I almost didn’t publish this blog post, because I wondered if it was a bit too harsh. It’s sat in my drafts for a while, getting edited and tweaked in an attempt to soften some of the blows. But this morning I read an article in Metro about men refusing to believe the evidence of women’s experience, and I figured ‘fuck it: why not?’ Let’s talk about Schroedinger’s Twat.
I got an email recently from a man who wanted me to put him over my knee and spank him. It wasn’t a polite email – it was incredibly direct, very demanding and had been addressed not to me but to ‘girls.’ How many girls did he send that to? And from how many of us was he expecting a reply?
I mentioned this to a friend, because although I found the email a bit disturbing in its demands, I figured the plural ‘girls’ warranted a giggle. But instead of giggling, this friend – who is a straight dude, which is very very relevant – said this:
“Why do men send messages like that, do you think? Could he genuinely believe that he’s offering you something you want?”
I should make it really clear here that we were expressly talking about emails which are aggressively sexual, entitled and presumptive. I don’t think a politely-worded email enquiring as to whether I’d be open to approaches falls into quite the same category. I explained that the entitled emails are usually sent for one of two reasons:
1. They are horny i.e. they are hoping that I will reply to say ‘yes please!’, even though I’ve expressly said on my FAQs page that I won’t.
2. They want to provoke a reaction of any kind. Maybe I’ll reply to say ‘fuck you’ or explain consent to them. Maybe they’ll get me to screengrab their email and publicly humiliate them, pressing a few specific kink buttons along the way.
Either way: they want a reaction from me, and I – a woman – am there primarily for the purpose of giving them what they want.
My pal suggested a possible 3:
3. They are truly lonely and unhappy, and have never done this sort of thing before, but coming across my website has led them to believe that I will be incredibly receptive to these messages, and they are in fact doing me a favour by sending them.
If this really is the case, then by ignoring his message or responding in a way that isn’t polite and gentle I may actually be doing him unfair harm. I don’t want to do unfair harm to anyone, so let’s explore this possibility.
What if he’s a good man doing bad things?
Although I present as a fairly cold-hearted bitch online, I am in real life quite a squishy person who tries to see the good in other humans. So in principle, I can accept that 3 is a possibility. There’s also a possible 4 – this guy has a particular kind of emotional difficulty that makes empathy tricky.
When my friend explained it, his reasoning essentially boiled down to ‘what if he’s a nice guy all the rest of the time, and he just doesn’t realise that this particular bit of reasoning is bad? Wouldn’t it be mean to act as if he is doing this bad thing, when in fact he may be making a legitimate mistake?’
Let me introduce you to Scroedinger’s Twat.
When a guy first contacts me online, he is Schroedinger’s Twat. He might be a perfectly nice dude, but he may also be a massive twat. I will not know whether he is a twat or not until I open the metaphorical box in which he resides – i.e. until I interact with him. Unfortunately, by the time I interact with him, it will likely be too late: I have already exposed myself to the twattery contained therein. I’ve expended energy composing a polite response, and when he replies to that I am already more open to whatever it is he says, because I can see from the way the subject and email displays that I have chatted to him before. If he then says something cruel, mean, threatening or otherwise horrible, it hurts more because I’ve opened myself up to it.
Therefore ideally I have to work out what his twat status is, using inductive reasoning, before he does something that is harmful.
The very first email I ever received that fell into the ‘wanna fuck?’ category received a reasonably polite reply:
“No thank you, but I’m flattered that you asked!”
And the second, and the third, and the fourth. One guy, I actually went on a date with, and it did not go well. So I returned to the polite replies. In fact, it took me a long time to start ignoring these emails. I think I used to send this reply to almost all the men who asked, no matter how aggressive or entitled the asking. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve either ignored (my most common response) or sent a shirty reply back (rare). And as I say, I still usually send polite messages to guys who are nice and not pushy.
