Alpha males on public transport
From the Male Dominance Displays on Social Media files:
It’s a bit weird, she keeps saying. It’s a bit weird for a man to sit in the aisle seat next to a woman on an empty bus, she says. No it’s not a bit weird; it’s blatantly intrusive and rude and bordering on assault. It borders on assault because she’s physically pinned to her seat: she can’t get out unless he lets her. It’s not a bit weird, it’s a deliberate hostile aggressive act.
I had a man get pointlessly aggressive with me on a bus a few years back, not in the “Hi honey” way of course but in the random belligerent toad way. I had a heavy backpack and a couple of auxiliary bags and the bus was mostly empty, so I was in one seat and my stuff was in the other, and Mister Toad came along and ordered me to let him sit in that seat. No, I said, there are plenty of empty seats – there were empty double seats – so sit in one of them. He ordered me to move my stuff, I told him if I did that I would have to stand, carrying all that stuff, so no, GO AWAY. He persisted, and I persisted in refusing, and he finally gave up, with some snide remark about my moving all my household goods. After about the third refusal I was simply shouting at him “LEAVE ME ALONE” and for a surprisingly long time he wouldn’t. It was insane.
If the bus had been full, of course, I would have had to stand, carrying all the stuff, because that’s only fair. I’ve had to do that occasionally. But the bus wasn’t full. There is no bus rule that says you can’t put your heavy backpack in one seat and sit in the other; that’s not a thing.
Dominance display.
I was in a similar situation on an intercity bus in Turkey (though the bus was fairly full). Went on at the transfer station and the next bus, until at one point while I was pointedly not looking or responding to him, he was bragging to others on the bus that he was going to take me home, and someone said to him “He’s not even talking to you.”
I’m a slightly above average sized man, larger in comparison to Turks at the time. I can only imagine how much creepier and scarier it is for women.
Creepier and scarier but also more…maddening, infuriating, in our faceing. I’ve ranted here more than once about the horror of walking around in Paris at age 17: the harassment was literally nonstop.
Sociologists have done studies on how people spread themselves out when they’re sitting in public spaces. There’s some variation among countries as to whether people go for maximum distance or just sit a few seats apart, but there is nowhere in the world where it is normal behavior to sit directly next to a stranger when there are many rows of completely unoccupied seats available.
I intensely dislike having strangers in my personal space under any and all circumstances—granted, this is a fairly common dislike, but my tolerance is well below average. I will not get on a crowded bus or subway car unless there is no feasible alternative, and I will cheerfully walk for miles in bad weather to avoid crowded public transportation. I have a healthy fear of potentially violent men, but my neuroses are configured such that I would have absolutely gone off on this creep.
I’m much the same, and all the more so since Covid.
It’s just ordinary bus etiquette, quite apart from the male harassment thing – you just don’t sit next to someone unless all the rows have at least one person, i.e. unless you have no choice.
I don’t know if I handled it the best way, but a few years ago I was driving by a bus stop and saw a young girl with some sketch guy sitting next to her and leaning toward her. I stopped the car and looked the guy in the eye. He looked away which told me what I needed to know. I stepped out of the car and stood across the street and called to her to ask her if she was ok. He started to say something and I cut him off with, “I’m speaking with her.” The guy took off. I got back in my car and asked her if she had a phone and could call someone to come get her. She did. I asked her if it would be ok if I just sat here in my car until they arrived. I waited across the street until someone came to pick her up.
I always hoped that if my daughter needed something like that, some other guy would do the same.
I strongly suspect that 99.9% of the dudes who choose to sit beside a woman on a bus when there are open seats would never do the same thing when choosing a urinal in the men’s room.
Pliny – Well done. Very well done.
I know it makes me non green, but I can afford a car and I have, post Covid, pretty much avoided public transit. Despite the fact they do display amazing athleticism, I don’t like the massive boomboxes at high volume hip hop and kids climbing around the narrow BART train cars.
Creepiness would scare me. Now BART is not 1970s NYC but….
Pliny, that’s everyday hero stuff. Well done.
Screechy, that’s not even a bet. In fact guys like that would almost never even attempt sitting beside another guy on the bus under those circumstances.
Pliny, that gets an ovation from me. You handled it perfectly, staying well away from her so she didn’t have to worry that you might also be a threat. Thank you!
I had a slightly different bus adventure this afternoon. I went to the far side of the city to explore, and had a very good time with stunning views I hadn’t found before (although I was cold the whole time – I had underestimated how cold the wind was – should have worn that 4th sweater), but then on the middle bus back when it was picking its way through downtown some fool ran a red light so the bus slammed hard to a stop and I mashed my kneecap against the metal back of the seat in front of me. Ow. A woman on the side-facing seats was thrown to the floor. This is in addition to the usual drunks and addicts. Sigh. (Not sorry though. It was a very good explore.)
The sitting in the aisle seat next to a woman, when there’s plenty of other seats. I’ve had a guy do that to me, while I was reading a book. He proceeded to talk at me. It took a bunch of “Leave me alone”s and “I’m busy”s before he moved. While moving he whined, “I was just trying to be nice”. I managed to say, out loud, “pestering someone after they told you to leave them alone is NOT being nice.”
Another time, a guy demanded that I watch his stuff while he stepped off the bus for a while. The bus had arrived at a timepoint several minutes early. I suggested he take his stuff with him. He whined that it was heavy. Again, it took several “No”s and “Leave me alone”s, and an “I have my own stuff to watch” (which I did have) before he finally left me alone.
