Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I believe you when you say it was not your intention to “silence women, offend women, or tell women how they should feel”. Awareness is a step in the right direction. @beebee3 states it well in the above post. Wishing you well.
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It doesn’t seem the folks who challenge and try to statistically disprove the vulnerable situations faced by women alone intend to be hurtful in their responses.
It’s just that the immediate, defensive posture - backed up by attempts to minimize the probabilities of harm and highlighting their individual good character- demonstrate a failure to see and appreciate those with different experiences.
It’s not that women need men to be sorry for offending us with their views (although that is certainly appreciated).
As stated so well above, the preference is for a perspective shift - one that accepts the experiences of many women as valid and legitimate - full stop.
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I’ve been reading French sources, which stated most came from within that radius (except for one who was on Ile de Ré, ~France’s Martha’s Vineyard).
Unfortunately they’re now almost all locked or by subscription only.
The article below is the only one I found that’s still free to read. It doesn’t have the precise number of km but states “Almost all come from the same Vaucluse région, are neighbors or live within a few kilometers of the Pelicot couple”.
I can post a couple articles from Le Monde in English if anyone is interested.
Likelihood of being bitten by a shark is very low, but if I see one swim nearby or towards me, I don’t try to test the hypothesis that it’s probably harmless. (*Caveat: I don’t know what I’d do). It’s the same with the random male hiker: he’s probably harmless but since there’s no way to know, it’s not possible to assume he is. Even if he looks fine.
That’s why the trial is being discussed: all these men are good fathers, good neighbors. They help others, coach little boys soccer, drive a van to take autistic kids to activities, take their kids and grandkids to school.
And still they didn’t recoil in horror.
Some were found to have hundreds of pedo porn pics on their computers. One had raped his step daughter. One had “purchased” a 15 year old girl to rape (from her own mother).
The worst part is that many STILL feel they are good guys. The above activities was listed as evidence they are good guys. Beside saying they are the victims and shouting yesterday (“keep going and I’ll go rape your mother”) they form a little band of pals, eat together, walk in and out together, laugh, etc. They’ve made it clear they only regret getting caught.
You recoil in horror, you can’t believe the depravity, and you’re probably sick to your stomach at the thought people could think you have anything in common with them. I would too. But from the outside if these guys had been hiking, for most of them, there’d have been no clue.
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Well said. This thread was started many months ago and I almost can’t believe it is still going. Hopefully some folks have gotten the jist of the question/statement.
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Yes, I try to avoid thinking about my daughter living by herself in an apartment in Philadelphia. She’s in a “good” neighborhood that’s well-lit, but still, I worry.
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When I read this thread, and responses from what I believe is a male, it simply irritates me.
For me it comes down to this: if anyone (male, female, young, old) tells me something is uncomfortable, or that something happened to them that now taints their view, I believe them. I don’t try justifying, or talking them away from what they experienced or feel.
Men are scary to many women. So are bears. However, women are 99.9% more likely to encounter a man than a bear. In my 66 years I have only encountered a bear at a zoo, and once from a helicopter. I cannot count how many men I’ve encountered. A bear never exposed themselves to me when I was 11, or grabbed my breasts when I was 12. A bear never followed me and my friends down the street for blocks when we were preteens. A bear never pushed me down and said I’d like it if I’d “only relax” - in fact, a bear has never laid a hand on me. A bear never did anything to scar me for life and distrust them. So yes, I’ll take my chance encounter with a bear in the woods…even vs a man on the street.
I take the Maya Angelou pov: When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
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Our cabin is in the Maine woods. Our lot happens to have many, many beech nut trees. Bears love beech nuts and we’re told there are a lot of bears in the area. We have not seen ONE in 34 years. They’re very shy. They leave us alone. I can’t say the same about SOME men.
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Right. But… to be fair, it’s the bold bears that people can see that are more worrisome.
When we camped in North Lake (upstate NY), there were some years with vigilant ranger checks on food, grills etc stored outside when careless campers had made the bears comfortable with foraging at the campsites. There are times here in Colorado when bears wonder down into my town. Residents try to give them a wide berth, hoping they will wander away again before causing mischief (3 strikes rule with the wardens).
