aerois:

timewarpagain:

aerois: ask-1pengland: facebooksexism: wtfsexism: toptumbles: Rejection Um. So I’m probably one of the few folks who doesn’t think this is adorable. At all. I think it’s fucking scary how this little boy keep pushing himself on her after she CLEARLY doesn’t want to be bothered with his ass. And the adult behind the camera doesn’t intervene at all because it’s ‘cute.’ And how analogous it is to when grown ass men don’t take fucking no for an answer, no matter how much we push and shove and say no. This is not cute. This is an absolute disregard of this little girl’s boundaries. In the very bottom left gif you can see he’s smiling/laughing. Like this is some kind of game. I would bet money that the person filming this is laughing and encouraging him. This is how we teach boys not to respect women’s spaces. She sure doesn’t look like she’s fucking laughing. It’s impossible for me to not view it like that too… Can we also point out the the boy pins her to the wall, several times. Not okay, basically what this is teaching is that it’s ok to pin a girl to a wall, even when she obviously pushes you away. Funny how people always say, “Ugh, just because my son keeps staring at the baby girl his age across the restaurant doesn’t mean he has some crush on her! He’s TWO! Just because my 3 year old’s best friend at daycare is a girl doesn’t mean he’s in love with her! He’s only a baby, he legitimately has no capacity to be in love!” but then when it comes to stuff like this, it’s OBVIOUSLY the patriarchy brainwashing a fucking infant to rape. You wanna know the REAL reason that little boy is “harassing” that little girl? Because he sees another freaking baby his age and he wants to play! He’s a fucking baby, he doesn’t know what no means! It’s nothing to do with rape, good God what the fuck is wrong with you people. My own nephew does this to other little kids. He does it to boys, girls, it doesn’t matter. He sees another baby and his first instinct is to literally go give it a kiss and hug, because his family greets him that way and so he reasonably does it to everyone else. To him, that’s how you play nice and meet new people. We try to get him to understand, but he’s young. He can barely speak more than 2 words. Eventually he’s going to grow out of it, but for now that’s just what he does and there’s literally nothing wrong with it. I know you guys are all for teaching boys to respect girls at a young age. That’s great, and I’m all for it. But for God’s sake, he’s being a regular-ass baby doing regular-ass baby stuff. Y’all need to calm the fuck down. He’s a fucking baby. Jesus Christ. Except that not teaching your kid to leave someone else alone when they clearly don’t want to be around that person is a problem. It doesn’t matter how old they are, it’s still unwanted attention and it IS harassment.

I totally agree we should be teaching our kids to not bother people who obviously aren’t interested. And like pretty much everything that a kid should be taught, we need to try teaching them as early as possible. I never meant to imply anything else, and I apologize if my post came off as some sort of “boys will be boys” type argument. That kind of mindset really isn’t acceptable.

But in regards to “It doesn’t matter how old they are…” yes, yes it does matter how old they are. He’s too young to realize what he’s doing. That boy probably can’t speak more than 20 words, plus he has to learn the rules for social interaction before he can be judged for not following them. Interactions like this, even though he’s messing it up, are learning opportunities for him. Things exactly like this are what tells him what he should and shouldn’t do and why. So even though he didn’t do the right thing, this is an experience he can draw on in the future. Next time he meets another child, he might think for a moment: “Oh, but the last time I went to hug someone they didn’t like it. Maybe I should be cautious and not grab them.”

His brain is not developed enough for him to have a functioning moral compass at that age. He doesn’t see the situation as him forcing himself on someone who doesn’t like him. His brain is saying, “I want a hug. When I hug people, they always hug me back. That’s how hugs work. This person must not realize how hugs work, so I’ll keep trying until they understand.” Here, he is learning that just because he wants a hug, doesn’t mean that the other person does.

He’s testing the boundaries of something that he once learned was concrete from his family: that hugs are reciprocated. When his hug isn’t reciprocated, it confuses him because it breaks the “rules” of hugging that he’s come to perceive as truth. He’s trying to see if he can get the “rules” to work again, or if there are new rules he didn’t know about before, which is the case here. This is something babies do when learning and experiencing new things.

For a baby, it isn’t as simple as “Don’t do that because it’s bad/wrong/incorrect.” Sometimes they have to make mistakes to learn from them because they don’t understand it any other way. Especially two year olds, who are not very good at following directions and not doing whatever they feel like doing. This goes for academics, perception, and yes,even morals. We should always strive to teach them not to do that when they’re young, but I would not label the actions of a two year old as any type of harassment, especially sexual harassment, which is the assumption of most people who would look at this post.

To reiterate: he’s a fucking baby.