Riddle me this
Posted on March 29th, 2007 by Jackie Danicki
If you were a woman, walking down the street in a not so wonderful neighborhood, and one in a group of men said to you as you walked past, “Girl, you need to smile at me” in a threatening way…What would you do?
Filed under: Life
Ignore him. If he’s intent on causing trouble, he will do so anyway, but there’s no point making it easier for him by interacting, and there’s a strong chance he’s testing the water with his opening remark to see whether you’re intimidated and won’t bother if you’re obviously not.
Course, that’s easy for me to say.
You OK?
Thanks, ST - I am okay, if annoyed and frustrated (but when is that not the case?). It’s just hard to take shit from people because you’re outnumbered and they could physically harm you quite easily…and they seem happy for you to suspect that they just might do so.
Walk faster.
Oh, ick.
I’d probably pretend I didn’t hear him, then hightail it into a shop or wherever there were more people about. Then I would spend the next year or so retroactively thinking up clever smackdowns and being angry at myself for feeling so helpless.
You know, I felt (feel) angry, but not with myself. I feel angry at those guys for feeling they are entitled to intimidate me and treat me like an object that only exists to get them hard. I feel angry at their parents, whoever they are, for raising their kids to be such sorry excuses for men. I will admit to being frustrated with myself for not knowing if I was doing exactly the right thing (I kept walking at the same exact pace and did not acknowledge their existence).
I think you did exactly the right thing - by just carrying on as you were you showed no intimidation (no matter what you may have been feeling).
I’ve experienced the same thing from gangs of schoolgirls. Not very nice.
Get older, fatter and dress down. Works every time!:wink:
Sounds like the right thing to me.
Walking faster is a sign of fear. Don’t do it. You need to show disdain or strength.
IMO, you did the right thing, (kept walking at the same exact pace and did not acknowledge their existence). He/They wanted a “reaction” of some kind to further “justify” their attitude/actions, if you had said anything they would have thought or said “You are just a b***h” as an example.
Monica, I don’t think that makes much difference to guys like this. I mean, I’m not some supermodel, and I was wearing jeans and a normal top, not anything provocative…And I know my older friends get their share of grief, too.
I haven’t lived in a walking city in a long time, but when I did, my response to any and all male hecklers was to laugh at them. It always made them retreat in confusion. I’ve actually read somewhere that men’s biggest fear is that women will laugh at them. I know it’s probably wiser to ignore and walk on, but some days, it just feels to corrosive to the soul to do nothing.
Hillary, I could see that working for certain guys, but I got the distinct impression that they’d have hurt me if I laughed at them.
I didn’t mean to raise that stupid canard about “she was asking for it.” That guy sounds more threatening than the usual that I ever ran into. Walking on and ignoring seems to be the right thing to do. And carry pepper spray.