“I feel HARASSED/THREATENED by gays”
It goes without saying that like straights, gays obviously come in all shapes, sizes and flavours. Perhaps somewhat true to the stereotype though, gay males do have a widespread reputation for not being as violent or aggressive in comparison to their straight counterparts. We’ve heard and read a good few times how landlords, taxi drivers and other professionals working in the service industry positively view having gay clientele. They consider that generally there is not the same problems involved as having a group of Neanderthal men drinking more beer than they can handle and itching for a fight or a good bout of vandalism (though some would still prefer the cavemen to the perverts, as this case show).
Violence:-
Gays In, Stags Out
http://www.krakowpost.com/article/1147
“…unlike the swarms of British and Irish stag parties arriving on cheap flights, gay tourists are better behaved and more likely to enjoy the cultural aspects of the city. Rather than scaring away customers with heavy drinking, gays are more likely to spend their holiday visiting museums and galleries, having a few drinks in a modern nightclub, sitting down for meals in nice restaurants and staying in upscale hotels.”
Krakow caught between pink pound and boozy Brits
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/17/poland.poland
“Club, pub and hotel owners are all for extending a special welcome to gay tourists. ‘Jesus, yes!’ said Thomas Naughton, owner of Irish bar Nic Nowego (Nothing New). ‘Gay tourists behave a lot better – and they have more money. We were the first place in Krakow to put up signs saying “No Stag nights”.’ With its cobbled streets and baroque architecture, Krakow is one of Europe’s cultural jewels which receives nine million tourists annually. In the euphoria of EU entry in 2004, Krakow welcomed boozy Brits arriving on cheap flights, but recent years have seen rising resentment against stag-night boozers who blight the cultural capital.
‘They like to come in wearing suspenders and shout their songs in their own language all across the bar,’ said barmaid Kasia Krol, at Nic Nowego. ‘They hassle waitresses about sex and brothels. One stripped off in front of all the other guests. They’ve started drinking out of their shoes, which they think is really funny. They drop ash and spill beer and vomit, and then they go off to brothels.’ Nightclub owners complain they have had to fork out on extra security to cope with drunken brawls that often break out between stag groups. And Krakow’s taxi drivers are fed up. ‘They pack themselves into the car, vomit out of the windows, and run off without paying,’ said one driver, named Tomasz. Even so, members of the Catholic right insist that they have no wish to see gay tourists instead.”
Consider the following alternatives: If you are running a business like a pub or hotel or coffee shop, with decent furniture and breakable window panes, and don’t necessarily have a first-class insurance for your property, who would you rather have for clients one Saturday afternoon: A group of tipsy middle-aged gays in town for another Liza Minnelli pre-retirement tour, or a group of similarly ‘tipsy’ Arsenal supporters in town and looking for bovver? There is of course no reason why the gays shouldn’t go wild after singing along to “Maybe This Time” and want to wreck the place afterwards, but this isn’t the reputation that they have generated throughout the years.
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Harassment:-
We’ve heard the following kind of story from many a straight girl (and would like any straight women to give their comments about this if they feel this is unfair or untrue): “If you go out to a pub or night-club on your own or with a female friend and are standing at the bar, it won’t be long before some man comes up and is trying to chat you up. Impossible to imagine that you’ve just gone out to have a drink, nothing else. Obviously you’re trying to pick someone up. Plenty have problems understanding the two-letter word “NO” and this can lead to harassment or even unwanted physical touching if it’s late and he’s a bit drunk. Either way, you’re always strange and out-of-place in that situation, although it’s perfectly normal and acceptable for a man. ”
Browsing around the internet, 2.5 million websites seem to be indicating this same recurring mentality too.
http://www.google.es/#q=woman+alone+bar&hl=es&rlz=1R2GGLL_esES369&ei=Acg7TIuNNoeuOPbyqYoK&start=0&sa=N&fp=6ed4e0d2f782348e
In Japan, there are even in the meantime underground train carriages reserved exclusively for women, following so many complaints from women about getting groped and touched up in the rush hour.
All-women trains are only way to defeat Tokyo bottom pinchers
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article394630.ece
“A year-long national campaign against bottom-pinching in Japan has failed, with nearly two thirds of young women saying that they have been groped on trains or at railway stations. Most say that there should be separate commuter trains for women.
Efforts by police and the courts appear to have had little effect on the activities of Japan’s increasingly devious sukebe, or perverts. A survey conducted by the Tokyo metropolitan government and JR East, the country’s largest railway operator, indicated that 64 per cent of women in their twenties and thirties had been molested on public transport. Most respondents said that they had been groped several times within the past 12 months.
For decades the crime has been the persistent scourge of Japan’s notoriously crowded commuter trains. At stations across the country, rush hour produces a twice-daily crush that makes it nearly impossible for victims to identify their molester. The problem is far worse in the evenings, when alcohol turns many salarymen into amateur sukebe for the duration of their journey home. Blameless male passengers make a practice of holding books and magazines with both hands to show their innocence in case anything happens near them.”
So, if straight men need so little provocation to hassle women, why are they so paranoid about it possibly happening to them too? Are they that frightened? And is it that likely anyhow?
Naturally, there is male-on-male sexual harassment too, which this website does not wish to ignore or sweep under the carpet.
Here some statistics on the subject concerning sexual harassment in the workplace in the US:
http://www.sexualharassmentsupport.org/SHworkplace.html
http://www.sexualharassmentlawfirms.com/Sexual-Harassment-statistics.cfm
Percentage of female workers who claimed to have been harassed at work: 31 %
Percentage of male workers who claimed to have been harassed at work: 7 %
Percentage of these women who claimed they were harassed by a man: 100 % (= 31 % total women)
Percentage of these women who claimed they were harassed by another woman: 0 % (= 0 % total women)
Percentage of these men who claimed they were harassed by a woman: 59 % (= 4 % total men)
Percentage of these men who claimed they were harassed by another man: 41 % (= 3 % total men)
Obviously, no form of harassment is to be in any way condoned.
