And the Creepy Boss of the Week Award goes to … this dude posting on Reddit

My favourite part was the commenter at the bottom that asked them to work less and just post more fat shaming content. Like, that’s content they were looking for.

ugh

humans

On the other hand, if nobody ever approaches anyone, then relationships can’t start.

Right now we seem to have a somewhat crappy place-based system, where approaches are socially accepted in some places (mainly, bars) and generally not in others (mainly, nearly everywhere else). Obviously, this has problems, especially for people without lots of money (alky is expensive, bars don’t tend to be next door to residences and car travel is expensive, and public transit is very annoying and slow and only somewhat less expensive).

I was going to suggest maybe we should update the old, somewhat broken ring based system we use (which hasn’t changed since back when “isn’t wearing an engagement/wedding ring, nor a nun’s wimple, nor a priest’s collar, equals available”, before “going steady” long before engagement was a thing, and which expects everyone to have even more money to spend than the “meet-in-bars” system does). Perhaps a pink or red ring for “available for the ladies”, blue for “available for the men”, and some third option (green?) for “available for trans/nonbinary/other” … or something.

Advantages include: can take off/put on at any time, when one would/would not welcome approaches; if only the color and being on the ring finger of the left hand matters, then any cheap bit of plastic will suffice, so nobody is economically excluded; can be extended to be more inclusive if need be; obviates strategies that amount to lying involving bogus wedding ring/hiding same, other than if you really do want to lie; and creeps would no longer have any excuse for making/having made an unwanted approach.

Disadvantages include: colorblindness could be a problem, but shapes or writing aren’t anywhere near as readily readable from a distance — maybe a which-finger code? Also, the system isn’t that helpful until it’s near-universal, and would take time to saturate.

Then someone beat me to it with some similar system involving earrings, which has the same advantages and one additional disadvantage: everyone who wants to date would need to get pierced, and then to keep the holes closing up there’d have to be “neutral” earrings for wearing at all other times. Earrings are also a hazard if they get snagged on anything and yanked hard as a result. Finger rings have fewer problems, and are already sort of used for this purpose, but in an obsolescent (and classist) way that just could use an update.

“Right now we seem to have a somewhat crappy place-based system, where approaches are socially accepted in some places (mainly, bars) and generally not in others (mainly, nearly everywhere else). ”

Really now? Are we talking specifically of strangers approaching others with sexual/romantic intentions?

I don’t see why we should have a system for that. It really shouldn’t be a thing at all for that matter.

“Disadvantages include: colorblindness could be a problem, but shapes or writing aren’t anywhere near as readily readable from a distance — maybe a which-finger code? Also, the system isn’t that helpful until it’s near-universal, and would take time to saturate.”

How about having to think who may or may not get in my pants every time I leave my damn house?

On the other hand, if nobody ever approaches anyone, then relationships can’t start.

Bullshit. I enter into relationships all the time that were not predicated on hitting on strangers. I go places to make friends, and make friends. I go to work, and have relationships with all of my co-workers. I post on message boards – I have relationships of various types with all y’all. I go to social events and have relationships with the people I meet there.

People who are not me go to church, a time-honored way to meet other people.

I know that what you mean is romantic relationships, and you’re being inexact, but a romantic relationship can grow out of any other type of relationship.

Additionally, we have dating operations, and always have. Once upon a time, it was common for young people looking for a romantic relationship to attend dances or other community functions explicitly to meet other people. Today we have online dating and in-person dating organizations that serve the same function. Not all of them charge money.

So this “If I’m not allowed to hit on strangers, the human race will die out!” argument needs to die itself. It isn’t true and never has been.

Actually, North America seems to be a poor place to meet people, period. Unless you have money. Nobody here believes in decent tax-funded affordable public transit; clubs you can join either want money or your devotion to Christ; pretty much every non-work venue where people are open to meeting new people is either expensive or a private gathering of friends-of-friends (raising a chicken and egg problem); and, of course, workplace friendships mostly would arise among people with actual careers, so middle class and above. At a McJob everyone’s overworked and rushed, so there isn’t much time for conversation and getting to know people, and of course the turnover is so high you won’t have a single coworker in common with your self of a few months ago. If you’re unemployed, forgeddaboudit.

