non-science

[rm]

Sorry, new and improved version. I left out some important options.

I realize this is entirely non-scientific and because LJ skews towards women even more unscientific for that. But I tend to think these little exercises still have their uses and least when it comes to reminding people about privilege (or I may turn out to be totally wrong).

ETA:

to answer some frequent questions:

1. Unwanted contact from a person you are in a relationship with should be read as a sexual overture (possibly entirely appropriate but you weren't in the mood) was made that you rejected, BUT the rejection was then not heeded in a fashion that you feel harmed you/violated your person/rights.

2. I know, I left out a choice for boss/coworker/clergy member/teacher/professional relationship/person in position of authority -- please put it in the acquaintance category. This was noticed too late to redo the poll and I'll note it when I do the results summary post.

3. If you are trans, genderqueer, etc. and want to answer in more than one category based on how you were presenting at the time, that's fine.

4. The way LJ shows the answers to this isn't actually that statistically interesting to what I'm trying to capture, and I will eventually make a post about some other things I'm seeing somewhat buried in the numbers.

5. Yes, your answers are viewable to everyone. There's a point to that too that will be discussed later as well.

6. Feel free to link to this in your own journal.

7. THANK YOU.


[Poll #1175760]

Comments

[tantra-cat.livejournal.com]

Did it save the previous results, or should we fill it out again?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Nope, had to redo the whole thing, so you'd need to fill out again.

[nickelchief.livejournal.com]

If it were an option, I would check the box for "co-worker."

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Yes, also "teacher," "minister", etc -- but don't re-do!

[schmidtybooger.livejournal.com]

Interesting, mind if I link to this?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Go ahead. The more answers the more useful.

[phaenix-ash.livejournal.com]

well now. that was depressing.

[lorriet.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I was about to hit submit..then realized "Oh, right...that box should be checked, too..."

Bah.

[delicatetbone.livejournal.com]

There are two main things that women never talk about, and yet so many of them have experienced it (the stats vary):
Being Raped
Having an Abortion

I find it incredibly depressing how much these two often very female-experiences are stigmatized in our society...swept under the rug and treated like unmentionables.

[catrinaz.livejournal.com]

i chose to tell just about everybody i know that i was raped last year. that's one of the main reasons. (the other being that my ptsd is such a big part of what i'm dealing with everyday that i can't imagine interacting with people who didn't know.)

[cwoolard.livejournal.com]

Where's the tick box for "My experience with unwanted sexual contact isn't any of the internet's business"?

It's not personal. . .

[punzel.livejournal.com]

(laughing) Oh, how this references back to the question of who wore a button and who didn't! Was that intentional?

For the genderqueer. . .

[punzel.livejournal.com]

It would be far too complex a survey, but I think some of this hinges on what an affronter perceives your gender and/or sex to be.

Re: For the genderqueer. . .

[rm.livejournal.com]

I agree strongly. And I almost asked people to respond based on how they were presenting at the time, but I also feel its important for people to identify themselves and also know that what's going on in my head and how I'm presenting don't always match and would effect my memory of an event and that this might be true for others as well. It's messy, and it's a sloppy poll, although I'm starting to get enough responses that the numbers might churn up something interesting.

[stupid-drawings.livejournal.com]

I took it as any sort of touching that I didn't want.
I used to get grabbed by the hips all the time by men I didn't know. Then I started wearing baggy shirts and glaring anyone down if they got too close to me. It still happens at conventions. Oh, and at Dragon con, I always get attack made out with at least once. It's because I'm friendly.

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

I..can't imagine either of those things happening to me.
I really don't know what I'd do.

[darkadaptedeye.livejournal.com]

One thing that I think gets missed in most of these polls, as well as most of these discussions, is a hetero-normative assumption that if "unwanted sexual advances/contact" is something generally done by men-to-women on the one side, whether or not the reflection is women-to-men on the other.

A lost issue is how often men are sexually harassed by other men, because of the massive stigma that either the male recipient was inviting it by "not being masculine enough", or that they're whining because they "weren't man enough" to deal with it themselves.

For every crude douchebag who stands on a corner going "hey baby hey baby" to every girl who walks by, he's probably following it with "hey faggot whatchu lookin' at. you wanna piece of this?" to the guys. Another form of this behavior regularly happens on sidewalks where guys will sometimes walk straight at another to make the other "chicken out" by having to walk around, lest they risk bumping and starting a confrontation.

If these things are suppressed from discussion, or left to the world of "shut up and deal with it yourself", one has to wonder at the number of things like non-reported rapes with male victims.


Or, umm... yeah... Anyway, sorry to hijack this this discussion into another tangent. It's probably better to just leave it with the old LJ gender slant that "all men suck". But one thing I will say is that often a bully is a bully, and an abuser is an abuser, and gender of the victim can be purely incidental. As we all know: just because something isn't reported or discussed, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think the most interesting (and surprising) thing I am seeing in the polls so far is that the female respondents seem to have dealt with harrassment/assault from multiple sources with greater frequency than men, but that being a target of harassment/abuse at some point is universal.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Both of my most recent experiences of unwanted sexual contact/advance were from other women.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I was recently aggressively fondled by another woman. I find it telling that I was more threatened by that than when I got groped by a man a weekend or two ago -- either I really wasn't expecting it from someone of my gender (I'm very straight, though openminded) or I felt a lot more pressure to Give In because she wasn't a man.

