Cat's Cats and All That

ASD Silicone Mood Bands

and yet

Protesters from across St Louis turned up and turned out for the first St Louis County Council Meeting since Mike Brown’s Death. (Part I)

Literary magazine AGNI has opened its annual reading period (now until May 31, 2015) and is accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, interviews, and translations.

AGNI was established in 1972 at Antioch College and is now published biannually (spring and fall) by students and graduates of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.

Aw, that’s cute. Being called childish by someone who had to go on anon to criticize me. That’s really adorable.

You know what else is really cute? Your whole “well, you didn’t do x so you’re practically asking for y” argument. Now where else have I heard that before…

And it honestly just sounds like someone’s a little jealous of all the game I have.

This whole attitude everyone seems to have about not owing anything to anyone else is the problem.

Oh, I don’t owe her any common courtesy because she’s dressed like a tart. Therefore she’s asking for it.

That’s how it starts.

Perhaps if you started treating others with some common courtesy, and not be so selfishly arrogant, then people would start treating others better. Have the guts to teach your friends to be more courteous. Tell them to do the same.

Have you ever tried rejecting a guy on an online dating site? Because I’ll let you in on a little secret: most of the time, they do not take it well. The men who barrage you with messages despite your lack of response are unsurprisingly the ones who explode with sexist and misogynistic rage when you have the “common courtesy” to reject them. So sorry that I don’t want to deal with that. So sorry I’m “selfishly arrogant.” Really, soooooo sorry.

I do get where you’re coming from though; when I first joined OkC, I made an effort to respond to everyone who messaged me, including the men who I wasn’t interested in. I simply thought that that was the polite thing to do. You know what happened? I was called just about every derogative term you can call a woman and then some. Men whose opening lines praised my beauty pulled a complete 180 and called me a fat, ugly whore. There were even men who were outraged that I took the time to write a polite rejection and would have preferred that I had said nothing at all. As a woman on OkC, sometimes it honestly feels like I can never win.

Your opinions, as a male, that are based on your personal circle of male friends (whether they are respectable people or aren’t), don’t mean shit. The fact that you’re vouching for the validity of your “well gee, I haven’t seen any guys act that hostile toward a woman who rejected him…okcupid must attract all the bad ones” argument is just completely laughable. How ignorant are you to consider your own observations and twist them as the majority view instead of reading about the tens of thousands of women who document their daily verbal and/or physical assaults on and offline? Your “guys who you know in real life” and their behavior in your little slice of life do not trump the experience of 9.98% women who deal with harassment from all walks of life.

White women, POC women, trans women, women from the Midwest, women from the South, West, Canada, Africa, Asia, Middle East, etc, women who make $200,000 a year, women who live in poverty, single women, monogamous women who get called whores by man-logic, pretty women, ugly women, fat women, skinny women, bitchy loud women, nice quiet type women. Teenage girls in high school are getting stabbed when they turn down a prom date because boys aren’t taught that they’re not entitled to owning girls.

We all deal with harassment from men no matter where we are, who we are, or who the men are. You are a dumb tool for dismissing this fact because apparently you haven’t witnessed it happening with your own eyes. Do yourself a favor and read up on what women deal with so that one day when you’re dating a girl who tells you she’s had a bad day because some guy felt entitled to fondle her on the subway, you don’t respond with, “Well I don’t know anyone who would do that, I guess the train just attracts a certain type of male. Maybe if you said you weren’t interested in him touching you, he wouldn’t have gotten offended?”

All of their emotional and physical scars at the hands of men vs. your inability to open your eyes and choosing not to see men act this way and believing it’s just okcupid that this happens on and omg someone get a psychological study going nevermind all the other women who have already been through this in real life.

Also consider this by your logic: If I gave you a bowl of candy at my home and told you one of the pieces would make you physically ill, but that I would be incredibly offended if you didn’t have some candy, would you go ahead and risk eating from the bowl just to appease me? Are you understanding that the candy in this analogy are all seemingly normal men, until you accidentally come across the poisonous one that feels the need to destroy you?

Why wouldn’t you go ahead and eat the candy? I know you want it because you told me it’s your favorite kind. And not all the candy is volatile…plus you wouldn’t do anything to deserve feeling violently ill because you’ve been such a good boy lately. Chance might just be that you pick the wrong piece by accident…1/100 chance of being ridiculed and threatened with rape. Go ahead and eat the candy because my ego will be bruised if you don’t. You stupid fucking pussy of a bitch.

…Now how do you feel? “Whoa, that was really uncalled for. She just went for me out of nowhere and was super rude.”

There you go. A slice of how we feel when we DO take the time to say, “Thanks, but no thanks. Good luck on your search” and it results in hurled insults and/or slurs. Your fragile ego or your “need” for your stupid fucking courtesy and attention does not surpass a woman’s basic desire and right not to be threatened and harassed over the internet. And that’s if she’s lucky, because sometimes dudes will be vengeful and will save photos to circulate around the internet, or send them to the woman’s job with compromising information, or find where she lives and deal with her in person.

