I'm wondering too. The only thing that comes immediately to mind is adjusting your pants in the crotch area, which, well, sometimes it's uncomfortable without there being any sort of excitement, and it's just a matter of comfort. Like pulling your underwear out of your but.
If that's an example of what's being referred to, it's really, really unfortunate, because it's a matter of one party acting totally innocently (most of the time), and the other party being conditioned to take it in a non-innocent way. That said, I could be totally off-base.
That's not what I was thinking, no, and it's a little weird that you immediately guessed it was something that you don't believe is an actual problem. Like, you didn't even wait for me to answer the question before deciding my answer was likely to be something bogus.
I don't think it's that odd, since I can't think of anything that qualifies for "men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns". Not thinking of anything that qualifies leaves me with things that I think don't qualify.
> Like, you didn't even wait for me to answer the question before deciding my answer was likely to be something bogus.
Is it that hard to assume I'm acting in good faith, and just trying to figure out what what you are talking about. It's obvious by this point that a statement like that caught a few people as odd. I don't think it's realistic to expect people not to speculate when you make statements that allude to behavior that many people take very seriously, and rightly so, without providing any sort of example. I wouldn't make a statement like "I believe my mayor is implicated in a murder" without providing at least some details, or at least some generic reasoning if I wanted to keep it fairly anonymous. Otherwise I would omit a statement like that. Expecting people not to speculate after something like that is unrealistic.
To be clear, I stressed the "If", and I followed up with "I could be really off-base". I'm trying to have a substantive discussion, and allowing for myself to be wrong. If you aren't prepared to do either, please don't post bait statements like that.
Yeah, well, unfortunately, you'd be wrong for thinking it's bogus. I've actually been verbally attacked for adjusting my swimwear on a beach in Mexico (an empty beach, mind you, that had all 6 American adults on it -- 4 of them being myself and my group).
Is that directed towards me? If so, please don't assume I'm acting in bad faith, or am unprepared to to be open to this discussion. I'm just honestly perplexed at what "notion that men are psychologically torturing women just by enacting common male body movement patterns in the workplace" could be referring to.
> Why bother when we know what the response is going to be?
Perhaps I should have refrained from getting out in front of a possible reply, but I'm really interested in what that statement is referring to, and beyond what I speculated, I'm completely clueless as to what it could be, and I would rather be aware of a way behavior of mine might negatively impact others. If it is what I speculated, I'm prepared to have what I consider a substantive discussion on about that topic.
Not off base at all. Even with your off the top of your head example, I'm sure everyone reading this can think of that person they know that would get offended by a male "repositioning" himself.
Yeah, I'm also interested. That statement is like those local news promos people like to make fun of, "it's killing millions of Americans and you could be eating it for dinner, find out on tonight's news at 10!"
This will probably be detached for being off-topic, but until then...
Men and women move in very different ways due to gender policing. Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. Sometimes in the workplace women are put in positions of less influence and less pay. They experience repeated instances of being passed over, thwarted, harassed, etc, while men with less capabilities, less force of will, in many workplaces advance further on average. Something as small as the way someone moves their hips while they walk immediately signals their gender, which on a given day could trigger feelings of powerlessness.
Or consider a woman who was being harassed by a man at work, and the first man she told was skeptical it was meant in the way she thought it was. She went home and got support from a bunch of girlfriends. The next day you walk into her cube with your male movement, and she's thinking "is this one on his side too?" It's possible that a more female-typical mode of moving and entering would've been less triggering for her even on an otherwise male body.
I probably need to note that I am not suggesting that ONLY women experience things like this, or that ALL women experience things like this, just that it is something that happens.
I'm a man, and I'm a feminist. This isn't controversial, regardless of what large swaths of the internet thinks it is. I believe in equal pay, I believe that we should work into our compensation culture new ideas to make sure that women who are societally conditioned to ask for less don't end up making less just because their equally qualified coworkers are more aggressive. I believe that we have a rape culture in western society because to this day rape victims are questioned and second guessed, and to some of those same areas of the internet a man falsely accused of rape is considered a worse problem than actual rape. I also believe that "Social justice" is inherently an important problem, and it pisses me off that "social justice warrior" is a derisive insult.
I'm also an ally - I call out male coworkers who talk over or interrupt my female coworkers. And if a group of male coworkers get too "bro-y", even without women around, I'm the villain to say "yo dude, don't be sexist", and not back down from the "It's just a joke" defense. I'm a software engineer and I regularly introspect about how I can take active steps to make my environment more welcoming to women engineers.
I say all this to give you SOME of my beliefs before I say the next thing as un-insultingly as I possibly can.
The stuff you are talking about is a step too far, and it actively actively harms the cause of progressive feminism by making it seem frivolous, and immature. There is real harassment going on all around us, active/aggressive, and passive/insideous. But the way people WALK? Are you kidding me right now? I am an ally with my words and my actions. I will not change the way I walk because it signifies my maleness to a sensitive little wallflower who apparently feels powerless in front of 50% of the visible population?
I hate the "#notallmen" hashtag because it was reactionary and distracting from women who were at the time trying to speak real truth about their experiences. It misses just as much of the point as "All Lives matter".
But in the case of your example, a woman who is being harassed at work surely does not assume that all men in her workplace are against her by default, on account of their maleness. If she does, it has more to do with how they treat her, and not how they walk through the office.
Oh, just noticed you followed up here which. of course is where you should have followed up. I just wasn't looking in the right spot.
> Things like how much you are allowed to/required to move your hips side to side are different for men and women. I had interpreted "common male body movement patterns" as movement patterns unique to males, which severely limits the possibilities of what they could be, which is why I had speculated on movements regarding adjusting the crotch area. Given how I had misinterpreted that statement to limit the possibilities, that's the only thing I could think of.
Okay, if you're talking about double standards, and how a woman that moves her hips more might be seen a different way than one that doesn't, and this may affect perception of her, I totally agree. That's a double standard issue, to a degree, and it's not okay.
> The next day you walk into her cube with your male movement, and she's thinking "is this one on his side too?" It's possible that a more female-typical mode of moving and entering would've been less triggering for her even on an otherwise male body.
I don't really understand this. How is your mode of walking, which is natural, or any other feature, such as facial hair or just the fact that you are indeed male, anything you can help? It may sound like victim blaming to say that I think in this instance, it's really the responsibility of her to make sure she's not projecting her feelings onto innocent people, but I don't think it is. I'm not sure how this situation is any different than a white man that feels threatened by a black man one day, and the next day a separate black man approaches him casually and he feels threatened.
That is, I accept that some women, and men, might have exactly these feelings, but I'm not sure that it's the responsibility of the other party to solve that problem. Is that the point you were making, that just accepting that this situation is possible is not allowed by the point of view of those forums, or is it a step farther, and it's the idea that this is the responsibility of the other party (the man in your example, the black man in my example) to somehow change their natural state to address this? I understand the former, even if I don't know enough about Voat to assess whether I agree about them, but I'm not sure the reasoning behind the latter, if that's something you are trying to express.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Do you want men to sway their hips? You think something like that would help? Or would that be a reasonable thing to ask since it sorta reduces to the structure of the body?
Somebody so unstable they get "triggered" by how ordinary human beings walk needs professional help. At some point, you have to acknowledge that certain complaints are not reasonable.