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But the bears don’t have bad intentions.
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I just finished watching “Penelope” on Netflix.
I enjoyed this YA series about a 16-year-old surviving in the woods for quite awhile. Yes, you have to suspend disbelief - she never would have lasted that long in real life.
I thought it was nice that all the people she encountered, men and women alike, were very kind. The mother bear and cougar, not so much!
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News update from the Pelicot trial
- more accused men who consider they ‘had consent since the husband gave it’
- a wife who came to defend her husband (18 counts of aggravated rape) to say “he’s very sweet, he wouldn’t rape anyone, he’s certainly not violent, like once he was very mad and he waved his little ax around but not once did he try to hurt me with it”
- most men had a miserable childhood (while their trauma is true, many girls and women also had a miserable childhood yet don’t rape)
- another family devastated because they’ve realized Pelicot had taught the dad how to drug and rape family members
The extent of ‘rape culture’ in French law /society, just in the past 3 days:
- man found guilty of 234 counts of rape on his daughter age 7-11: 2 years in jail, 10k in a trust fund (s.o calculated it was €42 per rape endured)
- judge used his wherewithal to auction his 12-year old online - someone reported it and he was arrested but held at home on his own recognizance without any protection measure for the girl. He got 2 years suspended.
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Horrifying. I hope this brings awareness and change to rape laws in France.
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That is definitely the hope and why Gisele Pelicot asked to have an “open” trial. There’s now official recognition “consent” should be part of the law wrt sexual assault and rape (it isn’t as of now, which makes such cases difficult.)
In addition, more hopeful small steps: a senator who’d drugged a colleague in order to sexually assault her (she got away and got tested immediately) had withdrawn from the Chamber but kept his salary and wanted to be reinstalled: because of the trial, he wasn’t.
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Yet another reason women would rather deal with a bear than a man.
My close friend, 59, is an RN in a large urologist practice here, the best one in the area. She had mentioned it before, but yesterday she went into great detail about how OFTEN men harass the female nurses. Just Thursday, a guy came in, and declined to have his wife come in when my friend asked if she wanted to. That was the first red flag. And then he said several inappropriate things, and even touched her on her back a couple of times. And you know what she did? Nothing. And you know how she felt? Not furious at the guy, but embarrassed and guilty that she didn’t call him out. The next day, she did talk to her supervisor about him, so at his next appointment, there will be two nurses in the room.
Another time, she had to give a guy two injections in the buttocks, the dose was so large. She is a very no-nonsense person and described in technical detail what she was going to do and he how he would need to pull his pants down some. As he was undoing his belt, he said, “It sounds like we should have a drink first…” She ignored him and did her job. As he left the room, he said, “We could still have that drink…”
It’s to the point that the office knows not to put some guys with the younger nurses. The abuse these women get on the phone is unbelievable, too. Just Friday, a guy was so inappropriate that the nurse hung up on him and went to talk to a supervisor. The guy phoned again and called the next nurse who answered something I can certainly not post here.
My friend said that if a patient is a repeat offender (but more than a couple of times!), the doctor will sit down with him and have him sign a behavior contract. Apparently, some doctors are quite blunt - “We don’t tolerate abuse of our nurses, and if you do it again, you’ll have to go elsewhere for care,” but others are more wishy-washy. Unfortunately, the doctor of the guy who was inappropriate last week falls in the latter category.
OK, done with my rant. I’m just so furious. 
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MaineLonghorn - that’s awful (and pathetic of the men). Sorry your friend (and other nurses) have had to deal with that!
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I would bet real money that each of those obnoxious men are considered “great guys” by most of their families, friends, and neighbors.
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The worst are the comments to this article - so much victim blaming.
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I think it breaks down like this. If you are a female or if a male your daughter or wife, would you rather come across a bear or a rapist/serial killer in the woods?
I think we know the answer, but the rub is females don’t know if the man/male is nuts or not.
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