Creepy Guy Tugs One Out to Feminist on City Bus

There’s two places you have no right to complain about the milieu. Public transportation and Vegas. 

Anybody who’s ridden the city bus knows there’s a strong chance on any given leg of your journey that at least one man will be holding a mason jar containing his own urine. And he’s the least creepy passenger. There are quaint little cities in fake charming tiny European countries where gas is so heavily taxed and parking so sparing that even moderately well-dressed attractive people ride the bus. It’s the exception. London, New York, Los Angeles, you’re getting urine guy.

Fashion magazines and websites like Refinery29 which have begun taking large investors on like Turner Broadcasting are convinced that feminist activism must be a part of their offering to attract young women readers. If there’s two things young women are defined by in today’s culture, it’s gender empowerment and amazing eye brow treatments from Revlon. Cosmo, Elle, Vogue, Refinery29, have all started adding heavy doses of outrageous female victimization stories with a sweet “we shall overcome” windup. None of these stories are the least bit vetted, investigated, or challenged. So, perfect for this audience.

Nathalie Gordon, who has dedicated herself to hashtags promoting diversity and a cessation of the rape culture, posted a long series of Tweets about being sexually harassed by a weird fucker on a city bus. She anticipated something horrible was about to happen when he asked her to remove her earbuds so he could ask her an innocuous bus schedule question. First mistake. Never remove the earbuds before pointing to them at least seven times and pantomiming the fact you can’t hear a thing. If it goes past seven, scream shrilly and defenestrate to the passing pavement.

Let me tell you a story about why men will never understand what it’s like to be female. I was just on the bus on my way to a meeting. A man taps on my knee. I’m listening to music so take my ear phones out. He asks me where the bus is going. I tell him what the next station is. He asks me where I’m going. I’m polite and tell him I’m going to a meeting. He then asks if I want to go for a drink. In that moment I instantly became worried. Again I am polite and say ‘no thank you’. I go to put my earphones back in. He pulls them from my hand and says ‘don’t be rude’. I say ‘Sorry’. I don’t know what to do, I don’t want to provoke him. I look out the window but out the corner of my eye I see he is staring at me and has started to rub his crotch. I’m horrified and turn to ask him to stop doing it. He laughs at me. I get up and go to the bus driver. I tell him that a man is rubbing himself on the bus. The driver, a man, says ‘he probably isn’t- sit somewhere else’. I say ‘the man just asked me for a drink and when I said no started to rub himself’. The driver says, ‘what do you expect me to do?’ I say ‘remove him from the bus, call the police- I don’t care’. The driver then says to me, ‘you’re a pretty girl, what do you expect?’ You know what I expect, fucking respect for women no matter who they are or what they look like or what they’re wearing. What I expect is to live in a world where it doesn’t matter what I look like- when I fucking say no, I fucking mean no. What I expect is to stop feeling so alone and scared. No man will know what this feels like which is why so many will choose not to care.

Gordon claims she’s received an outpouring of support from both men and women since sharing the story. Who knows if that fact or even the underlying story is true. Though any given city bus ride contains at least one guy Sling Blade moaning and rubbing one out. Somebody’s got to draw the short straw in seating arrangements. Imagine that man-spreading. 

The unchallenged premise isn’t that weird mofos ride the bus and bus drivers are sick to shit about having to deal with it thrice an hour, it’s the fact that men are never put in awkward or scary situations. Men are far less likely to be victims of opportunistic and indecent assaults. If that’s your universe of life’s situations, you have every right to complain. But if you’re willing to concede the existence of such minor contrivances as ten thousand years of wars and lives of labor and providing for families and heart attacks at forty-five, you begin to see perhaps a more balanced this-gender-sucks scale. 

What sane man is suggesting it’s cool for a dude with bug eyes to masturbate on public transportation? None. Who are you fighting? Men don’t need to know what it feels like to have a creep using them as spank bank material on a city bus to know it’s disgusting. It’s always other men who step in and tell the troll to quit it or take a fist to the face. Advancing the notion that men could give a crap if women are sexually harassed or assaulted because they don’t know what it feels like is idiotic and without support. You’re now the guy that screams out all women are gold diggers after being fucked over by a scheming woman he dated. You’re argumentatively retarded.

It’s odd and entirely unfortunate that activism has come to mean lazy generalizations and convenient logic. Unfounded anecdotes are not the same as research. Nevertheless, we live in a world where hype trumps science. Expect Nathalie Gordon to receive ten thousand likes and one single person asking an obvious followup question or two as to her tale. That person will be labeled a hater and shouted down. Society hasn’t become dumber, it’s merely agreed to collectively act dumber to avoid being called names.

_{Photo credit: Natalie Gordon/Twitter}