After replying to a few, it didn’t take long to realise that most of these men were twats. Some would reply to my emails to call me a slut (aw, shucks – thanks!), others would reply to tell me I was frigid. Still more would speculate that I must secretly be a man pretending to be a woman, the implication being that if I were a real woman I would hop onto their cock quicker than you can say ‘how do you not recognise the danger I’m putting myself in?’ Some would continue to be kind with their words but frightening in their actions: lots of ‘I’m not a murderer, I promise!’ combined with a steadfast refusal to accept that I didn’t want to meet up with them.
Scroedinger’s Twat
At the moment the email hits my inbox, this person is Shroedinger’s Twat. While I would sincerely like to say that the very act of sending a ‘wanna fuck?’ mail like the one bcc:d to loads of bloggers demanding a spanking proves that the sender is an entitled twat, I am forced to accept that life contains nuance, and there may be a small possibility that they know not what they do. It is possible that any individual guy is merely misguided, but until I open the box – replying to him, asking questions, engaging – I cannot truly know.
If I were to act as if he might be a nice dude, I would be repeatedly throwing myself in harm’s way. This is something I’d probably be OK with doing, if 80% of the people were nice and I would only get hurt about 20% of the time. Adjust percentages accordingly depending on how low my self-esteem is that week, or how much other stuff has been going on that makes me want to curl up under my desk and weep.
But even with those percentages, many would say I was a fool. I would, I suspect, get an ‘asking for it’ response if I were to complain about the 20% of twats who were horrible to me: ‘well, why did you message them back in the first place?! Surely you could have known he’d be a twat after that first email!’
And obviously – OBVIOUSLY – it’s not only 20%. In Schroedinger’s original thought experiment (which – thanks pedants! – I realise is far more complicated and sciency than I’m making it out to be here), there was a 50% chance the cat would turn out to be dead. In my example, the evidence gathered over years and years of my life tells me the chances are much closer to 99% that Schroediner’s Twat will turn out, in fact, to be a twat.
Presumably until this point you thought that Shroedinger’s Twat referred to the man in my inbox. So did I. But then I went outside for a cigarette and a sigh of unfathomable sadness and realised that maybe Schroedinger’s Twat was in the pub with me all along.
Why doesn’t my experience matter?
If I can accept that my friend’s hypothesis is possible, and some of the men who send emails asking if I wanna fuck are nice, misguided, dudes who merely need education on what is and isn’t OK… how is it not possible for him to accept that my years of experience tell a more accurate story?
I’d be foolish to ignore the evidence of my own experience. If every time you ordered a coffee, the barista spat in it, and you’d been ordering coffee for 8 years, presumably the next time you ordered a coffee you’d expect to get a little saliva with your flat white, right? You would instantly dismiss people who said ‘but this time might be different!’ because even if they’re right that it might be, living your life that way leads to you drinking a hell of a lot of spit. I’m being asked to act as if every possible interaction may turn out to be a miracle outlier, just because my mate would like me to consider the feelings of the one-in-a-million baristas who wouldn’t dream of gobbing into my latte.
In postulating that some baristas don’t spit, he’s right. I’m willing to accept that he’s right. But he’s asking me, in this example, to do more than just admit the possibility: he’s asking me to act as if his scenario is far more likely than my years of experience tell me it is.
Why won’t he accept the evidence of my own experience? Why are my eight years of sex blogging not proof enough that when I say ‘haha this guy’s such a twat’, I am not indulging in gleefully cruel hyperbole: I am giving him information backed up by extensive evidence. I am not sharing an opinion, but an insight into my life. Telling him ‘this is what the world is like for me, and here is how I deal with it.’
Every person I encounter has the potential to be a twat: whether big twats like the one in my inbox or disheartening twats like the ones who dismiss my experience. But until I engage with him, I will not know which category he falls into. Even if I do engage with him by, say, establishing a friendship with him that lasts for years and years, I still have to wonder if and when I’ll discover he’s spat in my coffee. Whether one day, instead of trusting my extensive experience, he’ll choose to give the benefit of the doubt to a total stranger. Asking me to waste my time, deny my experience, and treat this stranger like an angel: even though I know he’s probably a twat.
