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
That’s the point of it all, isn’t it?
To get women to be afraid and live in constant fear, so they don’t stand up and speak out and shut this shit down.
It’s a terrorist tactic.
@midlymagnificent
I’m so sorry to hear that. But unfortunately, you’re not alone. People naturally develop coping skills/defense mechanisms to get through awful experiences and avoid them in the future. And that can be anything from avoiding places/people, gaining weight, hiding from social situations, to splintering into multiple identities. And the abusers and apologists don’t have any clue what the lasting effects are. And how it can also effect future generations (since your parenting skills can be effected too). I suppose there are folks who can just shrug off their experiences or repress them to the point of never having it interfere with their life…but I think that’s a tiny minority.
@Paradoxical Intention
Exactly. So on second thought, I guess the abusers DO know the lasting effects, as in how terrified the victim will be (and hopefully quiet about it). Just gross.
Thanks, because reasons. They’re pretty messed up people. I don’t have anything to do with anyone from my bio or step family but my grandmother. We are considered to be the weird ones in the family, a badge we are both proud of. “Normal” people are racist, sexist, LGBTQ-phobic and the “right” kind of Christian. I’m atheist and she believes God loves us all. My mother once told me that she’d rather I be an atheist than a liberal Christian. She’s disgusted by them and my grandmother’s church allowed female deacons and gayz. That’s even worse than being an apostate like me! So, we’re not held in high regard.
She’s an overcomer, a dynamo with a keen mind and utterly, completely fearless. I probably won’t make it to 80, but if I do I hope I’m just like her.
I won’t be as hot. My grandmother is drop dead gorgeous. But in the other ways, I’ll try to be like her.
I just went back to check and found this one that really affected me despite all the others talking about incest and assault and really awful stuff.
This one made me sad.
@Lea
Grandma sounds awesome 🙂 At least there’s one member of your family that’s not a jackass.
@mildlymagnificent
Indeed very sad. I think we’ve all engaged in some self-victim-blaming. 🙁
Well, “be careful what you ask for…”
I’ve got stories too, and the reason I’m not setting any of them down here is that they’re not very interesting compared to many of the ones which have already been offered and which (I think) ought to be left to speak for themselves.
But I’m very grateful that physically I was a slow grower and a late bloomer. I always have been but this makes me even more so.
What I do find fascinating is that this is taking place in a part of the noosphere were it’s commonplace for men (who aren’t teenagers but who are 30 to 40 years old) to argue that they ought to be able to court and “marry” girls who are, exactly, around 12/13 years old. They’re not arguing on behalf of their right to mess around with 16 or 17-year-olds, who should be young enough for anybody but who already (this is my guess) look and act too much like adult women to suit these guys. Nor are they arguing on behalf of their right to pursue 14 or 15-year-olds, who are (also) already over the sill. No, they want a relationship with a kid, with a girl so young she’s only just barely begun to differentiate herself from…a boy. (Hence, IMO, the vast engrossment with the characteristics by means of which she has only just barely begun to differentiate herself. It’s different from the average adult-male engrossment, is all I’m saying.)
“Because I love her so much. Why can’t you guys accept that an older man can really/truly love a young girl? If a man can love another man and if a woman can love another woman, then why, darn it, can’t I love a 13-year-old? What’s so creepy about that? Why are you guys always so critical? What is your problem?”
That’s the question which has been asked time and again in just these purlieus and very rarely does anyone attempt to answer it, other than to nod along and to join in the chorus. “Yeah, man, that is the way it is; it’s too bad for women if they can’t handle the truth; and besides you know the reason women can’t handle the truth is that women are all in denial.”
“My mother ended up going to the store and getting the guy fired. Apparently this wasn’t the first time he’d used his job to get numbers of women to call. This time he got fired.”
Translate that into MRA-speak and it comes out:
“This is what we mean when we say women are out to ruin men’s lives. Who are you, just ‘cuz you’ve got some boobs and stuff, to call up a guy’s work and get him fired and ruin his life? What did he ever do to you other than try to give you a compliment? And you’re ready to lose him his job when you’re only 12 years old. Plus, you got your nasty harpy of a mother to do it for you, and plus that, the bitch lied. See what we mean when we say women are evil? This is all the proof we need.”
