Thursday 11 June 2009

taking responsibility

first we had chris trotter and now we have brian rudman telling women we should be more tough. we should simply tell men to f**k off if they pester us, and all will be solved. in their world view, it is perfectly ok for men to behave boorishly. apparently that's just what men do, and there's no need for them to change. no, it's women who must change, as it always is.

and in their rather strange world view, men who are clearly told to f**k off have no sense of entitlement. they immediately get the message the first time. they never use positions of power to intimidate. in fact, mr trotter can completely make sense of the power differentials between economic classes, but can somehow not translate this power differential to gender classes.

well guess what, how about an alternative. how about the guys back off. you ask once, and when you get a no, you don't ask again. you don't act like you have some entitlement to keep pestering a woman just because you can. you accept that she knows how to make up her own mind, and when she says no, she means it. it's not difficult. all it involves is men taking responsibility for their own behaviour, instead of expecting women to police it. why is that a problem?

3 comments:

Tui said...

Can we kick Chris Trotter out of the left, please? He's why we can't have nice things.

Anonymous said...

Yes yes yes yes yes. Trotter's MO is to say something that will appeal to rednecks, then dismiss criticism from the left by making out than none of us understand it as well as he does.

Getting kind of fed up with the argument that middle-aged desperadoes like to put up - if you don't like me behaving like a groping pig, it's because you don't like sex and there's clearly something wrong with you.

AWicken said...

I often wonder how he reconciles his extensive knowledge of history and socialist theory - which he professes to believe in - with some of the opinions he appears to seriously come forth with.

To be fair, he's still to the left of ACT. On most issues.