Even networking through friends won’t work if they mostly avoid you because you’re inconvenient to accommodate, because someone else always has to make transportation arrangements for you to visit with them or go somewhere with them, and you can’t afford to buy your own tickets to $(EXPENSIVE_EVENT) they all want to attend, and you never take a turn to host any gatherings due to lack of money and living space at your digs, and your random and unpredictable work hours make it impossible to coordinate plans with you, and so forth, so even that is basically out of the question for the below-middle-class.

And of course since 2008 the economy has been in the shitter, with a very significant fraction of the population lacking a career or a career-track middle class job.

School is, I suppose, an option for people without workplace prospects for meeting friends, but of course that costs an arm and a leg these days.

So, basically, in North America meeting new people other than “strangers in bars” is limited to the middle class and to those, mostly also middle class, who can get existing friends or family to introduce them to new people, who can introduce them to more new people, and so on. And then there’s that chicken-and-egg problem again.

How many people in North America are not middle class or above, have nobody they know who lives close to them due to having been uprooted and moved recently (chasing jobs, most likely) or for any other reason, and are therefore stuck that way? A million or more? I doubt the number is much smaller than a million.

If anything, what this says is the earring/ring thing needs to be expanded for people seeking plain old (non-online-only) friendship, if we don’t want to make that the exclusive province of people who can afford car payments, plane tickets, and suchlike. With so many people these days barely able to keep their rent paid up, utilities connected, and food on the table, I can’t agree with maintaining the current “barriers to entry” to meeting new people, whether for romantic purposes or non-.

Actually, North America seems to be a poor place to meet people, period. Unless you have money. Nobody here believes in decent tax-funded affordable public transit

WHAT!?
NO, you do not hit on people on the bus!
For crying out loud, do we have to tell people this in the year 2017?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that if a woman wears whatever jewelry that signifies that she’s interested in possibly being approached, a man approaches her and she turns him down and then he sexually assaults her, she will be blamed for wearing slutty jewelry.

If we did have this jewelry code in place, women would learn very quickly that men will decide that if a woman is okay with being approached, that she isn’t allowed to turn down any man that approaches her ever and it is unlikely that many women will be willing to wear that jewelry. Then men would just complain about how there were no women willing to give men a chance.

In other words, dating culture wouldn’t change at all. Women would still be mean prudes for saying no. Sluts and whores for saying yes and saying yes to one men means she has to say yes to all men or she’s a slut and a mean prude all at once.

I did not suggest approaching people on the bus! The public transit would be to get around to places where meeting people might, or might not, happen.

The point was that people below about the bottom edge of middle-class have usually a small travel radius, and many other obstacles in the path to meeting new people for any purpose (not just sex, or even just romantic relationships).

Unfortunately that seems to have been misread.

Also, I never claimed that I was in such a situation. I’m not sure how that got read into it either.

What is certain is that many people in North America are limited in their access to meeting-people opportunities, particularly those who live in smaller cities. I doubt very many cities under 100,000 in population have comic book stores, for instance. In the very big cities (NYC, Toronto, LA, Atlanta, etc.; not so sure about in Mexico) I’d expect there to be some, but then there’s the question of transit quality and accessibility. It’s probably not so bad in a metropolis with a subway. It’s probably iffy in a mid-size city with a bus system with more than 2 routes. It’s very doubtful in a town or smaller city to easily get about, or that it will have very much beyond “ordinary” or “non-social” retail (shoes, clothes, food, household items, furniture, hairdresser, etc.), a few bars and restaurants, a multiplex, and possibly a nightclub or two.

I’ve seen bigger cities and I’ve seen little ones. The little ones look like they could easily isolate people without sufficient money to regularly travel to the nearest big one, or a substantial existing network of friends. And that’s aside from the other isolating impacts of lack of money and/or of wonky and changeable work hours, both of which go with the territory of being below the middle class.

When I plugged the names of three towns within 100 miles of my city into Meetup.com I found nothing, nor did a facebook search reveal promising group names (e.g. Singles, , etc.), nor did a Google Street View stroll down their main streets suggest any promising venue. (Nope, that includes no comic book stores). Populations 15,000, 14,000, and 8000. Only the largest one had a bus stop sign that I noticed, and that had no route numbers printed on it, so probably the three towns combined have a single hourly bus with a circular path through the densest suburb and the main street of the largest one.

What Google Street View did show was low rent looking apartment blocks and tract houses near the peripheries of all three, and a single McDonalds on each main street, so there’s no doubt there are people with McJob-level or poorer employment/socioeconomic status in each town.