As I mentioned at the top, I almost didn’t publish this at all, but fuck it I’m feeling cheeky today. Please don’t assume I dislike this dude: I love him very much, and I guarantee I fuck things like this up too, which is why I am grateful to my friends who are happy to tell me when I make similar mistakes. This conversation was frustrating and sad, but not uncommon – why, here’s another example of men I love not believing my experience! The older I get the more I realise just how many dudes struggle to take me as seriously as they’d take a man in my shoes. Which is odd, because with my age comes experience, and that experience doesn’t make me less credible, just less likely to behave.
30 Comments
It’s a frustrating reflection of our warped social conditioning – you, a woman, are expected to give J. Random Dude the benefit of the doubt because the default presumption should be that he may be right/good/nice/lonely/awkward/etc. The cost to your time, effort and emotional health is just the price you expect to pay for being a woman online with opinions and a sex life, right? (Aaaggghhh)
The unspoken counterpart of this is that you, A. Specific Woman are presumed to be wrong/over-reacting/in need of instruction unless proven otherwise with evidence which has been validated by a man. (AGGGGHHH!!)
Of course, as you’ve noted; if your response to these incursions brought J. Randomer’s abuse, harassment harm, awkward unwanted entanglement to your door, that would obviously be your fault as well for not having the psychic ability to differentiate the twats from the phats before the box is opened.
Some days, I honestly think that just setting the box on fire is the most sensible approach…..
(And for the Waynes of the world; I don’t hate men. I hate how both everyone is prevented from living their best lives because of bullshit gender role tropes and sexist double standards.)
J. Random. I know that reference. Do you wear a ring with a common semi-aquatic rodent on it?
This is so well put. Thanks.
You’re certainly right to be sceptical of any email advance like this, and I enjoy reading your process of how to deal with it.
Loved the pun btw, that’s what what drew me and I wasn’t disappointed.
I have a complicated reaction to this post which means it’s a good one!
I read slowly and carefully, and I’m GLAD you posted it. Truly.
There are a lot of threads of interest here and it’s a bit messy and hard to know what parts to reply to but one thing I can say simply is that I think you have the right to receive an email and make your own judgement about it based on many factors, without having to give the sender such a huge benefit of the doubt as if the presumption should be that men are always right. I have a lot of love for some of my male friends who say stupid things sometimes so I don’t want to sound too hard on YOUR friend … I understand we are all products of the world … but I’m honestly like WTF to that part in the beginning where your friend asks why. Who cares if some guy genuinely believes he is offering you something good (when he’s not). You don’t have to find compassion for his delusion. Fuck that!
Applauds Lexy!
Totally, and you’re right that ‘we are all products of the world’ – I definitely fuck up on stuff like this too, and I am certainly not saying my friend is a terrible person. Just that these incidents really hammer home just how much work there still is to do, if even the people we love struggle to believe/listen when we try to talk to them about things which harm us. But yeah, it’s still a bit shocking.
As a (hopefully) ex twat, I tend to assume twatness and be happily surprised later.
It doesn’t matter if the guy is well meaning or not, your under no obligation to feed his delusion with any type of reply.
I find myself constantly being disappointed with my friends, as I’m sure they are of me, but that’s part of friendship. After all, maybe the twats are the friends we made along the way?
I trust your experience. My experience also (as a man) tells me that it’s like 99.99% a twat and one poor clueless nerd who doesn’t know what a tongue-ring is for.
Anyone who questions your experience should be encouraged to take a fistful of email addresses from these twats and reply to them himself. Let them learn by dint of life’s little liberating lesson.
You have only so many minutes and hours in a day; you don’t need to waste it on people who are clueless in this sense.
And hey, great post! You can now link to it anytime the issue comes up and you feed that you need to address an answer to someone!
There’s a lot that can be talked about here, certainly on the ‘women not being believed’ point. But my initial thought is just this: it’s arguably a huge simplification to think of men (or anyone) as being either ‘nice guys’ or twats. (And accepting that binary plays into the hands of the twats who can pass for a ‘nice guy’.)
The more complex reality is that we all contain elements of both. I’d like to think I’ve learned enough over the years to reduce my twat percentage, I hope so anyway… but I’m sure I can still do unthinkingly twattish things sometimes like your friend here.
But anyone who sends a ‘wanna fuck?’ email, even in the best scenario, is at least 60% twat. Even the most clueless innocents should know better than to do that.
