Do women often worry men will go psycho simply for rejecting a dude? Been reading some stories and shit that is fuckin scary
Seriously the stories I've read about dudes threatening to drive to womens house and murder them or something over rejections is insane.
Have any of the ladies here had to deal with a psychopath like that?
Friend of mine used to be friends with this dude named Chris (and yes, it’s that friend). They hung out every day for like two years. And then one day they were hanging out, and he, in their words (and they say it this exact way every time) “pulled his whole dick out.” They told him to fuck off, they gave him another chance after a couple months, aaaaand then he did it again. Then he started stalking them.
I wonder sometimes if the reason they never communicated things to me very well (i.e. why they never fucking told me they were uncomfortable with me following their Reddit account) is because they thought I would lose my shit or something.
What's the big deal? Isn't pulling your dick out a friendly gesture? It's not like it's a gun.
It's not like it's a gun.
The ladies call it my derringer
Yes, and while the risk is not comparable, it's not just men. I had a woman pull a knife on me while screaming I was too ugly/worthless/etc to reject her, how I couldn't do better and I should be begging to be with her. Plenty of people are unhinged.
I saw multiple cishet dudes around me lose their shit after rejections and instantly go in stalker mode or worse. I always try to temper them down and sometimes it works, I'm amab presenting for now (sadly), at least I put a couple of people off from doing weird stuff
Short answer: Yes
That's not love and that's not companionship. I fail to see the point of wanting a relationship with someone you had to intimidate into giving you a chance or something.
Patriarchy, r*pe culture, some dudes feel entitled to womens' and AFAB presenting bodies.
After I socially transitioned even before HRT, I didn't really pass, but as soon as I put on a skirt that was the most I've been "accidently" touched and squeezed. It's hard to get if you're cis male and look it because it just doesn't happen - but as someone who has been on both sides, it's real and it's shitty.
yeah, like most of the people around me were fine when i used to just crossdress occassionally around them but like there was this one guy who was really creepy and sexual about it and if i ever tried to call him out on it he'd say it was just a joke and stop doing it for a bit and then start again
tldr: kill all men
I had a very strange experience like this when I went to the Ren Fair as a vaguely greek goddess. There were lots of older cis women who were very handsy and aggressive with me. I was thankful it wasn't any men. But the number of psycho guys I met while dating as a men @.@ fellas can be wild.
I mean, serial killers do horrific things and that never solves their abuse or intimacy issues. It's usually about having control over their measly lives. If she accepts them, great, the abuse will be withheld for a couple of months. If they get rejected, then it's another strike on their list of grievances.
stories I've read about dudes threatening to drive to womens house and murder them or something over rejections
This happened to my 8 year old niece when she told a classmate she didn’t want to date him. They learn young.
Jesus fuck
If her dad comes 'round then I'll smash his car with a rock (came to my mind instantly, also probably good advice here)
Flat yes, but if you think about the guys in your life and think "Oh, they wouldn't do that, I'm a close friend of so-and-so", it's actually a lot more common than you think. You're just not the sort of person they'd do it in front of (unless the person they were doing it to was your partner and your partner told you about it).
CW For the expected stuff, given the subject matter. ::: spoiler spoiler A boy I rejected in middle school promptly attempted to choke me to death in front of everyone. In high school, a guy threatened to off himself if I didn't date him. A close male friend once body-blocked me into his bedroom and wouldn't let me leave until I started crying, when I didn't give him the answers he wanted. :::
So yeah. People do worry, it does happen, and it's quite common. At least one in five women is a victim.
Jesus christ both of those are terrifying.
I try to keep this all in mind when I get ghosted. I know I'm not gonna go absolutely psycho on a girl who directly rejects me (at worst I'll brood and maybe fantasize about sending mean text messages that never get sent) but they don't know that, and it's not personal. Still hurts, though.
I know this is a "first world problems" aspect, but it makes it such a pain figuring out how to ask someone out in a way that will minimize the chance they will think I'm one of those
Yeah there's just no way you can convey this except vibes but boy can the right vibes be hard to convey if you're already nervous
yeah theres something to be said about trying to not care about the outcome. i know its hard for some people but it does make everything smoother for everyone
yeah its mostly vibes. in general, a crowded, social place or a history of comfortably knowing each other makes me less skittish about guys approaching me. obviously im going to reject them cause im with my bf but its not concerning i think. being mindful of your positioning (re: dont physically back a woman into a corner to ask her out) and distance is also appreciated.
but this also is problematic in that bars and so on are very commercialized and expensive. if we had a normal society this wouldnt be an issue. closest thing to a 'free' place to hang out is a dating app or social media, lmao. theres also a lot of creeps at bars (need guarding drinks and so on) so people are more on guard.
