On asking to touch the breasts of a stranger

[kate_nepveu]

If you are a stranger, especially a man, perhaps especially in a group of other strangers who are men, and you come up to me and say, "You're very beautiful. I'd like to touch your breasts. Would you mind if I did?":

You will put me in fear.

Because you could be someone who will go away quietly if I say no (which I will). You could be the exiled gay prince of Farlandia, cursed to wander this Earth looking for the key to his return that can only be revealed by touching the breast of a willing stranger, and who isn't enjoying this at all. You could, in short, not be a danger to me.

But how am I supposed to know that?

How am I supposed to distinguish you from the person who says he's really just whatever, but is actually going to put emotional pressure on me, or make a scene, or stalk me, or rape me?

I can't. Because that would require a level of discernment and of trust that is not possible, by definition, in my dealings with a stranger.

And therefore, if you ask to touch my breasts, you will frighten me.

If your goal is actually to make a better world, I suggest that you use a method that doesn't involve putting women in fear.

(Also, I find it hard to believe you can create "the kind of world where [people can] say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful," by going up to women, touching their breasts, and then going away. Among many, many other problems that are noted in the comments to the original. But that's secondary to my main point here.)

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Racial privilege: I admit it, I am white.

Class privilege: My grandfathers were a farmer and a laborer; my father was an electrician; I grew up in a working-class to middle-class neighborhood.

Protective parenting: My father was a verbally abusive alcoholic and my mother was an emotionally dependent woman who started asking me for advice when I was about 11.

Progressive education: Catholic school for 12 years in the 1950s and'60s. Progressive? Not hardly.

Physically imposing? Maybe, though when I have asked friends this specific question, the words they apply to me are "womanly" and "motherly." OTOH, my husband says that it isn't so much that I look like I could beat the s**t out of someone who messed with me, but that I would be willing to try. So yeah, I have attitude.

I am fat (240 lbs. at 5'9-1/2") and I could count on one hand the number of times I've been harassed for it (if you don't count my younger brother [now deceased, and no, I didn't kill him], who called me "fat and ugly" throughout our teenage years).

you're wilfully blind to the fact that your experience is fairly unusual

No, I'm not. I know very well that it's unusual; what I would like to explore is why I've had an unusual experience.

sitting there prissily saying "it never happened to me, so what are the rest of you complaining about"

I don't say that, I haven't said that, and I wouldn't say that. At most I am saying, "It hasn't happened to me, and it might be useful to try to figure out why."

(And in the several hundred comments I have read on this topic in many people's LJs, I am far from the only woman who has not "had these terribly unpleasant experiences with men at cons.")