Ah yeah, you’re right of course. And when it comes to my pal it is always easy to say ‘well we’re all just good people who sometimes do twatty things’, it’s just that for the stranger, there’s not much point in my investing in looking at all the other parts, because the twat part is what will harm me, and so it’s much easier to just sort him immediately into the ‘twat’ pile rather than waste my time, and energy, and vulnerability, on the non-twat part.
It’s why I can tell my pals if they’re doing things that are frustrating or sexist, while I wouldn’t bother having the same gentle conversation with the twats. I take your point though, and you’re right in the broad sense. It’s just that my experience tells me treating *everyone* in that way will see me harmed more often.
To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting that you’re doing anything wrong in not responding to these people! Only that we all have a twatty side, but obviously there’s a huge difference between friends you know personally who you can argue with and hope to persuade, and random internet weirdos who fail at the first hurdle on ‘how to interact with women’.
I wanted to comment on the “men don’t believe me” post, but forgot that time. First of all, I totally believe those mentioned experiences (idiots making photos, sending “wanna fuck” messages), because I see these too. On various forums I saw pictures clearly taken without authorization from the woman on the picture and I also see “wanna fuck” messages. However, I also see lot of women believing in esoteric stuff (and for some reason this seems a mostly female thing) and when they talk about astrology, karma, “greater plans”, “teachings”, homeopathy, etc – that’s the point I don’t believe them. Nowadays I’m being wiser (or just more polite?) and don’t actually tell them I don’t believe them.
I’m not saying ‘you have to believe everything women tell you’, I’m saying ‘believe women’s experiences.’
Let’s have a look at your comment, because it’s really interesting:
“I also see lot of women believing in esoteric stuff (and for some reason this seems a mostly female thing) and when they talk about astrology, karma, “greater plans”, “teachings”, homeopathy, etc – that’s the point I don’t believe them.”
I mean… fair enough. There’s no evidence for this stuff, and some of it (like homeopathy) is outright harmful bullshit. I would never tell you that you should believe in homeopathy, and I’m quite surprised that this is something which occurs to you to mention in light of this post, because… well… I just wouldn’t ever say that. Homeopathy is terrible bullshit. I *am* intrigued that you think bullshit is more the domain of women, though: there are plenty of men who subscribe to beliefs for which there is no evidence (and, in fact, a huge body of evidence to prove them wrong) – see: climate change denial, 9/11 conspiracy theories, flat earth, etc etc. Humans in general are prone to believing in bullshit and it’s not just the domain of women, though there is absolutely a big discussion to be had about the ways in which these things are gendered, and which groups tend to recruit people of one gender or another.
SO. What am I saying, if not ‘believe in literally everything women say’? I am saying: when women tell you about their experiences, and how the world is for them, believe them in the same way you would if a man told you. If a male friend of yours said ‘I was walking down the street and some random dude yelled ‘TWAT’ out of his car at me!’ would you insist on seeing examples of this happening to other people before you believed him? Probably not. So if a woman says the same, believe her. Trust that the world, for her, may look different to the way it looks for non-women, because people treat women differently.
In your comment you say:
“I totally believe those mentioned experiences (idiots making photos, sending “wanna fuck” messages), because I see these too.” [emphasis mine]
What I’m saying here is that if women, who are your friends, tell you about this stuff, you probably don’t need to see it too in order to believe them, right? You can probably trust that the women who you have formed relationships with are exercising their judgment and giving you an accurate picture of what the world is like and why they behave the way they do – which may often be different to the way you behave, because the world treats them differently.
So many things to answer :-) I start with the last (and probably most important): “if women, who are your friends, tell you about this stuff, you probably don’t need to see it too in order to believe them, right?” – Well, it depends on the “stuff”. I don’t want to get into very personal details, so it might be too vague what I’m writing, but I’ll try my best. There was one specific stuff (how certain people behave towards women) that I didn’t believe until I witnessed the issue (yeah, I’m too sceptic). Then there are specific “stuff” I still don’t believe: women close to me went to an “aura-reader” and got “useful” reads. I believe they went to a person who calls himself “aura-reader” and they believe they got “useful” information – but I also believe it was a scam (this is the part I don’t tell them – instead I simply acknowledge that they had an experience). I think I choose to believe what I experience first hand and/or what feels logical. I am sceptic.
