User Comments - SF_Rachel

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Pretz, I'm guessing that given your indefatigable speculations regarding how to quantify what's really going on about questions you're curious about, your bosses either love you or hate you for it. Assuming, of course, silly me, that you are not the CEO of your own company.

I do like your idea of measuring the degree to which different lessons bring lurkers out of the woodwork. :-)

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

没关系朋友。I wasn't addressing your open question of what what actually happening in the dialogue, but was more addressing some comments from others that I perceived as suggesting that WeiWei and company didn't have the right to object to being aggressively ogled (if they are being leered at -- a supposition I'm happy to concede as unproven) if they were looking at any men.

Anyway, I probably overstepped my brief -- being a little 敏感关于性骚扰的问题 and maybe inappropriately feeling a little obligated to appoint myself spokeperson for the entire sisterhood. It just so happens that this summer there's been a lot of extra rumpus on the Internets about the tolerance (and subsequent persistence) of sexual harassment even in progressive communities because people don't always recognize it, and a call for more women to speak up to try to educate. Which I've taken too much to heart.

I need to swear off ranting for a little while, no doubt.

Posted on: A Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Because I'm a dork, at the part of the dialogue where YouYou is trying to trick her way past the front door (here to pick up some things, indeed!), I was kind of hoping the dialogue would go for "你是那条聪明的鲨鱼，不是吗？" Candygram!

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Grambers – of course you can call me Rachel, I certainly prefer it to “Ms.” Respectfully though, I find a lot of what you say genuinely troubling. In my defense of WeiWei, I tried to take pains to make a distinction between a woman's reaction to looking versus leering, but maybe I wasn’t as clear about this as I intended.

A woman (or a man) may welcome being looked at and appreciated but not wish to be ogled. When I was in my teens and 20s, being looked at or "checked out" made me feel good about myself, and I’ve checked out a guy once or twice, because you’re right, we all look. But being ogled made me feel icky: bad about myself, bad about men, and sometimes scared. It’s less about *which* guys are invited to look (vis-à-vis wig-wearers and Jay Chow) than about *under what conditions* the gaze is okay.

As opposed to mere “looking,” ogling expresses and/or exploits an unequal power relationship between the viewer and viewed. I’ll totally concede that in real life, as in the dialogue, the line between the two can be subjective, but in the abstract there is a meaningful difference: it comes down to whether the object is powerless or is made to feel powerless to withdraw from the gaze. This may occur when a persistent gaze presents as aggression (the object is physically unable to withdraw, or an attempt to escape is met with pursuit or significantly restricts the object's quality of life). Another variation (not occurring in the dialog, and having different effects on the victim that I need not address here) is when looking is 偷偷看的 or 偷拍 -- the viewer not only views the object without their knowledge but specifically gains pleasure from the very knowledge that the object is unaware and powerless.

A woman may feel like an obvious ogler’s persistence in the face of even a small symbolic attempt to withdraw is frightening. It even suggests that the looker is an entitled misogynist who doesn’t believe that any woman has a legitimate right to withdraw – or has ceded her right to withdraw by putting on makeup and a pretty frock – and will aggressively violate any attempts to do so.

Whew. Here endeth the rant. Thanks for staying with me.

May I respectfully suggest that this is a website for learning Chinese? Perhaps we can agree to disagree and not subject anyone to a boring and uncomfortable discussion of sexual power politics and feminist theory? I certainly don't relish being in a situation where being the sole representative of a female point of view helps me earn the dreaded "Ms. humorless feminist" label, especially since I doubt I'm changing any minds.

It's also possible that we're both bringing some baggage to the conversation that's not helpful to anyone. I’ll hastily cop to having my own very strong personal feelings and experiences re: sexual harassment that color this whole discussion.

Shall we electronically shake hands and move on? I wouldn’t want to distract anyone from eviscerating the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” in this week’s new UI lesson.

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Baba - Since it seems it probably boils down to our different perceptions about what actually happened in the dialog – I believe the story centers on a genuine creeper who did not know WeiWei, you believe the story centers on a sincere man and WeiWei is playing a pretty awful game – then I'm sure we can agree to disagree in all cordiality. As you say, it's pretty subjective.

And after all, it is fiction and not an actual situation we’re trying to untangle. It’s like disagreeing about whether the protagonist in Inception was actually dreaming all along, or what happened to Tony Soprano after the screen goes dark. It's fiction -- there is no truth! All possibilities are equally true and all possibilities are equally fictional. We can call it our “The Lady or the Tiger” dialogue (alternatively, “Schoedinger’s Creeper”).

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

"...but you went on to bring up a very good practical point"

我们妇女都是务实的，特别是关于丈夫。这并不意味着我们不爱他们。男人们都可能实际比较敏感的，浪漫的，等等。

Put more cynically (the party line of the more humorless strains of feminism I'm afraid), is that romance is actually a sneaky trick of the patriarchy to oppress us. Boo, patriarchy! Boo, oppression!

I kid, I kid: please do not aim flamethrowers in my direction!

It's now very late at night local time, so now exiting Spunkytown, population 1.

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

没问题。 我觉得大家明白你是好心的，没有坏感觉。

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Ugh, so sorry about that. Afraid to post now. Being careful -- I see "Replying to RJ" right above this input box. If this one doesn't fly straight I'll have to assume my laptop is possessed by thread-fraying demons.

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Got it, thanks. I'm well aware how easy it is to hit the wrong "reply" button in these threads -- and yet I keep doing it. Why hath my threadgods forsaken me?

That being said, I can't even see how that happened in this case! familypast commented in a different conversation (the one about Pimsleur creepiness), which I also replied to with a different comment; I don't think she commented in this conversation (about the expansion sentence), and yet my comment here shows up threaded in the right conversation but "addressed" to familypast. WHAT IS THIS WITCHCRAFT?

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Sorry familypast, I pushed the wrong "reply" button (sigh ... I do it ALL the time) so my reply to you from a few minutes ago may not show up in your stream.