Usually I don’t think I’ve been a victim of much sexual harassment, but when I start to think about it, I remember all these incidents of strange men offering me rides and asking if I were by myself. And most of these happened when I was underage and it didn’t make sense until years later, which made me realize the danger I could’ve been in if they had decided to keep pushing on it. I was such a wimp until the last couple of years now.
Oh, but there has been a few times where I’ve been touched or asked to touch someone inappropriately. Those situations I repressed for several years coincidentally. The ones that happened in public were done by boys about the same age as I though, but what still pisses me off is that despite having multiple people around, even a teacher or my older brother, no one stepped in to help. I’m not much of a looker plus I’m pretty fat, so the attitude people(including my family) give me about harassment is that I should be grateful for getting “that kind of attention”. Eeuegh.
It’s telling, isn’t it, that these folks are only concerned about how much they love the young child, but there is no mention of any consideration they might have that the young child is not emotionally, physically, or mentally developed enough to love anyone in that fashion.
These shitgolems don’t give a single fuck about consent and emotional capability, they specifically want someone who will be vulnerable, naive, and easily maleable.
There were so many I kind of forget them but I would say it started at around 8-10. I can’t remember exactly. When I was 12, it was my first day of high school (In Australia we just have primary and high. Primary 1-6, Secondary/High school 7-12) and I was waiting at the bus stop. I knew that the guy living around the corner was a pedophile because he had already made a move on me and the other children when we were younger. The bus stop was unfortunately right out the front of his house and the school bus would come by there. My sister and I were standing next to each other (she was 14) and he drove past us very slowly staring at us. It made me feel sick and nervous all day.
Also another time, I was walking around the shops when I was about 10, I had this old pair of jeans and the zipper broke without me realising and came undone. I saw two older guys (roughly in their twenties) pointing and commenting to each other. I looked down and saw that they had been looking at me. It felt like they were looking at me sexually but I guess I can’t know for sure. It just made me feel embarrassed, ashamed and like I wanted to go home.
Earlier in the thread I said that this is endemic, and I’ve just remembered some stuff that is “odd”. I’m a father of two young girls (6&9) and, of course, I want to ensure that they can navigate this world safely.
I’ve had four separate unconnected male (no longer) friends who have made weird statements about having daughters to me which all ended up with aggressive responses from me and the end of friendships. What more interesting is that they are all from different social economic backgrounds, different relationship statuses (one married,one divorces two single) different ages and different parts of the country, the only commonality amongst them is that they are educated to further degree level and have various levels of entitled chips on their shoulders (meaning they think they should be more entitled than they actually are).
It’s interesting because it shows from my extended network of male “friends” that I can come up with a quasi statistic that 1 in 8, feels at liberty to say such things to another man. In actuality I should have trooped them all off to the police, but then I would have had to contend with hearsay, proof and an act of slander on my part. Instead I terminated the “friendships” (I actually did hit one and he called the police on me – when I gave my explanation I got off with a warning, fair enough I committed an act of violence yet all the cops said to him was “don’t say stupid stuff like that”).
Presently, I’m listening to my two laughing and giggling in another room and when this shit happens to them I will give them all my support and help. All I can do from now on is that when I meet men who are the do-ers of this stuff, I will explain in firm, non-violent ways just what they are doing wrong.
One more thing that has struck me now. (I went back to the thread again once the rage-nausea-tears subsided a bit.)
This is for all the horrified dads.
If you scan through a lot of those stories you’ll notice there are two kinds of common negative experiences, not just the obvious one of the creepy same-age-as-my-dad types. It’s the classmates and same age group boys who are pretty horrible. I’m beginning to suspect that the drive by hollering and aggressive butt pinching blokes of the college age or not-quite-old-enough-to-be-my-dad harassers started out life as grabbing, groping, teasing, bullying schoolboys (or the ones who stood by and cheered them on or dared them in the first place).
Dads of both girls and boys would do all of them a service if they were, one way or another, involved with boys. Helping out as an assistant coach of a basketball/ hockey/ baseball team or a games group or some similar local organisation. No need to preach about responsible manhood or anything, just set a good example in their own behaviour and step on any negative, bullying, offensive or obscene talk about girls and about each other Like It’s A Cockroach.