My point here is that anyone who says it’s easy to meet people may be exhibiting a touch of class privilege, or perhaps in some cases a sort of “urban privilege” (though, with the prices I’ve seen listed and recent reading about gentrificiation issues and other things, being able to afford so much as a bachelor pad in downtown anywhere-big-enough-to-have-a-comic-book-store probably is class privilege now, unless it’s rent controlled and you’ve lived there since the 80s).

As for what prompted this research, it was a Guardian article a while back about how neoliberalism was spreading an “age of loneliness”. It troubled me so I sought to look into just how bad the problem could possibly really be, and the answer was: Quite bad, if you wound up in one of those smaller cities without a middle class job, and probably not great if you wound up in even a large city without such a job.

In closing I would like to reemphasize that I absolutely do not support approaching people who do not wish to be approached. I was under the impression that some such approaches come from people being intentionally abusive, but others do not, and a clearer way of differentiating the two would be useful, especially if it meant the latter source of unwanted approaches vanished entirely (some unwanted approaches gone is surely better than none?) but perhaps not. I do see WWTH’s point that there might end up being no improvement to the problem, except perhaps to eliminate unwanted approaches that were not predatory in intent — though if no woman would end up signaling willingness to be approached, then we’d be fully back to the status quo ante. (And yet, women do go to singles bars…)

Perhaps there’s no solution short of a complete and total smashing of the patriarchy?

And perhaps the friendship problem, to the extent it likely exists in at least smaller cities and towns, has no solution short of a Scandinavian scale welfare state with widespread public transit (including affordable intercity trains), more affordable housing and utilities, and a higher minimum standard of living that gives everyone, from the lowliest unemployed person or McEmployee up, enough discretionary income after necessities are paid for to splurge on occasional travel, or tons of gear from Sportchek or the comic book store or whatever fits their interests, or membership fees for various things.

But somehow I don’t see either of those things happening on this continent especially soon.

Let me get this straight. First, someone else mentions an idea, which at the time nobody criticizes. Then I elaborate upon the same idea, and somehow suddenly it’s a misogynistic idea (despite being gender-neutral, and indeed not heteronormative or trans-erasing). And now, you don’t read what I wrote, admit that you didn’t read what I wrote, assume that I wrote certain things (when in fact I didn’t write anything remotely resembling those things), and then criticize the heck out of those things, concluding with “fuck you for suggesting it”?

I will state for the record one more time:

– I do not suggest sacrificing anybody’s quality of life.

– I do suggest that social isolation is likely to be a problem for people in lower socio-economic brackets in North America, due to a complex of factors that include poor and expensive transportation options and a lack of social venues in lower income areas, especially outside of major metropoles.

– I do not pretend to know a full and complete solution to the problem, but I certainly would not recommend any that replaced the class oppression noted in the Guardian article with sexual or any other kind of oppression.

I’ll drop this entire subject now, because for some reason it doesn’t seem to be possible to communicate about it without being misunderstood.

Hello.

I do not know if someone aleady post it (cause i can not see some pictures – except for the lovely cat ones in general – must be a cat conspiracy, for sure), but this person ranting makes me thing to this :

“You are tearing me apart, Jenifer !”

> Katz

But that sounds like an awful situation where anyone not interested in a relationship is constantly forced to turn down unwanted offers.

I do not know if it is still an actual thing, but network computer nerds would tell it is a “Windows situation”, by opposition to a “Linux” one, because in Linux, by default all ports are closed and you just open the ones you want to communicate through, while in Windows, by default, all ports are opened, and you have to shut down those you do not want accessed, often receiving a pop up message each time something tries to go through a port without a open/close setting (unwanted offers, then).

Have a nice day.

@Surplus
I think you’re talking about a real problem, that being loneliness, and like most problems it affects people without resources more than it affects people with resources…the trouble is it feels like you’re shoehorning that problem into this situation. Douchey bosses aren’t lonely and telling people they shouldn’t hit on coworkers and especially subordinates does nothing to increase the problem of loneliness in general society. If anything, limiting hit-on areas would help because people would feel more comfortable being around others that they don’t know very well.

I don’t think you’re talking about a non-issue, but I think you’re talking about it in the wrong place.

Thank you, PoM. I was making myself dizzy rolling my eyes at how a creepy boss somehow got translated into sad boners of non-boss people. Thank you for shooing away that teal deer.