So no one has ever “hit on you” with the intention of getting to know you as a person, and maybe actually have a relationship with you? It’s always just to objectify you?
There’s “hitting on” women, and there’s “having a conversation with a woman that you happen to also find attractive.”
Edit because I’m not even through my first cup of tea: Let me put it to you this way. It is entirely possible that some people on this BBS find me attractive. I’ve posted pictures before. But I don’t know about it because the people here choose to have conversations with me instead of commenting on how attractive they find me. That’s the difference.
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If they have, maybe they should figure out an approach that doesn’t leave the person they are talking to feeling objectified, robbed of agency, and reminded that their desires don’t matter.
There’s no point in arguing with how your actions make other people feel.
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That’s great. Hopefully, you deploy that on a regular basis with your men friends. I think this has been a major part of the problem, guys often won’t call out their friends on such behavior, even if they warn women in their lives away from them. In many ways, this is a key aspect of the problem, getting men to help police other them.
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To answer your questions in order: no and yes. Hitting on women is a power play centered around the male’s desires, not the female’s. It’s a situation where the male has decided that the female shall have his attention and that she shall appreciate it. There’s no agency for the woman involved in this interaction.
Now, let me ask you a couple questions. Do you wolf whistle or cat call random women on the street? Have you ever commanded a random woman to smile in a public space?
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Once you stop the immediate bad behavior the next step is telling them to find a new friend.
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So kinda tangential, but heard an interview with Run the Jewels a coupla hours ago. Both Killer Mike and El-p were saying they tell men at their shows to keep their hands to themselves because they “grew up with sisters” and “no-one goes to a show to get groped”. I’d suggest that’s the case whether audience members are topless or not. And I now greatly respect both members of Run the Jewels and appreciate their being allies.
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No, and no. However, I have talked to women I don’t know in public, without objectifying them or taking away their agency.
There’s also no point in arguing when you’ve pre-determined how you’re gong to feel.
Which feminazi wimmens do all the time, amirite? /s
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There’s a lot of room for me to misread this statement, but what it seems to me to suggest is that I’ve brought a fixed emotion-based position to this discussion and so there is no point in arguing with me.
If that’s what you meant, then perhaps I didn’t explain my point very well.
You have been told by someone with direct experience that being “hit on” is a dehumanizing experience. That is the thing there is not point arguing with, there’s no logical point to be made about whether or not that was their experience.
Now you can do all sorts of things with that information, just a very quick list off the top of my head (certainly not intended to be exhaustive):
- Decide to never hit on anyone again because you might make someone feel dehumanized
- Believe, based on your perception of how women feel, that women don’t dislike being hit on, and so this person must be an extreme outlier, not really worth changing your behaviour for
- Decide you don’t really care about that anyway, or that the harm of making the occasional person feel belittled is justified by the importance of men being able to hit on women
- Draw dire conclusions that civilization would grind to a halt if men stopped hitting on women
- Assume that what you mean by “hit on” (maybe catcalls?) and what they mean by “hit on” (pleasantly strike up a conversation?) might not be the same thing and conclude that what you do is just fine
- Instead of assuming what you do is just fine (i.e. option 3 above), ask people you’ve hit on whether you made them feel bad by doing so, then try to adjust your behaviour
- Read articles written by women about being hit on to try to understand what might distinguish “hitting on” (as a negative term) from the positive “hitting on” you are imagining
I don’t know you, so I have no idea which, if any of those, you’d be inclined towards.
Tone on the internet is a tricky thing, when you wrote:
It seemed to me as though you were challenging the notion that being hit on was a degrading experience for a particular individual who said they thought it was. That seemed to me like an odd thing to challenge. Challenging the idea that there is something wrong with men hitting on women in general is something that could be done with reason (I don’t think it could be sucessfully done, but that’s another thing). But challenging an individual on their reported experience suggests you don’t think such an individual could exist.
If we change the question around a bit and instead ask:
“Do you think that in this world there is at least one man who have engaged in behaviour that they would describe as “hitting on women” whose behaviour was appreciated at least one woman who was being hit on?”
“Hit on” means different things to different people. Different people react differently to different situations. Somewhere out there there is a happy loving couple that started with “hitting on” that went over spectacularly well. It’s a big world, so I really don’t think anyone doubts that (and having granted that that has certainly happened, I’m not going to engage in debate over how common it is unless exactly how common it is is somehow important).
But @IronEdithKidd said that being hit on was degrading. Challenging that or being incredulous at it feels really bizarre to me. Like the idea that there’s even one woman out there who doesn’t like being hit on is such a shock that it can’t be tolerated, when it seems to me that it ought to be as obvious and uncontroversial and my idea that there’s someone out there who is happy they were hit on.
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Just checked my own comments, and I didn’t say that. In our fabulous patriarchal society, there are deeper meanings to the interactions men force upon women in public. He doesn’t want to understand that he hasn’t at all considered whether or not the women he hits on desire his attention. It appears he doesn’t care so long as his own desires are sated. To that I’ll simply add that sometimes women, fearing for their safety, will indulge a rando for a short time, but only to make him go away faster.
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Sorry about putting words in your mouth. I misunderstood you.
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Um…
Merely ignoring problems never resolves them, not in my experience.
Not responding at all just reinforces the fallacious idea that assault (ie, any unsolicited physical contact) is ‘no big deal.’
Immediate repudiation is an appropriate response to bad behavior.
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For real. My dad was of the “just ignore them and they’ll get bored” school of dealing with bullies/harassment. In my experience, 95% of them just escalate until they DO get a reaction.
I mean, I once successfully ignored two guys following me home from school and spitting in my hair. So they knocked me down, ripped off my shoes, and threw them onto a nearby roof.
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Same here.
‘Just ignoring’ bad behavior is how you end up with a complicit clusterfuck like the Weinstein scandal.
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Story of my life. Social anxiety disorder made me assume that by default.
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Follow up:
Addendum: being topless in public is legal in NZ. For everyone.
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