Boys teasing and daring each other to say or do those run up and grab the newly budded breasts or try to grope the crotch of girls in their class or their neighbourhood should be t.o.l.d. that this is not fun and it’s not funny. Nor any of those other try to see up skirts or make girls jump & run just to see boobs bounce – it’s bullying and it’s offensive. It’s also bullying and unfunny to shame or insult other boys who refuse to approve or do those things or who try to speak up on behalf of the girls.
Starve or poison those seeds before they sprout and there’s a better chance that some or all of those boys will be decent themselves and a moderating influence on any group they later become part of.
@mildlymagnificent
Nah! the dads shouldn’t be horrified they should be aware that this happens. All they have to do is ask – wives, girlfriends, mums, sisters, grans, I’m aware just because I’ve listened to what my fellow blokes say (their versions of what been said here) and have been thoroughly disgusted.
As you’ve pointed out they can effect change by being the ones who change and think different
What @mildlymagnificent said. In grade 6, the girls knew every recess that we were in danger of having our pants pulled down in the yard. This was a trend, and they’d yank hard – hard enough to try and get the underwear to come down too. Right in the middle of the schoolyard. It was humiliating. No-one ever did anything about it. (And of course, the messages that girls got about ‘well it just means they like you’ meant tons of weird, conflicting thoughts, ie: this humiliates me but also means I am attractive and worthy so I should… like it?)
No-one at school intervened when a male classmate literally tackled me from behind, knocked me to the ground, got on top of me and held me there, sort of grinding against my butt. I was face in the dirt, in front of the school, with all the buses lined up and kids going home. No-one did anything. I didn’t know what to do. Again, this was grade 5 or 6.
No-one was telling the boys that this was not funny or ok. No-one was telling the girls that either.
I’m pretty confident that a 10-yr-old boy who thinks it’s fine to tackle girls and hold them down, or yank their clothes off in public, becomes a 14, 16, 19, 23 etc year old who feels the same way or worse – if no-one ever intervenes and tells them otherwise, or models good behaviour for them.
“It’s telling, isn’t it, that these folks are only concerned about how much they love the young child, but there is no mention of any consideration they might have that the young child is not emotionally, physically, or mentally developed enough to love anyone in that fashion.”
I’m going to go slightly off-topic and pull what may be an unwarranted comparison. What these guys are looking for seems to parallel what some fans of “parent-centered” child-rearing are after, in a weird way. Both want a very young person to love them or be grateful to them with an intensity that, as you say, no kid that age is equipped to handle: that kind of emotion is just not on the kid’s register as of yet (or if it is something is seriously wrong). But this is something the adult absolutely forbids himself/herself to recognize: my baby ought to love me as much or more as I love him/her, because Jesus says so, or: the paper-girl who lives down the street ought to quit avoiding me and recognize that I’m not such a bad guy, because I honestly think she’s cute (ergo I’m not just playing around with her) and because all my asshole-buddies agree that I’ve got a right to behave the way I’m behaving. There’s no evaluation of the target of these sentiments as a separate being at all. There’s no assessment of reality whatsoever in either case.
@Tracy
That sounds awful and I’m sorry that happened to you and all the other girls at your school. Not sorry towards the little shits that did it. Who the fuck thinks it’s acceptable or even remotely true to say “it means he likes you” when a boy assaults a girl like that? Harassment and violence is affection now? Way to give the girls a complex and tell the boys that they’ll be off the hook if they ever want to assault someone female.
I don’t know what the name of the school governing board is in your country but they should have been all over that problem from day one. Nobody reported this to the superintendents?
@Tracy
Same shit happened to me in school. I was bullied badly by girls and boys (although i always had more boy-friends than girls). And any time I spoke up about it I got this:
The boys do it because you’re pretty and they like you.
The girls do it because you’re pretty and they’re jealous.
So my young brain was very confused about consent and things that *feel* wrong. I also learned that girls are catty bitches and competition for boys. Boys that will humiliate, tease, inappropriately touch, etc. me because they have some kind of crush on me. Wut?
Nowadays there’s much more awareness about bullying in school, but it’s usually the same-sex kind of bullying that people think of as “being picked on”, not this sexual stuff. And it’s ALL bullying and ALL wrong!
@because reasons
That’s very true. I was looking at this thread yesterday and I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, but the first time I was harassed in any obviously sexual way was when I was 9, by a boy a year or two older than me. We were in a sort of kids group that met in a church, and somehow he convinced me to go with him into the Sunday School room closet (this detail seems funny in retrospect) where he tried to touch my crotch and have me do the same to him. He called it the “tickle game” (and this detail seems really, really creepy in retrospect because it sounds like something an adult child abuser would say – I don’t want to speculate on this kid’s home life, but I hope nothing like that ever happened to him).
