Be Excellent To Each Other

On a long train or tube journey I have a horrible tendency to stare off into the middle distance and day dream. Completely in my own world and not 'seeing' what I'm staring at. A pick pockets dream basically.

Once I woke up to realise I was staring at a girls ample cleavage. Which was horrendously awkward as she was glaring me to death when I came round, and the other time I was staring at mans quite apparent "package" whilst him and his girlfriend watched me.

Whoops!

Eeeh! You should be locked up. You're a ruddy perv, and that's swearing.

Didn't someone do a sketch where a woman walked past a building site and got wolf whistled at, so she tunrs around and lifts up her skirt to reveal she wasn't wearing any knickers and was, in fact, a pre op transsexual?

Ok, let's see if this causes offence or not... I've run out of nice ways to phrase it.

There is a reason that every pic I've seen of you seems to be from the classic MySpace "straight down the tits" angle. To whit, you're certainly not adverse to playing up to it. You can't then expect to "get away" with that completely unlooked.

Jesus, yes, schoolgirls today. Dress like whores, I never know whether to give them sweets or money.

Felicity-with-the-three-legs: I thought you'd left that place?!

See, I think Shin's touched on the crux of it, really. There's nothing wrong with just looking at attractive people, of either sex, provided you're not doing it in a way which is threatening. And be honest with yourselves, if you're dressed up nicely, wearing something that accentuates the nice bits, why are you dressed like that? Because you like the way it makes you look? Well, you're not spending the day looking at yourself, so it's so you look nice viewed from outside your own head, isn't it? I know when I make an effort over my appearance it's not so I can look in a mirror all day admiring myself, it's so I look nice to the outside world, and I like it when I get women giving me appraising looks.*

Yes, the difference there is that a woman isn't a threat to a man, but then most men aren't a threat when they're looking at women, they just might be being a bit obvious about it. And context, as with many other things, is king.

An illustrative story. In a tutorial at university, there was this absolutely stunning woman. I mean really quite phenomenal. I couldn't take my eyes off her for most of the tutorial. I knew I was staring, so I tried to stop as I was worried I was going to creep her out if she saw me doing it. But she did look up and caught my eye, so I gave her an embarrassed smile and an eyebrow, conveying "heavens, I'm terribly sorry for staring but you are just lovely, but I'm mortified that I may have been impolite" (I have expressive Roger Moore eyebrows). But she smiled back, a big "Aww, shucks" smile, and then came up to me after the tutorial, and we went out for a bit. I'm not sure I did anything wrong there.

However, if I'd been ugly, I suspect she may have acted differently, but that's a whole other strand of the argument (didn't someone post the excellent video guide to sexual harrassment on here recently? )


*Just a preemptive precaution, I should point out that anyone even remotely taking anything in this paragraph as suggesting that a woman dressed provocatively is in any way "asking for it" in terms of being raped can shush right now, and then go off and learn to read.

ZOMG U RAPER

Was she partially sighted Paddy?

I don't like your new avatar, Myp. It looks like a tiny wee Bavarian sex offender. Change it back.

It's a mini-Guybrush.

The new Museum of Tits picture makes me look like I'm in chemo.

You shouldn't have had a haircut then, should you. Was it some sort of bet? Is your head chilly?

I like it Mypotika. Be even better if it was animated (the avatar that is, not your haircut).

He stood too close to a Large Parting Collider.

Were you just oogling her breasts, though?

Looking at someone because they are pretty is one thing, just staring at someone's chest is quite another.

Shin, I would never have been brave enough to bring it up, but I do sort of agree. Pictures of yu I hsve seen have all been of the 'tits ahoy!' version, and so maybe you use that to your advantage or just do it for, ahem, titilation, which is fine if you don't mind what is to many people unwanted attention, but I don't try and put my boobs 'out there' and still men stare all of the time.

It does make me uncomfortable - not when someone looks at me, but there is a difference between that and someone just fixedly staring only at your boobs as you walk down the street. If women started staring at mens crotch areas all of the time in the same area you'd soon notice how different it felt, I think.

I don't think my crotch area would feel any different if ladies stared at it all the time.

And indeed if I was walking around in a leopard print thong, the comparison would actually start to have merit.

Admittedly no, so perhaps it's not the same thing. But they did get a look in, as it were.



