Lets Whine Our Balls Off

October 8, 2009

I’m sure, like me most of you guys have been rudely honked at while riding a bike or walking down a relatively isolated pedestrian strip of road. In my experience, it has nothing to do with safety or my gender - its usually just a couple of guys in a pickup truck or similar vehicle that see my back is turned and get their jollies out of startling me by blowing their horn, often making a hand gesture and shouting something at the same time.

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper’s The Sexist blog is convinced that these guys just harass women. In a recent post, she wrote:

Women who speak out about street harassment have been accused of arrogance and ungratefulness. Believe me when I tell you that women who catch street harassment don’t have to be hot shit. Most of the time, the only requirement is that they be women.

The real discomfort with reporting street harassment is that it requires us to call out the harassers. And some people are still more comfortable ignoring victims than they are admitting that their significant others, relatives, and neighbors routinely verbally harass people based on their gender

…

Targets: Women Who Walk, Women Who Bike, and Women Who Wait for the Bus.

My response:

Amanda, it appears to want to find bad deeds by guys targeted at women everywhere, but its not just all about gender. Guys are targets of The Douche Bag Who Honks, too.

I’m a guy that can in no way be visually mistaken for a woman, and very straight-looking males, often in pickup trucks, have honked at me on numerous occasions, often in combination with screaming out the window. They always do this when my back is turned to them, so as to startle me. It has nothing to do with gender, other than, in my experience, the gender of the offender has almost always been male.

That having been said, I am going to try to bring some truth to your post. I am sending out an alert on my blog, The Balls Monologues, asking my readership to stop honking at guys. After all, if guys are going to falsely accused of targeting women for misdeeds, a good deterrent to the false accusations is to actually start targeting the very misdeeds dreamt up about us. Hopefully the douche bags who honk will listen.

So, if any of you guys are the assholes doing this type of thing, stop doing it to fellow guys. Lets bring some truth to accusations that our bad behavior is targeted at women – that way, women will have to think twice about whether they want to libel us by accusing us of targeting them.

Shiyuan Deng of San Francisco’s Torrent magazine unleashed a Tiananmen-like massacre on another guy:

Vincent – guys don’t honk because they want to get with a woman. Guys honk their car (& slide up to you at the bus station, wave to you from the construction site, ambush you as you’re walking to your car at night..) because they FREAKING CAN. Because we live in a society where the shame & blame associated with unwanted male attention falls squarely on the woman’s shoulders. Like the article says – either you’re arrogant, or unappreciative. If the blame & shame were put on the men committing those acts instead of the women who unwittingly found themselves the recipients, the streets would look a lot different.

My response to Deng:

Because they can? Thank you, Ms. Deng, for yet another sperm libel against guys.

And a guy sliding up to you at a bus station is an “act” for which a guy should get “blame & shame”? I won’t defend some of the types of acts mentioned here, and don’t engage in any of them, but undoubtedly countless marriages have their origins in a guy sliding up to a woman in a bus station.

Women aren’t the only ones targeted in public because of their gender. Just last Sunday, I was repeatedly harassed on Ocean Drive in South Beach as a result of my gender. As I passed virtually each restaurant, one hot chick after another stuck an advertcard practically in my face and verbally tried to coerce me into eating at the restaurants they were hostessing for. The cards were stuck in my face, not my date’s face. She wasn’t approached by a single one. The hostesses probably assumed, correctly, that I was the one paying, and also probably assumed, incorrectly in this instance (my date is very bi and had just shared two other women with me the night before), that I would be more swayed by being approached by a hot chick.

I was approached and harassed before I ate, and I was approached and harassed after I ate. I even thought that next time I go down there, I am going to wear a sticker or carry a sign that says, “I already ate.”

In fact, of course, a sign that says, “I already ate” is really the same thing as a woman wearing a wedding or engagement ring – it, in effect, says, “your time and energy is better expended elsewhere.”

…

As far as what to do about guys waving at you from construction sites – why does that bother you so much, anyway?

That last question still remains unanswered.

Aposter threw one of the classic below-the-belt punches in the female verbal playbook, accusing us guys who were opposing the female’s whining as being the ones whining : “Yup, you guys [plural] keep whining about how unfair the world is to you. Meanwhile, those of us who have to experience this kind of crap almost every time we go out in a public space will continue to discuss it constructively.”

The discussion soon took an unexpected turn – the other guy then turned on me, saying I was the one whining. Meanwhile, of course, she had accused both of us of whining. First, I addressed the woman who wanted to exclude guys from the discussion.

… “constructively.” By constructively claiming that obnoxious horn honking is gender-directed, by constructively accusing [a guy who sees his future children in a woman's eyes and approaches her at a bus stop] as committing an “act” for which he deserves “blame & shame,” and by constructively implying that harassing people in public is a guy thing.

I then turned to the guy who cut and run when he was accused of whining.

… You’ve fallen for one of the favorite verbal tactics of women, which is to accuse any guy who asserts himself half as loudly as they exclaim their nonsense to be whining, and, of course, its not attractive for guy to whine.

If speaking truth to female empowerment is considered whining, I’m happy to say I’m whining my balls off – even when I’m not. You should, too, before you retreat by dumping on fellow guys after you make good points merely because some whiney woman describes your good points as whining.

Guys, we can’t be afraid to “whine” - women whine and it works for them. If we’re afraid to whine, we’ll will continue being disempowered. As you can see, its pathetically easy for some guys to back down after being accused of whining – I must admit I displayed that weakness myself in the past – but we don’t have to put up with that now.

Yes, it doesn’t look good for a guy to whine, but the girls on Backpage and Craigs don’t care as long as our money is green. That’s why we need our right to choose willing sex partners. And besides, the girls on Backpage and Craigs don’t give us much reason to whine, anyway.

We need to whine our balls off now, so we have nothing to whine about later.