Men’s Rights Activists and other warriors against cultural misandry often complain that women accuse them of being creepy, not because they’re genuinely creepy but just because they’re men, men guilty of no crime other than not looking like Brad Pitt.
One of these fellows took to the Men’s Rights subreddit recently with a sad tale of being unfairly profiled as a creeper just because he was lurking in a truck in the parking lot of a pharmacy until after the store closed, hoping he could chat up one of the store employees while she was walking to her car.
I know, totally unfair!
Here’s his sad tale, in his own words:
I was in a small town in NJ, spending the night in my truck waiting for a job in the morning. I park at corner pharmacy lot. I go in once and buy my items. Checkout girl is cute, make up a reason to go back in. We chat for a few seconds at most. I go back to my truck to browse the ol Reddit. Place closes at 10. I’m kinda hoping the checkout girl comes out so we can chat some more.
Yeah, yeah, I know, some of you gals have already decided he’s a creep. Isn’t a guy allowed to buy something from a cute checkout girl, to leave the store to go back to his truck, then return to the store on a pretext to chat with the cute checkout girl, then go back to his truck and just, you know, lurk there until the store closes reading his smart phone? Seriously, who could possibly find any of that suspicious?
At 10:05 pm 3 cops surround my vehicle and demand identification, claiming the employees of pharmacy we’re afraid to go to their vehicles because of a suspicious work truck with a big scary man in it.
GOSH HOW COULD ANYONE BE SUSPICIOUS OF HIM. Clearly there is some big time misandering going on here.
Obviously they want to delay me so the employees can get safely out. That is somewhat understandable, but God damn, I go out of my way to not be creepy around women, as I am a very big person.
And what an amazing job he did this time not being creepy!
What is it like to be a woman? Are you constantly afraid of being raped everywhere you go? Kidnapped? Murdered? I exchanged maybe a dozen words and a friendly smile with a cute cashier and I immediately got the cops called on me. Fuck.
Yeah, it’s not as if you WENT BACK INTO THE STORE ON FALSE PRETENSES SO YOU COULD TRY TO CHAT HER UP and then got into your truck and DIDN’T LEAVE. AT NIGHT. WHEN THE STORE WAS CLOSING.
The cops have been here for 30 minutes parked right next to me as I type this. It seems like all men are guilty until proven innocent…
CREEP RIGHTS NOW!
I can’t help but think of this scene from Tucker and Dale vs Evil.
In Dale’s defense [Spoiler alert!] he doesn’t immediately run to the Men’s Rights subreddit to whine about misandry, and despite taking the bad advice of his friend here he does turn out to be a genuinely good dude who honestly doesn’t want to creep anyone out.
He’s also got a little bit more self-awareness than our friend in the truck. Can Reddit truck dude even be real, or is this actually some kind of masterful trolling?
Most of the Men’s Rights redditors commenting on the story actually do tell him he was acting creepy as hell, so I’ll give them a few points for that.
Yes. In retail service jobs, you’re required to be nice to people no matter how they behave. On top of that, many women really don’t like having to reject someone and they’d prefer to politely reject advances and for the behavior to simply stop.
Assuming the post is not trolling, he’s waiting for her shift to end at 10 pm because (hopefully) nobody else will be there, so he can pressure her. Many predators become truck drivers and target people in small towns because they can leave quickly and the police won’t pursue the case.
The one thing everyone seems to be overlooking is that this happened at a pharmacy.
Even as a guy, if I saw a bug dude hanging out in the parking lot after hours my line of thought would be that he may have this plan:
1) Go in twice to case the joint.
2) Wait until I’m alone in the parking lot and knock me out cold or hit me with his truck.
3) Steal my store key and steal the oxycodone/vicodin/valium/dexedrine/whatever other pills have a high black market resale value.
There’s a lot of addictive and semi-addictive stuff in a pharmacy store room . They’re a prime target for burglary.
I have to go do something, but I’m just gonna say for now that since I started attempting to present more as female in real life, such as losing weight, growing my hair out, and removing my body hair, I’ve been getting looks from dudes like they want to hold me down and fuck my face.
Other dudes just look like they want to beat me the fuck up for being so obviously non-heteronormative.
Some backstory: I’ve been called a woman before without any prompting on my part, so you can gather that I am obviously already feminine in appearance. I don’t take hormones and don’t even wear breastforms or anything.
I’m genuinely afraid of getting raped now. I never realized it was this bad. I’m pretty strong, but obviously I can’t fight off five dudes at once if they decide they want to gangrape me.
I’ve been looking into getting a handgun.
I have a shotgun already but you can’t just carry that around here.
Also stranger rape is still a significant problem. Stranger rapists might stalk a specific person and wait for her to be somewhere by herself.
