Here’s a story about a young woman, and a benevolent older married man, and the awkward dude who was obsessed with her. Go read the story, with this in mind:

When I tell this story to women, they spot The Question right away. The men don’t; they think that Dr Glass behaved like a gentleman, neither doing too much nor too little. They are feminist men, and good people. They have read “The Gift of Fear” and they talk about privilege and the patriarchy, and they don’t spot it.

I’m a woman, yet I didn’t spot The Question (I was too busy looking for it in the wrong place, alas. I got the creepy sinister vibe from the beginning, so when The Question should’ve popped, it was lost in the noise of ZOMG all of that is so fucking wrong. I felt like a right proper doofus when it was pointed out, because it went from well that had the potential to be a really awful situation to oshit it almost happened right there, and I didn’t see it). Tell me if you spotted it. For those of you who didn’t, what made you miss it? Did the whole tone of the story change once it was asked? Or were you not in the least surprised?

Don’t miss the original post that comment was left at. The whole thing is necessary, and bears repeating a hundred million times until our culture gets it and changes, but here’s the takeaway message:

I don’t know how we fix it, but one step has to be to stop tolerating it when it happens to us and when it happens to people we love. Making our social circles and spaces safe means making them AWKWARD AS HELL and UNSAFE for creeps and predators. It means constantly reframing the conversation away from the dominant narrative, so when stuff like the situations in these letters comes up we can say “That’s called sexual assault and it’s a crime. So I need you to stop talking to me about his feelings and pressuring me to invite him to parties.“

Direct your don’t-get-it guy friends, family and acquaintances to the two posts above. Tell them to read for comprehension. And don’t give them a pass if they don’t get it. We can’t stop repeating the message until it’s sunk in: this creepy, predatory behavior is wrong and has to stop. The people who can’t stop engaging in it cannot be part of our social spaces. Period.

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