And now for a change, saying what I actually think

[sqbr]

So, last week, pretty much at random, I came across a relative stranger complaining about sexual harassment. From a guy I know.

My first thought was "Wait, really?"
My second was "Actually, that is pretty consistent with what I've seen of his behaviour around women"

And I had this moment when I stopped and was struck (as I have been before) of how hypocritical it is for me to talk about standing up for what's right etc when there are so many people I'm on good terms who consistently behave in a horrible way(*) to other people (but not me) That while I may make a token bleat of complaint every now and then when people say or do objectionable things, it's always in a non-confrontational way, and I back off if they get too narky, making me in some ways more complicit with their actions than those who say nothing.

But after angsting for a bit...I got over it and moved on.

And then it happened again. Different guy. Different stranger. Different context. Same complete lack of surprise or disbelief.

Which just...argh. Enough is enough.

So, I don't know what I'm going to do about it. For a start I'll try harder to learn not to collapse in a heap when in a confrontational situation, but I think I need to suck it up and learn to let people dislike me.

I'm not going to say who either of them are because
(a) That would be wanky and cowardly, unless I was willing to confront them about it in private and let them defend themselves, which I'm not (yeah, ok, so I am still pretty cowardly)
EDIT:Also, please no speculation in the comments for similar reasons.
(b) I like the idea of letting anyone who reads this and thinks I might be talking about them stew(**), and making everyone else think about the issue in general rather than focussing on individual cases (especially given the fact that you may be quite happy to confront those particular guys, but have other people whose crap you put up with)

So if you are reading this, and you know your behaviour makes women uncomfortable, and you do it anyway? And you can think of several women who might rant to strangers about the way you harassed them? Stop it.

There's no "Or I'll.." after that. Stop it because it's wrong.

And if you know guys like that, or other people who act in ways which make those around them miserable, and you put up with it...why do you put up with it?

And if you don't, got any tips on how to deal with the fallout? :)

EDIT: A few things:

1) Something people have pointed out which I ignored was the fact that speaking up can get you in a mess of trouble, not just from the guy being a bit rude, but from all his friends if noone agrees with your interpretation, and maybe even physical danger etc depending on context. All I'm saying is that even when it is safe and we know other people agree with us, we still say nothing, and that is bad. But other times? Saying nothing may be your best bet.
2)I'm not saying we should 100% ostracise everyone who does an individual horrible thing. Everyone screws up sometimes.. That said, just because someone is mostly nice doesn't mean we should let individual bad actions slide, even if we don't like the person making the accusation etc.
3)I'm not talking about guys who make everyone around them miserable by accident. I do think they need to be confronted, but in a different way. Though as strangedave points out, a lot of skeezy guys are in denial about just how unpleasant they are to be around, so the distinction isn't very clear.

Also, in my experience fandom/unisfa's overall approach is to ostracise/pick on people who do socially unacceptable things (the same way they would treat someone who was just really annoying) which
(a) Doesn't always make it clear to the person why they're being excluded, and easily blurs into cliqueyness (ie standards are higher/lower based on the person's popularity and likability)
(b) Doesn't do much good if the person brazenly ignores the social pressure, since people often don't actively stand up to individual actions.

In my opinion people need to stop the vague teasing etc, and decide as a group that certain kinds of behaviour aren't acceptable in a given context (the unisfa room, swancon, someone's house or lj etc), and if people persist then kick them out unless/until they're willing to stop.

Second cowardly act: I've been feeling intermittently bad at answering email etc lately, so I may be crap at comments for a bit. But I needed to get this off my chest before I lost my nerve. Also, it hopefully goes without saying that I may not be my usual patient self with people who start ...crap in the comments.

*hopes I am not setting myself for a buncha flames*

(*)Sexual harassment is totally not the only issue where this comes up, mind you, it's just the one that was really driven home to me recently
(**)Though I know that if I was a guy I'd be the sort to be automatically paranoid that this was somehow about me, even though I wouldn't fit the description I just gave. So to such guys I say: sorry for the uncertainty, hope it's not too stressful, it's ok, I don't mean you :)

Comments

[volandum.livejournal.com]

On (**), would the relevant guys, on the other hand, simply consider the topic irrelevant to them?

[alias_sqbr]

Quite possibly. Still, I feel better for saying something (venting being half the point of having an lj, after all) and it might generate thought/discussion in the other people in my position.

Also, this gives me something to point to if later on they're all "Wait, why are you complaining about this all of a sudden?" :)

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

Seems unlikely.

[capnoblivious.livejournal.com]

Sorry - more information.

I'm a nice enough guy - I think - but I am concerned about what people think of me and I can't imagine any guy that wants to be thought of as sleazy or skeezy. So when someone says, "someone's behaviour was unacceptable but I'm not saying who," it gives me a bit of a spur to consider my own behaviour - "am I doing ok? I think so..."