Honestly, no, I don't think so. I'm not sure I'd mind at all. But I think that goes back to the perceived "threat" of the starer, though.

Why? I don't wear anything that compares to a leopard print thong around my chest That doesn't stop people.

If I giant black* man was looking at my crotch with a grin on his face, salivating from the mouth, then truly I'd be a bit perturbed.



* or white, I am not racialist**




** much

Exactly - I think it goes back to how much of a threat you see the person staring at you as being - how likely it feels that the staring or, indeed, shouting will turn into something physical.

My crotch area feels different when pretty ladies look at me. It feels all hot and big and it scares me.

Damn you Squirt. I have to try and explain my giggling to my roommate. "This chap was talking about his crotch, see..."

Bastard.

Maybe that is the heart of the matter, MrChris, I find it uncomfortable at best, but very frightening at worse, and I don't think that people should be made to feel that way. Maybe Kat is (I think she may be) a bit more bolshy* than I am, and so does not mind, perhaps enjoys, the attention. I don't liek it when I am with Craig or other people, but it doesn't frighten me so much then. When I am alone, though, walking through Wembley, that's when it happens most, and where it can be quite frightening.

As I say, I don't think anyone should be made to feel either uncomfortable or frightened because people don't have the good manners nor respect to keep staring at their breasts.

*A word I have often heard said but never seen written, I have no idea if this is correct

"you got 10p for some chips?"

It's not just pretty ladies, it's often big fat hairy ladies, twice your size, that could take you down in one fowl grunt. And they smell. Probably.

Hey! I'd never do something like that!

Sexual attraction isn't the same as sexual objectification, man.

The feminist argument isn't that nobody should try and look nice. It's certainly not that sex is automatically demeaning to women. It's that far too often the media potrays women as things that exist solely for the pleasure of the male observer, and that that's a bad message to be sending out to society as a whole.

It's easy to say that the men who leer at fils or catcall at Mimi are just individual misogynist fuckwits who'd obviously be that way even if the media wasn't subtly telling them that it's OK. That sounds worrying close to "I'm alright Jack, bugger everybody else" to me.

This is a really, really easy subject to get defensive over - after all, saying that something you enjoy/consume/aren't actively offended by is sexist is by implication calling YOU sexist too, and since you know you're not then OBVIOUSLY there's no problem with whatever the actual subject of the comment was, and the complainer is clearly a joyless nitpicking PC drone out to spoil everyone's fun.

(This is a general observation about a non-specific "you", by the by. I don't know you personally, anything like well enough to make any sort of judgement as to what's going on in your head. But I've seen this reaction so many times in so many places, I've certainly justified shit to myself in the same way and I thought it was worth mentioning in passing).

Oh indeed - I know that. But it seems that the two do sometimes get conflated by people arguing against the sexualisation of everything.



I think that's part of it, yes, but I do often come across articles which seem to work from the assumption that anything involving women and sex in the media is automatically portraying women as soulless objects there only for the edification of men. And this simply isn't true, and is a very patronising attitude to take to the women concerned. Yes, there's a problem with the way that absolutely everything is being sold with sex now (it being bloody tedious, for one), and there's certainly a problem with playboy thongs being sold to pre-pubescent girls, but the whole lot seems to get wrapped up into one big ball of Victorian prudishness, and the outrage at the things that are genuinely problematic spills over into everything else that to a sexually-liberal mind are entirely healthy (porn, for instance, Ann Summers, lap-dancing lessons etc etc. I've seen columns decrying women taking pole-dancing lessons as degrading themselves, as if somehow by virtue of being a feminist you get to tell other women what they can and can't choose to do in their own bedrooms).

Hell, even this discussion is all over the place!



That's not *quite* what I was getting at, though. I do think that the chaps who do that *are* individual mysoginistic fuckwits, but I'm saying that there are broader societal effects that have caused or contributed to it being seen as an ok thing to do (by the shouty chap rather than by society as a whole - any time you see a bloke shout at a woman like that you'll see a number of men staring at him with contempt. Me included). I don't think that the blame for that can be laid wholly or even mainly at the door of the portrayal of women in the media. This sort of behaviour isn't new at all - it was around 200 years ago as well. Ill-educated, insensitive men have always acted like clods. The problem with this is *bigger* than FHM and Nuts, is my point.

