A question about the legality of personal space

[Ms. Toad]

204. I didn't say they would take it in stride

What I am saying is that it is not the level of personal space invasion that rises to the level of expecting sympathy and outrage. You seriously need to read through the #MeToo threads on twitter, talk to - no listen to - women. Part of your problem in this thread is that you aren't listening - you're batting back at women who are telling you that what you experienced is merely the background noise we live with on a daily basis.

I'm not surprised that you are only aware of a "few times" when it happened to women you know.

First, women don't report - to anyone - as a general rule. Why bother - it doesn't' change anything. The #MeToo movement is the first time in my 60+ years of living that there has been a vehicle for women to share their experiences in a way that did not automatically trigger knee jerk defensive responses (from men) and self-protective responses (from women - counter-intuitively some of the most challenging doctors I dealt with in the ER as a rape crisis advocate were women, who - for psychological reasons - needed to find a way to believe that they couldn't be raped because they would never act as this particular rape survivor had). In the early days of the #MeToo movement, for the first time, men heard from women in a way they were actually able to hear, the every day experience of women.

Second - from your reactions in this thread, you would not be someone I would share stories of inappropriate conduct with. You are extremely dismissive of women who are trying to tell you that this is what we experience all the time. Women tend to be pretty perceptive about who will be supportive - and who won't, and avoid sharing with people who will make surviving harder. So it doesn't surprise me to know that your female friends have not confided in you in any significant number.

As for whether you believe me - let me suggest that implying I'm a liar is entirely consistent with you not knowing many women this has happened to. Your friends are probably not interested in having it implied that they are liars.

It happens too frequently for me to remember each incident distinctly and, as I said, if I worked myself up to the level of agitation you have, I'd have been dead of a heart attack - probably before I was out of my teens.

I have been sexually assaulted in ways that are distinct enough that remember (with less than a minute's thought) a dozen times - including rape, twice. If I took time going through my memory banks, I'm sure there are even more.

The last time I had an experience similar to yours was December. During December I can also distinctly remember 5 incidents of inappropriate familiarity that included not only invasion of space, but also physical touching. It would be extremely rare for me to distinctly remember an invasion of space that did not also involve physical touching even in the month after it happened, because I don't have space in my memory to track all of that.

I can only distinctly remember the December events because that was that was the last full month and I have an easy frame of reference. But, rest assured, December was not out-of-the-ordinary.