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Men and Women

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Following the news today with the confirmation of the death of Sarah Everard and the subsequent tropes and memes and all the radio and social media coverage and the proposed vigil in Clapham…I had a thought. I was shocked but realised subconsciously in the 1980/90s this could have been me in attitude if not action.

I have never really considered a women’s viewpoint on this before in terms of how safe they feel on the street. I would always cross the road if walking behind a women going in the same directions as I has some awareness of this but that was about all.

I know my partner has experienced stuff like this since she was 14 and she is now 51.

Thoughts?

6

Comments

  2. If the women who are staging this protest want to avoid being hassled by the police, all they need to do is tell the officers that they wish to complain to them about being harassed by men on the street. The police will immediately vanish, muttering something about not having time for this shit.

    A predictable source perhaps, but I really think this says it very well. the thing about modern men ‘doing their thing’ even when you’ve got your kids with you is particularly striking.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/12/what-happened-women-uk-harassed-street

    You’re brave for starting this Wheaty, because I think I know what’s going to happen on this thread and who’s going to say it.

    • Another thumbs up for Marina Hyde’s article which is a real eye-opener.

      She describes the random, malicious and vilely unpleasant abuse that women can often be subjected to so very well.

  4. Before any “not all men” bellends jump in, it needs to be said that this news story, tragic as it is, is just the tip of a very big iceberg. I think that if the men of this forum talked about this to the women they love, work with, live near they would be horrified at just how many of them have experienced some kind of sexual threat, been made to feel uncomfortable on the street, been too cautious to go out after dark. It’s widespread, and it’s horrible. No, of course it isn’t every single man, but it’s a much, much, bigger subset of men than the usual “he was an unbalanced loner” narrative, and we all need to be much more alert in watching our own behaviour and challenging others.

      • I always remember what Kurt Cobain, of all people, said:

        In an interview with NME back in 1991, Cobain explained his thoughts on how he believed society should look to eliminate sexual assault and rape. One of the most important factors in eradicating sexual assault, he believed, was educating men about rape.

        The musician spoke about a female friend who had begun attending rape self-defence classes, he said: “She looked out the window and saw a football pitch full of boys, and thought those are the people that should really be in this class.”

        Thirty years ago….

    • But what is it our responsibility to do? I like to think no one reading this is a predator who would do anyone harm, so other than obvious stuff I have always done (cross the street and maybe take a diversion to avoid having a woman think I might be following her and being generally aware of the possibility) what can I contribute?

      It’s similar to the Me Too movement, which also attracted lots of men shouting ‘It’s not me!’ as if they were the victims, and felt attacked by women demanding their right to walk down the street without being subject to anything from sexist language to assault. Pretty much all women have experienced this sort of treatment, and just because we don’t know (or at least don’t realise we know) the men who perpetrate doesn’t mean we are excused from listening. So we know it happens, but generally without us noticing because it doesn’t happen to or because of us.

      I saw a comment on FB yesterday along the lines of ‘I bet you didn’t know that twice as many men as women as the victims of assault!’ I didn’t know the stat, which was unevidenced, but neither did it surprise me. Young men have always been the most likely perpetrators and victims of violence, especially in the 80s when I was a teen and young man, a much more violent age than now. That isn’t the point. As a middle aged man I’m largely invisible to people out to cause trouble and my default setting is to assume that I’m safe in most places. If I’m in a moody area, or if I sense that something is going to kick off, I can switch to high alert but it’s not all the time as it has to be for women in far more situations.

      So what can I do to contribute?

      • Probably not a lot and that is how I feel as a 55 year old man.

        But awareness and appreciation of others insight and lived experience is what I have taken from the last 48 hours.

      • @Dave-Amitri has a good answer below. We should be picking up on dodgy jokes round the table in the pub (remember pubs?) or “funny” memes shared via WhatsApp, just to make someone to think twice before they say something like it again. Yes, it’s a long long way from there to kidnap and murder, (but not all that far to leering at women on the train or shouting at them in the street) but that kind of unchecked othering and diminution is ultimately the soil those crimes grow in. I’m as guilty of letting it slide with mates as much as anyone else, but I’m going to try to do better.

  5. Back in the eighties in my 20’s when drink was involved I behaved in a way that embarrasses me now. In a verbal, laddish, cowardly way. A lot of us did. My dad would have killed me. My boys now in their 20’s themselves have much broader world view and would be equally angry at me. In my 50’s I’ve called men out for their attitudes towards women, men of my generation who should know better. I ask them if they would be happy if they heard their wives, sisters, mums, daughters being spoken to in that way. I now feel a power in that because if I make one man think differently then its something. Ultimately it’s on all us men to confront it when we hear or see it, maybe even here. I, like many accept saying to our wives / girlfriends call me, get a cab, dont walk home, go careful. We won’t ever stop the psychopaths unfortunately but we can make a difference. It’s on us..

    • I look back at the routine sexism (and racism) in the office ‘banter’ when I started working at the beginning of the eighties and shudder – it was horrible. It’s clear though that the attitudes behind it run deep and are still around far more than we would like to think. The shocking tragic attack on Sarah Everard may be at the extreme end of things, but it’s a product of a deep rooted view of women as primarily objects for male exploitation. I really don’t know what the answer to this is but if the upshot is that half the population is afraid to go out after dark, we have to stop accepting that as a reasonable state of affairs.