About my unfortunate the side-track: I think there are different levels of belief in bullshit. For example I know a person who believes in homeopathy – yet she’s taking medicine when the doctors actually prescribe them. In this case I feel it’s mostly harmless: she’s taking homeopathy only for stuff like common cold which doesn’t actually necessitates medication. I can tolerate this (and politely not making a point every time she’s taking that useless stuff). Same with e.g. esoterica – I don’t really care if she thinks everything has to happen for a reason (“the universe wants to teach something”) if it doesn’t really guide her every day. I guess you know the “Trust in God, but tie your camel” quote – I don’t care if she believes in God as long as she ties the camel. Now, if she would not take the medicine when she’s seriously ill, or would do something stupid because “the universe won’t let anything harm me” – that would be a different beast.
I also thought about wether bullshits are gender-specific. Believing in flat Earth, that 9/11 didn’t actually happen or the EU wants to replace local population with migrants, etc. are probably not gender-specific, but I feel them so incompatible with me that I tend to not have social relationship with people actually believing in them. There are also less serious(?) bullshits that I can tolerate.
I think I can divide the people I have social relationship with into two categories: people I got to know via work or common interests (and for some reasons they are almost exclusively male and don’t believe in bullshits – probably because we have something in common and not believing in bullshit is part of this common stuff) and people I wanted to fuck (and their circle of friends). This later set mostly contains women (given my sexuality). Interestingly I only have social relationship with friends of the women I wanted to fuck if we have a common interest or background. I think there’s a serious observer’s bias working here: there are so few women with common background with me that I get less picky (in other words, more tolerant to believing in certain kinds of bullshits) – that’s why I only see women in my environment believing in bullshit. In other words, I take some BS for pussy :-)
sigh
Welp. That’s quite the irrelevant me-rail, kistanyer.
*sighs right along with you*
Homeopathy, and ‘alternative’ belief systems are entirely irrelevant to the discussion we’re having here. I don’t really know what to say to you other than ‘go read the piece I actually wrote, rather than the one you are imagining, based on your prejudices about women.’
It’s very very odd that you seem to place ‘women’s reporting of their lived experience’ in the same bucket as ‘belief in auras/homeopathy.’ These two things are not in any way the same.
Also the way you talk about women in general is quite gross.
When it comes to email, there is no politeness as there are no social consequences, especially in the random contact phase. Equivalently, in a more ancient form of communication, the telephone, there used to be a social more to listen to the poor telemarketer’s schpiel before politely informing them you are not interested in their wares. Now, with the advent of robo calling, the salesperson doesn’t even have to type in numbers, they have robots or AI call and waste peoples time. The only appropriate response anymore to them and random “wanna fucks” (whether the emailer by an aggressive
male or any other lack of social skill individual) is spam filters. We live in an era where everyone feels out to waste others time and energy and our only defense is to cut them from our visual and audible circle. Social nicety is a rare and precious thing to be hoarded so we aren’t driven into emotional poverty by the massive twitter twatters of the world. The only response to your “nice” querying friend is a hearty laugh at what has to be a joke because to believe otherwise puts him in a weird denial about the power of anonymity that exists today.
Speaking as and on behalf of straight guys who do not send random women uninvited sexually aggressive emails, it can be hard to believe that people send these things. Because if you aren’t already the sort of person who does this, the thought processes that would lead you to do it are bafflingly alien.
Its not – consciously – a question of refusing to believe a woman, or believing that the woman is wrong. Its a matter of trying to find a rational explanation for something that makes no sense within a wordlview where you never experience this. I could easily see myself making the same comments as your friend, and it would come from the perspective fo trying to rationalise and understand why this alien thing would happen.
When you actually have to put up with it all the time, yeah the conclusion is there’s a load of twats. But when you’re told about it separately, without the direct investment of receiving it yourself, I think you’re more likely to try and work it out, especially if its strange to you.