Found the murderino.
Murderinos unite! (Is actually listening to an episode right now)
I’m actually trying hard to remember to ‘fuck politeness’ because I’m pretty polite all the time, and really don’t like conflict.
I recently had an experience over texts where I was trying to buy an expensive board game, and the person on the other end didn’t want me to open the box to count what was inside. He called me crazy (for insisting on being able to see what it was I was buying? And wanting to know if this old game reeked of cigarette smoke?) and then I still wished him good luck on selling this because… ??? Like, how do you respond to that? I was annoyed at myself that I was so darned polite. Fuck politeness.
It was a weird experience.
I don’t think he was consciouscly trying to exercice power over underling. It’s both less intentional and creepier.
I think he feel entitled to a girlfriend, and more precisely that there is a magic rote that give him a girlfriend, which is “start talking to a woman, then go on a date, then marry”. His post here is basically “I followed the magic rote but it did not work as expected !”.
The difference with exercing power is that power is exerted on other individual, to make one feel victorious. Here, I don’t think he considered a single moment the woman as an individual. Or even as a specific object, more like a part of the decor.
That’s particulary visible in that he is not angry against the girl, or against the cops, but against the society. AKA he is not even able to grasp that the “cute cashier” is a discrete entity, even less that she could have goals.
I would also point at that quote : “I go out of my way to not be creepy around women”. That mean he think that there is an objective definition of Not Being Creepy. That personal interactions are like basic-level mathematics, with easy to apply formulae that allow one to get the result he want with certainty and minimal work. (see also : the magic script of getting a girlfriend he seem to want to follow). And then, when it fail to work, the childlish cry that the world is “unfair” because the world don’t work the way they think.
Well, a lot of words to say that I have a feeling what he do is worse than deshumanisation and objectification to me. It’s more like that he didn’t realize that there is other conscious entity beside him.
@ lindsayirene
Is that the one that the other subatomic particles don’t talk about?
Murderinos, represent!
@Alan – “Fuck Politeness” and “Stay Sexy, don’t get murdered” are lines from a podcast, My Favourite Murder.
Fans call themselves murderinos. But also fans of true crime in general, maybe? But mostly this podcast.
A shirt with the slogan on it~
@ rhuu
I’ll check that out. And I like the shirt. You’ve probably heard me banging on about “Don’t die of politeness”.
@Fran
I feel you. Although I don’t get the second kind much anymore, on account of I’ve actually got breasts nowadays, and don’t look as androgynous.
@Dali
[returns from her post-workout shower]
Right!
So, ignore this if it’s too personal, but I’m curious now: did you acquire those through surgery or hormones?
Yes, I am sorry to say it IS a bit like this. For the 2 years from 16 – 18 when I had an evening job and got kerb crawled and catcalled A LOT I was constantly aware of the harm that certain men could do to me. This was not helped by there being a serial street rapist in my area who raped about 15 young women before being caught. When he was caught he turned out to be the brother of a boy I was at school with.
@Francesca Torpedo
I’ve been trying to present more feminine too. I don’t notice the exact same things, because the nature of my personal traumas cause me to view men – yes, all men – as a threat whenever they’re closer than about five meters from me. And as a potential threat when they can see me. So I classify them all as “threat” and miss out on such disgusting subtleties as this.
That said…I have felt the same, on the days when I check to see if I can relax. I definitely feel men looking at me, undressing me with their ears, thinking about hurting me. Especially when I make an extra effort to look good, like I normally do when my friends are having a party. A lot of my girl friends are cute, and I like opportunities to really banish dysphoria for a time.
Some of the guys there have been trying to get with me. It’s like…you were creeping on other girls earlier, stay away. You introduced yourself to me by groping me, piss off. You…honored an inconsequential but sweet deal you made with me, but now I’m worried about what you might be trying to get in return. You won’t leave me alone unless I bribe you (And I’m not the only girl who has to resort to this), so you can just stop being a fucking creep. You’ve been trying to walk over me since I met you, and you’re trying to argue semantics about what is rape. And you don’t seem to be getting that I’d rather flay you alive than sleep with you, even though I’ve turned you down numerous times.
Men ignored me when I presented masculine. Now they’re the big threats of my existence. Even with me being 6’5, it’s…ugh.
As for the article, most everyone has already said what needs to be said. If she’s interested enough to roll the dice, she will let you know. Assume anything else is just a store clerk being nice.
@Dalillama & Francesca
I’m on hormones and stuff is growing, but I normally wear a bra so it looks like I have boobs.
Dudes who do this are rapists or want to be rapists. Your instincts are great; this guy is no good.
@Fran
Just starting my second year on hormones.