Thing is, I need to do this questioning, because I am rock-solid certain that I won't be told if I cross the skeeziness line - I'll just find my friends have moved away from me. I agree with alias - it's often easier to ignore and thus condone bad behaviour than confront it. People won't tell you if you're behaving badly. But they won't like it, and they won't like you.

One doesn't know and has no real way of knowing, short of asking. And even then, it's hard to trust the answer.

I've been wondering since alias posted this whether to say anything - the environment of silent condemnation but visible condoning is an unpleasant one for all concerned. I think blokes in general and nice ones in particular would benefit from clearer rules and boundaries around appropriate behaviour. The benefits for women are obvious - the benefits to men are more subtle, but very much there.

[cupidsbow.livejournal.com]

I find it very hard to deal with these kinds of situations too.

The one I've been most aware of as a bystander is racism. As a white person, I'm often left flailing about how to show support or intervene without totally destroying the face of the person being attacked. It would be different with people I know, but when it's strangers and I'm an outsider... I still haven't figured this one out. :(

All the best with your new approach; you have my support for what that's worth. I'd love to know if you find anything that works.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, I'm still working my way through "Confronting people 101", dealing with strangers is too advanced for me right now :)

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

If a person like this happens to be on my friends list and it turns out that this is their typical behaviour, I defriend them. I can think of a few examples, and they tend to be one of those 'can't you take a JOKE' type people. One I have defriended twice.

Are you by chance speaking about someone who made a 'guest' appearance on hollaback oz?

[mexicanjewlizrd.livejournal.com]

http://fliboing.livejournal.com/122969.html

[alias_sqbr]

Oops. *adds "And please no speculation in the comments" clause I should have had there to start with*

So...no comment.

Anyway: I think friending/defriending for me is just a symptom of a larger issue I have with always responding positively to everyone who is sincerely friendly towards me, regardless of the context. But I have certainly steeled myself to defriend people more in future, as well as holding commenters to a higher standard (my lj, my rules, after all)

[davyd.livejournal.com]

Failure to communicate and confront can be a real issue.

One persons failure to communicate - this may be verbal or somatic - may make another person feel uncomfortable (even though Person 1 did not mean this). Person 2 continues to sit there and feel uncomfortable but without confronting or communicating their discomfort to Person 1, so Person 1 never realises.

It can be something so simple too: bad body language, lewd jokes, seemly wandering eyes (often due to insecurity with eye contact), accidental violations of personal space. The socially inept can often fail to identify where the boundary with each person they interact is positioned.

I also think it's an issue transcending of gender, affecting all pair-interactions. Of course, due to all that macho-bs, guys don't talk about it.

[alias_sqbr]

This does happen, though it's not the type of thing I'm talking about (or not entirely)

What you also get is Person 1 completely failing to notice or listen to the many signals (body language as well as actual complaints) they get from Person 2, unless they over-react so much that Person 1 can then go "Gee, whatever I did it didn't deserve that" and play the victim. Don't get me started on how people (male and female) would act when I asked them to stop tickling me ("Haha, sure, whatever"...."OMG THAT REALLY HURT whay are you so MEAN")

In either case I think it's very unfair to blame it all on the victim (I'm not saying you're doing this, but it's a very common response), why should they be expected to have better communication skills in such a stressful situation? Especially when there is often no response that will have a psoitive outcome for them from the harasser. And even if there is more they could have done, that doesn't make the harrassment ok.

Anyway my post is about the role of the bystander: if the harrasser is too self absorbed to notice/care, and the victim too intimidated/awkward to fight them off, then it's up to us to do something.

Also: while I agree this sort of stuff does happen in all gender combinations (I've seen men suffer some pretty nasty treatment, and I agree they have even less scope to complain about it. Plus of course the crap transgender people get from everyone) there's a lot of very specific baggage that goes along with the male/female dynamic.

[anxiolytic.livejournal.com]

what the hell did I do now?

[alias_sqbr]

:P

[seaya.livejournal.com]

My biggest problem with this kind of stuff are the times I confront the person and no one else, including women, confronts them. They all give the person a free pass.

But, I'm usually not afraid of confronting someone about their behavior towards someone else.

When it's their behavior towards me, however, I tend to do the smile and nod and get away thing.

[alias_sqbr]

My biggest problem with this kind of stuff are the times I confront the person and no one else, including women, confronts them. They all give the person a free pass.

Yes, that is a problem, and I'm not sure it can be combatted as an individual apart from trying to set a good example, which is a pretty tough road to take alone.