  6. I’ve changed my route home from work about three times in the last five years because I thought I’d be in danger. This was a big deal to me at the time – for women of all ages it’s absolutely routine.

    I think once I even made a joke of it on here along the lines of “took a ten minute detour to avoid some gentlemen whose acquaintance I did not wish to make”. If those guys had beaten me up, the police would have looked into it. If I was a woman I’d literally have to be dead before they were even interested. That’s what has to change.

      • That would be a quick and easy explanation of the parlous state of the UK economy but alas no.

        For quite a lot of people, usually men, recreational violence is a thing. They don’t want anything from you, other than your fear. They might nick your phone but that’s incidental. A Clockwork Orange was documentary, not fiction.

  7. I am assuming violence towards women ( and maybe violence in general.. . i don’t know) has become more prevalent in my lifetime. Why is this? I used to hitchhike everywhere without a thought of my safety, but I suspect no one does now. I used to walk home early in the morning all the time and feel perfectly secure. I wouldn’t nowadays, and I am male, so I simply can’t imagine a woman’s perspective.

    Has the world changed, or is it our knowledge of it that makes it appear so?

    I have a daughter who is the same age and and the same profession as the young victim here – we can’t begin to imagine how her family feels.

    • I don’t know if the rate of violence has increased, or if awareness of it has. Any rate of violence is unacceptable, but I thin it is likelier to be the latter than the former. My sons generation, anyway, if he is an example, seem much more aware of what constitutes acceptable behavior.

      He lives with his Mom, so I can take very little credit for him. He definitely doesn’t get it from her, because she sent me to hospital when we lived together. I think he gets a lot from his peers.

    • I don’t think that is necessarily the case. At least since the 80s I have witnessed lots of violence and heard of attacks on women. It was also the time of the Yorkshire Ripper.

      I do think the UK is an exceptionally violent society. I have lived in 3 other countries and visited many more and have rarely witnessed the undercurrent of menace present in many British situations.

      • I’m agree there, Dai-san. Moose above talks about “recreational violence”. That’s something that doesn’t really exist here in Italy.

    • I don’t know that it has, as my impression (purely my impression, no evidence or stats) is that there is much less violence of the kind I used to see in the 80s when brawls outside pubs, and inside sometimes, were common, pretty much every evening at a club would have the bouncers weighing in to a ruck on the dance floor at least once, and that’s without even mentioning football matches. Explanations for the decrease, if there has been one, range from kids taking to E and weed rather than booze, to lead being taken out of petrol.

      But that’s not the subject. I suspect we are more aware of violence against women now, and it doesn’t just involve strangers denying the basic right to walk down the street as they choose. My other half’s daughter was in the police for a short time. When I asked her what her day to day duties involved she rolled here eyes and said, ‘So many domestics …’ (almost entirely involving men attacking women). And even that isn’t what we are discussing precisely, though it has to be part of the conversation.

      • I’ll park myself uncomfortably on the fence here. I thought Bellows’ OP was misogynistic nonsense. But to blame such threads for the lack of women on here, a site populated by “old” blokes densely discussing remasters of classic recordings, is a step too far.
        Saying all that, for the umpteenth time I do hope such a tragic death really does make us men think about what we say and do as regards women. We really, really have to stop saying “I’d give her one” or “Have you seen the nipples on that” even if that’s when we are Men Only at the bar supping our pints or discussing the merits or otherwise of VAR.

        • The fundamental point of my comment was that I thought the OP was sexist and infantile and had no place on this blog (or anywhere else for that matter). It was curious to me that people leaped on the secondary point (though one I stand by) that posts like that are hardly likely to make women feel comfortable here; rather than the point about the offensiveness of the OP. But maybe people thought it was completely fine.

            • I’m somewhat on Bri’s side here. On the Toyah ‘n’ Bob thread I asked about how YouTube vids are monetised as I’d noticed a trend for “My Brownie Recipe” – 10,000 views versus “My Brownie Recipe In A Tight Top – 1,000,000 views and it seemed liked that’s what Toyah ‘n’ Bob we’re doing and was a genuine story that wealthy pop stars (however much they might be addicted to attention) would go down that route. Such stunts undertaken by those of status seem to me like fair game for piss taking, however dumb or juvenile, as the whole thing has an almost Newtonian action/opposite reaction built in. The second thread, which had no “look what our pop chums are up to now” value attached, seemed redundant and – yep – to serve only as a discouragement to any female lurkers thinking of joining in.
              But it still seems to me like a long way from that to my friend feeling uncomfortable walking past a group of workmen or revealing to me how hard it is for her to get paid as much as the next guy just because he’s a guy.
              Lots of terrific posts on here, though..

              • Are Toyah ‘n’ Bob wealthy? I suspect they are merely what gets described as Comfortably Off. Covid has probably put a dent in their finances, like a lot of other people’s.

                    • Hepworth, who has more knowledge of the living conditions of more music makers than most of us will ever know, always says there are two types of money to made in the business, ‘less than you would think’ and ‘more than you could imagine’.

