Comment by csande17

Comment by csande17 4 days ago

It's pretty standard for middle schools to hold assemblies discussing sexual harassment and healthy relationships, but they don't always do a great job communicating those concepts.

Back when I was in middle school about a decade ago, the principal got up on stage with a police officer and explained that sexual harassment is when you talk to a girl and she feels uncomfortable. He then went on to assert that the school had zero tolerance for sexual harassment, describe various authorities to whom victims could report instances of sexual harassment, and implore students not to risk their future by engaging in sexual harassment.

If you weren't super confident in your ability to predict or control other people's feelings, probably your takeaway from that assembly was that talking to girls was a risky thing to do.

squigz 4 days ago

"Don't make people uncomfortable" and your takeaway is you shouldn't talk to them at all. I don't think the problem there lies with the sexual harassment narrative.

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PaulHoule 4 days ago

Many young people are vulnerable.
I was bullied in elementary school and graduated the same way Ender Wiggin did.
I was out two years and skipped three, started in the middle of freshman year.
I had no idea how I was going to find a mate. The world my parents grew up in, where my mom was introduced to my dad by his sister, was long gone. I knew I couldn't trust anything I saw on TV or in the movies. Adults, including my parents, were completely dismissive of my concerns. Might have made a difference if I had a sister, but she was born premature and I never saw her before she died.
I sat next to a beautiful girl in English who left me feeling entirely outclassed. [1] I came home crying from school about this every day for most of a year until I met the new physics teacher who let me hang out in the lab during study breaks, which gave me some meaning in my life and led me to get a PhD in the field. I still was afraid I'd wind up alone forever and went to a "tech" school which had an unfavorable gender ratio; I did find a girlfriend in my senior year, then was lonely and miserable in grad school. I found someone who was a friend of a friend and I've been involved in a love triangle ever since which he lost out in. My partner is a 100% reliable person from the same culturally Catholic background of myself (my parents did not involved me with the Church, she did all the things and has a positive orientation towards religion but doesn't take communion because she doesn't believe it literally.)
Boys today don't have it any easier. My immediate reaction is to be sympathetic towards "incels" but as an organized group they teach boys self-loathing which is primary to the 50% attraction-50% hate that they express towards women (hmmm... something a lot of people who are more or less healthy feel towards their parents because the conflicts that come out of being dependent on people)
[1] She was traumatized by her parents going through a nasty divorce. She teaches the Quechua language in Hawaii now. There's a photo of her next to a huge dog, no sign of any human relations. I probably did better at love than she did in the end.

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csande17 4 days ago

Of course, a lot of activities carry risk; doesn't mean teenagers will completely abstain from them.
The missing piece here might be that, as a teenager, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that the main way girls will reject you is by expressing that they're uncomfortable. (I believe this is called "getting the ick" in modern slang; the old movies your parents like call it "get lost, creep".) So if you're afraid of rejection, it's plausible that you'd be afraid of the legal consequences of making someone uncomfortable more than the personal embarrassment or emotional pain of the actual rejection.

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