I can totally sympathise with this

[babalon-93.livejournal.com]

This is an issue for me too. I am way better now at speaking up--and every time I do I really have to force myself--but usually this is after a repeat performance, I still have many many occasions where I find myself stewing over this afterwards thinking of all the appropriate things I wish I had said at the time, it is just that as I get older and more practiced my ratio of action to non-action is getting better. It is still difficult every time though. But the (good?) thing is that people who hold discriminatory values are very likely to repeat their behavior and give you another chance to speak up later on. And of course there is nothing that says that you have to say something at the time, you can always say something to them later after you have worked out your feelings on the issue. I do find it much easier to deal with as it happens though--but yes, awkward and painful every time.

I still have these mixed feelings about hollaback oz too (as a moderator), I 'know' that giving people a space to speak up and have their experience validated in a safe place is the right thing to do, but I still feel the fear of confrontation and that sense that pointing out other people's bad behavior is not a 'nice girl' thing to do. But of course this is just another opportunity for me to learn about and improve myself.

Re: I can totally sympathise with this

[alias_sqbr]

Adding to all that, I find, is the worry that I really am getting upset over nothing, since while I very rarely get angry that is unfortunately no guarantee that when I do its justified :( But as you say, most of the time we get repeated chances to reassure ourselves of people's skeeviness and take some action. Lucky us.

You have total big time respect from me for running hollaback. I'm still far too caught up in nicegirlness to be able to do anything like that (also, I was a mod for a while, and it drove me half crazy)

Re: I can totally sympathise with this

[out-fox.livejournal.com]

Oh, interesting.

I didn't get the idea of hollaback at 1st. I do mainly RL physical confrontation, I'm kind of at the other extreme of being all YOU THERE, STFU!! [I blame being a former tomboy].

My concern was more that confronting *may* risk escalation, these being such issues of dominance in physical space, so how can people translate that into the non-physical online space?

I figured it's a good idea as a CR space: affirming the right to confront and to have supportive people to debrief/applaud it with afterwards.

In light of the OP here, I'm thinking more of ways that space is maintained without confrontation simply by stating a stance on social norms.

Like, this OP has gotten a fairly positive response, and I've seen some people get good responses from adding the Hollaback banner to their blog.

That visibility of norms might influence lurking RL sleazes to revise their behaviour simply by diffusing the MO of targetting people in isolation. They know that more people will be aware of it to call them on it next time.

Especially with mens responses. As much as I don't believe men should be all "we protect the damsels!', men being seen to have no problem with these types of statements can really take steam away from guys who want to pretend that sleaze is "natural" male homosocial bonding. No confrontation necessary.

This was wordy, thinking aloud sorry.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Someone needs to tell them directly. Not necessarily confront them in public. But tell them.
All too often I think these guys fool themselves that its just that those women misunderstood them, or whatever. Maybe, after a few times, they'll understand its not.

Why do people put up with it? Its a good question. I think often there is a situation where a lot of people feel the same way, and would be prepared to back the offended person up in public if it came to it, but think its best to leave it to the offended person to complain as it's their issue -- and that person either finds it easier to just avoid the offender, or confronts them in private (and the offender just assumes that its an individual misunderstanding, or an easily offended person, or that it was just a joke, or that that person just doesn't get them, or whatever excuse they have). This tendency to leave it as the offended persons issue to decide how to handle only tends to be overcome if its very serious indeed (violence, for example). I think its very understandable, too -- there is obviously a worry that if the offended person has to discuss it in public, it can be unpleasant for them, and we don't want to dump anyone in that situation.

So, how can we break out of that? I guess you can go to the complainer and offer support, and let them know that if they do confront the offender there will be support. Friends of the offender can quietly let them know that they think its a problem, but that is difficult. All too often, what happened is the friends of the offender just stop talking to them or quietly start to exclude them from certain events, without really openly discussing why.

That said, we all do dumb stuff from time to time, and some of the most ardent feminist women I know have managed to screw up from time to time, let alone just about every guy, especially the young and inexperienced. Learning to be supportive of our friends while condemning their behaviour is probably part of it.

[alias_sqbr]

Heh. You've made pretty much every point I realised I should have added but hadn't gotten around to editing in yet :) (Have added them now) So, agreement all around.

Especially this:
All too often, what happened is the friends of the offender just stop talking to them or quietly start to exclude them from certain events, without really openly discussing why.

And so what happens is the offender is either confused and hurt, or doesn't care, and either way will quite probably continue doing the same things.

It would be nice if enough was enough, but it never will be.

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

Now hopefully I won't get too offtrack with what I try and say here, my trouble is my viewpoint here is incredibly harsh (for obvious reasons). Also incredibly badly written as usual.

The line between someone doing this kinda of thing by accident/ignorance and the ones that delibrately do it is incredibly blurry. This is mostly because the ones that don't do it by accident always have (and do use) the "I didn't mean anything by it" "it was an accident" excuse. I've usually found that the skeezy ones are the ones that pretend they did nothing and hide behind someone else when pulled up on it though.