                • Not just about money maybe. Also about something to do to keep occupied during these times. Wasn’t she worried about him going into himself too much? I read that somewhere. Maybe here.

      • Why does your link go to my post in particular? Just an ironic nudge nudge wink wink aside. Do I need to be taken away for Afterword re-education?

        It’s sending up the absurdity of the whole thing and the absurdity of ageing music fans (like us) subscribing and getting aroused. Surely that’s clear.

      • I certainly have no trouble whatsoever with Mrs. Fripp’s weekend videos, and the ensuing lighthearted comments, but my (perfectly styled) eyebrows go up to 11 when I read statements like »….minority groups – black, female etc – ….« here.
        And I definitely don’t want to live in a world where someone changes to the other side of the street when he sees me wearing a skirt.

      • Perhaps not my finest post, and I beg forgiveness. But, in my defence, as reply #1 says it was not the first time it had been aired round here.

        Plus… don’t shoot the messenger – Mrs F actually alerted me to it. And she’s a lady.

  9. This is a huge issue in Australia at the moment. Three things have happened recently

    1. A ministerial staffer went public to say she had been raped IN THE MINISTER’S OFFICE by a male staffer. This was maybe 2-3 years ago. The PM was, amazingly, not informed, or so he says. Various inquiries have been started.

    2. Then rumours circulated of an historical rape in 1988 committed by a Cabinet Minister. The Attorney General, a slime bag by the name of Christian Porter, who had already been named as a sleazy lech in an ABC-TV Four Corners doco (the flagship current affairs investigative program) finally held a press conference, admitting he was the Minister implicated, and wouldn’t you know it, denying it – “it just didn’t happen”. Because the victim took her own life and didn’t sign a sworn statement the police have said they can’t take it any further. So our thicker than pig shit PM has decreed Porter is innocent until proven guilty (which is of course legally true), but he refuses to hold any further inquiry or ask Porter to at least stand aside (one or both of these will have to happen cos – public opinion, and more witnesses coming forward including the head of McQuarie Bank)

    3. A young woman called Chanel Contos, only a few years out of high school, asked on Instagram if any girls had experienced rape while at school and to tell their stories. The response was massive, mainly from well-to-do private schools in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

    All this in the space of a couple of weeks.

    I was astonished at the number of women I knew who said #MeToo when asked if they’d been or felt threatened by men’s predatory behaviour.

    It’s a massive problem and it will take generations to fix, if at all. There seem to me to be encouraging signs but Mrs M reckons as long as there is the pig-headed male culture in government and business it won’t go away in a hurry.

    Can you believe there was a faction of Liberal (=right wing in Australia) MPs who called themselves the Big Swinging Dicks?

  11. “I have never really considered a women’s viewpoint on this before…”

    I’m quoting this incomplete sentence from the OP, not to get at UW, who I think did well to bring this good to the AW, but as a hook to hang my thoughts and reflections on the wider questions of male culture.

    When I was a child, I had action and construction toys. I loved building things, Lego, Fischer-Technik, Hornby, Airfix. My engineer dad really indulged this interest, bringing back new kits from his many trips abroad. The only figures I had were the 6 Million Dollar Man and Action Man, probably because other boys in my class had them, and I wanted to join in with them. Mostly it was about the kit they had – helicopter or deep sea diving set (rarely about the guns, although those were part of the accessories).

    My sister had Barbie and Sindy, who she dressed up, baby dolls, and a doll’s house, which she furnished and accessorised. Those were then the characters and stage sets in her mini dramas – picnics, birthday parties, child nursing, etc. Frivolous and babyish, I thought, compared to my big construction projects and I didn’t pay any real attention to what she was doing.

    Decades later, and I now have two daughters. I was sometimes sad that they weren’t interested in my old train sets and boys adventure stories that I used to enjoy, it slowly dawned on stupid, dense me that their Playmobil houses and villages, their treasured dolls and soft toys have been the basis for hours and hours of dramatic role play, for echoing, rehearsing, practising and developing complex human interactions, confrontations, relationships, and ultimately empathy. Possibly the greatest part of their education, certainly the emotional side of it, was something that was a deliberate closed book on my part. It took the unprepared exposure to real life adult relationships in my twenties to start to knock ineffective and unreflective perspectives into something approaching a better understanding of feelings and emotions. I’m still learning, of course…

    Shock is never a good filter through which to encounter other people. It leads to fight, flight or freeze reactions. My upbringing led me to the second and third of those, which is small relief, but I can imagine other adult men may have experienced similar childhoods, without necessarily having the same stigma against the first reaction.

    It’s fear, fear of the unknown, and I think the best thing we can do to improve male culture is not to stigmatize, but even better to encourage childhood activities that draw out the expression and exfoliation* of feelings. Strange and uncomfortable as that might seem at first, accustomising oneself to it means we aren’t so threatened by them when are supposed to be responsible adult males.

    *This is a autocorrect typo for ‘examination’, but I kind of like it.

    • Mrs M and I attempted to bring up our children on a strictly non-gender assumption theory. Our first, a girl, insisted on pink things from an early age, with no encouragement from us. Now my grandson is somehow instantly drawn to diggers, bulldozers, cars, lawnmowers and helicopters. A Barbie doll gifted from the girl next door lies unloved in the backyard.