I was sort of confused because 1) I was just too young to want to do sexual stuff with anybody, and 2) he didn’t “like” me. In fact, he’d been bothering me in other ways: kicking my feet under the table, calling me names, and so on. Thankfully he left me alone when he saw I wasn’t into it. I wasn’t traumatized, but it bothered me even at the time, since when I was a kid I thought “touchy, huggy stuff” = “love or like” and I knew I wasn’t his favourite person in the world.
td;lr: sexual harassment doesn’t equal “oh, he liiiiiikes you.” Nope, nope, and nope. And I’m sorry about everyone who’s had such experiences.
@epitome
There is very little chance that boy came up with it on his own, using that terminology. So sad when you realize how the cycle is perpetuated from abuser to victim, victim then (in some cases) becomes an abuser or (more often) self-abuses. 🙁
I want to thank everyone who shared their story here; it’s brave and I hope it has been at least a little cathartic.So, so sorry that any of you had to go through what you did. .
I knew intellectually that this shit was common, and I’ve heard similar stories from some of the women I’ve known, but reading so many stories here, and on the original Reddit thread, really brings home how pervasive and how destructive this shit is.
Also, because reasons, I think, sadly, that you are right. No kid would come up with that on his own.
@mildlymagnificent and others like @autosoma:
I am definitely with you and your idea is a great one. I hope to emulate it with my kids.
I just wish it extended beyond the parents and included the school sex-ed system. If more boys were taught at a younger age that this stuff is harmful, I think many would stop and change their ways. Especially if it was taught in a manner such as this, with anonymized accounts of women recounting their life at a young age and how that negatively affected them. I hope more boys would think twice before catcalling if they had to read twenty plus accounts of how catcalling traumatized young girls. It hopefully puts a face on their crime.
As a dad I worry about what I can do to make sure my son does not turn out to be one of these abusers/harassers/rapists, and what I can do to protect my daughter from becoming a victim. Hopefully I and my best friend in the world [a.k.a. Wife] are doing it right.
At least I know an easy place to start – don’t give him something negative to copy and don’t let him hang out with those who have someone negative to copy.
Spaceman,
Agreed. But, educating about consent can start before they ever know what sex is.
I have a little boy who likes to fight. Loves it. He says he wants to be a boxer. Sometimes his friends and siblings want to fight with him. It’s play. Sometimes they don’t and he’d rather not take “No” for an answer. That is bullying.
So, we’ve had some serious talks about how things that look fun or morally OK in movies are often not, how people’s bodies belong to them and we don’t do things to their bodies that they don’t want us to do even if that thing is a hug. I told him that even if Timmy was play fighting with him before and having fun, it’s over when he stops wanting to play and I mean the second he stops wanting to play. Period. Paragraph. It’s over.
People who voluntarily fight in rings = cool
People who hit other people without their consent anywhere = assholes
I think he’s gotten the message.
Teaching consent doesn’t even have to be about sex.I think the key is teaching children (because girls need to know this too) that women and girls are people with rights.
Still, comprehensive sexual education including education concerning consent should be a given in our schools.
That’s because their behavior is normalized. It’s considered to be “what manly men do to prove they’re really men!” It has nothing to do with “class”, and everything to do with how me act as a class. As in, they’re a social step above women, and this is how they show it: by putting us in what they have decided is “our” place. And the way they do it is specifically sexualized: “Look, I’m superior to this inferior female! See how scared she is that I could rape her?”
So of course women showing their bodies without shame are considered a “provocation”. As are women who dare to step outside their assigned social class by taking on “men’s jobs” and succeeding at them. Gotta put those uppity women down before they get ideas, y’know!
Had a junior high teacher who began rubbing my back, making me feel very uncomfortable. I reported him, with predicable results. I was in my twenties when he was finally caught at it. Ran into him at temple a few years after with my daughters… Urgh, I wanted to scream, and get my kids away from him.
But what’s even worse was my daughter started middle school this year, and four days into the semester her social studies teacher disappeared, he was then charged with sexual assault of a minor. I had to explain this to her. We shouldn’t have to worry about these things.