These perv stories reminded me of a creepy math teacher I had in HS. Once while the class was silently doing problems from the book, I raised my hand with a question and he came over and crouched or knelt down beside my desk. While he was showing me how to do the problem with one hand, his other hand started running up and down my calf. @-) I must have jumped or reacted somehow because he pulled his hand away real fast and got up and walked away. I was so creeped out but I never said anything to anyone except my friends. 
I should have reported him to the principal. Ick.
It makes me really angry too. When I was a child, back in the Dark Ages, if I complained about something, I was usually told that I was wrong. “Oh, VeryHappy, I’m sure that’s not what he meant.” “Oh, VeryHappy, I’m sure it was just an accident.” “Oh, VeryHappy, Mr. Smith was just being friendly.” So after a point, you doubt your own feelings because you’re always being told that you’re wrong and the “adult” is right. It’s no wonder that we didn’t speak up. I don’t have daughters, but if I did, I would hope that times are different now.
ETA: I just remembered a huge issue from my childhood. I had a second-grade teacher, Miss Wilcox, who had “story buddies” and “music buddies,” depending on the activity du jour. If you were picked to be that day’s buddy, you had to sit next to Miss Wilcox on a chair while she hugged and stroked you. Everyone in the class thought it was creepy and no one wanted to be the buddy. When we complained, we were told that she was just being friendly.
(Her touching didn’t go anywhere it shouldn’t have, but we did not like being so close to her. It invaded our space.)
It seems as though I see a teacher molestation case almost every day when I open up the newspaper. LAUSD has had to pay out mulitple millions of dollars recently for knowing about molestations and covering them up. Daily I read stories of coaches, teachers and teacher’s aides (male and female) who are arrested for sexual assaults on students. It seems to be an epidemic.
Very Happy, my 7th-grade English teacher, Mr. Wooster – a white-haired man in his 60s with rosy cheeks and a friendly smile, who had been teaching at the school since the late 1930s – used to dole out “Woo pinches” on the behind (which were quite severe) to kids who were “bad,” and “Woo hugs” to a few “good” kids every day. The Woo hugs involved calling someone up to the front of the class, and hugging them, stroking and squeezing their backs and rear ends, etc., for 10 or 15 minutes at a time while continuing to teach all the while. He never picked the boys who were already almost 6 feet tall and needed to shave by the time they were 12 – only the little kids like me, who were still well under 5 feet tall at that time. (I happen to remember that I was 4’ 4" in 7th grade, at the age of 11.)
I must have been very innocent, because it never occurred to me that he was anything other than a kindly old man. (Perhaps especially because about halfway through that year, a physician I was seeing began sexually abusing me – although once again, I didn’t acknowledge to myself that that’s what it was until years later, because even though it made me uncomfortable, the doctor always told me that what he was doing was part of his examination of me. Compared to that, I guess what Mr. Wooster was doing seemed completely innocuous.)
I can’t remember ever hearing that anyone complained about old Woo. Within a few years, though, we all realized what had been going on, and, being cynical teenagers, used to laugh about it with each other.
@DonnaL: Was this at the private school we’ve heard so much about, in Riverdale?
I don’t recall being groped by anyone as a young teen, but when I was flying to or from England by myself circa age 15 the man next to me fell asleep and slumped over half on top of me. I was incredibly uncomfortable, in every way, but didn’t say anything, just tried to squeeze further into the other size of my seat. The stewardess actually stopped and asked me if I knew him, but then didn’t do anything. I think it was pretty obvious that he was just alseep.
When I look back on it, I can’t believe I didn’t just say Excuse Me loudly and wake him up. Instead I sat in a state of intense discomfort for hours.
I would never do that now.
Yes, that’s the one, Very Happy. Mr. W. – who retired and died decades ago – is not one of the ones whose sexual abuse of students has come out in recent years. But I did know almost all the teachers whose behavior has now been made public (one was my 10th-grade English teacher), as well as the headmaster, who was one of the worst. Another one was a classmate of mine who later became a teacher there.
I can attest to the “freezing” reaction, by the way. A couple of years ago, when I was on the subway, a man sat down next to me and asked me the time, while simultaneously starting to rub my arm, back, and shoulder. I couldn’t believe what he was doing, and completely froze at first, and just sat there instead of getting up, or removing his hand, or telling him to stop. I did get up and move at the next stop, though.
Sickening.