Its cute that you mention ostracizing, because in my experience when I know someone is doing something skeezy whether to me or to other people and I suspect I look like a target my instincts are very much to be incredibly horrible to them, in order to keep them the fuck away from me. Why not confront them? Every time I have (both for myself and for others) I've had them brush me off or pretend they did nothing, hide or move away. And lie about doing so. So if you aren't getting group support over something, getting them ostracized even if they act clueless is a fairly tempting option to feel comfortable again.

Anyway what I'm trying to get at with the next point, is why you shouldn't confront people. I have a temper and I'm aware I cause arguments and a lot of people don't actually like me (which is fair enough in most cases, I don't have a lot of patience with various people for various reasons and I should work on that). However the thing about skeezy guys is they still have friends, and the will/do have girlfriends/boyfriends. Saying someones boyfriend groped you or x? Good reasons for the partner not to like you after that. That extends out to groups. You comment that someone is sexually harassing you the immediate reaction is blame. You comment x is being sexually harassed, the immediate reaction is 'nah that guys a good bloke, she's just out to get him, or had it coming etc...' or my favourite 'why is she putting herself in that situation then? She should quit her job' * If you then have a partner (which you do) that hate can extend to them and before you know it you've got that horrible thing where you can't hang around with your partners friends and your partner is given that horrible choice between girlfriend or friends. Horrible horrible flow on effects that can cut you out of an otherwise good group of friends

Being horrible to someone randomly can also give other people the impression that you are a bad human being, so then you are being horrible and gossiping if you want those people to understand you aren't just being a bitch. Which by definition, makes you more bitchier.

So yeah, confronting people is messy I recommend against it. Mostly it didn't work so good for me, though I still have failed to come up with a better solution. Talking openly as people suggested only seems to make people more angry the harasser to feel victimised (because he didn't do anything!) and get further in denial and people judging the actual victim.

Also I like the idea of every guy currently being paranoid about this post speaking up, because the odds are those are the actual cool ones. The ones that actually make women uncomfortable. They've already got their excuse organized. (ITS ALL MISCOMMUNICATION** I TELLS YOU)

Despite all this, I still like having male friends :P

* Gross simplification of the many varied things that people say, that usually boil down to this

** To pick an excuse I've found particularly skeezy

Re: It would be nice if enough was enough, but it never will be.

[alias_sqbr]

I have a headache so may have to reply again when my head is less stupid, but I wanted to say some of this now.

The line between someone doing this kinda of thing by accident/ignorance and the ones that delibrately do it is incredibly blurry. This is mostly because the ones that don't do it by accident always have (and do use) the "I didn't mean anything by it" "it was an accident" excuse.

Very good point.

And you're right, my post assumes that everyone acknowledges that this behaviour is bad and just does nothing about it. I guess this comes from my own experience, since I've been in that situation a lot (it's very much what happened when I was harrassed in unisfa).

But when noone but you even acknowledges there is a problem..that sucks, and it is hard. The way people blame the victim in this situation is disgusting (I say having just read a chapter in a feminist memoir about the days when the police assumed all rape victims were liars)

And I totally understand not being confrontational in those circumstances. What I guess you can do, though, is always be willing to give at least private support to someone you see being mistreated. Hmm.

And yes, despite all this, I'm not quite ready to become a lesbian seperatist either :)

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

(from Ulaanbaatar, while photos upload)

I've always found sleaziness highly objectionable in guys, I have no idea how I come across myself but I suspect it's not the most egregious of my character flaws.

I don't believe there are many guys acting that way who really do think their behaviour is "acceptable" (whatever that means in any given context).

When I first joined UniSFA I had major problems with men I thought were fairly obnoxious insisting on massaging people at parties and so forth. I'm probably pretty wowserish about that sort of thing.

Well la-di-dah Mr Ulaanbaatar

[alias_sqbr]

No, you certainly don't set off my sleazy-alarms. And huzzah for wowseriness, says I :)

I think these sorts of guys like to pretend their behavior is acceptable, or act as if their violation of community norms is free-thinking rebellion against the PC police.

[(Anonymous)]

I've had my arse grabbed on numerous occasions, and I usually slap the guy who did it. This worked for a few guys as they are too embarassed to try again, but a few continue. The annoying thing is that some are my *friends* who are lovely people 99% of the time, but... yeah...

[shehasathree]

really interesting post (and comments).
i too have something of a problem with confrontation which i would like to work on.

[alias_sqbr]

OH REALLY?? ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT??

:)

[shehasathree]

really interesting post (and comments).
i too have something of a problem with confrontation which i would like to work on.

[alias_sqbr]

OH REALLY?? ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT??

:)