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
@Alto Fronto Thank you. It’s left its scars for sure, but I have worked through the bulk of it and am finally in a healthy, loving relationship (after years of abusive ones with creepsters).
@sunnysombrera Thanks to you too. Since I never knew any “father figure” that wasn’t abusive and pervy, my idea about fathers, male role models, and men in general was pretty warped. As I said, I still get grossed out when I see a dad with his kids (because part of me immediately assumes he’s a predator), but I’ve learned to tell myself that #notalldads, basically.
@Supernova Your story reminds me of a time I was with my mom getting gas and she told me one of the male attendants had said (to her) “Your daughter is really pretty, she should smile more.” I was like “Wtf? He should mind his own goddamn biz” but she told me to take it as a compliment and that he was flirting with me. UGH. That kind of stuff did NOT help- it basically told me my instincts towards creepsters was wrong, or at the very least, rude and unlady-like. Which unfortunately is how society still deals with girls/women. Always be nice above all else, be pretty, don’t be fat, remember to hate your body, other women are just competition, men are gods, etc etc. It’s 2015, FFS! When is this gonna end?!
Also, seconding whoever thanked everyone for sharing! You are all brave, we are all survivors of something, which is what makes us so strong and awesome. And Thank you so much to David and the rest for giving us a SAFE place to share our stories! HUGS for everyone! (Oh, and some kittehs)
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZG-ki2PQKEk/ULtrrNBRxCI/AAAAAAAAHOo/0rQhjCMG034/s1600/too.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1JKIgtF-h9U/T5zTtATy71I/AAAAAAAADHA/8-RJZDcss3o/s1600/cute-kitten-pictures-001.jpg
Oh my god, I just thought about how the MRA are just gonna dismiss this shit.
Why.
@WWTH
My thoughts, exactly! He was probably imagining his post turning into some version of Penthouse Forum or whatever it’s called. Women recounting their earliest sexual experiences, with older guys…oh, boy! Time to get out the wank-lotion! Fuck. Him.
And I’m sure even with all the disturbing accounts he got instead, he’s still sitting in a pool of his own spooge. Because as sickening as it is, the thing that gets these guys off more than anything else is seeing or hearing about a woman being vulnerable, getting dominated or abused/harassed, or in their minds “getting what’s coming to her” or “being shown the ways of proper ManlyMen love.” Gross. K, off to wretch and cry.
@Banana Jackie
Of course! Everyone knows women just looooove playing the victim for all the attention they get! In reality, these ladiiieeez probably loved every second of it. Also, wimmenz are always bitching about this stuff like it’s bad…when any man would loooove to be “sexually harassed” or “molested”, because logic.
Ew.
@Catalpa:
I’ve been thinking about my first boyfriend for quite some time in this fashion. I was about 16, his parents were gone for the weekend, and we were fooling around. He tried to put his hand in my panties and I kinda froze up and told him to stop. He did, and although I stayed there for the remainder of the weekend, and we continued fooling around and slept in the same bed together, he did not try again. No pressure, no nothing. Just doing things that I was comfortable with.
I shouldn’t be so grateful for this. It should be a normal story. But I know that had he tried to pressure me, I would have eventually acquiesced even though I didn’t really want to. I almost wish I had some way of thanking him for not being a selfish boundary-violating asshole. It’s apparently a big fucking deal.
@because reasons
Whhhhyyyyyy did you saaaay that it was bad enough thinking it noooooooo
Also, in the way of brain bleach, I give you CHICKCAM!
[ustream id=538640 live=1 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
(lessee if that embeds properly)
@Banana Jackie
I know. I feel gross for saying it. I’m sorry! We need more brain bleach, stat!
@Dawn
I wish it wasn’t a big fucking deal to find a decent man who respects boundaries. But, you’re right. I have encountered a couple and I felt the same way- like I should send them a fruit basket or something for being decent towards me. As for the other douchepervs in my life, they need a basket full of shit delivered to them.
Internet hugs (if they’re wanted) to everyone who had such awful experiences. It’s sad and telling just how much that Reddit thread became a megathread because of just how often it happens. Even sadder yet somehow not surprising that certain Redditors are being gross about it too. Some of the posts were edited to add how the posters received disgusting PMs in response to their stories of being molested and harassed *as kids.*
—
I was very fortunate to have protective parents who warned me at an early age of child molesters and kidnappers (or “the bad man/lady”), taught me to use words like vagina and penis without embarrassment, and drove me to and from school. The only problem is it was framed in the stranger danger fashion and didn’t address what if it was someone I knew. There was an uncle who, as I grew into my teens, would lean in closer to me than I was comfortable with at family gatherings and once took a picture of me when I was asleep. When I told my parents it made me feel uncomfortable, they said it was harmless and cute.
