Thursday, October 30, 2014

A necessary PSA after a fight I clearly shouldn't have wasted so much time on:

If you think that you are, or anyone is, entitled to the one-on-one attention of any perfect stranger on the street, even if their body language is in total "leave me alone" mode, for anything other than a true act of kindness such as "Excuse me, you dropped something" or holding a door for them, whether they be male, female, anywhere in between, extraterrestrial humanoid, minor, grown-up, whatever, don't care -- you're not a good person and I don't want to associate with you anymore. Especially if I already specified that it's A-OK if the person is ambling at a relaxed pace and is clearly in an open, engaging state of mind. 

Oh, and stop acting like women can't tell the difference between a simple hello and "hello" with the elevator eyes and *that* tone of voice. We KNOW.

If we have a 45 minute long discussion in which you get more and more heated when I continue asserting that nobody, not even you, precious snowflake, is entitled to anyone else's one-on-one attention on the street, and you say I should not bother because "everyone has problems" or because men are more likely to be physically assaulted than women, so women's defense mechanisms against street harassment are a pathology rather than a conditioned, valuable tool of self preservation, and you say I'm selfishly trying to impose my will on the masses -- I don't want to associate with you.

If I carefully, consistently use gender-neutral language except in cases where it's statistically determined that reported levels of an offense, namely harassment, are higher in instance of male-on-female than vice versa, and you insist that I'm sexist against men and that I don't care about violence and harassment against men, even though I fully acknowledge that harassment of men is a problem albeit statistically one which happens in lower numbers, and I hope that all levels of harassment go down -- Do not let the door hit you in your ass on the way out.

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