LordoftheMonkeys wrote:
[Well, someone made a simple statement objecting to the belief that men should be treated like rapists. You responded by attempting to justify that attitude.
In
certain situations, that attitude is definately justified. There are situations where treating any man you meet
in that situation as a potential rapist is the only prudent thing to do. One thing for men to do to be more succesful with women is to make sure they never approach a woman in one of those situations:
when she is alone, in a place with few people around, in a place where there is no particular reason for him to approach her, when she has never seen him before
That's why all the advice about being introduced by a friend, joining clubs, taking classes and talking to classmates- the idea is to avoid situations where women are pretty much obligated for their own safety to treat an approaching stranger as a potential predator.
Did you ever get the Stranger Danger lecture when you were a kid? The Stranger Danger lecture is (these days) given to girls and boys both because both are susceptible to predators. That lecture basically tells kids the situations in which they should consider men in general to be potential rapists. As boys grow to men, they shuck off the Stranger Danger wariness (if it was succesfully instilled) because as adults, they really aren't the targets of this sort of predation anymore. But women don't because women stay in the predator victim demographic. It's just different specific men who want to attack a grown woman vs. those who want to attack a 10 year old boy.
Think back to those long ago Stranger Danger lectures. I bet you weren't told that it was ok to get in the car of or walk off with a man who seemed nice. In fact, you were probably specifically warned to be
extremely suspicious of men who approached you and were "nice". You may have heard different variations of the "nice" facade that could get you molested: the man who claims he needs help looking for his lost puppy, the man who tells you his name and wants to know your name etc.
Boys grow up and don't need to heed the warnings of Stranger Danger anymore. Girls grow up but those Stranger Danger warnings still apply. The warnings about not fallling for the "nice" facade also still apply. You probably don't take it personally when some little kid barks, "I don't talk to strangers!" at you when you were saying something perfectly innocuous. It would be insane for women to just disregard the warnings of their youth because women don't grow out of being in a high-predation demographic until they get much older (sometimes not even then).
So the best thing to do is to only approach women that have at least some marginal familiarity with you or at least have "seen you around".
14 Jun 2011, 4:22 pm