At age 17 I had just finished high school and had a summer job at Chuck E Cheese. I was working at the prizes counter when a man old enough to have grandkids was telling me to smile for him with a creepy grin of his own. What I felt was a sort of combination of nervousness and protectiveness of the children. My guard was up until he finally left, without any kids in tow, and I spent the rest of the day suspicious of what he was doing at a Chuck E Cheese.
Wow, this is really eye-opening. I’m sixteen and lucky enough to be pretty sheltered and not have any stories like these yet, but they’re all awful. Hugs to anyone who had to go through this.
Exactly. I’m sure that the original Mormon cult (and their various fundie offshoots today) got started just so a greedy guy could have the pick of the girls for himself, and/or use them as leverage to acquire shit-tons of money and property. The really unbelievable part is that they brainwash girls for it by telling them they won’t get to heaven except with the help of their polygamous husband. So those “marriages” are called “celestial marriages”. No doubt it’s heaven on Earth for him, and hell on wheels for the girls. And not too surprisingly, in the really fundie-fundie cults, the girls are married off as soon as they hit puberty. Because to leave them without “celestial husbands” at such a “dangerous” time is too tempting. They might start finding boyfriends their own age, and that’s not kosher. The outside world is “Babylon”, and the spectre of rape is held over their heads there. No, better to tie them down as soon as possible, trapped in a cycle of pregnancy and more pregnancy, so they never get a chance even to think of a different life.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I haven’t gotten sexually harassed to the extent that many women have, especially by strangers. My biggest problem was senior Spanish class, and when he finally provoked me into making a scene, the teacher told me that sometimes boys do things to get girls attention. I decided it wasn’t worth it to tell her anything else.
A few years later, I sent her an email telling her that what she’d apparently missed was a year-long campaign of harassment and when she brushes off “minor” problems it sends the signal that she won’t listen about major ones. She did apologize and I hope I she changed her behavior.
My sister, though… my sister is a fucking magnet. Just this week a guy at Starbucks used the name on her card to try to friend her on Facebook. She’s going to complain to the manager, but her first instinct was to find another Starbucks.
But our Dad is really supportive–his suggestion for when older men hit on her when she was still underage was to give them his cell phone number. She never, as far as I know, did, but I would have loved to hear that conversation. (The military recruiters were fairly aggressive towards me, and I felt bad being rude to them on the phone. He didn’t. They stopped calling. It was great.)
How disgusting (but not at all surprising) that this is being used by men on Reddit as wank fodder.
I have read many accounts of the sexual abuse of children on EverydaySexism and it always makes me think – things are WORSE for girls and young women than when I was young.
But of course it happened to me too. I was 9 and groped genitally by a 40+ man when I was walking home from school. I still remember what he looked like – real stereotype of a paedophile. I went to the swimming pool a lot when I was 9-11 and it was very clear that many men perved on me and my friends. By the age of 11 I was well aware that men 30+ were not safe people to be around.
I was treated as if I was a prostitute quite often 12+. The general consensus about this kind of behaviour was ‘oh well, there is nothing you can do about it’ – it was the 70s and I do not think that many adult women around me had been empowered AT ALL – they taught us Stranger Danger, but my own mother minimised what happened to me all the time.
For some reason old men approached me ALL the time. Middle aged men were the worst – I didn’t get much crap from teens or 20s at all – in comparison. Now I am a middle aged woman I feel SO distrustful of men my age because in my personal experience middle aged men lust after the under 15s most of all.
The ONLY thing to do about this is to be loud and unashamed. Make a lot of noise. Make it clear that you know that he is a perve. DO NOT let them get away with it. Yes, people WILL call you crazy and aggressive, but if it gets one of these men away from yet another girl, and lets that girl know that there are adults looking out for her then it is worth it.
For people being harassed for someone’s phone number (in the United States), there’s a fake number you can give them that tells them off for being creepy when they call it, instead of outright rejecting him and risking him getting violent:
New York, NY: +1 917 512 2833
Chicago, IL: +1 312 697 1778
London, GB: +44 20 3095 4193
Toronto, ON: +1 647 496 0921
Montreal, QC: (438) 793-7247 (in French!)
Monterrey, MX: +52 81 4170 7141
Tel Aviv, IS: +97237630163
If you’d like to know more, click this!
Of course, there are guys who will insist upon calling it before they get you out of their sight so they can be sure, but you can give him this number and try to get away in the meantime.
Stay safe out there!
(Sorry, I posted this in the wrong thread earlier. My bad.)
The movie and musical don’t deviate too much from the general storyline, so it still has the same adorable relationship between Jean Valjean and Cosette. The book is actually one of my all time favorite novels, it’s so amazing!