Now that's a complex thought... I feel a post coming on.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Ok, maybe this is a stupid question, but can you define "unwanted"? Because by some definition "sweetie, please stop grabbing my tits... I'm not in the mood" said to my SO is a reaction to "unwanted" sexual attention. When I said this, of course, he stopped. I don't consider this in any way an inappropriate act on his part or any kind of violation. We have a relationship in which an acceptable way to say "are you in the mood?" is to initiate sexual physical contact (as I suspect many people do). But in the broadest sense he did something I did not, at the time, want. A stricter definition of "unwanted" would be such an action performed by someone I did NOT think had the right to do it.

(hi, here by a link from joedecker)

[rm.livejournal.com]

I thought about clarifying that and then thought that doing so would insult people's intelligence. What I mean is something you felt was inappropriate. In the case of a stranger that's clearer. In the case of a partner, I would say that it's when saying no to an advance is not heeded in a way that the person answer the poll felt harmed by. Certainly, that question was written with the knowledge that I have more than one friend who was raped by someone who was their spouse at the time.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Would you mind if I directed people to this?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Not at all. The numbers only approach being meaningful if lots of people respond to it. And very few people have been upset by it, which gladdens me, although it's been stressful.

[pinesandmaples]

I'm genderqueer now, but I was "normal" or "binary" for a while so I answered under both the first and last sections based on my experiences at those times in my life.

If you'd like me to remove my answers in one section or the other, I'd be down.

[rm.livejournal.com]

No, that's fine. I was going to ask my various trans and genderqueer friends to do exactly what you did, but I decided that was up to them. I myself identify as genderqueer, but only answered in the female section as I've only had these experiences when clearly presenting as female in garb and manner.

[awe-struck.livejournal.com]

Men and women stats for family memebers--what a difference. Men 5, women 34. Something we don't talk alot about for either sex

[eversearching.livejournal.com]

Here via zarq.

That was a strangely stressful thing to do, but I'm glad I did it. Is it ok if I link to this? I'm glad you are asking these questions.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Please go ahead. The more responses the better.

Thanks!

[hokahey.livejournal.com]

the weird thing is that i totally forgot when i first answered the poll, and then i had to go and fill it out again.

[weirdodragoncat.livejournal.com]

interesting poll. I also rather enjoyed the post that inspired this. I found you via joedecker. Hope you don't mind, I added you as friend.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Welcome! I am going to try to write the poll results up in the next couple of days and get through friending everyone back (I generally do but read journals first to make sure people aren't all memes, post in a language I can read and aren't connected to a particularly tiny subculture that I post about in locked-entries in a way I'd like to keep private) in that time frame too. Of course, I stepped into the middle of this very loudly in the midst of a book deadline and so I am moderately crazed.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating. Thinking back on it, I have gotten a lot of unwanted sexual contact from all kinds of people. Sometimes it really upset me. Sometimes it mildly annoyed me. Sometimes it freaked me out tremendously.
I know I have been fortunate, because while it has scarred me in little bits here and there, it has never seriously damaged me.

This has made me think of my own privilege.
So I hope the original fellow with his ill-advised post on boobs (to which I am sympathetic; I am in London and just went to Rigby & Peller, arguably the world's best lingerie shop, for a fitting in which they told me that they do not have anything in stock for breasts as disproportionately large as mine and I would have to have something custom-altered; I'm used to being a bit of a freak, in short, and having people ask if they can touch them etc., though I admit I teared up in the fitting room after the fitter left just now because I'd really hoped she'd say I was more normal than I'd thought...) can understand his own privilege in this matter.
I'd probably let him touch my boobs.
But there are so many loaded conditions behind that "probably" that I do not even know how to explain...
So thank you for helping me think them through enough to perhaps someday explain them. I'm understanding, as I grow older, that most of the bad things humans do are born of a lack of understanding. The more of us who are equipped to explain ourselves, the fewer opportunities there are for painful and possibly fatal misunderstandings to arise.

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

Although I ID as genderqueer, I'm biologically female and I present as female, so I filled out the "I am a woman," bit.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yup, thanks. I did the same.

[featherofeeling.livejournal.com]

I was going to check another box, but I realized that the unwanted contact I've gotten from my friends isn't really sexual. Even when they touch my stomach or sometimes boobs (like feeling without permission to compare size), it's not sexual in intent at all and I don't really receive it as such. It's still a manifestation of the fact that my body isn't seen as my own sometimes, though. So is it more wrong when there's no...as you put it yesterday, no honest desire behind it? Sometimes I think it's just playful and friendly and I overreact because I'm too body-conscious. It would be interesting to see the breakdown by gender for that kind of touching, though.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm too body-conscious

I grew up being constantly told I was too sensitive. And I'm not really any less so now, although I can hide it a little better. But it's one of those things I will never get over. How is it possible to feel _too_ much? How is it wrong to happen to want to keep your body to yourself?

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

How sad is it that I consider some of these events so commonplace that I don't seem to have remembered them?

[feather-brain70.livejournal.com]

I did "acquaintance" for co-worker, but also for someone who I knew but didn't consider as a friend. Suck.

[clawfoot.livejournal.com]

How loosely are we defining "contact" here? I've had unwanted sexual advances that did not include any actual touching or physical contact, but did not cease when I asked and actually bothered me so much that I had to close the store I was tending, sit in the back room shaking and crying, and call my sister to come sit with me for the rest of the shift in case the guy came back again.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

Although if we're being nitty-gritty about it, it's a little more complicated for me than identifying as female, I filled out that part of the poll because I am cisgender female and identify predominantly as a woman.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

Additionally:

While most of the unwanted attention I've received was from men, I was also molested by a nine-year-old girl when I was eight.