This of course is not saying men should ignore women on this, I’m mostly thinking outloud about perspectives and thought processes.
This comment kind of matches how I feel, and I wanted to elaborate on this point earlier…
I *know* there are men who send ‘wanna fuck?’ messages (and dick pics, etc) to random people online. I’ve even had a few of them myself, on a Certain Social Network Website, even though my profile there makes it pretty clear I’m mostly straight. I still don’t really understand the kind of person that would do it, though.
I also know there are men who sexually harass women in the street, even though in all my years alive I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed that myself. I take for granted the reports of women that it does happen. But I can’t even imagine the person that would do such a thing. Yet it’s horrifying to think that such an experience is apparently so common that so many women – statistically, probably most of those I know, even many *children* – have suffered it.
The incredulous, rationalising reaction is at best an attempt to try to make sense of the incomprehensible, in the hope that perhaps if you can understand why someone would do it, you can work out how to stop it. I recognise it is not likely to be taken well by anyone who experiences such things themselves, though…
“Its not – consciously – a question of refusing to believe a woman, or believing that the woman is wrong. Its a matter of trying to find a rational explanation for something that makes no sense within a wordlview where you never experience this.”
Yep! And I think this is a neat way of putting it. I don’t think the majority of dudes do this because they consciously do not believe women, or consciously think we are less intelligent or capable of reporting our experiences. Some do, obviously, but the majority are not deliberately trying to harm or belittle women. But disbelief of this kind – when a woman has demonstrably vast experience of a topic while the guy who is disbelieving her has little – is still harmful, even with the best of intentions.
I live in a society that has traditionally ignored/dismissed women’s experiences, and which tends to frame (white) male experience as the default, and which broadly encourages us to see a heirarchy of believability, with rich white men at the pinnacle of it. So whatever the reasons (good or bad) for saying ‘I can’t believe this happens!’, we still perpetuate this cycle which helps to cement the idea that women’s experiences are less believable, less real. I say ‘we’ here because I certainly do it too on other intersections – for instance, there are examples of racism in the UK that have caused me to be profoundly shocked, like ‘OMG I can’t believe this happens here and not just in America!’, then seen tweets/articles from people of colour going ‘umm we’ve literally been telling you this for fucking ages, why didn’t you listen?’ It’s not that I deliberately heard and tuned this stuff out, or consciously dismissed it because I don’t trust the people telling the stories, it’s that I live somewhere which fails to report/downplays these real experiences, and also gives a lot of airtime to white people going ‘well I don’t see colour’ or ‘we’re not really racist any more.’
So when you say:
“I could easily see myself making the same comments as your friend, and it would come from the perspective fo trying to rationalise and understand why this alien thing would happen.”
I totally get it, and I understand where you’re coming from. As I say at the end of the piece, i don’t think my friend is a bad person, or is consciously saying ‘women are untrustworthy.’ But I think the key is what does someone do when confronted with the fact that women are disproportionately told ‘I don’t believe you’ or forced to jump through hoops to prove knowledge and experience which would just be taken as read if we were men? I don’t want anyone to fall to the floor weeping and beating their chest and going ‘OMG I’m such a terrible person’, more just examine how these unconscious biases may affect our behaviour and interactions, and correct for that in future.
SCS your point that “The incredulous, rationalising reaction is at best an attempt to try to make sense of the incomprehensible, in the hope that perhaps if you can understand why someone would do it, you can work out how to stop it.” I totally get as well, and I think honestly this blog post (and others like it) are mostly my way of trying to tell people that a really significant step in helping to stop it is trusting the people who say that it happens, and not insisting that they measure up to a higher standard of ‘proof’ of expertise, experience, etc, than we would demand from a rich white guy who told us the same.
“if I wanna fuck are nice, misguided, dudes who merely need education on what is and isn’t OK” do you think this kind of misguidedness could be corrected by education, if they could learn why wouldn’t they know already?.
