By @BginKC
Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
That really just happened. I’m having a hard time processing it, but it did. It happened.
By now you have all seen the video of the woman walking around Manhattan and getting whistled-at, harassed and just in-general bothered by jackasses on the street who don’t know how to act. Those of us of the female persuasion don’t have a hard time believing it’s true, because we gird for battle every time we leave the house. We have mace and a flashlight in our purse, and the smoke detector at home might run a month or two longer than recommended between battery changes, but that purse flashlight? Those batteries are fresh as a daisy. We all get harassed verbally, and one-in-three will be sexually assaulted is a scary fucking number. We all know someone or it has happened to us. We also know that one-in-three means that more than one of those creeps who is challenging her space is probably an attacker in waiting.
We know that a PR firm mic’d up the young woman and sent her out there to collect data for them. We also know that the right-wing noise machine got really, really huffy about the effort, and have been trying to discredit it ever since. The latest effort is an accusation that the men were all actors, the harassment scripted and fake and, a Facebook acquaintance proclaimed, he knows scripted and fake, and this was scripted and fake. I countered that I’m a woman, and even though I will be 52 in just a few weeks, it still happens to me; I know creepy and unwanted and what I saw was creepy and unwanted…but I shared links to legitimate criticisms, like the white guys being edited out and that the criticism was coming from the idiots at Fox, and said that, for me, until Snopes verified the charges, I wouldn’t believe them.
He countered by first congratulating me that my looks have held up well enough that I still get catcalls at 52. Seriously.
Then, without missing a beat, he maintained that “Snopes is not infallible.” Then he followed that with an urgent comment that “they” were on CNN “right now” and repeated the admonition that “It was all scripted and fake! I knew it!”
I asked a simple question, because I don’t have cable…notice I let the obviously sexist comment go that he made, from the outset…I asked something else, trying to keep from starting a whole big thing and bringing the conversation back around to a place where reason might reign…was the PR firm confessing, or was it being accused?
And that’s when it all went to hell, boys.
Well they were being accused, but that didn’t mean anything, and by the way, don’t argue with me on my own wall kitten.
Then he “unfriended” and “blocked” me.
Now, this isn’t someone I “know” know, like I know the other bloggers here or the other Democrats in Jackson County. He lives in another state and I know him only on Facebook, and what I already knew of him there, he was not someone I was likely to seek out for a dinner companion if I had 24 hours to kill in his town. When I accepted his friend request a second time, I bought the excuse that Facebook had closed his account and he was restoring his friends list. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think I said something, he took exception to it and, lacking the balls to have a civilized debate just “unfriended” me. After a sufficient cooling off time, he sent me another friend request and none-the-wiser, I accepted it.
That won’t happen again. I mean, for starters, I could never be friends with anyone who would congratulate me for my looks holding up well enough that I get catcalled at 52, then puts the cherry on that sundae of sexist stupidity by calling me “kitten.”
On a thread about how he knows the video is fake because men just don’t act like that.
What the fuck ever.
I think he just showed us all they sure as hell do.
