Men's attitudes to sexual harassment

[mirrorshard]

Lots of people have been posting about this recently, with good reason. However, everyone I've seen posting recommendations has been either female or transmale, so here goes.

cereta has been hosting a discussion about rape and men's attitudes to it. I'm not going to attempt to summarize or quote; read it.

khalinche tells her own stories, and asks: where are you? Where are the Nice Guys who Aren't Like That when women need them?

wildeabandon asks for shared stories - go fill in the poll/.

This is not an exhaustive list.

In comments to khalinche's post, she asks why straight cis-men aren't commenting much. Since I'm rather curious too, here's a poll.

NB: "participation" means reading at least one post I linked above, preferably all of them, posting at least one comment, and sticking around to read any followups. Less than that is either "listening" (good-ish) or "driveby" (bad).

If you haven't seen any of these posts linked to yet, read them then fill in the poll! There is no onus on you to participate immediately. Considered reflection is good. You have no obligation to participate at all, but it would be a Good Thing to do.

"I", of course, means the person filling in the poll.

"My friends" means male friends, specifically. I am not interested in female sexism here. Nor is anyone else.

[Poll #1414756]

Comments

[oneplusme.livejournal.com]

Just to be clear, I didn't mean that there exists some common category of people who are never potential rapists in any situation - I absolutely agree with you there.

What I was trying to get at is the existence of two related problems. The first is, obviously, the occurrence of rape. The second is the fear thereby induced, and the effects that this fear has upon the mental and physical health of women, and upon their freedom of choice and action.

My thought was to question whether it might be possible to address the latter even in spite of our lamentable (current and almost inevitably future) failure to address the former, given the harm that such fear does both to society and to women's potential to live fulfilled lives within said society.

Then again, this point is probably coloured by the more general problem of fear of crime massively outstripping its incidence. Given the horrific under-reporting of rape, it is probably one of the few crimes where this mismatch does not exist.