as small as a world and as large as alone

5:37am May 27, 2015

sevensneakyfoxes:

thewriterchick:

dealyndus:

thentheysaidburnher:

datarep:

Age that women first noticed men were looking at them sexually

by Teelo888

Girls don’t get childhood. They get girlhood.

Because I don’t want to see any comments after this reblog on how it’s perfectly normal for boys to start noticing girls when they’re all going through puberty – this graph is based on women’s responses to an /r/AskReddit thread that specifically mention grown, adult men. 

I remember doing a shift at my work experience placement in a bookstore and some grown man (he was starting to grey around the beard) came up to me while I was stocking the shelves. He was asking if I always worked in the History section and I said no, I stock all over the store (duh?) and suddenly went from zero to a hundred by asking “What time do you get off work? Can I take you for coffee?” 

The feeling was instantaneous - hot and cold at the same time. Your stomach curdles and chills while your skin heats and feels like it’s melting away. My whole face turned red and all I wanted to do was vomit.  “I am fourteen years old.”

He looked embarrassed as hell.

… And yet …

“What? No, you can’t be.”

“… BUT I AM. I AM FOURTEEN YEARS OLD.”

“Bullshit, where’s your ID?”

“SIR, the only ID she has is from her JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL.”  My (male) manager had walked up behind me (he later said he heard me say my age the first time around and came running over). “She’s a minor. She doesn’t have to show you anything. Can I help you with something? Do you need help with a purchase?”

The word ‘minor’ set this guy off and he started ranting about how I was leading him on. Another customer (probably in his 20s) overheard it all, looked at me and back at the guy, obviously determined that I was not in my twenties, sneered and went “Gross, dude” - which, yeah, but that set this creep off even more. My manager and another male employee ended up walking him out.

I will fucking love that manager until the end of days for stepping in like that - but unfortunately nothing will take away that cold, gut wrenching feeling a young girl gets hit on by a man twice her age.

I was fourteen, in the Bahamas on vacation, and a full-grown man tried to lure me away from the table where I was waiting for my mother who was in the washroom.  I was timid and shy and had absolutely no idea what his motives were, but in retrospect, best case scenario, he wanted me to have sex with him.  Don’t want to think about the worst case scenario.  I looked mature for my age, but he ASKED ME MY AGE AND I TOLD HIM AND HE CONTINUED TO PURSUE IT.

Thank the fucking lord my mother returned a minute later and had a fucking meltdown when she saw what was going on.  

If men want to complain about how they’re always seen as predators, this  graph is  a good fucking example of why most women do.  I guarantee you that most women have one or two stories like this.

When I was on vacation at the beach with my mother, probably seven or eight years old, a man came around and apparently wanted to photograph me.  My mom told me I did the right thing by “totally ignoring him”.  The reality was (due to autistic sensory processing issues – meaning-deafness and meaning-blindness) I never saw him and never heard him talking to me, so “ignoring” him came naturally.  My mom saw and heard the whole thing though.  I wasn’t sure what the big deal was because I didn’t understand his intentions even after my mother was upset.

The first time I was totally aware of a grown man approaching me sexually was age eleven when my grandfather was more than explicit about his intentions towards me.  (I would have probably remained clueless if he’d just groped me, but he groped me and talked to me about how he loved touching “little girls” like that because it made him feel good.)  I didn’t understand the word “molest” at that age, though – that much I remember because someone used it in front of me at an older age, I asked what they meant, and they treated me like I was kidding because nobody could be that old and not know the word “molest”.  (I also got a high IQ score at the age of 5 without knowing the meaning of the word “test”, so… long history there.)

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