Okcupid does not attract a specific type of aggressive male. If you did some research, you’ll find that women from all the dating sites report the same type of harassment. You know why? Because we’re supposed to take it as a compliment and pander to the male ego. The same one that you’re defending and making excuses for because you can’t accept or fathom that the great majority of men think this behavior is okay or have at some point been hostile toward a woman when they shouldn’t have been. Your fragmented view of how we’re treated is sickening and toxic to society.

I hope you educate yourself and realize that you’re part of the problem with this “it must be okcupid” outlook of yours.

Edit: And, really eviltessmacher? The same exact thing you said in regards to women ignoring men can be turned around to apply to men who respond aggressively and in an abusive manner after women politely decline their vulgarities.

I could copy exactly what you said—"Perhaps if you started treating others with some common courtesy, and not be so selfishly arrogant, then people would start treating others better. Have the guts to teach your friends to be more courteous. Tell them to do the same. You’re not the only one on the planet."—and paste it in response to a chauvinistic man.

Hey, angry entitled male, perhaps you could treat others with some common courtesy and not respond to messages calmly declining your uninvited and obtrusive offer for casual sex with calling the girl a whore.

Hey, angry entitled male, perhaps you could not be so selfishly arrogant to hurl an offensive and threatening rant at me when I exercise my right TO NOT SLEEP WITH YOU and decline your offer. Maybe you can treat me better and not shame me for sleeping with other people who are not you.

Hey, angry entitled male, do you have the guts to teach your bros to be more courteous when they catcall a woman on the street and tell her to suck his dick when she’s just trying to go to the grocery store or to pick her kid up from the sitter after a 12 hour day on her feet working retail?

You’re not the only one on the planet either, eviltessmacher. But you sure as hell are thinking like it.

Obviously I wasn’t fully capable of understanding the amount of crap that you go through. If I put myself in your shoes I can understand the rationale behind not replying. Does it seem rude? Yes. Does it save you the time and hassle of having to deal with psychopaths harassing you? Absolutely. 

I can’t say that I would get upset with you if you didn’t reply to my messages if I was on an online dating site. It would be nice if you said you were not interested, but I can accept that if you didn’t reply you were either busy or not interested. 

Also I’m not saying it “must just be okcupid”. I’m saying that it would be interesting to study the habits and psychological profiles of people on online dating websites in general vs. the average non online dating male. Mostly because I feel the anonymity of the internet as well as the impersonal nature of text messaging has a huge role in allowing men who would normally shy away from confrontation to become these hyper aggressive douchebags. I’m not dismissing the fact that men are like this, however I find it morbidly interesting that online dating websites seem to bring this quality out.

No. I fucking don’t. I don’t say a goddamn thing because I’m not entitled to him. He doesn’t owe me an explanation as to why he doesn’t want to talk to me. He’s a complete stranger! He doesn’t have to say “sorry, not interested, but I hope you find what you’re looking for” like I do, because my ego doesn’t take a beating everytime I don’t get a response. But here we are pandering to the fragile male ego in the hopes of an off chance that they’ll just leave us alone. Rejection is a natural part of dating and you acknowledge the fact that not everyone you’re interested in is going to reciprocate that interest and move the fuck on.

You use the word “anonymity” that the internet allows, which I don’t think is a correct use of anonymity if you’re referring to dating sites since these men have their photos, work, and other personal information up for public view. And I also feel you’re dismissing their behavior by putting the impersonal label on internet interactions instead of holding them accountable off and online. The same dudes who behave this way over the internet do it in person. And the ones that don’t shouldn’t be lumped into this other category you’re putting aside for them because online harassment is still harassment.

Calling a woman an ugly pig for not responding to your message online = hurtful and makes that guy sitting at his computer an awful person.

Calling a woman an ugly pig at the party when she doesn’t go home with you = hurtful and makes that guy an awful person.

It doesn’t matter if a threat or insult was said online or at a bar, it’s still the same individual exercising a lack of decency. Do you not understand how your argument is reasoning harassment as happening because it’s through an anonymous/impersonal venue, and that you’re saying it likely wouldn’t happen with the same individuals in person?

False. Incorrect. You’re wrong and you’re not wrapping your mind around it. A bad man is a bad man. Whether he lashes out a woman in the privacy of his own home or whether he does it on the street, the woman is still attacked and you are indifferent to her trauma because you’re implying there’s a difference between being a victim of it over the internet vs in person. Or that men only behave this way over the internet because they’re at arm’s length from us.

This thread is so unbelievably frustrating because you are a man completely disregarding everything that we, as women, women with firsthand experience of misogyny and male entitlement, are saying. Instead of taking a step back and acknowledging your privilege and the unwitting role you may have played in every day misogyny, you think that continuing to shout over us and refusing to address any of the valid points that we have brought up will make us change our minds.

I mean, do you even realize how utterly absurd you sound? You, a man, are trying to tell multiple women that it’s our fault that men react violently. It’s our fault that there’s misogyny. That if we just acted politely and sucked up the possibility of being verbally and/or sexually assaulted or even, here comes the jackpot, being killed, in the face of rejection that the world would be a perfect place and men wouldn’t have to continue to be dicks to us.