      I dunno any more. I turned 67 last month…

      Also, Mrs M and I await the arrival of a grand daughter this year, obviously with delirious love and anticipation. I’m not even thinking about what may interest her yet. Yet…

      • Having boy/girl twin grandchildren is fascinating. At the age of nearly 3 Lucas is all cars, diggers etc just as you describe; Sylvie is all dollies and cooking, though she sometimes decides to play with cars just to annoy Lucas. All this without any prompting from their parents.

        As to the OP, I don’t have much to add. I was undoubtedly guilty of low-level abuse in my youth, like most males of my vintage. Now I’m old and fat I’d like to think that women don’t see me as a threat, but who knows if I’m right.

        I confess that when I saw the route Ms Everard took, my first thought was, why the hell didn’t she get an Uber? My second thought was, well, perhaps she had reason to be afraid of Uber drivers. In an ideal world of course a woman should have the right to take a 50-minute walk through London at night without being murdered, and 99 times out of 100 she would have done so safely. I’ve no idea where this line of thought is taking me…

    • I am not sure that women are as inclined to empathy as we like to make out.

      I think they are at risk from men, and men need to own that.

      But the only near suicide I encountered at work ws driven by the bullying tactics of young women to another young woman. The anecdotal evidence from my female colleagues was that women can be very cruel in ways that men may not be.

      • You are right, I think, to say that women are not necessarily drawn to empathy. Role-playing social interactions might give a better grasp of the dynamics of human relationships, but that can be exploited for negative effect, as well as for benign. The Germans have a word for this (of course) – zickig – quite a taboo, now I think – which loosely means bitchy. My sister went to an all-girls school for a year or two, but left because of the bullying and ganging up. I experienced that as well, in an all-boys school, so it’s clearly not gender-specific behaviour, but I think girls can dig deeper with psychological torture and exploiting perceived and expected social roles.

        The German wiki page on wiki had a paragraph on how clearly-defined arenas for male conflict (sport, etc) have given a socially-acceptable space for the expression of male conflict, in a way that hadn’t been made acceptable for female expression until recently. I wonder, given the way women through play, prepare themselves for psychological conflict, whether men are unprepared for confrontations in that arena?

  12. I certainly don’t want to take anything away from the main point of the thread or the tragedy of this particular news story, so apologies for any insensitivity in advance….

    One thing that puzzles me is that whilst this is undoubtably a major news story, I read that Jess Phillips brought up there had been 118 deaths of women this past year at the hands of men. Why is it that I had not heard about a single one of those, yet this Sarah Everard one has been headline news for the past few days ? I would hate to think that it’s because she was white, middle class, well educated etc……

    Maybe the fact that there were so many – a figure that did surprise me – reinforces the points above that violence / threats towards women is still too prevalent.

    • Because, unusually, she was grabbed from the street by a stranger. Those are the ones that make the news. Most of the routine, everyday violence against women is perpetrated by partners or members of their family and often goes unreported because the police couldn’t be less interested. This is so much a part of the fabric of our society that it’s either boring to the news media or the news media is run by the sort of men who feel a sort of relief when an allegation against a celebrity is proven untrue, because it allows them to ignore or dismiss all the true ones.

      And we all know the ones. The ones who have reacted defensively to every high profile MeToo case they’ve ever read about. Who give it the incredibly thick and irrelevant “Not All Men” treatment because stories of everyday misogyny hit too close to home, whether they’re conscious of that or not. Who think none of the women in their lives experience this stuff, because they’re not the sort of man a woman would feel comfortable sharing it with. Whose instinct – which they’ve never questioned – is to disbelieve rather than to believe. Who have never totted up in their own heads how many stories of abuse and male violence they’ve kneejerk dismissed or disbelieved, vs the ones they’ve believed. Who still give it the boorish pub twat when discussing women with other men. For whom women are just commodities or objects, and for whom the world is divided into “people” and “women”.

      Those men are everywhere and as @kid-dynamite says above, they’re the soil in which grow Peter Sutcliffe and that bloke you work with who is routinely abusing, terrorising and coercing his partner. Because you do work with him. He might even be your friend. And both he and you probably think he’s a great guy.

      • Ps: I go running alone in the early morning or early evening when it’s dark. I’m not talking about times we all might avoid being out in town: late night. I’m talking 6pm or 6am.

        None of my female friends, my daughter, my partner – all of whom are keen runners – do that. None. It’s daylight or nothing for every one of them. And I only realised it relatively recently. A dark or dusky 6pm is safe for me in a way it isn’t for any of the women I know.

    • There was, similar to your point, a young BAME child go missing in, I think, roughly the same area.

      Anyone seen tons of press on that.

      There is a definite pecking order in Society. Men first, women second, but if you add any kind of qualifier like BAME in front of your noun,, you automatically get relegated.
      See also: ridiculous amounts of money being spent on McCann.

  13. There was a figure that I saw yesterday that I thought was deeply shocking. 97 percent of women between age of 18 to 24 have reported being sexually harassed. If that figure is correct, and there is no reason to suggest it isnt, we have a massive problem.
    Not acceptable.

