“Hey, what about her?”
It came from some dude, talking about my mom to one of his buddies. I was standing in line with her at the post office. I was eight. They leaned back and watched us. They started making comments about me. My mom told me to ignore them.
Eventually, they walked off.
They called us boring.
In college, this guy used to come to my favorite coffee shop almost every day. He bought an ice tea. He found a table across from a cute girl and stared at her until she got uncomfortable and left. Sometimes he stared at me until I moved to another room. Then he stood beside the espresso machine and stared at the barista. She couldn’t leave. Nobody believed they could do anything to stop him.
He had a right to be there, after all.
One time a stranger grabbed my friend’s arm as she was walking into a restaurant. He almost yelled, “You’re so beautiful!”
She screamed.
You see these stories all over the internet. A man blocks a woman in her parking space so he can get her phone number. A man follows a woman into the locker room to ask her out. A man flags a woman down and hands her an explicit poem about her body. A man follows a woman in his truck while she’s out jogging.
Women are harassed constantly.
They try to talk about it.
Nobody listens.
Well…
The internet has found a new problem for us to solve. Apparently, more than 50 percent of men avoid interactions with women. They’re scared to ask them out. They worry about looking creepy.
Somehow, it’s women’s fault.
Women don’t hit on men enough. They don’t make men feel welcome. They something-something-something.
Who knows?
As far as I can tell, this piece of dating lore originated from a post on Psychology Today. It’s a good piece. It talks about the need to define “creepy behavior,” so that men can socialize and even hit on women without making them uncomfortable.
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