Hmmm good question. There are two things here, I think. The first is that while I really would hope that most people know this isn’t OK, there will be many for whom it either isn’t apparent OR they realise it’s not OK but don’t fully get how significant it is for them to do it anyway. If it’s true (as I believe it is) that people are given some really dodgy messages by society about consent, then I also have to believe that for many it will take time and effort and education to unlearn some of these dodgy messages. There’s more detail on this point in this post: https://www.girlonthenet.com/2018/01/24/presidents-club-metoo/
So… it’s totally worth educating people, even on things which might seem to be common sense or obvious, I think.
However, on an individual basis, I don’t think that anyone who is potentially harmed by someone’s behaviour (i.e. who has received aggressively entitled ‘wanna fuck’ emails) is obliged to educate the person who sends them. Ideally education is a responsibility that we all take on, as a society – encouraging people to behave better, explaining to friends/loved ones where they fuck up, and writing blog posts that people can read/share/think about which highlights the ways in which our behaviour might be damaging.
Basically, though: not everyone knows everything. When I first started out in blogging I had some really terrible views, which I have since learned more about and changed position on, and some things of which I was blissfully ignorant are now ones which I think about a lot more. Back in the day some people told me ‘this is so obvious OMG how can you not know it already?’ but I’d just never heard something articulated that way or mentioned at all before. So although it’s unlikely that this guy doesn’t know his email is entitled/rude, I’m happy to entertain the small possibility that he doesn’t, and hope that he can read a little more about the topic so that emails he sends in future are more polite and respectful (or not sent at all).
I think that the observation that they “realise it’s not OK but don’t fully get how significant it is for them to do it anyway,” is a crucial one and gets at a lot of the core of both your friend and the emailer. I know it sounds clueless and it is the literal definition of privilege, but I feel like every day, there are these small moments where I realize that something that I’ve taken for granted my entire life just doesn’t exist for many people around me.
The thing about education though is that I’m not sure if it can be done if someone isn’t open to challenging the way they think. It’s why when the twats are called out, they respond with vehement denial and insults. They simply refuse to acknowledge your experience and you could probably explain it for the rest of eternity without them budging one inch. I feel like humans have this incredible superpower of empathy, but there is so much pain in this world that it is overwhelming to extend that empathy too far. So, everyone draws their lines and (hopefully) expands it as they mature. But, the emailer has drawn that line in between himself and you, and as a result, he cannot understand the significance of his words and is unlikely to be interested in finding that out.
This is a little all over the place, but keep up the good work! Your blog is really thought-provoking. Thanks for putting it all out there.
Exhausting.
First off I want to say that it’s really good to read such a nuanced thought process on what is right and even considering that oneself might not be perfect, you’re smart.
About the email issue, I’d say a good answer to someone being so pushy and possessive is “Dude what the fuck, you’re not entitled to me. Fuck off with that.”. Like this, you very briefly made clear that the message made you mad and what specifically was the problem, him acting so entitled. And I say even if he is the loneliest and most pitiable human on earth, it doesn’t excuse that he did something that was not okay. Now, if he thought he would be all cool and sexy with his email and went out on a limb being so very blunt, but normally isn’t like this, he will acknowledge his mistake and hopefully apologize. If he instead continues to be an ass, I’d ignore/block him from that point. This is the modicum of energy I might devote to such an email. Of course, if all those emails are still too much, you could cut your losses and never respond to such messages. Maybe add a disclaimer to your email address that such “offers” will always be ignored. All of this might seem a tad rough, but in the uncertainty of the internet being honest and blunt is our best method to stop misunderstandings and protect our sanity.
Now considering people not believing your experience, I’d just like to warn of one slip-up you might make if you said “Why do men do that?”. I don’t know if you say it like that, but if you tell a man that men do this, he will feel insulted, and rightfully so, since it’s a gross generalization. Saying he doesn’t believe you would then be his defensive reaction to shake off the implication that he also is such a creepy twat. Now, beyond that, others have no business doubting your life experience. They should instead be happy that they have such a good life that the thought of someone being harassed is so unbelievable to them.
P.S.: I honestly don’t understand what this has to do with feminism, I just see people being asshats.
I used to get irate when receiving messages like that, now it’s got to the point where I for the most part, ignore them. I LOVE the title of this and echoing what PurpleSole said, the post certainly didn’t disappoint! x