When I was working as a museum guide in my teens, I dealt with an inappropriate touch or two … always so brief that the person was gone before I even grasped that someone had the nerve to cop a feel in broad daylight in the middle of a museum lobby. (That’s still stunning to me; what did their parents do wrong?) I imagine this happens to young women in retail pretty frequently.
I do legal work for a retail company, and you wouldn’t believe the stuff that still happens. Customers behaving inappropriately (not just male on female, either), managers saying or doing inappropriate things… I keep thinking we have evolved enough that people understand what you can and can not do. We aren’t there yet.
Two stories that present an alternative reaction:
In the early '70s, a good friend was walking down Broadway in Manhattan. Some man reached out and tweaked her breast, and then just kept walking. She had the chutzpah to stop, turn around, and yell to him, “What the HELL do you think you’re doing?!!” It caused lots of people to stop and stare at him.
The second story has to do with a woman named Rita Mae Brown, who has become an author of some renown. At my first job just out of school, I worked for a publishing company and she joined a year or so after I did. (This was around 1972 or so.) We were in midtown Manhattan. She came back from lunch one day, furious that construction workers, truck drivers, etc., were catcalling to her. She said she yelled back at some man, “Hey, get down here right now! Come on, let’s do it, right here, right now! I want to **** your ****!” She kept calling to him and calling to him, while he just became more and more embarrassed.
When she told me this story, I realized I’d be terrified of someone actually assaulting me. She, apparently, had no such fears!
When I was in my twenties I was leaving Fenway Park after a Red Sox walk-off win. There was a big excited crowd leaving the stadium and someone groped me from behind. I spun around and kicked him and all my friends were like, “What did you do that for?” When I told them they all tried to find him but he was long gone. I never even thought, just reacted.
LOL. From what I’ve read of Rita Mae Brown’s novels that doesn’t surprise me a bit.
After a year in France, I got really tired of guys harrassing me. When someone pinched me I whirled around with my umbrella and whacked him. It was pure instinct and boy was he surprised.
Wish I’d read this yesterday. Just this morning I put my 13 year old D on American Airlines UAM flight connecting through DFW. When I paid the $150 they said she’d be seated in back row so flight attendant could watch her. While We don’t know all the facts, I’d say AA dropped the ball on this one. If there was one empty seat on this other girls’ flight it should have been next to her. Will be definitely speaking to my D about her flight home.
As a society we definitely need to teach our young people to stick up for themselves.
But there is always the assumption that the adult is right.
S2’s HS GF was bumped from behind as she sat at a light. She was crawling forward a tad to see if it was safe to make a right on red, when the guy behind her hit her from behind. The fellow in the car behind told the cop that my son’s GF had started to go through the light and then stopped suddenly – absolutely not true. The girl was furious that the adult was believed while, because she was a new driver, she wasn’t.
There were no ramifications – no ticket or anything – but she was livid nonetheless, and I don’t blame her.
I honestly had to stop reading this thread after MOWC’s post. I will come back, but my heart is racing, and I think I am going to need an extra set of lungs to handle the pressure inside.
@GMTplus7’s post is the impetus for me advising my girls the way I do when they are out separately.
I was on the subway in NY in my late teens and this guy “bumped” and leaned into me at a location where the ride got a little loopy in the tunnel.
I thought, “No way. This cannot be happening.” Then I thought, “Oh, my goodness, this man is leaning on me and …”
I rolled up the magazine in my hand and began to beat the living shiitake mushrooms out of him, screaming at him, calling him out for his perverted, assaulting behavior.
The other people on the train became invested in this, and jostled him from one set of hands to the next as he sought to evade the flailing. When the doors opened he jumped off.
I was embarrassed (!) and felt yucky, but the other passengers were great about it, and they understood.
Even based on that claim from the driver behind, it should still be his fault, in that he should have been paying attention and not following too closely.
Well, yeah. Of course. His story was that it was her fault. He was the adult; therefore he must be right.
Once I whacked a creepy dude with my heavy purse on the head. The creep approached me from behind as I was walking through the wooded park as I regularly did to get to work. He put his hand on my shoulder and said something while trying to pull me closer… I whacked him and ran - I was almost 8 months pregnant at that time!! I really did not think about the possiblity that he might have been armed. I heard voices in the distance of people cutting through that park, so the creep did not run after me. Needless to say, I never, ever walked through that park again.
Nowadays, I walk through questionnable areas of our downtown “with a purpose.” Fast pace, poker face. Beggars and creepy folk do not approach me. I am vigilant on Metro buses, but they are so packed that creeps have to sit at the front or way in the back. On commuter buses, I feel like I am at Cheers - where “everyone knows your name.”