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One thing I’ve noticed: If a white woman dares to tell a black man to leave her alone, it is not uncommon for her to get accusations of racism.
Karen, I find accusations of racism in the strangest places. One of my students said in her paper that it was racist to say sickle cell anemia is more common in African Americans than in Caucasians. WTF? Knowing the basic facts of medicine is the exact opposite of racism – it is allowing people to get the best possible care, which someone with sickle cell needs. Failing to acknowledge that reality could lead to death.
It’s just like these people who don’t want us to use sex as a category in medicine…ignorant and dangerous.
Sorry for being OT; carry on.
iknklast, was that student white or black? From what I’m seeing online it looks as though a lot of “conservative” white people are getting very sensitive and snowflakes about discussions of poor economic/social/health outcomes for black people. They basically don’t want to acknowledge that those things exist and have turned themselves into the victims in the situation – “By highlighting these things you’re teaching white kids to hate their culture you racists!” Of course, your student may just be really weirdly mixed up about cause and effect and think that somehow black people are being described as to blame for having SCA for are inherently defective in some way. Either way, they need a much better science education. Sounds like you’ve been forced to teach people with very shaky educational foundations.
Another example of male dominance display, which I see all the time on city buses here: a woman with headphones or ear-pods in, clearly listening to music, and maybe reading a book, and some dude insists on pestering her to get her attention and to try to talk to her. Dude, all those things are signals to leave her alone.
Rob, I do not know. The student is in my online class, has not put a picture on her profile, and has the sort of name that has no particular ethnicity; once upon a time I would have said it is Anglo, but it is also the sort of name most Caucasians aren’t giving their kids anymore, so who knows?
My guess is white, but that’s mostly because I tend to encounter those sorts of comments more from white “woke” students than from anyone else. And yes, we do have “woke” in Nebraska. They’re getting bolder, too.
James #15
That was also more or less exactly (iirc) the example used in the original “Schrödinger’s Rapist” article of the kind of behavior that marks you as a greater perceived threat. And rightly so, since your behavior is making it abundantly clear that her boundaries don’t matter to you, and that what she may or may not want is not going to stop you from going after what you want. Red alert! I wasn’t going to repeat what others have already said about the people who never stopped referring to the Schrödinger’s Rapist argument 10 years ago who would later go on to argue that only a Nazi (or at least the moral equivalent thereof) could possibly have any problem with male fetishists in womanface forcing themselves into women’s rape shelters or parading their private parts around in women’s locker rooms…
But I guess I just did.
Young men can be quite blind to such things. In 1964 I spent a few weeks in Greece with four (male) friends from university. We found the Greeks very pleasant and unthreatening. A year later my sister, then 20, went to Greece with four women friends. She said that they found it horrible and unbearable because they were never left alone. Men followed them everywhere and tried to interact with them.
My wife says that it wasn’t like that in Chile when she was young. She could go anywhere in Santiago that she wanted without being bothered by young men. However, when she went to a scientific meeting in Montevideo at the age of about 25 she found on the first day that she couldn’t go anywhere outside the meeting place without being pestered. After that she always had a group of Chilean men around her as a wall of protection. I suspect that Chile was (and is, for that matter) unique in that respect in Latin America.
The lone perv cornering a woman on the subway and the young men hassling women in groups are obviously both creeps, but I suspect they tend to be creeps for slightly different reasons. The former is almost certainly a pure predator and a naked threat. In the case of the latter I strongly suspect the behavior often has more to do with showing off to their male peers than any genuine interest in the woman. This became apparent to me when I was in the army back in the mid 1990s. From my experiences at the time I quickly concluded that there is no lower life form in the universe than soldiers on leave. If actually attracting women was the goal, the means pretty much effectively ruled out the ends.
I remember a girl I knew at the time saying something that actually made a lot of sense. Her theory was that these (very inexperienced young) boy-men were in fact terrified of getting consent. Apparently the “thinking” went something like this:
This incidentally brings up something I once read on the topic of complementary cultural roles. One example involved traditional gender roles in southern Italy. Once again to prove he wasn’t gay, a man was expected to hit on every woman in sight. On the other hand the woman was expected to be “virtuous” and “pure” and kindly reject his advances. Because the woman could usually be counted on to faithfully perform her complementary role, there was very little risk on the part of the man of actually having to deliver what he was peddling. Apparently the number of men treated for impotence began skyrocketing around the same time the traditional norms of female virtue and purity were starting to erode, leaving women more open to accept men’s advances.
*There is obviously an element of homophobia involved, but also a not entirely unreasonable fear of being treated the way gay men are treated because of other people’s homophobia.
To add to my comment at #12
The instances I saw, the accusation of racism came from the black man harrassing the woman.
Athel, Bjarte, that could be true, but what societal thing is it that drives these expectations and behaviors? As Bjarte said, part of it is homophobia, but a huge part of it is misogyny coupled with entitlement. Men are entitled to what they want; women are there to give it to them, and then discard when they don’t want her anymore.
And it does no good saying it is an expectation and everyone knows it. It’s still horrible for the woman who must endure it.
iknklast, by all means. Even if the second kind of creep I was referring to isn’t actually trying to get the woman, he must at the very least be willing to let her pay the price for his quest for validation, which is pretty fucking misogynistic in its own right.