m friendly with him. I never want my friendliness to be misconstrued as anything but what it is.
I have one friend (she’s White, conventionally pretty and blond) who does this often and wonders why I don’t talk to men.
Its not an attitude that works all the time, work sometimes, in lieu of blatant sexual harassment, you end up getting the “you need to smile” treatment from men young enough to be sons.
Really it’s just lose/lose all the time, every time. There’s absolutely s**all you can do as a woman that won’t have someone physically policing you, in some manner.
I was about 9 when a former ex cop put his hand in my pants while he and his wife were supposed to be babysitting me. My mom trusted them, because he was a cop, a neighbor, and a “friend”. I was petrified when my mom called the police, and I told them I had made it up because I was scared to death.
It’s really all of a piece, isn’t it. From the micro to the macro level men feel as if they have the right to police and control women’s bodies. All the time, everywhere.
From street harassment to rape to abortion laws and rules created to control when or if women can have sex/children. Every single bit of it is about the sexual control of women.
I was 5 and no, I didn’t want it. But it progressed from there. And nobody knows about it, so many decades later.
Whatever grim statistics are there on this issue, they are not grim enough. Reality is far worse and we learn to keep it secret.
I remember walking around outside in the late spring/summer in 7th or 8th grade with a friend. A kid our age leaned out the window of car passing by and yelled something at us and we both burst out laughing. They turned around about a block ahead of us and his older brother leaned out and yelled something at us, which just made us laugh harder. We couldn’t hear what they were saying but we thought it was absurd that another 13 year old would be cat calling us.
In retrospect, I’m not sure which is creepier: we weren’t even 13 and we had been made numb to cat calling, or the fact that the kid was obviously being taught to catcall by his older brother.
Kill everything.
Thank you so much for posting this. Honestly in a way this thread is an amazing resourse for men, women, and parents: women, to know they’re not alone and feel empowered to share their experiences without shame; men, to get a bigger, more graphic picture of this reality; parents, to engage in conversations with people who have gone through this and to become better equipped to deal with this in their own kids’ lives.
REDDIT GIVES US SOMETHING GOOD, WHO THE FUCK KNEW, RIGHT???…
When I was 12-14ish I was on holiday in New Zealand in Rotarua. My family took us up to the luge-park there and as I bent over A twenty-something guy did a weird ‘hump dancing’ thing behind me (sort of like exaggerated simulated anal). I turned to face him and said ‘I’m fourteen.’ He just grinned, but his friend was horrified (That I was a kid, not that I was being harassed) and dragged him away. I’ve always looked older, partially by blood and by being a chubby kid. I was a curvy C-cup at thirteen and I looked like a (spotty) high school senior. Still no excuse for pedobear to start ‘making friends.’
My conventionally attractive sisters (read= are usually freshly showered, made up and dressed to the nines) tend to get more shit from creepers then I did. We went tip shopping today and this creeper with his ‘hands in his pocket’ followed my younger sis around and tried to separate her from my mum and other sib. They get this bullshit almost all the time when they dress up, put on makeup and generally be normal teenagers. The fact that a grown man thinks make-up+ formalish clothes= totally an invitation to pubescent sex!11! Is fucking horrible and these reactions from men frighten them. I go out of my way to put off blokes like that. In public I sport flip-flops with daggy clothes and oily hair to avoid this kind of BS and it (mostly) works. It sucks that I have to do that to be left alone. When did nice clothes= sex?
Tealdeer: Creepers need to be rocketed to Mars. With no return ticket.
PS no makeup and flipflops are totally misandry. So are makeup and high-heels. Everything is misandry. EVERYTHING.
Reblogged this on Zarathustra the Serpent and commented:
“Thousands of “women of Reddit” stepped forward to tell the horrifying yet in most cases completely unsurprising stories of the first time men started perving on them, in many cases before they were even teenagers.”
Please share. This is awful. I remember being at a UN conference when one of the speakers asked men and women if they were ever touched inappropriately. Almost none of the men raised their hands but almost all of the women did.
This is simply awful. I remember being at a UN conference when one of the speakers asked men and women if they were ever touched inappropriately. Almost none of the men raised their hands but almost all of the women did.
kellyrtillson: Professional Optimist.
You can put that on your resume now.
I wonder if that might be because there’s more “shame” attached when men are abused. Like how it’s supposedly even harder for men to say they’ve been raped because it’s seen as “un masculine”.
[Not that it’s any easier for women to report rape; but that’s a whole other set of issues]
When was I harassed first by grown men? Well, the first I distinctly remember was a honest to goodness flasher in a trench-coat (I was 10 or so). And next a guy who put his hand between my legs on a crowded bus (I was 13 or 14). The scariest one though was an actual real life rape threat by a teenage boy (he was around 13) when I was 6. That I still have nightmares about.
I was five years old when my mother’s boyfriend would coerce me into taking off my clothes for him. Sometimes he wanted me to dance for him. Sometimes he’d put all the spare change from his pockets onto the table and say, “You can have this money if you take off your clothes for me.” Sometimes my mother was home, sometimes she wasn’t. He was an alcoholic, abusive asshole and he’d beat her for going against his wishes. We had to move far, far away to get away from him.
Unfortunately for me, immediately after we made that move my mother married yet another child molesting alcoholic asshole. The PTSD from that caused me problems for decades.
This is not uncommon. I am sure all of our stories will be swept under the NotAllMen rug, as always, however.
Trigger warning here:
________________________________
I was first harassed by a grown man when I was twelve. I was playing outside in the sprinkler with my brother and sister in a one-piece bathing suit and he called me into the house so he could rape me for the first time, and continue for another two years. That man was my stepfather.
This makes me sad. I hate that anyone should have to go through that, it’s extremely unfair to say the least. It’s hard to even imagine being treated like that, like you’re there primarily for the enjoyment of the opposite sex, nothing else, and need constant reminding.
I just… don’t get it. I am not a nice man. I am not a good man, or a decent man, or even a meh man. I’m a bad guy. So how is I’m still disgusted and appalled by this?
I don’t do anything. I literally hide in a room and count the days as they pass. I am consumed by the horror of what I am capable of, by guilt for the aid I don’t give, and by regret for all the petty misery I’ve helped cause. Yet I sit here, and I read these accounts, and I just don’t understand.
I don’t even like children, but seriously, what the fuck? How can anyone think this is ok? There’s no way they don’t know the damage they’re causing. How do these men get away with this? I mean, I understand how, on a cultural level, they get away with it, but how do they escape themselves? I don’t even know what I’m asking. I just don’t fucking understand.
@Paradoxical:
I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I’m sorry anyone had to go through any of these things.