It's Different for Girls

Those do indeed matter. As Louis CK artfully explains, as a white male, you can't even hurt my feelings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY

It's almost impossible for me, as person advantaged by society, to fathom the death-by-a-thousand-papercuts feeling that people who are less advantaged experience. I've tried a lot, for years, and I regularly fail. Just today, I read a great piece titled, "Calling the White Man's Police": http://tressiemc.com/2014/05/02/calling-the-white-mans-polic...

And another little bit fell into place for me. Yes, around here, they are effectively they white man's police. There are a number of factors around calling the police that I never thought about because I never had to. Because I'm white and educated and articulate and I've been well off for long enough that I have a lawyer who I can afford to pay.

It would be easy for me to think trolling is an awesome way of bonding with everyone because my life is pretty swell. I can hear offensive things and not sweat it because I'm safe. But for people whose regular experience is a lack of safety, hearing offensive things is entirely different. Then, an offensive comment isn't necessarily an endearing reminder of cameraderie, it's often a glaring reminder of inequality.

That's not to say I won't engage in clever banter. But I am very careful when it crosses lines of privilege or trauma. As John Scalzi says, "The failure mode of clever is asshole." http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-c...

> The really sad thing about is that the vast majority of guys I talk to about this topic are simply not aware that women, especially attractive women, go through stuff like this all the time. So when they hear women complaining about discrimination, harassment, glass ceilings, and so on, they think those women are simply "being bitchy." Which simply perpetuates and intensifies the status quo.

Assuming not all (attractive) women will publicly or privately complain about such behaviors by men, will the others submit to such behaviors by the men in those positions? Will some women complain (public/privately) and still submit to such behaviors, and what circumstances is that more likely to happen? And is that act submission more socially accepted than say, if the sexes were reversed?

Tangent: I wonder if such things could be analytically studied? Some one could mine sites like HN, twitter, etc for a signal. Check the various states of the author of such. But then it would be hard to match that with the outcomes of submitting to such behavior or not without some kind of surveillance.

Meta: My tangent makes me really wonder what the world could be like where the current information asymmetry when it comes to present and technically possible surveillance systems, did not exist, where nearly everyone could leverage such scale of information in the same way that nearly everyone can leverage the atmosphere to breathe…

Edit: So I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted since I'm not trying to lead any bias towards any group that could be placed on either side of the interactions, It could be Martian's propositioning some being from Alpha Centauri system. Is pondering a way to study such things (and how one could even approach to) so controversial such that no one will respond yet shame at the same time? It's like we're not even allowed to try to explore what is going on. We all must trout out more anecdota, spout out more faux outrage about what has been going on (we're all apart of the status quo, and even with the internet outrage we haven't progressed very far in understanding it seems, who could have guessed…), and damn everything else. Anyone going to propose another reason to refute that's not what's going on here? Maybe someone can point me to a place where I could attempt to frame such ideas/questions/ways to approach studying such things and doesn't cost $xx,000 per year, since apparently, HN isn't for such. Amusing HN…

>That they have a knee-jerk reaction to the word "patriarchy" and dismiss anyone who uses it? That they idea of "allies training" is somehow repulsive and unfair?

When ideological lingo is used to communicate, it's going to, right or wrong, cause some folks to stop reading.

Yeah. Street harassment is another thing like that. E.g., I naively assumed that my girlfriend's experience going out and running alone was exactly like my experience when I was with her. Until she started telling me about the frequent whistles, comments, and sexual propositions she would receive.

It just didn't happen when I'm around, because people who are jerks and abusers are, unsurprisingly, very crafty in doing it only in contexts when they are unlikely to get called on it. So male perception of this bullshit is almost totally unrelated to how much it happens.

As an aside, it made me really happy to come across a poster last week for the #stoptellingwomentosmile campaign: https://twitter.com/williampietri

Attractive woman are going to have such problems as a matter of course. Men are attracted to woman primarily based on their looks and confident men are going to act on their desires. If you are an attractive woman and want to do business under such potential circumstance, then your best bet is to try to make yourself look unattractive. You can't have it both ways. You can't lure a client with your looks and then always expect totally platonic behavior from them. And if instead, you just want to pin all the blame on men for being pigs and expect them to change, well good luck with that. Mother Nature quite clearly has other designs.