I agree with everything you said about Valjean’s feelings towards Cosette. They needed each other because Cosette was in an abusive environment and needed a good adult in her life to give her everything she needed, and Valjean cared for her so unconditionally that it never would have occurred to him to hurt her in that way. It’s so wrong that people pervert those kinds of relationships, and it happens so often in my fandoms that I barely feel even safe participating in them anymore.
We were first raped when we were eight. It only got worse from there on out, and we didn’t manage to escape the raping till we were seventeen.
Those were nine very long years. (And we still had people creeping on us until last year, because even at twenty-seven, we still get mistaken for being in high school sometimes.)
On the plus side, I’ve come out publicly about it, am making comics about it, and warned my younger brother and the family. None of them are actually DOING anything about it, but fuck them, we’re out now, and we can at least help other people (and make some money off the whole fucking thing, which helps).
It was seeing people on television talk shows telling their stories of abuse that finally got me to thinking “I’m not crazy, this wasn’t MY fault, and I don’t have to be silent or ashamed anymore!” (sorry about the c-word but that’s how I felt at the time) So thank goodness for brave women (and men) who speak up! I agree, it is the only way to make any progress. I haven’t been super vocal about my experiences, but I’m also not shy about discussing it when the topic comes up.
The only ones who should feel disgusting and ashamed are the predators!
Yeah. Over the years, I’ve started being more and more open and forceful about it, in part because a LOT of multiples I encounter have horrendous life histories and desperately need to know they aren’t alone.
That and I figure that if half a dozen kids getting raped aren’t enough to influence my family’s behavior, the slight whiff of possible public shaming might do the job. (This is a very minor thought for me, and only comes up because of how they reacted when they stalked my blog and found me mentioning the incest publicly. You’d think I’d called them Nazi Klansmen from Mars.)
Yeah, the FIRST time this happened to me is a story I don’t tell. But in re: the last couple reddit posts, that’s so, so true. Once when I was a senior in college on a flight back to school this guy was talking with me the whole time. He was cute and I enjoyed talking with him, he gave me his number, I was intrigued. It got weird at the end when he asked me, while I was wearing my college sweatshirt & class ring on a flight into the city said college was in, ‘so, are you still in high school?’ No, no I am not. Did I call him? No, no I did not.
Walking home from school at age 12. Guy in a car turns into a driveway, blocking the sidewalk in front of me and proceeds to strike up a conversation (I think it was something innocuous like directions or the weather or something) so I approach closer–just close enough that I see his pants down and he’s giving himself a good wank. When I told my mum later what had happened, she called the police to come and get a statement from me. I distinctly remember thinking that she was overreacting, that it was no big deal. I must have been so accustomed to being perved on by that point that I didn’t see it as that far out of the ordinary, though I don’t recall any specific prior incidents. Other than a hug at about the same age, maybe younger, with an adult male relative that went on a bit too long and involved an erection (I’m pretty sure that was unintentional and I never brought it up to anyone and there was no further questionable attention on his part).
@CL Aw, yes. That certain class of creepster who seems ok at first, even charming…then finally lets something slimy slip out and the red flag sensors go off. Ugh.
@LBT I can relate to the family reaction-thing. I never said a word to anyone about my abusive father until around 3-4 years ago. And I quickly went from being one of the “favorites” to the black sheep and was basically shunned by his side of the family. They all thought he was the Golden Boy and wouldn’t believe anything I said. Thankfully my mom stood by me (she already hated him for other reasons and the news of his years of abuse made her want to kill him). But it was freeing, in a way. I definitely found out who was really in my corner.
Apparently someone doesn’t want this information being shared; your website is being reported as a problematic link at facebook, almost certainly due to false reporting.
RE: because reasons
Yeah, in our case, the grandfather was main perp, abused many people (including our mother) but everyone is still weirdly in his thrall, even now. We went from Golden Child to Black Sheep too, facilitated by us suddenly going “crazy” and therefore no longer being trustworthy. (Never mind that our crazy was A TRAUMA DISORDER.)
Aaaand I think now might be a good time to drop some Maru right here:
If it fits, Maru sits. And if it doesn’t fit, he’ll still try and try and TRY to sit.
And when he’s all tuckered out from the hard work of sitting in too small a box, he’ll just fall asleep on the couch like an old man…
so if flirting with a guy or dressing sexy gives him the right to do with me what he wants?
Like really?
Flirting is actually a heahlthy thing. If someone flirts with me I make sure I keep some respect…not creeping him around or follow him
Yep even if he has no shirt on. there is healthy flirting. and there is also molesting someone and creeping around, knowing that the other person isnt okay with that.
I feel sick that these girl have the need to say ”ohh but I wasnt flirting when he molested me”….oh come one as if flirting gives him an excuse to, intentionally, make you feel like shit