  14. About twenty years ago, we were on holiday in early autumn in a small Yorkshire town not far from York. Before going into the pub for our evening meal, we took a turn around the town. It was still light, the shops were closing and there were very few people about.

    As we came through the small market place, a teenage girl came over to us, followed by two teenage boys. ‘Help’ she said, ‘I want to walk with you’. My partner put her elbow out, linked arms and walked with the young woman. We laughed, pretended to know her, said we hadn’t seen her for ages. The two boys dropped well back. The three of us carried on our walk into the pub, the two women going in, while I stayed outside. The two boys carried on walking. Inside, mine hosts were talking to the girl. She didn’t say much about the boys, other than they were following her. She left via the rear of the pub.

    I often think about this incident, and what might have happened if she hadn’t seen us or someone else.

  15. My daughter and I watched Bombshell a few months back and her comment at the end was ‘You don’t know the half of it!’ She has her own interior design business and the stories she has told me from being on site and people expecting a man to turn up, to proposed investors sending messages to wear a specific dress or clothing, married men inviting her to dinner and trips to Dubai all outside of the expected working relationship. I shudder to think what she has held back and not spoke to me about.
    It’s made me think about the initial #metoo movement and the stories from men regards simple things like holding doors etc and the responses they have had. To get to a stage where women are so wary of even a simple polite gesture because they are so unsure of the motives is frightening and sad. The bravery they show simply by leaving the house each day is astonishing.

    • Yes, great post.

      The consequences of treating a good man like a bad one are some hurt feelings for the man. The consequences of giving a bad one the benefit of the doubt are assault, rape or death for the woman. It’s so clearly a no-brainer that anyone who can’t see it is really just telling us all that they do indeed have no brain.

      Like Margaret Atwood said, men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.

  16. This rather long, but rather magnificent, piece was shared by a friend on Facebook. It’s a shame that it has to be mansplaining, but many men – and, still, some women – just don’t get it. *As an aside, I highly recommend the book Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates*.

    From Ben Rushworth, who I don’t know; this was shared on a friend’s page.

    “I spewed some furious barely-thought-out words on this over on Twitter, but you know me: why stick to 280 characters when I can ramble on for paragraphs on end?
    Basically: I am fucking sick to the back teeth of seeing women being told that they effectively have a curfew. Don’t go out after dark. Don’t wear headphones. Don’t forget to tell someone where you’re going and when you’ll be home. Don’t be too confrontational in case you make him angry but don’t be too friendly in case he thinks it’s a come-on. Don’t smile but also “smile, love!” Don’t wear a short dress in summer or a slinky party outfit, like a woman hasn’t just been literally snatched from the street while wearing a beanie, trainers and a face mask.
    Just fucking stop it.
    Perhaps we should have the curfew. A sunset curfew for all men. There was an article about women sharing the things they’d do if that ever happened, and the way that they pretty much all described normal mundane everyday things should have made every man stop and take a minute. “I’d go for a run after dark.” “I’d walk to my gym classes” “I’d walk home from the pub.” The stuff we do without thinking is a relentless series of plans and contingencies for women. The need to think about a taxi – like taxi drivers haven’t been reported repeatedly to make unwelcome advances to their female customers – about a route home, about who to tell. If they’re meeting us for a date, they share our social media pages with their friends in case they “don’t come home”. Think about that.
    That’s what it means to have privilege. It doesn’t mean your life isn’t hard; it means that one of the things that is making it hard isn’t your sex.
    Literally every woman I know and every woman you know has a story about how a man left her feeling unsafe; feeling scared; making plans to defend herself if necessary; worrying about our reactions; making up a fictional boyfriend or husband because sometimes that’s the only way to get the message across. They all have stories, and they all have MANY. Think for a second how fucked up it is that we don’t listen to her say “I’m not interested” until she qualifies it with “because a man already possesses me.”
    And you know what? They fucking KNOW it’s “not all men”. They know that. It isn’t a mark of distinction to announce by saying that that you personally are not a murderer, a violent thug, or a rapist. Imagine listening to a story of abuse, harassment or worse and feeling that the most important thing to make clear is that you would not do that too. That feels like a pretty basic fucking benchmark. So don’t be that person.
    Because, crucially, you and I look JUST LIKE the men that are like that, to those that don’t know us. I look like what I am, a hefty six-foot chap with a long stride and (probably, if I am having to walk anywhere) a grumpy/angry-looking expression. So of course a woman that doesn’t know me is going to worry if I am walking near her at night or waiting with her at a tram stop. I have coasted to a stop at traffic lights in my car, or paused to give way to another driver or a cyclist, and seen a worried glance from a woman walking nearby who has heard a car pull up near her and is worried that she is suddenly about to be the target of abuse, catcalling, or worse.
    She doesn’t know that I’m a slightly camp wuss who’d last less than thirty seconds in any physical altercation. So yes, despite that being my lot, I will cross the road to make sure I am further away from a woman alone. I will make a loud and unnecessary phone call to my mum if that will put her slightly more at ease. I will find an irrelevant shop window or something to look in, or something to read, if it lengthens the distance between us and makes it more obvious that I am no threat to her. These are just the things that I have instinctively come up with as I have grown; if there are others that the men I know have come up with themselves, I will take those on board too. Because (radical thought!) my ego is not more important than someone’s right to feel safe when exercising their fundamental right to exist outside of their homes.
    I will also do my best to call out the men I know if there’s any creepy or unsafe vibes coming from them. I think that the men I know are pretty much universally safe and wholesome – why would I have time for them if they weren’t? – but if I see my friend worriedly edging away from some pub creep or trying to politely but non confrontationally decline his advances, I will call him out. We need to get better at making it clear that that is not just “how men are.”
    Two more things.
    If you say “speaking as a father” or “speaking as a husband”, what you’re essentially saying – and what the women you love will hear – is “I didn’t understand that women were humans too until I had one of my own.” It shouldn’t need the addition of a particular woman to your worldview to realise that all of them have worth. The same goes for “imagine if that was your sister” – I know you mean well, but you are again saying “I only define whether women deserve safety and kindness depending on their relationship to a man.”
    And finally, if you defend the behaviour that is at the thin end of the wedge leading to the horrific fate of Sarah Everard: the shouting out of car windows, the catcalling of women exercising or commuting or walking their dogs, the workplace sleaze, if you say “it’s a compliment, lighten up!” or “it’s just banter!” then you should understand this: whenever you do that, a woman you love silently and suddenly realises that she cannot trust you.
    *Edit 12/03*
    I am getting a lot of responses to this that I did not expect when I angrily started ranting at 4am on a break from work. And in writing angrily and quickly, it seems I have not been entirely clear.
    My reference to a male curfew is a deliberately outrageous suggestion made to make a point, a rhetorical device, not a serious policy idea. It was the same when the peer in the House of Lords said it too.
    It is intended to draw attention to the “safety advice” women are given regularly – including, this week, the advice in one area to stay indoors after dark – and how normal it apparently is. If the same suggestions were made about men, they would be (have been!) dismissed as an outrageous assault on personal freedom.
    You don’t like being told you should have to stay home at night when you haven’t done anything wrong? Neither do women.”

