The other day I went out to dinner with three female friends. After we ate, we were in the car about to leave as a group of around 15 guys walked past us. One of them thought it was perfectly appropriate to come up and physically open the driver’s door of our car to inquire if we wanted to accompany them to a bar.
This creeper wasn't drunk—I asked and he said "not yet"—so I can't blame alcohol on this transgression. Once he learned none of us were 21 he retreated back to his pack, and we were free to drive away.
I realize he was probably spurred on by the energy of his 14 friends in order to get some vestige of his masculinity validated, but it was also because he believed he was entitled to break normally imposed social barriers in order to ask us out. In fact, he probably thought we would be flattered (nope).
This example may be a little extreme, but I believe it's symbolic of a lot of female-male interactions and the power dynamics involved. It's perfectly fine for men to break social standards for the sake of evaluating or even "courting" women, and we shrug it off with a kind of "boys will be boys" mentality.
Which brings me to my main point: There's definitely a double standard in the social space that women and men are allowed to occupy. In movies, for example, guys can be obsessive or have stalker tendencies and still be adorable. Edward Cullen watched Bella sleep, and we're supposed to think this type of weird hyper-chivalry is romantic. Meanwhile, when women are obsessive, they usually have some sort of mental illness, like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”
And if you needed more proof of double standards in social space, it seems to be routine for prominent male commentators to make extremely sexist remarks on Fox News, as seen in this recent cringe-worthy compilation.
The moral of the story is that gender doesn't confer a special status by which it's okay to act in a harmful way. Sexist statements are not cool, and neither is infringing on personal space. So let's stop accepting this behavior by speaking out and standing up.
