Also: are these men weirded out slightly that teh wimminz be uzing their toys? How can that be?

A-men.

“For many guys it’s a bonding ritual”

I definitely think this is the case and when I’ve heard it pointed out before the rejoinder tends to be “but women do that too”. Which is true, but there’s a very important difference in that I have never in my life seen a group of women feel that it was the right and proper thing for them to inform the object of their examination about their verdict. I’ve often heard men complaining that trying to stop street harassment is “demonizing male sexuality” and “trying to make it a crime to be attracted to someone”, as if male sexuality inherently includes making your attractions known to the general public. It’s like, come on, guys, we all learned as children that there’s a difference between thinking something and saying it out loud. I can only assume they’re being purposefully obtuse.

As to failures of imagination, I don’t think that it’s simply men not caring or not trying to imagine that there could be scary guys out there who are unlike themselves. I think at least a solid plurality of the guys that say “but I can’t even give a girl a compliment?!” *are* creepers. They’re not out there trying to meet their soul mate by happenstance on a street corner, they’re just blindly exercising their privilege by letting everyone on the street know whether they deem each individual woman that passes by fuckable or not. When they think she is, and have made this clear, they believe that they have given the ultimate compliment (after all, all the women that aren’t fucking them rightthisminute are just women who didn’t realize they were up to par!) and that any response other than coy delight, giving a number, or, I dunno, an instant blowjob is an indicator that, although fuckable, this particular woman is a stuck-up bitch.

Of course, if a woman reacts badly to public pronouncements that she is not up to a particular gent’s fuckability standard, she is told to toughen up, lose some weight, or “act like a lady” and ignore him.

Street harassment happens way too much for it to just be serial rapists making every other dude on Earth look bad. For many guys it’s a bonding ritual (you can’t tell me I’m the only woman to get on a train or walk past a group of guys to hear them all deciding as a group whether they’d “hit that”), for others it’s a way to pass the time, and for all but the tiniest minority it’s a harmless thing that guys do, and why are you making such a fuss, and why do bitches gotta be so SENSitive all the time? We were just fooling around!

Blergh. There goes that relaxed feeling.

That is the dynamic I think most regular guys have trouble imagining, that there are people in the world who do not want a chance to meet a nice girl on the street and get to know her, their motivation is to scare that girl so they can feel powerful. The exact same dynamic is in play with acquaintance rape, regular guys see the situation from their regular perspective without thinking that there are people in the world who go out at night looking to rape ladies and who would prefer rape to a nice consensual roll in the hay.