There are plenty of nice chaps on here who may enjoy the pictures of the nuddy ladies. It doesn't make them go out and yell "PHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAR" at innocent women minding their own business. So what does make men do that? I think it's a centuries old, hell, milennia old problem with the way society has developed, with men nominally at the top and women as the servile homekeepers and baby makers. To lay the blame for this at the door of the media is to miss the deeper problems of the ingrained sexism of society.

As with 99% of things, education is the key.



P'raps, but I think problems caused by certain elements can be overstated. For instance, I'd lay far more blame for women's body image problems at the door of hateful rags like Heat than I would at men's unrealistic expectations fuelled by watching pron.

I'm not really defensive about this, as I'm quite happy that I'm not sexist. But I am concerned about the possibly over-puritanical direction we could head in if this "all sexy stuff is bad" nonsense gets too far. We're already seeing unfortunate self-censorship in the arts coming in due to this "extreme porn" law, for instance. It also drowns out the quite sensible discussions about the various pernicious effects of the media.


Oh heavens, even if it were, chap, I'm not the sort to take offense. I know who I am, and I'm comfortable with my lovely inclusive lefty right-on liberal-itude.

Fag.

I think I'd agree with you there - Mrs Squirt gets some of those every now and the ( Love it! is the greatest mag ever ) and some of them seem to take a spiteful, gleeful pleasure in pointing out the latest celeb who has some minor "problem" - cellulite or a bit of a belly or less than perfectly shaved legs. "Boobies are great!" is hardly the best message to be putting out, but it's better than "Jade goes up to a size 16, and is therefore mockable! And, by inference, so are the 50% of UK women who are a size 16 or above!"

5) strongly agree.

Absolutely - and they seem to take the approach that anyone going above size zero is horribly obese. Cor, I wonder why we have problems with eating disorders.

I'd love to start a Heat-alike magazine that focusses entirely on Heat journalist's bodies.

(a) They are, though and (b) we hardly needed telling.

What if 'they' are pretty, though?

Best part of this thread so far. Also, I lean towards Mimi's views over yours, Mr Chris. I see where you are coming from with the "education is key" thing but I think Mimi has a point -- that the media send subtle messages to the, shall we say, shallower end of the gene pool that being twats to random women in the street is OK. Which for some of the random women in the street is distressing.

Of course, they are also too retarded to add anything to balloting except randomness and casual racism, so should probably not be allowed to vote either. Still, as MyFinger once said, there's nothing wrong with this country that a few million tons of contraceptives introduced into the water supply of strategic areas can't solve.

I do suppose I agree that this is what some of the shittier people in society read into some of the media's output, but I really do think they'd be doing this without the media's influence anyway... Why do *they* read this as affirmation of their "PHWOOOAR YOU HAVE TITS" atitude when you and I don't?

I'm still all for banning FHM, Nuts and Zoo, but for the reasons I enumerated earlier more than anything else...


MyFinger for PM then, frankly.

I think it's because we're not fucking stupid.

He outlines his policy platform #comment-1005" class="postlink">here.

I'd be worried about the mandatory eating of burnt sausages with Dave's Insanity Sauce more than his policy on eugenics.

Can I also point out that the same messages are being sent to the shallower end of the gene pool (Women only section). BB Contestant -> Kit off for the Star/FHM/Nuts/Zoo -> Sportsman boyfriend = a career.

I concur. This also applies to the body image thing too.

Sadly that works, though.


Hmm, I'm not sure that's fair. Otherwise sensible and intelligent women fall for this too though, and get insecure about their bodies due to the constant cattiness about minor blemishes in Heat.

Hmm, if the shallow female end of the gene pool thinks like that... then they probably appreciate being wolf whistled at... which means they are more likely to cop off with shallow-end blokes, whilst deep-end women will only cop off with deep-end blokes. Hence stupid marries stupid and breeds stupid, and vice versa.

So it's idiocracy or eugenics then!

*Takes polaroids of moobs and sends them to The Sun and Fatima Whitbread*

*Waits for cash and marriage deal with Hello*

"Kissy kissy" <-- you dropped these.

Well, view it as your job as intelligent men to go forth and procreate with great gusto and hope that it balances out all the knuckle scraping retards out there breeding as it's the only thing they're good at...