I’m glad that cashier and/or her co-workers also listened to that feeling of creepiness and called the police. A lot of times I think that women or the people around them brush off that feeling as “being over sensitive” or “paranoid” until something truly bad happens and then everyone acts like “well she should’ve said something”.
When I was in 10th grade one of the guys in my group of friends was in 12th grade and stalked me for almost a year but no one listened to me because he was one of my “friends”. He used to memorize my class schedule and be waiting for me between classes, hug me from behind for no reason and send me all kinds of unsettling emails and notes. Everyone just thought it was cute.
Even my mom said once “Oh if you were older you would like all the attention, you’re just too young to appreciate it right now.” Everyone continued to make excuses for his behavior until I finally showed my mom some of the more unsettling emails he was sending me and told her that I’d asked him to stop and he wouldn’t. Then she banned him from my house but I still had to see him everyday at school and my friends told me not to say anything because they didn’t want to upset the group. It eventually slowed down when he left school and then stopped when I moved away but sometimes I still worry I’ll run into him somewhere.
@IgnoreSandra
CW: MAY CAUSE DYSPHORIA
_______
Well, the reason I asked is because I – and a sizeable amount of MtFs – either can’t or won’t use hormones for different reasons.
Some of us – like the wonderful girl in this blog:
http://manual-trans-mission.tumblr.com
– just don’t respond to hormones at all.
Some of us, like myself, are awful renegade transwomen who don’t have dysphoria about their genitals and would like to keep their dicks, thank you very much.
We would also like our dicks to work, and when you take hormones it’s a crapshoot. Sometimes your machinery will work and sometimes it won’t.
I’m a hypersexual being (when I’m not suffering from acute attacks of depression) and don’t really care to have my machinery fail to operate. I’m not trying to make the discussion about my genitals, either, but I have quite a nice-sized dick and am rather proud of it. There are other transwomen who feel this way as well.
I say “awful renegades” because certain transwomen consider us embarrassments and eyesores and think we’re ”trans-ing wrong”.
I’ve heard my sisters complain about how they sustain awful attacks from other transwomen about how they should just stop trying to be women, how they aren’t ‘real transwomen’, etc etc.
So, for the time being, I belong to the renegade party of transwomen who aren’t doing hormones and probably never will. I’ll give it a shot, but if it causes me erectile dysfunction, I’m out.
I’ve heard of some transwomen who claim HRT gave them bigger and more powerful erections, in which case I’ll probably continue to do the thing, but I’ll have to try it out first. I’ll definitely get surgery to reconfigure my body and probably take hormones just to see what happens, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve found that many of my sisters are upset with how the media and society puts so much pressure on ‘passing’. Most of us are all like, “We don’t pass and don’t really care.” You will find a lot of us calmly discussing our girldicks in our online spaces.
We also like to say that we’re the scary [t-words] that cispeople are afraid of.
http://68.media.tumblr.com/1610b62579fbadc30c2f871f3df390df/tumblr_inline_om7f1nxEp41ttcikh_540.jpg
However, we’re all very nice and respect people’s boundaries. You won’t catch us sexually abusing people in bathrooms.
@Policy of Madness
Yep. He was shut down by me on this topic, then told by the hostess to stop, then told again by the hostess to stop, then a third woman told him to stop talking, then I shut him down again when he continued. A second guy told me to lighten up, he was already on my shit list for being a transphobic misgendering neo-nazi scumbag, but proof he’s a rape apologist is nice too.
Like, none of us wanted to hear it. We were telling him to shut up. But he insisted on going on and proudly announcing to all of us that no one should be so foolish as to bed him.
Kinda like this creeper – he goes out of his way to make sure the cashier sees him as a creep when he could have just gone on with his life. We really don’t want to see men prove their awfulness to us, but they keep insisting on showing it.
@Francesca
Ah. I’m basically non-sexual at the moment, and I’m not sure I ever wanna be sexual again. So I don’t care if my machinery never works. Plus, sex doesn’t necessarily mean penetration. I’ve only been on hormones for four months, so I can’t speak as to whether they inhibit me yet.
I think it’s pretty clear that you can be any kind of transwoman you want. It’s w/e. People’s personal journeys are different.
@ fran
Ha, brilliant.
My friend worked a summer job at a shoe store to help pay for school. A customer refused to accept her service because she was a woman and her boss yelled at her because she didn’t stay polite. The customer was banned from the store, though.
conversely, as I present trans masculine, my creep ratio has gone down Id say 95+%, & it isnt just aging bc the difference when I cut my hair alone was so immediate and stark.
@IgnoreSandra
Is it too much to hope that BOTH the guys in your story are no longer invited to parties?