Thanks for the pro tips
They don't care if it affects other men though. They're just selfish fuckers. Incels will go around killing random men and neo nazis go around killing random white children. I know that stalkers and creepy men aren't an exclusively right wing problem, though it heavily is, but the selfish part applies to these people as well. They'll complain about how no one takes men's mental health seriously or male loneliness or whatever else - and they may all be legitimate issues - but then they turn around and do everything to make those problems even worse for the rest of us because they simply don't care about anyone or anything but their own desires.
Patriarchy makes us men types see relationships as markers of success in some kind of competition, or boxes to check on the "doing it right" rubric. When a woman rejects a guy like that, they feel themselves slipping back down to where they started, all that progress seemingly lost, and it makes them fucking angry, probably because a guy like that is too emotionally illiterate to not see rejection as some kind of gatekeeper slamming a door in his face (always being able to consult the patriarchy rulebook in times of emotional upset leaves you that way).
Btw this is not to say that these men have no agency or are purely victims. Maybe I am just hoping there's a conclusion to be reached that isn't "men are essentially volatile beings" since I'm a man who has never struggled with that kind of anger and I want to believe I am living proof that there's a better way for men to live.
I was only a girl for a while so I didn't get to experience much of this. The only time I had to turn down a guy in high school he: cyberstalked me, sent me tons of anonymous messages, made many alt accounts to lurk in my friends' group chats, impersonated me to break up with my then girlfriend on a day he knew I wouldn't be at my computer, sent me sexual/threatening messages for years, then told lies about me when I tried to tell adults. Because he was a lonely kid and I made the mistake of being friendly with him at school.
So yeah I they can be freaks when you don't give them what they want
Yes, in my youth there was a few of these and a lot of other mandatory being careful around men of all ages with some very bad experiences. And also one who became suicidal on rejection or so he said, locked me in for some months out of fear he might not be ok. In hindsight I think it was a manipulation tactic most of all.
i drag my killing machine of a bf everywhere now
cw: horror stories ::: spoiler spoiler like gropings passed off as moving by me, a guy asking about my underwear, a guy following me around and staring at me. not to mention the crazy stuff i used to deal with when i was dating. one guy threatened to hunt me down and mount my head on a wall for rejecting him and then whinged about how hes too good for a tra***, who are just vile demons trying to corrupt christian men. police got involved with that one cause apparently he threatened a lot of other women and was being investigated. i also have been SV'd a number of times but i dont feel like talking about that rn. sometimes it feels like these kinds of guys can tell youre damaged goods and are on you like a fly on shit. one time a guy was very dangerous feeling to me because he was backing me into a corner at some isolated place and i just went along with it and gave him some random number
sometimes i think about how it is taliban policy to chop the hands off of people that grope women :::
Transgender women seem to unfortunately get regular creeps and then the extra weird "chasers" (like Vaush) who want to reduce you as a person down a fetish for them.
Yes.
It also runs a whole spectrum. There are people who react immediately and in a blatantly threatening way and there are people who, when dumped, scale a 4-story apartment building and go to your (thankfully locked) balcony to try to win you back. That is still a scary thing but is a different form of the reaction, where it's obsessive panic and not threats of violence. This is the same thing that leads to stalking.
Shit is scary, yo.
Yep, I got stalked after turning down a guy. Not fun.
Nowadays I wear a fake wedding ring so it hasn't happened in a long time.
I'm afraid that a guy will go psycho and start a fight over me looking at him the wrong way. We need to de-radicalize men in general.
Women are right to be afraid.
IME, girls I know who get hit on frequently or have experienced dangerous creeps will try to be nicer and vaguer about turning down guys. Those who don't have a lot of guys hitting on them or haven't encountered a dangerous creep will usually just reject them normally.
With my own personal experience, they're usually straight forward with turning me down. I've gotten maybe 2 girls who just kept saying she was busy every time I suggested we do something together and I got the hint quickly.
Is there a reason for this societally or is it that just men are sorta just unhinged in general?
I think there's a pile. None of this is to say that anyone "owes" someone a relationship or that an individual man isn't making some sort of a choice when he goes off the rails and stalks me for several years. (this is also about cishet men)
I also want to say that this is going to appear in individual men different amounts. If you're a man and you reflexively think "well, I don't X", that's fine. But take it on board and think seriously (possibly with a therapist) whether parts of this do exist in you the next time you're rejected or whatever. This is a rough broad cultural commentary, which is fuzzy as hell. It is also done to boys and men (by other boys and men, and sometimes by women, if that takes some of the sting away).
