I have a problem. Okay, I have lots of problems, but this article is going to focus on just one of them. I’m an information junkie. Sometimes, that leads me to learn about beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that are downright disturbing. Call it a morbid fascination with the deranged, or a waste of time for someone who almost certainly has better things to do. In any case, I’ve habitually gazed upon the darkest corners of the human mind, and no amount of brain bleach—aka liquor—can make me unsee what I’ve seen. When you look long into the abyss, the abyss looks long into you, and we’ve been locked in a staring contest since my early teens.
Desensitized as I am, some of the things some guys say and do to women utterly horrify me. What they expect can be even more disturbing.
This article was inspired by a friend’s online interaction with someone who introduced himself by saying he wanted to “pound [her] sooo hard,” only to get upset when she made fun of him. I asked women I knew to share similar stories, and I was simultaneously not disappointed, and beyond disappointed. They are identified with initials that only vaguely correspond to their names, even if they publicly shared their stories on my Facebook wall. I’m also editing the stories for brevity and language (not surprisingly, some unflattering terms were used).
Ladies and gentlemen, grab some antibiotics and put on your scuba gear, because we’re diving into the septic tank of moronic depravity.
“A group of us girls went out dancing one night… this older man came up to me and asked for a dance. I said no thanks. He grabbed me by the wrist and started tugging me out the back door. I started yelling but couldn’t be heard over the music. Suddenly, this dude came out of nowhere and shoved the old guy off me. I do not hug random people, but I hugged that dude that night. I do not like to think about what would have happened if he had not helped me.” – M.A.
“A guy followed me around a Home Depot telling me many flattering things about my appearance. I said thanks and left. He approached me again and said he didn’t want to be creepy, but felt I deserved to be told these things. I said thanks again, but said it was starting to get awkward. He apologized, but then said ‘don’t let me catch you outside though.’ At this point, a very nice stranger stood between us and stayed there as my ‘admirer’ told me again not to let him catch me outside because he would make me his wife.” – L.M.
“I was in an elevator one day, when a man looked directly at my chest and asked, ‘can I hang my coat on those?’ I couldn’t think of any response, so I ignored him.” – P.M. (she added that this was years ago, and there was a time when people would have laughed at such a thing. In retrospect, *prolonged shudder*.)
“I was seventeen and in my school uniform, riding the subway to downtown. A middle-aged man and his roughly seven-year-old daughter kept staring at me. I didn’t make eye contact and when I left at my stop, I heard the girl say ‘papa, she’s leaving, I can’t see her.’ Spooked, I hid behind a pillar, and moments later heard the girl say ‘papa, she has to be here.’ I saw them actively searching for me, so I booked it to the end of the line where some ‘rough’ looking men were standing, and hid behind them. They saw I was scared, and when the father approached, they blocked me off from him until he roughly took his daughter’s hand and left. He used to his own daughter to find me.” – J.A.
(I’m not going to use quotes, because this person gave me three stories and I’m going to summarize two, since one’s… certainly creepy, but sadly, not a “winner.”) First, a guy grabbed her ass in a club and followed her around, calling her rude when she told him to leave her alone. Second, a guy exposed himself to her, tried to touch her with his genitals, and she feared she would be raped until an off-duty police officer heard her scream and chased the guy off. – N.D.
(Another two-fer. She shared something like five, but these stood out.) “Friendly, normal conversation while I bartend. He’s in town for work. Says goodbye and slides a room key across the bar. “I expect you to show up in nothing but a trenchcoat.” I did NOT go. Also, after turning someone down while having drinks at a bar, the rejected replied, “well, it’s your loss, because I would have been the best [obvious expletive] of your life. Not with that attitude.” – S.M.
M.P. was sent a dick pic, and showed me a transcript of the conversation, which seems to involve him apologizing, then sending her another dick pic, apparently out of spite for calling him out. He also seemed to suggest he masturbated to her Instagram photos. She treated him like a joke. She’s definitely one of my favourite people.
I’m getting to both the word limit for Obiter articles, and the limit of my patience for human stupidity. Also, I have some more “triumphant” stories that I feel should be shared, because they reflect one important lesson we can take from this: when this sort of thing happens to you, start a damned ruckus. Call the cops, scream, raise a fist, or find the nearest guy who seems to have a low nonsense threshold. If you’re lucky, the last one of those might step in anyway.
Cases in point: I was once at a party where I saw a girl crying because a guy had called her a slut, basically because she shot him down (so much for logic). I was about to step in, when he antagonized my roommate, who proceeded to throw him into a litterbox of a cat with bowel problems. It was a beautiful moment of karma.
Another friend once saw a guy corner a woman on the subway. He stepped in and told the creep to leave. The creep punched him in the chest. My friend has a muscular disorder that prevents him from working out, so he wears actual chain mail armour under his shirt to keep his muscles from atrophying. As the creep tried to figure out what he’d just hit, he got a fist to the jaw, hit the floor, was dragged away by TTC security at the next stop. The creep now presumably has a criminal record, earned losing a fight to a physically handicapped guy who doesn’t look a day over fifteen.
The moral of these disturbing stories seems to be “stay vigilant, because some guys have no sense of decency.” Stand up for yourself, and don’t be shy about asking others to stand up for you. Some of us are more than happy to.