    • (I’ve probably said too much on this thread already in my longwinded fashion, so sorry if you have to scroll over even more of my paragraphs).
      I think it’s a good, forthright text – a de facto curfew for women is appalling, and a curfew for men would shake things up and give a fresh perspective on something that male privilege has allowed me not to think about. I agree about calling out everyday sexism, as well.

      But I’m not sure about this:
      “It shouldn’t need the addition of a particular woman to your worldview to realise that all of them have worth”.
      The objectification of women is, I think, why men’s behaviour towards women can be and frequently is so appalling. ‘They aren’t people, they are objects (of the male gaze)’ seems to be the unconscious attitude.

      We objectify groups of people all the time (the unemployed, the elite, Brexiters, Remoaners, etc). It’s a convenient shorthand for broadbrushing groups based on a few perceptions, received opinions, and probably wish fulfillment. It’s lazy and prejudiced and divides people into tribes, but it’s a human trait – we can’t concentrate on everything at the same time, so we rely on something like peripheral vision until it gets corrected.

      And it gets corrected by encountering and getting to know real people, who may fit in some way into the tribe one would have preconceived opinions about, but who are, of course, rounded, complex 3 dimensional individuals. Ideally that leads to a more benign view of humanity, not a ‘some of my best friends are…’ approach.

      It should be a given that ‘women are humans too’, of course, as it should be a given that all people in every country are humans. But is it wrong to say that It is through the women that men have personal relationships with – be it partner, daughter, sister, mother, friend – that the sense of objectification diminishes as real, lived experiences demonstrate the falsity of that approach? Connect to the women you know, and extrapolate from there.

      • I tend to agree with you.

        My way of expressing it is that unless you are personally subject to the fear, abuse and harassment that women experience, your empathy is likely be that of an intellectual level. The closer you are to women who experience it, the closer you are to their lived reality and thereby closer to the full emotional impact.

        It’s a little like becoming a parent. You can read all the literature in the world and talk to all the parents you like, and think you are ready and you know what parenting is like. Until you actually have a child, you don’t.

  17. In recent months I’ve participated in listening exercises at work where employees from minority groups – black, female etc – have had a chance to describe, how ever they wanted , what it’s like to be them. What I’ve heard has been at times very angry, mostly very sad, even occasionally funny. Mostly as a white, male armchair liberal, it’s left me thinking there isn’t a hole deep enough to crawl into.

    As a tangental example, one of the ways in which women will attain equal pay is if men tell women who ask how much they earn. There have been a number of successful cases that hinged exactly on this. Men have the power, they have the solution.

  18. Possibly the most depressing and ultimately scary thing about this debate is that, while we’re hearing lots from the UK, from the USA, from Oz and so on about how appalling the lot of women is in the personal power wars, as far as I can recall those territories don’t routinely stone women to death for wearing the wrong sorts of clothes, burn them to death for looking at the wrong man, cut off their heads in the street for falling in love with an inappropriate person or even require them to walk a yard or two behind the man who owns them. Outside of these places, the human race has an even longer way to go on wider shores before it can tell itself that it treats women fairly.

  19. My first full time job was when I was 16 working in a large bank. Most of my colleagues were female. I remember Ange telling me that she had a rape alarm in her bag for when she was walking home at night alone in the dark. It looked like a lighter and was very loud – like a domestic smoke alarm – she carried it in her hand, just in case. Imagine feeling that you have to do that just walking home from work.

