Sex educator and Philadelphia Weekly columnist Timaree Schmit posted the peculiar document below to Twitter the other day. It was evidently handed to a friend of hers who was innocently making photocopies by some guy who wanted her to know that she had given him a boner and that he felt really really bad about this, because Jesus.
Guys, don’t do this.
Here’s the creeper’s little manifesto; the pic is a little blurry, alas, so I made a slightly less blurry version of the key bits and pasted it below the original.
I already used the nope badger in an earlier post today, so here’s a nope doggo instead.
H/T — @TByrne75 for letting me know about this, thanks!
@kupo
Oh now that you mention it I can’t stop noticing it. He spent that much money on a creepy manifesto and couldn’t even be bothered to make a quality creepazoid pamphlet. I don’t even want to get into the fact that since he’s passing this out in public, and because his letters are shiny, that means any woman who does bother to read this drivel would be blinded by the sun being reflected off the letters. The signature is so lazy, he’s not even trying to make it look unique and instead just made a few squiggles.
Apparently Return of Kings is trying to win converts to Hinduism now:
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=127963
No, not because they like George Harrison or that trippy sitar music. Mostly it’s just because of the caste system. I’m sure sati and purdah are just their cup of tea.
Here’s a joke for you: What did Michael Joseph Merritt say to Andre Du Pole? “Your karma ran over my dogma!”
Wow, that’s creepy.
He definitely put a good deal of effort into these beforehand, and the foil lettering somehow makes it extra creepy. The “dearest damsel” part made me cringe.
—–
‘Dearest’ Creepy Stranger,
When you handed me your foil embossed letter, I got a sinking feeling in the pit my stomach, as if I were about to be sick. Pretty sure it’s disgust and fear, and not a norovirus this time. Reading it has only made me recollect other uncomfortable moments I have had in public, such as the time this other dude on the bus made a point of (unsolicitedly, of course) telling me that I had sexy legs after creepily staring at them for like five minutes. In the future, please keep your God and your boners to yourself, unless specifically asked. No one really wants to hear, or in this case read, it.
KThxBai,
A Concerned Citizen
————-
In other news, noroviruses are not fun. Bleah.
There 2 ressons i can think for this guy to behave like this. But before i say, obviously it not really important which one it is , or even if there something more – because when you give like this to someone it has exactly the same results and never will it be explained to them. So they will feel same.
But i think 1. He really is religious and he too stupid or he listen to bullshit and not realise if god didnt want us to be excited he wouldnt make us so we can. And he truly must be stupid if he think this how to correctly behave if he is. Because this is causing harm to another and if he have insights he should already understand this. Or there is some powerful religious person who make him believe he must do this and he not thinking of his effect to this women.
Or number 2 he just real life troll and he came up with this fucking bullshit to harras people but then because he claiming to be religous he can just lie and say he did only because he believes it correct by god.
But like i already said, not really important which one it is.
Regarding this kind of things though. I dont know about others but if someone get accidentally excited in public, they fucking do not want anyone to know. No fucking one. And will try to hide. Correct? So this guy got to be seeking attention to behave like this. Or he just believe all is about him and this women are not people to him who DONT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.
HAHA…huh? I am amuse/concern/ed.
I’d kind of like to flash-mob/prank this putz with a performance of this (but a woman in the suit and guys in the backup babe dresses):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyNa-ReeZc8
[I couldn’t do it– I think I’m too old and fat to get a notice.]
Also what will he do if he become excited for no reason, like men sometimes do? Will he give the letter to himself? I think not. Because there no satisfaction in making yourself feel uncomfortable.
The *best case* scenario here is that this dude has decided–or perhaps been informed by a mentor–that this is a strategy to combat lust, because by admitting it to people, he is shaming himself and will eventually therefore lust less through punitive reinforcement. I can scrape together a tiny shadow of a doubt that he somehow thinks he means well in all this. HOWEVER.
Even if that’s the case, it’s still a tremendously rotten thing to do, because it foists *his* spiritual battle upon a complete stranger. *He* may feel better, but now *she* feels worse. *He* got a weight off of his chest by loading it onto *her* shoulders. Not okay. Not biblical.
At the worst, this is straight up malicious harassment meant to make women feel uncomfortable. At best, this is bogglingly misguided and still 100% harmful. There is no angle of this that is not deeply skeevy.
I don’t think he’s getting a physical boner at the sight of the women he’s harassing. “Boner” in this context is a metaphor for relating to women as though they are sexual objects, and their attractiveness is their most (or only) important trait.