Most bad: Under patriarchal norms, there is a sense of ownership of a woman (a specific woman, rather than women generally) in our language of relationship. This has been more explicit in the past, but it's still there in our media, "thought leaders" etc. Obviously, no guy says it and often they can't even sus out their feeling. It happens early in courting, well before any sort of exclusivity or even much social contact. The sting of rejection sucks, sure, but that you'd take it beyond your immediate feelings and wander around after a person requires some sense of... "This person is mine". This thought pattern is pervasive and unaddressed and causes, I think, most of the violence against women (you wouldn't want your property running away from you, your toaster doesn't talk back to you etc). I think this is worth delving into more specifically than just "male entitlement to women's bodies" (which other people have written about a bunch)
Also bad: Men in our society are in a competitive hierarchy. You want to be taken seriously by your friends? Well, maybe they'd stop making fun of you if you had a hot partner. Again, this is something a lot of guys will not say, but a lot of "choosing" a partner is about what they think their friends (and powerful men around them) would say. They might be fine with someone chubby or trans or whatever, but a voice in the back of their head says "But I know Robert will make fun of me for this". This applies more the further down the hierarchy of masculinity you are, the further you are from being taken seriously in that sphere. While the first point applies to men pretty well across the board, this definitely has a classist ableist character. See the dating foibles of masc computer science students.
Bad, related to the first two: Men, as a class, feel entitled to women. Myriad reasons, as caregivers and sources of offspring. In our modern liberal nation-states, there's always an obsession with birthrates. In prior generations, familial lines and property inheritance promoted... Well, men owning women, both as a class and as individuals. However, any individual man being under the effects of this doesn't necessarily feel that entitlement. Some definitely do, see the prevalence of cat-calling. Some do without cat-calling (say, a handsy boss). Other people have written more about this and better than I could.
More innocent on the part of men, but still bad societally: Men are more isolated than women. I realise that men have more access to power and privilege than women in this society, however men are also divorced from both their internal feelings and their communities in a way women (often) aren't. If you think about the typical men's friend circle, it's often mediated almost entirely around common hobbies and a once-common space (school, uni), and the conversations tend to be surface level and avoid anything particularly rough. There's an emphasis on never backing down from a position, lest one lose their position in the aforementioned hierarchy, which means that any interpersonal emotional discussions are very high labour and high risk. This is isolating. The most acceptable way to access that sort of connection is through a romantic relationship, for men at least. Women do sometimes experience this, but to a lesser degree. Men are also raised to have few emotions. Realistically, this means they still have those emotions but do not understand them well and outwardly try to express rage, glee, or lust (the real man emotions that aren't really emotions and you can express them without anyone lest yourself doubt your manly stoicism).
Unmet social needs: I had someone get on my case about calling them social needs, but that's the psych language. It's not going to kill you like not breathing, but it will kill you like smoking and drinking. People have romantic, platonic, and physical affection needs that a lot of single men are not getting met at all. While it's not on any one woman or women generally to fix this, it is something that does need addressing. Traditionally, everyone would be a part of a community which would meet quite a lot of these needs, but we live in a very isolated society. Whatever else, these unmet needs causes a lot of extremely weird behaviour even outside of harrassing women. That isn't to say that a solid community wouldn't have any of these problems (e.g. peasant communities in many places are very patriarchal), just to say it would have less of our current weirdos.
Ancillary: Sub-section for relatively surface level things that nonetheless cause a lot of these interactions and reflect a lot of the above. However, they can be changed by producing different media etc.
And obviously, some men are sociopaths and do stuff because they can get away with it. But that's actually pretty rare (1 in 25? idk).
I don't really have a good answer. I know that modern "trad values" masculinity basically wants more of this (with a side dressing of idealised yeomanry). Suburbia destroys community by making us competitive (lawn measuring) and making everything very far away. We only really encounter bastard forms of community in modern society that have had to be recreated from the ground up with people who've been raised with very hierarchical military/prison rules (corporations and schools), and a lot of the stronger "communities" we encounter in urban life are reactionary. :( Be the best man you can be though.
I also don't think ceding this entire ground to reactionaries is the right choice, even if I think that most of "masculinity" is at the very least silly and arbitrary. Kinda like how I'm definitely an internationalist that would get rejected from any nationalist project, people are attached to their nations and its within "The Left"s best interest to be able to work through and address the topic without alienating a huge number of people.