    That’s not the bit I remember though – she wasn’t just talking about it to me, it was something she told many people about and I overheard her saying the same thing each time. “I’ll probably never use it – after all, he’d have to be pretty desperate, eh?”. Getting that line in before someone else did.

    • It would be nice to think that they would…..
      Some very disturbing scenes on tonight’s news from the vigil at Clapham Common, police brandishing batons and dragging women away in handcuffs, doubly unfortunate in the circumstances that it seemed to be predominantly Male officers doing the manhandling. I wonder if a BLM peaceful protest would have been handled with the same lack of sensitivity….

      • Let’s not forget the accused is a Met officer. Met officers are used to getting away with absolutely everything: this time that actually might not apply, for one token occasion. They’re probably quite angry about that – you don’t join the met and expect to have the law applied to you like one of those civilian mugs whose taxes pay your wages. So those kind of men do what they always do when they’re angry and take it out on women.

        The Dixon of Dock Green-sentimentality that is still applied to the police in this country is nauseating. As in most countries in the world, they are not on our side: they are on theirs.

        • I’m sure the rank-and-file police are very angry indeed about this case, but I reckon their anger is almost entirely towards the accused, who has blackened the reputation of the police so much it’s effect is going to last for years. People already distrust the police and the cops must all be aware that the distrust is now much, much deeper.

          • Well, to modify the rather extreme position I took there, my cousin is a PCSO and works his fingers to the bone trying to gain and keep the trust of the community he serves. Of course a PCSO on a rural beat isn’t on the same planet as the job the Met do, but the brand is the brand. He’ll be furious about this as you say, as he always is about these things: my comment on Dixon of Dock Green is based on an exchange I had with him a few years ago:

            Me: I bet you get sick of people asking you if it’s like on the telly.
            Him: I don’t mind, I get to tell ’em it’s not.
            Me: Not all shoot-outs and car-chases eh?
            Him: Well people watch these things and think everyone becomes police for the right reasons… and a lot of them definitely fucking don’t.

            He doesn’t swear much.

            • The police certainly have their share of outright thugs and arseholes. When police or military are in large numbers together, they seem to easily sink to the level of the worst among them. I bet there were some really choice bantz in the police buses on the way to Clapham Common.

      • It’s the sheer ineptitude of the Met here that is so breathtaking. They could have had low level inconspicuous police attendance, and just let the thing gradually unwind – or they could wade in as they did and inflate the whole situation and cause untold damage to the their own reputation. I can’t see Cressida Dick surviving this one.

        • Utterly tone deaf. A vigil for a woman who is thought to have been murdered by a serving Met officer is heavy-handedly policed by the Met, mainly by male officers so far as I could see, who then man handle the women at the vigil.

          The photographs from last night, so much more vivid than the video footage because the effect of a harsh flash on the Met’s hi-viz jackets and the woman’s red hair and pale skin, we startling enough for Priti Patel to call them ‘upsetting’ (Cressida dIck: ‘I’m sorry if you feel that you were upset Hime Secretary’). Today’s reasoning from the Met is

          “We absolutely did not want to be in a position where enforcement action was necessary. But we were placed in this position because of the overriding need to protect people’s safety.”

          In other words the ‘look what you made me do’ defence.

          • They also opposed the vigil, forcing the organisers to stand their stewards down, only to then start throwing their weight around when the crowd still showed up. As Jess Phillips (sort of ) said on Marr earlier, Borough Market was just as crowded yesterday, and plod didn’t bat an eyelid.

        • Wear ’em like bruises, I say. A healthy community like this ought to be able to police itself. Only seven people responded to that thread, including one who has been absolved (see below), and two who leapt in to condemn it. Does that ‘speak volumes’ as Vulpes suggests? It does, but not for the reason he thinks.

          • Stuff your smugly superior attitude old son. It spoke volumes, eventually, that only seven people responded. But that observation only became possible in hindsight, when the final level of response became clear. At the time that two of us ‘leapt in’ (aka ‘responded’) with a condemnatory comment, the level of response still remained unknown. What also spoke volumes, I thought, was that anyone would have taken the trouble to chastise the condemnation.

    • Your posts on this thread have been amongst the best and most interesting on it. And there is a world of difference between your genius deployment of the double entendre, which brings only joy unconfined to this site, and the kind of misogyny and sexism which is pretty rare here but which we all see elsewhere.

        • I was trying to think of a way of saying something similar, but it has been said much better. We no more believe you to be a drooling sextard than we believe Boris to be a loveable buffoon.Keep on hurring (or herring as spellcheck would have it.)

          • (piece of shit rambling post incoming)

            It’s been rightly pointed out that that thread with the tits* on it was awful, and there I am on it, loud and proud, doing my thing.

            The bloke who harassed Marina Hyde – and all the thousands of men he represents – does what he does partly because he feels he has the tacit assent of blokes sharing dirty jokes amongst themselves. Maybe. I don’t know. Help me.