However, we do think it’s only right to put things into perspective and point out how sexual harrassment is most certainly not a gay issue. The most frequent form it takes is men on women.
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What to do if you’re a straight man who is worried about gay men chatting you up:-
Firstly, don’t panic or jump to hasty conclusions – straight men should bear in mind that gays are not automatically attracted to all males around them. There are plenty of good-looking, well-built fish in the sea so unless you really are more the drop-dead gorgeous type, the chances are you are not necessarily going to attract that much interest from the gay crowd anyway (or perhaps even any at all). It wouldn’t be the first time that one hears an overweight, hetero fugly going on about how no poofter is going to touch him up and get away with it, blissfully unaware that no poofter would touch him with the proverbial bargepole. A recent example occurred when British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, when questioned about the issue of gay rights, replied, “I demand the right not to be bummed.” Clarkson is certainly no oil painting and may rest assured that his wish will almost certainly be respected. Perhaps a more astute comment might have been more coming in that moment when he opened his (large) mouth:
Are you really that irresistible? Do you have lots of women contacting you in the hope of a romantic adventure? If the answer is no, that could be a good start.
If however, you are a relatively nice-looking straight man who is out on the town with friends one night and they suggest going for a dance and a drink to a gay bar, before you break out in a sweat of pure fear, just bear the following in mind. Should you get chatted up at the bar by some gay man (who is naturally assuming you are too – we don’t have stickers on our forehead), simply do what any average attractive straight girl has to do a few dozen times a month. Simply say or indicate, “No thanks, not interested”. Politely but firmly will suffice. It’s really not that difficult BUT if you are unsure about how it’s done properly, phone up any straight girl you know and ask her advise.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, we should also add the following: It is quite possible that a gay man will talk to you without any ulterior, sexual motives. Have you never talked to a woman for purely social purposes (perhaps discussing the weather, when the next bus is coming, what she thinks about this or that)? Wouldn’t you get a bit pissed off if every woman you came near moved away out of fear that you’re ‘trying it on’ when you’re just being polite or sociable?
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Although not a common occurrence, there is nonetheless a deep-lying fear among some men about male sexual harassment and even rape. The use of this in a court of law is the so-called “gay panic defence”. An introductory wikipedia article on this legal phenomena can be found here and includes a few cases where it has been used by the defence in murder cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense
To quote the article: “In the gay panic defence, the defendant claims that he or she has been the object of romantic or sexual advances by the victim. The defendant finds the advances so offensive and frightening that it brings on a psychotic state characterized by unusual violence.”
Although there is no doubt that there are violent gay men just as there are violent straight men, and that as shown above men are indeed occasionally sexually harassed or threatened by other men, it also seems pretty certain that this scenario is often used in legal situations as a simple crutch for an otherwise weak defence case. It doesn’t matter whether it’s implausible or untrue, it is often considered worth a try to deflect the blame from oneself and on to the shadowy, sinister world of the gay man. Fortunately, this notion of ‘sudden, temporary insanity’ has been thrown out of numerous legal cases. (see *Appendix for an example).
NB: It should be made clear that we have referred here in this article (and in the entirety of this website) to openly or self-identifying gay men. It is important, especially in the framework of this particular discussion, to distinguish between openly gay or bisexual men on the one side, and on the other side basically heterosexual men who engage in (often sporadic) homosexual activity without considering themselves to be bisexual as such. Common scenarios for this kind of homosexual behaviour include prisons, ships and other long-term, all-male environments. Also male prostitution out of financial necessity. Hence the umbrella terms MSM (“men who have sex with men”), which refers to all men who have experienced a homosexual experience, in some/many cases without any identification of being gay.
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* Appendix:
One such case of the “gay panic defence” is detailed in Z1 – First Addendum at the end of this website. It concerns the murder in July 2006 of two young gay men in Galicia, in the north of Spain. The story goes like this: The defendant went drinking one day at a bar and was eventually picked up and taken back home by one of the victims to where he lived with his boyfriend. There were a few visits by other friends and drugs were consumed until the defendant decided to stay the night at the flat with the two men. He claimed that one of these men threatened him in the night with a knife and insisted on sex with him. We only have the defendant’s word for this of course, as the two gay men were killed and have nothing to say in their own defence. Out of panic and wishing to defend himself, the defendant first of all killed one of the gay men, and then bumping into the second gay man in the corridor, proceeded to kill him too. It might sound like an unfortunately dramatic and exaggerated defence, if it were not for the number of times the defendant stabbed the two men in order to simply get out of the flat as quickly as possible. A total of around sixty stab marks were established. If you are in any doubt as to whether the defendant was or was not guilty of murder, you can try an experiment of your own to test the veracity of his statement. Take a sharp knife and an old pillow or cushion that’s ready to be thrown out. Stab the pillow thirty times on the one side (that’s the first victim), and another thirty times on the other side (that’s the second victim). Was that necessary to simply “defend” yourself? Bearing in mind that you are effectively stabbing into human flesh, the sensation here will be more one of being in the mind of a crazed psychopath with a deeply rooted hatred. To provide additional information in this particular case: After stabbing the men to death, the defendant went on to a) drag the corpses into one of the bedrooms and set fire to them, b) search for and steal a case of valuables and take it with him. To add insult to injury and much to the outrage of the rest of Spain, he was eventually acquitted of murder by the jury of twelve. For the full story, see Z1 – First Addendum.
HoywOk 