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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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OP: "Sometimes I feel paranoid that I might accidentally look in a way that makes someone feel sexually harassed."

You: "So if someone expresses that their constant impulses toward free-floating sexual opportunism with random women are troublesome and uncomfortable to them"

Way to miss the point. The problem isn't men's impulses, it's women being empowered to interpret men's behavior as explicitly sexual even if he doesn't view nor intend it as sexual and use that interpretation to exert power over him via creep shaming or other social bullying. The more we crack down on "creepy" behavior in men, the more we incentivize women to interpret even more innocuous behaviors as creepy in order to abuse that power. Cracking down on sexy dress (EDIT: by saying she "deserves" to be leered at and thus can't exert social power over men if she dresses that way) is one way to dis-incentivize such abuse.

I think I was responding to this bit:

But when you see a woman wearing a super cut low tank top with a pushup bra and high-heeled pumps, and the absolute tightest pants she could possibly wriggle into... cmon. That's sexy. [...] It's more like a mild discomfort. It's just a feeling that never, ever goes away when you're surrounded by women like that at work and in daily life, constantly,

I'm not seeing the concern in the passage above that one's strictly chaste, "accidental" and "innocuous" glances toward women might be misinterpreted as sexual; it seems more about someone who is annoyed that they get a constant arousal response, to an "uncomfortable" extent, from any visuals that show the shape of a woman's body? Thus, the opening of this conversation was about whether it's fair to complain about constantly getting aroused around boobs, while also deliberately entraining that exact response pattern, and keeping oneself in a state of artificial sexual hyper-sensitivity, through regular masturbation to porn.

If it's pivoting instead to a conversation about how women overestimate the perviness of the male gaze, then I don't see how clothing is relevant one way or the other. Men can look at women lustfully no matter what they're wearing, so presumably a woman could also level a wrongful accusation of ogling regardless of her dress.