Let’s say, for example, that we’re discussing beauty standards and how they are harmful and white supremacist in the West. Some guy drops by to inform us that women with no makeup are actually really hot. He probably doesn’t have a raging hard-on, but he’s nevertheless taking a complicated conversation and simplifying it down to whether a specific action that women can take (or not take) is attractive to him personally. We say that he’s updating us on the status of his boner, as a figure of speech.
Boner updates don’t have to be malicious! In my example, the dude in question actually means well and is trying to reassure his audience that they are still attractive even if they don’t wear makeup. The problem is that he’s framing the interaction as though women being attractive is the only important trait they possess, and therefore the best way to make a woman feel happy is to tell her that she’s pretty.
In this case, the guy isn’t trying to make women feel happy, so his boner update letter isn’t well-meaning. But it wouldn’t be benign even if it were. Telling strangers that he’s thinking about them sexually (and only sexually) in a public place is a creepy update on his boner’s status. It is literally a note from a boner.
That is exactly what I thought – he has to draw them into his fantasy further with this ghastly ‘apology’, so know he knows that they know and that is important to his boner.
@Policy Of Madness
That is such a clear explanation of why this is wrong even with the most generous of interpretations. One of the best things about this site is seeing arguments distilled so elegantly and then shamelessly plagiarize next time I want to help someone else who knows something is off but can’t articulate what.
Me: *looks over note*
“So…you wanna fuck, or what?” *snaps gum*
fin.
A bit tangential, but the use of the verb ‘to give’ in this context, as in ‘she gave me a boner’, is very odd if you step back and read it literally. It’s like, ‘Greetings, kind gentlesir. In honour of your steadfast dedication to staring at my ass in the supermarket queue, I bestow upon you this boner. Use it wisely, or not at all.’
(Also, I’ve just discovered that ‘tromboner’ is actually a synonym for ‘trombonist’ and not just a joke from The Simpsons. I am 43 years old but this is still incredibly funny.)
@Policy of Madness
What Wicked Witch of whatever said (see what I did there? :D).
The explainy part if this site is by far the biggest reason why I keep coming back. So much to learn.
I thought I had the part about attractiveness and boner updates understood, but it appears I hadn’t really thought about it enough. Thank you for explaining!
I was kinda getting at the fact that while it’s not well-meaning (as you noted as well) it’s not really malicious either – at least that’s the way it seems to me. And a lot of the other commenters seemed to view it maliciously, as if he got a thrill out of informing women, doing it specifically with the goal to harass.
And it’s just, there are so many horrible ways to harass women cheaper and without leaving proof and your full name that it seems like way too much work to do just to metaphorically fuck with a few women.
I guess it boils down to what kind of experiences you’ve had – I’ve been relatively sheltered and so tend to assume the best and I know from lurking that a lot of the commenters have had really bad things happen to then. Experience modifies your viewpoint.
Which is why I posted my comment – not because I don’t think the viewpoints of others are invalid or wrong or anything, but because I’m trying to understand them, just in case someone read it that way.
CW: sex
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That guy looks like he would be a really boring lay.
Like, “missionary-with-the-lights-off-for-only-4-minutes” boring.
Also, I don’t think he would give it to me. He seems like the type of dude who Only Has Sex With His Own Race [swallows back vomit].
@zaunfink
Maybe it’s because I spent so many years working in customer service. Maybe it’s because I’ve been on the Internet so long. Maybe it’s because I’ve hung out here so long and seen what the manosphere thinks like. But I just can’t see this action in any way that’s not malicious. What would motivate someone to hand these out to strangers if not to punish them in some way? Even the religious angle would be punishment, wouldn’t it? She’s committed a sin by being a cause for lust, so he needs to make her aware. Even if he’s taking some advice from a mentor — let’s say someone told him to control his lust by apologizing to the woman and to god. Even with that advice to decide to print these up, sign them, and hand them out, that is no longer about him or the advice. I just can’t see a non-malicious motivation for this.
@kupo
Yeah, a little over five years in customer service has made me suspicious, too. The worst was a guy who tried to follow a coworker out after she got off shift. One of the weirdest was a guy who’s goal seemed to be to make us say the word “wet,” and when I naively fell into his trap the look he gave me made me want to rush home and take a shower. Then there was the guy on the phone who insisted I sounded like this girl he knew in high school, who he made a point of saying was an exotic dancer now. I don’t even remember the ‘real’ excuse he gave for calling us. Like, dude, tmi, and totally irrelevant to my job, here.