GOOD post
More innocent on the part of men, but still bad societally: Men are more isolated than women. I realise that men have more access to power and privilege than women in this society, however men are also divorced from both their internal feelings and their communities in a way women (often) aren't. If you think about the typical men's friend circle, it's often mediated almost entirely around common hobbies and a once-common space (school, uni), and the conversations tend to be surface level and avoid anything particularly rough. There's an emphasis on never backing down from a position, lest one lose their position in the aforementioned hierarchy, which means that any interpersonal emotional discussions are very high labour and high risk. This is isolating. The most acceptable way to access that sort of connection is through a romantic relationship, for men at least. Women do sometimes experience this, but to a lesser degree. Men are also raised to have few emotions. Realistically, this means they still have those emotions but do not understand them well and outwardly try to express rage, glee, or lust (the real man emotions that aren't really emotions and you can express them without anyone lest yourself doubt your manly stoicism).
this part is very accurate and well-spoken
test reply
Also bad: Men in our society are in a competitive hierarchy. You want to be taken seriously by your friends? Well, maybe they'd stop making fun of you if you had a hot partner. Again, this is something a lot of guys will not say, but a lot of "choosing" a partner is about what they think their friends (and powerful men around them) would say. They might be fine with someone chubby or trans or whatever, but a voice in the back of their head says "But I know Robert will make fun of me for this". This applies more the further down the hierarchy of masculinity you are, the further you are from being taken seriously in that sphere. While the first point applies to men pretty well across the board, this definitely has a classist ableist character. See the dating foibles of masc computer science students.
i feel like this also goes both ways in some way. i have family and people in general take me more seriously (both as a trans person and as a woman) when i have my bf, a masc hot guy, around. so in a way i can leech off of his hotness and our relationship to make people take me more seriously (re: doctors not listening to women except with a man in the room and so on). so bizarre.
Overall great post, and this in particular is 100% accurate.
If you think about the typical men's friend circle, it's often mediated almost entirely around common hobbies and a once-common space (school, uni), and the conversations tend to be surface level and avoid anything particularly rough.
How would you describe the typical women's friend circle?
As for what is to be done... I personally think the concept of masculinity has so much baggage that we have to reject it and look for something beyond it.
For some reason this didn't show up in my notifications. Nice post
these unmet needs causes a lot of extremely weird behaviour even outside of harrassing women.
like what?
Is there a reason for this societally
yes
My thoughts as a trans woman:
Basically patriarchy denies women agency and decenters them in society. Womens relationships and communities are based around men and attracting suitable men for their class, ie sororities. Mens relationships are based around impressing other men. That is why nearly all women put effort into dressing how men like, and men don't usually dress how women like. This gives men the impression that success with women is a natural consequence of being a good man, more specifically that they are good at being men. These men focus their personalities and energy doing things to impress other men under the assumption that it will lead to success with women. The whole of patriarchal masculinity is based on the idea that if you perform it properly you will get women.
So when those men get rejected it is effectively calling into question their manhood. In their eyes they are good men, as in they are doing man well not in terms of ethics, so they deserve the women they want. Remember their ideology doesn't respect women's agency. This is why they so commonly react by insulting the women. They need to put the women back beneath them in order to retain their masculinity.
note: In this comment men = straight men, women = straight women, and I'm assuming "traditional values"
I think like at least a good quarter of modern dudes just go psycho over rejection. That's why women are so much more careful about sussing out potential romantic partners. They don't want to end up chopped up in some angry fucks freezer.
I've had women friends tell me "Yeah I thought he was attractive physically, but something about him seemed clingy and possessive and didn't feel right" or something similar when describing certain men they've rejected.
i feel like theres a certain number of dudes that just lash out at every woman they can see almost every day. and i also feel like they like going after some kinds of women more than others, possibly because they seem more submissive from something like PTSD, are small, or are just quiet. i feel like me and my support group of SV survivors have way outmoded and more numerous bad experiences with men in comparison to the general populace of women
Moids being moids
Note to self: Get pepper spray or a pistol ASAP
I'm not in the public space often and, when I am, am not in very crowded situations. I've gotten a lot of men ogling at me, but never had someone speak to me directly. Thankfully.
Pepper spray for sure, and the gel kind specifically. Basically error-proof, and you don't introduce a lethal weapon to a bad situation. I got fucked with a little less when I openly carried some.
I’m know that I’m not the target audience, but reading these responses and seeing what everyone has gone through makes me so damn sad and angry. Seeing the shit people will put others through is so upsetting. I’m sorry any of you here had to experience any of it.
Every woman I know has had at least one occurrence of this
Aye... sorry about that friend. It's not in me to be mean to anyone. I usually get my feelings hurt at rejection, but I don't threaten to harm a woman over rejection.
Really you just deal with maybe hurt feelings for a couple days and then you pick yourself up and move on. Or at least that's what i tend to do
People should write their info on paper more often. Meet someone on the train, have nice conversation, "this is my stop, here's my number/insta/tiktok/whateverthekidsusethesedays, hmu if you'd like to continue this over drinks" and leave it at that. It'll be clear you've asked them out, but they don't have to decide in the moment, they don't have to reject you to your face, and they don't have to give you any personal info. You leave them in a position where they only need to take action if they're interested in talking to you again, and they don't have to expend any additional energy on you if they're not interested.