John-Henry Beck:
You just explained the benefits in writing about harassment in such a clear way, I am certain jenny6833a will be back to apologize for hir contentless comment…any minute now.

Okay, I’m a bit late to this comment stream, but maybe you’ll notice it anyway, queequack. You wrote:

I didn’t say street harassment or annoying OKCupid messages were a good thing, only that it’s a price I’d pay. And I would.

Dude. No. Just no. You do NOT want street harassment. Here’s a little anecdote for you:

When I graduated with my B.S., I got a job in Amarillo, Texas, as an engineer. 21 years old, six feet tall, lanky as hell (I probably weighed 145 lbs), and long blonde hair. What can I say, I was trying to be mister hippy rebel, or something. Anyway, I worked in the only tall building in town, which was smack dab in the middle of town, so that’s where I had to park my car. At that time, Amarillo’s downtown was shuttered and dying, for the most part. Lots of homeless people, lots of poor people living right on the edge. I’d never been harassed in my life, never had a single problem, and was blissfully unaware of the way people could act… until a bunch of guys who lived down there noticed me. Guys who apparently had a thing for skinny blonde kids with long hair.

They started out by leaving notes on my windshield. Initially nothing bad, things like “what’s your name?” I ignored it, but they slowly became really disturbing, disgusting notes about what sex acts they wanted to perform on me. After a couple of weeks, they graduated up to openly confronting me, and telling me in person. I tried parking on different streets, but they always figured it out, and they’d always be waiting for me after a couple of days again. It just kept escalating, and after a couple of months I started to feel real fear, like maybe they would go beyond just harassment and taunts.

So I quit that job and moved away.

You speak of harassment like it’s validating–some kind of good thing that would help you feel better about yourself. It’s freaking not. Since I left that job, I’ve never experienced harassment like that again, but the memory of it has stuck with me for the 25 years since then, and there is no way in hell I would want to experience that again. And what I got, in terms of harassment, was likely orders of magnitude less than what a lot of women experience every day for their entire lives.

It seems to me that clearly identifying the problem is an important first step in dealing with a problem.

And with a problem like this, identifying the problem behavior is a big start since just having more people recognizing what’s going on and being able to state that harassment is actually happening goes a long way toward stopping it. “Stop blowing off complaints of harassment as minor and discrete incidents,” is a good start on a solution.

But this post IS a solution. The problem is that people don’t understand, and you’re explaining it.

I don’t see YOU coming up with any suggestions, smartypants!

Why? Why is the pattern disregarded by the newcomers and onlookers? I’m not satisfied with the “it looks so different from the outside than from the inside” as a full story. Some of them look like (otherwise) sensitive people. Also some of the newcomers write insightful, deeply felt stuff. So why? What is the reason for this particular blindness?

I think that a few of the men that get involved with these threads really are mystified that the adjective “unwanted” can modify the noun phrase “sexual attention”. It must seem like an oxymoron.

But if you complain about the pile, and ask people to stop leaving sand everywhere, most will usually cite the tiny size of each individual, isolated grain as proof that you’re being overly dramatic about an insignificant problem. And then some people who are attempting to be sympathetic (but have never had to live with that sort of thing) are far too eager to tell you that they were in your shoes, they’d be making pearls.