@Faerie Bard
I got the whole range from guys explicitly telling me they’re playing with themselves (hit the emergency record button on that one and management didn’t care), guys trying to get me to keep talking while I could hear it in the background but could do nothing, guys telling me how sexy I sound, flirting with me, asking what I’m wearing, you name it. Then there were the guys who would get incredibly angry about getting a woman, since we’re not supposed to know anything about electronics, or who would scream at me for making them feel dumb by doing my job and helping them get their electronics working again (BTW I was always sympathetic even if it was a silly mistake and would reassure them when they started to go down that path by letting them know that this was a really common mistake, everyone does it, etc.). Men who feel entitled to women’s attention are the worst.
I’m actually with kupo et. al. here. While he may not be consciously intending to harass women, his action is harassment anyway. It is making total strangers aware that he finds them sexually pleasing. Note the language on the letter: “I deemed you to be fair.” And then he signed it with his full name. He’s making damned sure that any woman he noticed at the gas station notices him back. He is ensuring that she thinks about him for at least a few seconds, and, depending on how bothered she was by the unsolicited boner update, that she thinks about him and his boner later, too.
He clearly knows that he has a problem with intrusive sexual thoughts, because he’s printed up a supply of these letters to apologize for them. He’s ensuring that his intrusive thoughts intrude on others as well. That’s harassment, and we need not interrogate what his intentions were with the letter to conclude that he is harassing women. Harassment is inherently malicious in nature, so I conclude that his actions are malicious, regardless of his intentions. At the most charitable, he has elected not to bother to think about how his letter is going to affect the women to whom he gives it.
Hey, any tech support call I make that doesn’t end up with some difficult to understand accent… yay! I swear, some of these tech support people don’t even bother to try to speak English.
Or whoever writes the damned script for one of the companies I dealt with… Every time I answered a question. “Thank you for that information” in exactly the same bored intonation. It always required at least 10 questions to do anything, and it wasn’t the same person every time.
Boner notes are so pervasive and normalized in our culture that we often just don’t even notice it. But once you do start noticing it, you can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere.
Even men who are not raging misogynists feel the need to constantly give their opinions on women’s appearance. It’s incredibly common for men to introduce their wives as “my beautiful wife” while it’s pretty rare for women to introduce their husbands as “my beautiful husband” or “my handsome husband.”
I hate it. A lot of it seems like such a small thing so of course you’re the no fun feminist if you bring it up. But even though a lot of this stuff seems minor, it isn’t. It’s part of how women are objectified. When women are seen as decorative objects first and foremost, it leads directly to the more serious sexual harassment and to sexual assault and rape. It feeds into the discrimination that women face at work or school based on appearance, extra for women who aren’t white and cishet. Even the seemingly benign unsolicited commentary on our appearance enables the dehumanization of women.
I remember seeing an interviewer with a street harasser. He said that God put women on this earth to give men something nice to look at so he didn’t see anything wrong with shouting his boner notes at women. It just didn’t even occur to him that we’re human beings going about our lives. Nope, we’re just beauty objects for him.
The notion that women are meant to serve as the sexual class is just one of the most stubborn aspects of patriarchy. I honestly don’t think there’s been any improvement on this since feminism started. Sure, sexual harassment and rape are technically illegal but usually men get with harassment and rape and women are blamed for being the victim of them. It’s not remotely socially unacceptable to act like women exist to be beautiful and if we fail to perform beauty, we’re committing a grave sin. It’s very frustrating.
It’s the fault of the companies for outsourcing their customer service. Not the workers. I know it’s frustrating that it takes forever to get to someone who can effectively communicate with you and give you answers to your questions that aren’t off of a script. But it’s not like they’re having thick South Asian accents at you.
Can be just because I work with people from India and Philipines, but I never have trouble with this kind of accent. Indian people working for centers like this always have good english, better than my, just that their superiors there tell them they must to only answer in one way. And Filipino people usually also very good on english, especially younger generation like 40 and below. I call before in Philipines for support for windows and she help me exactly how I need before. But I don’t know, can be that this just my personal experience. There nothing wrong with saying you cant understand some accent. Just now in Charleston I have big trouble understanding this ‘southern’ US accent. Bunker surveyor sounded like he is not even speaking english. But also you can not blame someone, definately not if english is their second language and also if they doing shit job like listening people complain about problem and working on shifts. No fun (((
@Valentine
Yeah from what I’ve read the customer service industry is a complete perversion of anything resembling service to the customer. It’s already people terrible for both the employee and customer in the US, I can’t imagine how much worse it is for people in other parts of the world.
@Valentine
I was just about to say something similar, for similar reasons.
Most of my family is from outside the United States, so I’ve never had a problem with discerning people who speak with heavy accents.
Also, has anyone told you how astonishingly handsome you are? 😉