            My wife is a proper feminist, not one of these modern ones who thinks porn is just a bit of a laugh, and she puts me right when she has to. She doesn’t mind the jokes though. I asked her about this and she said that a joke about sex isn’t necessarily sexist. What’s wrong with…etc

            (*not the one about the Royal Family, oho)

            • As a friend of mine likes to say, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was getting a generation of young women to agree that porn and prostitution (sorry, “sex work”) was not only fine, but “empowering” and feminist. Because heaven forbid anyone think us prudish. “Sex positive feminism”, regardless of its good intentions, gives a large number of people cover to do that “I heard she’s well frigid” back-of-the-school-bus snigger we all remember so fondly.

  22. As one of the last remaining “Afterbirds” here you may expect me to say something on the subject.
    Honestly, I just don’t have the energy to dissect the female experience in a blog (sorry; forum) post.
    TLDW…to spare you from TLDR.
    However: nice show of solidarity and if this tragic story has made anyone think twice and behave better/call out unwanted behaviour in others, that’s a good thing – but most of us are probably intelligent enough to be able to tell the difference between a misogynist joke made in bad taste and a funny (or boring but harmless) joke that happens to involve women…so don’t feel that you have to stop all of the hurr-ing just because you’ve been reminded that being a woman can sometimes be a disadvantage…I can’t speak for all other women, but that sort of thing really doesn’t offend me.
    The only reason why I’m not posting as much these days is that I don’t have the time and energy to spare at the moment – it’s not you, it’s me, as they say. You hear a lot about how the internet is a dangerous place, but as a woman I’d say it’s one of the safer places to be (especially this particular corner of it)!

      • I should have added that I don’t think FPO was harmful so much as obnoxious, a shibboleth to warn me that I couldn’t assume that I would share the user’s worldview.

    • Well, I don’t use it any more because of the cold wind of disapproval, but it always struck me as a mildly amusing arfish expression (see also GLW, and memsahib come to that) whose degree of offence is not absolute but varies according to the significant other and the relationship you have with her. Mrs thep, whose sexism antennae are highly sensitive, found it dumb but was amused by it. There’ are really serious matters on this thread we all need to take on board, but I don’t think this is one of them. Happy to submit to re-education if I’m wrong.

    • My take on FPO is that it’s a variant of CPO which stands for Chief Petty Officer, i.e. not a really senior officer, but a jumped up matelot with a miniscule but telling level of authority who is able to make one’s life a misery if they feel like it. An equal, or nearly, but one to whom one is bound to defer on some matters. Ask a sailor.

      As such, it’s not gender specific; it just means the person with whom one has an inextricable and unavoidable day-to-day relationship, and for whom one’s personal discomfort, or simple lack of guilty fun, may annoyingly on occasion be a source of joy.

      I put it in the category of acronyms or foreign terms, originally derived from military origins, that have entered the language and been adopted for wider use by civilians. English is awash with such.

      • I think it’s a variant on Fire Prevention Officer.

        Incidentally my father was a Chief Petty Officer, Aircraft Artificer, who joined the Fleet Air Arm in 1941 and served for forty years. I thought he had done something brave and to be proud of, but there you go.

        • I’m sure he did, I don’t believe I insinuated any denigration, so don’t get huffy!

          However, it remains true that, from the point of view of a simple noncomm grunt, army, navy or what have you, any NCO is an object of disgruntlement. At least until the bullets are flying.

          I thought of Chief Petty rather than Fire Prevention mainly because my uncle was a CPO in the RN for a similar length of time.

      • I was a Chief Petty Officer (electrical artificer) in the Royal Navy. I worked hard for years to become one, & it enabled me to have an 18 year career in the power industry.

        Or as you put it, a jumped up matelot.

        Go fuck yourself.

    • My wife and I both refer to each other, and indeed ourselves, as “The FPO” because we always found it funny. All of these things depend on context. It did get a bit wearing on the old place site when it was generically used as a slightly derogatory term for the female significant other (who does NOT like Mogul Thrash or whatever)

  24. I think FPO (Fun Prevention Officer) was used by Jerry Leadbetter in the Good Life, describing his wife Margo to Tom. In the context of those two characters, it is very funny because he was timid and terrified of her – and wouldn’t dare say anything like that to her face. The “fun” he refers to is drinking beer from a can and eating a takeaway.

    • In a longlost episode called ‘Fawlty Goods’, Jerry and Margo took Tom and Barbara on a couples weekend break down to Torquay, staying in a boutique hotel some distance from the coast. Jerry spent most of the time in the bar with the owner (sorry, manager), sharing hard luck stories while Margo took advantage of an offer to go golfing with the manager’s wife, who had membership of the local club – apparently they had a rare old time, cackling away at the foibles of their partners. Tom holed up in the kitchen, trying to get the chef to place an order for his organic veg and practising his Spanish with the waiter. Meantime, Barbara made the most of everyone else being busy by enjoying a few drinks on the terrace with an American woman, who was nominally the waitress, but seemed to do most of the work around the hotel. I think Barbara shared a ‘Surbiton sausage’, made with that ‘herbal tobacco’ she grows in the greenhouse.

      Of course, Jerry and the manager managed to kill one of the guests and set fire to the dining room, but Barbara and the American waitress successfully defused the situation and bluffed the police, fire brigade and ambulance who showed up with what looked like weary familiarity halfway through the afternoon.

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