spooniewifey:

roachpatrol:

jumpingjacktrash:

sptrashcan:

As a man who frequently worries about the apparent ease with which I could stumble into accidentally hurting women, it is a great relief to consider the possibility that the people who profess to blunder into sexual harassment may be fucking liars. Maybe my lifetime track record of zero hilarious molestation mishaps isn’t a lucky coincidence. Maybe I can have an unlimited number of cordial conversations with women without tripping over my tongue into an outrage.

The patriarchy hurts everyone, indeed…

i think my female followers might be surprised that a story like this fills men with relief, but yeah, it is good to know that these ‘accidental’ villains are playing dumb as part of their scheming bullshit.

i mean, there’s times when you get surprise privelege-checked upside the face and it hurts like hell, i’m not denying we can be sexist by accident and cry when we get called on it, nobody likes a sudden guilt+scolding combo and not everyone will be a grownup about it. but that gets conflated with these stories of sexual misconduct, and it’s terrifying.

so it’s actually really comforting to understand that sex criminals promote that conflation on purpose to protect themselves. it’s not something we have to buy into.

you won’t sexually assault someone by accident. these assholes know they got told no, and consciously chose to ignore it.

yeah it’s like the ‘helpless creep’ who ‘doesn’t know any better’. truly awkward men are awkward to other men too! they misread cues and get into conflicts with *all* their peers. but predators use the *appearance* of haplessness to ignore women’s social signals and tresspass all over their boundaries, then play the victim when women get mad, and other men give them a pass cuz the predator hasn’t bothered *them*.

“There’s a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler’s perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men — particularly powerful men — use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts. The bumbler takes one of our culture’s most muscular myths — that men are clueless — and weaponizes it into an alibi.”

Very relevant: Meet The Predators

From the conclusions:

Second, the sometimes-floated notion that acquaintance rape is simply a mistake about consent, is wrong. (See Amanda Hess’s excellent takedown here.) The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again … and again … and again. That just doesn’t square with the notion of innocent mistake. Further, since the repeaters are also responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of the intimate partner violence, child beating and child sexual abuse, the notion that these predators are somehow confused good guys does not square with the data. Most of the raping is done by guys who like to rape, and to abuse, assault and violate. If we could get the one-in-twelve or one-in-25 repeat rapists out of the population (that is a lot of men — perhaps six or twelve million men in the U.S. alone) or find a way to stop them from hurting others, most sexual assault, and a lot of intimate partner violence and child abuse, would go away. Really.

(Also: Predator Redux)

Mythcommunication: It’s Not That They Don’t Understand, They Just Don’t Like The Answer

The same seems to apply to just about any type of creepy predatory behavior. It’s all a matter of degrees, and as they say abusive behaviors do tend to run together.

The major problem is coming from a relatively small percentage of hardcore repeat predators who are aware their attentions are unwanted and just don’t care about the harm they’re doing–not bumblers accidentally violating boundaries.

As Cliff Pervocracy put it in an older post (We are the 95%):

The one big lie at the center of all these little lies is: “If you were in my place, you could have done the same.”…

So when you hear all the totally plausible ways it could have been you, realize: nope, probably couldn’t have been. Most people don’t struggle not to commit rape… just as the vast majority of people don’t have trouble restraining themselves from torture or murder…

This is part of why I talk about consent so much. It’s not just to keep well-intentioned guys from accidentally raping. Most well-intentioned guys don’t really have that problem. It’s to help well-intentioned guys (and girls, and everyone else) see how vast the gulf is between them and rapists.

If affirmative, negotiated, freely given consent is the norm, then rapists lose the ability to say “I just didn’t know.” They can no longer make anyone think “but regular sex looks practically the same.” If romance doesn’t work a damn thing like rape, rapists can’t hide behind “I was trying to be romantic.”

Again, the same applies to harassment. And it keeps coming up whenever a known serial harasser’s patterns of behavior gets public attention. This endless focus on the potential for bumbling and legitimate misunderstandings just offers the hardcore predators plausible deniability. The rest of us don’t have to go along with that and help preserve that cover.

The Myth of the Male Bumbler