stories from the Realm

Dear creepy men of the world: I do not want to be your girlfriend. When I act cold, it is not because I’m being coy. It’s because I’m not interested. I do not have to talk to you, accept your friend request, respond to the comments you leave on my blog, be nice, or listen politely to your solicitations. You are not entitled to any part of my attention. It doesn’t matter if you’re a homeless man in Washington Square Park or a fellow student. You’re creepy, and I don’t like you. Leave me alone.”

This is something I jotted down in a notebook a while back, in response to something that recurs in my life with alarming frequency: I attract creepy men. It doesn’t really matter where — on Twitter, on Facebook, in person. They are there. They often approach me first with an innocuous question, which I answer, because I generally try to be a polite person. It goes downhill from there. They ask overly personal questions (asking my opinion on abortion is NOT an appropriate way to introduce yourself; nor is asking me about my religion), try to solicit me for a date, and generally expect me to be OK with entertaining them and engaging in long drawn-out conversations, because I’m a girl in public so of course it follows that I must want to talk to EVERYONE. I’ve been approached by strange guys 4 or 5 times in the past 2 months. I’m getting really sick of it.

I’m aware that the line between friendly and overly friendly is a rather fine one. So at what point does conversation become intrusive and creepy? I can’t say exactly — often, I just get a bad vibe. A skeevy, dirty, can’t-wash-it-off-with-soap, you-make-me-uncomfortable vibe. At that point, I usually cut off contact. And that’s where it gets tricky. A lot of people would say that I’m being unnecessarily mean by ignoring people or taking steps to block them from contacting me. Sometimes, I feel strangely guilty at cutting off contact, even when it’s clear that the other person makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

I only recently realized — decided, even — that I don’t HAVE to feel guilty about ignoring someone who makes me feel weird. I have the right to a safe environment. I have the right to ignore. Is this mean? Perhaps. But I think it’s equally as mean to argue that I should continue to interact with people who make me uncomfortable just for the sake of politeness. So I’m just not going to put up with it anymore. I’m not going to accept your friend request. I am going to block you on Twitter. When you decide to sit in the chair behind me and pull strands of my hair out as I try to eat a meal with a friend, I am going to turn around and yell at you to get the fuck away from me. I don’t care about politeness. You crossed a line.

All that said, I’ve had plenty of perfectly reasonable exchanges with strangers, most of them with nice, intelligent people in the media industry, and all of those have been rather enjoyable/informative. So it’s not as though I’m a paranoid person or hate talking to strangers. I just wish those strangers weren’t guys who think I’m going to talk to them endlessly about extremely personal subjects when we don’t really know each other at all.