madamovary:

halfhardtorock: Men who have literally never experienced the endless barrage of aggressive and microaggressive sexual harassment that women have to deal with on a daily basis: [smug smile] Did you ever think to just say clearly that you’re not interested or to tell them to fuck off??? You’re welcome. I do not want to listen to a drunk guy on the bus berate me for the next half hour of my ride after I tell him to fuck off. Neither does anyone else on the bus. Just saying “fuck off” ALWAYS, ALWAYS opens a can of worms that may or may not end in getting punched in the face, stalked home, or violently murdered. What am I going to do, mace him in the face and get arrested for assault?

YES. Exactly fucking THIS RIGHT HERE.

If we seem timid, it’s because we’ve already learned the hard way.

A man who does that shit to a woman?? He already broke the social contract, stomped right through her boundaries, and raised every fucking internal red flag she has. This becomes about survival right away. Women aren’t being timid when they read all these DANGER-DANGER! signs and choose to de-escalate the situation as quickly as possible by being quiet, careful, placid. What seems like timidity and weakness is a woman intelligently reading all those signs of disrespect and danger being put off and acting in the best way she can to fucking live. A lot of cis men don’t have any idea how to read these situations because they’ve either a.) never been in one or b.) been on the wrong side of one. If you give advice to your woman friends, girlfriends, sisters, wives that they should have just tried to “speak up!” when she was harassed (when literally no one who witnessed it tried to help either, lets not ignore that reality), you live in another world and have no real understanding of what women go through.

(via perminas)