Woman fined for hitting man who grabbed her

[Orrex]

76. Well, if that was his instinctive reaction, you already excused it.

But otherwise I agree. If he can't control such instinctive reactions, then he needs some sort of restaint.

Of course, that assumes that he grabbed her as she alleges. Apparently there was insufficient evidence to charge him, so we have only her account of the event.

I imagine men get pissed off by unwanted sexual touching too, but I am not a man and I don't know specifically how they feel about it. I felt threatened by it when it happened to me. I don't know if men feel that way so I don't know what would be a normal response for them. When it happened to me, I felt threatened and went into "fight or flight", and as the place was crowded, "fight" won out. I can only speak for my own experience. I can't make assumptions about how someone else would feel.

I can likewise only speculate about how others would respond. When it has happened to me, I haven't felt physically threatened, but I have felt very uncomfortable. Part of that was because I simply didn't welcome the contact, but I was also instantly aware that I had to be exteremely careful in my response. Too strong a reaction would be interpreted as assault, but if my response were too weak then the contact might persist, or else my weak response might, in that context, have called my masculinity or heterosexuality into question.

Some in this thread (though not you) have suggested that men do not object to such contact or that they can shrug it off as inconsequential. In reality the situation is more complex than that.

Perhaps because I did not perceive an immediate physical threat, the "fight or flight" response wasn't part of the equation.