My friend Charlotte is a badass. A dickhead was a shit to her today, and she made a video about it that inspired me to draw another stupid comic:
I want to talk to the men for a minute, okay? Listen to me, men: women are constantly harassed by men. I think it was Scalzi who said that not all men are menaces, but all women have been menaced by men. We have a responsibility as decent people to teach our sons that harassing and menacing women is never okay. We have a responsibility as decent people to hold our friends and families and, yes, strangers, accountable when they harass or menace women.
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high five
Even more high fives.
Totally Agree!
Wil your absolutly Right and we have a Duty and as Picard said the First Duty of every starfleet Officer is to the Truth.
Wil, since I don’t know if I can even post a photo here, I direct you to this Imgur page: https://imgur.com/gallery/hUVpd
Highest of fives to you, Wil
Total high 5, Wil – we wouldn’t have the issues we have now if fathers would just teach their sons to not be dicks.
That is those who bother to be father’s to said sons.
Absoluty brilliant. Thank you.
And women need to step up too: stop breeding with assholes. Harassment won’t go away because it is too often successful.
Lee Daniel Crocker:
Did you just blame women for the fact that there are men who behave like assholes? Seriously???
Dude, YOU are part of the problem.
So, you’re saying that being an a-hole is genetic, and that men aren’t responsible for their actions? I mean, if only their moms had chosen better mates, right?
No.
Where is the world did you get that from? All Wil is trying to say is we (adult males) have a responsibility to ensure that we raise our sons to treat women the way they should be treated.
Hopefully I’m not feeding a troll.
She’s not replying to Wil. Comments are threaded.
Fun fact: you’re a shitty philosopher. And also just shitty.
Hence wonderful hashtags like #AllMenCan – keep up the good work, guys.
You’re one smart person thanks for letting people understand why women can get bitchy we get everywhere I even had a boss that would stare at your boobs I even had to use my hand and tell him my eyes were up here.
Ha! So true…highest of double high fives!
Boys, do your homework…
is it life imitating art, or the other way around? either way is that what we want kids to see? who is responsible for the continuing portrayal of women in these roles, the media producers, or consumers?
Just like the Sith there will always be Douchnozzles who want to start some shit and make people feel terrible all the time. It’s up to us to Jedi Up and keep that from happening even if it’s happening to a complete stranger.
Best of luck on your campaign to rid the world of dicks, Wil Wheaton. There’s a reason I list my occupation as ‘hermit’ when I file taxes… how you handle being a celebrity in this society, I cannot fathom.
Oh, and keep making the comics. They’s adorable!
Any man who hassles women isnt a man at all, he’s just a grub. They are a disgrace to our gender.
can you explain why? y’know… for us unmarried guys
1) That comic. YES.
2) That video. I’m sorry it had to be made, because UGH, but it made my day. THAT is the sass that I aspire to. You’re a fucking BAMF, Charlotte. Thank you.
I am sass and SO CAN YOU!
This is why Wheaton’s Law shouldn’t just be about gaming but practiced in all aspects of life…. Don’t be a dick!
A woman is not a “person with boobies”. A woman is a person.
Thank You!
It’s so very sad that one of the things I’m looking forward to about getting older is less harassment. I’ve had horrible things yelled at me when I’m just trying to go about my day. It shouldn’t be this way. So many people are terrible. Thank you for being a good one.
A, I totally agree! At middle age now, I like being able to be invisible to those types of men, I dress to be even more invisible to them (always have), and it totally rocks to be able to walk about un-harrassed. There are other ways men habitually hassle or dominate women and I’m not safe from those and won’t be till I die but at least I get to be invisible as I go about my day.
Was there ever a woman in the history of women that responded positively to that hand gesture? If so, girl, we need to talk.
unfortunately, yes. My best friend in college forgot about everything once a random dude complimented her ass. He was stealing 3 sherries meals at the time. Wtf?
Speaking as a woman who is well endowed in the rear, we put up with SO MUCH shit for not conforming to the current body type that we go nuts for the men who like big butts.
Also, it’s confusing to get both compliments and insults for being skinny to normal with a big tushie.
Well shoot. I don’t think I can defend people. Are you Dexter lovin’? or what
It’s easy to tell a boy “treat women with respect; don’t harass them,” etc., but putting that into practice requires that they recognize their own bad behavior, especially when it comes to interacting with girls/women they fancy. These guys are often just desperately trying anything and everything to woo their crush, even making a lewd gestures, as happened in this case. They’re always just looking for the magic button to push that will Change Everything and make them be given a chance—or another chance, whatever the case may be. Unless the girls very harshly shut them down—which almost inevitably leads to the girls being called bitches—hope springs eternal.
When the woman is someone the guy has regular access to, what ends up happening is quite often an excruciating, weeks-long pattern of teasing, goading, pestering, badgering, guilt-tripping, steering conversations toward sex, leaving 20 voicemails and 200 texts, sending photos of their junk, and so on…always looking for a way to get and keep that foot in the door. Eventually, some girls relent, due to guilt or insecurity or just wanting the harassment to stop. And then the boy/man-child has learned that there was nothing wrong with the tactics; it simply takes exactly 20 voicemails, 200 texts, talking about sex every third interaction, and 2 months of general pestering to get what they want.
I outgrew this nonsense by my late 20s (I’m in my 40s now) and feel badly about ever having pursued women in this way, but I’ve seen guys that age and much older continue to “succeed” with women through this insensitive behavior. They don’t look at it as harassment at all; it’s just “the chase” to them, and to call it anything worse than that is “overreacting.” If called out on it, they get defensive and say it was all a misunderstanding.
I’m not sure what we, as parents and mentors, can tell boys today that will change any of this.
I’m so pissed that I have to tell my son, regardless of what you see in video games and TV and movies and society, or even read in books –women are not prizes to be won. They have agency over who they date, who they like, and who they want to spend their time with. It doesn’t matter how nice you are or what you do for them, it is still a choice for them to make. And it DOESN’T make them bad people if they don’t follow the lies YOU have been told in our world. It makes them a human being.
Thank you Wil and Charlotte. Thank you Charlotte for saying “I am a person” and thank you Wil for letting it stand that way and not going into the “she’s someone’s daughter / sister /mother” routine that is supposed to make guys empathize but that really just de-humanizes women. “she’s someone.” That should be reason enough to treat anyone well. #yesallwomen
Keep ’em coming, Wil!
Here is another virtual “highest of fives” to you!
I believe the best kind of boy is the feminist geek boy! Thanks, Wil.
Be hopeful, Wil. There are a lot of guys in the world who are not dicks. In my 33 years of life, the closest I’ve ever come to being “harassed” by a guy was 8th or 9th grade, a strange man drove past me, honking and waving – and it turned out to be my mom’s cousin, just saying hi. I have met loads of men who were kind, polite, helpful. Not just in my hometown, but online in my younger days, when I was a coder as a hobby. None ever made me feel like a “girl in a guys’ world.” So yeah, definitely have hope.
I think Wil, being a non-dick himself, is aware that most men are not dicks. I am presently in a long-term committed relationship with a non-dick. Neither my father nor my brother nor my cousins are dicks, though of course they all have done dickish things. The point is not that most men are not dicks. The point is that some men ARE dicks, and closing our eyes and ears to them will not make them go away.
Fantastic! Thanks Wil for everything you do. 🙂
How about we just confront anyone being a dick, rather than just when the victim happens to be female?
High Five to both Wil and Charlotte! Yes, dads have to teach kids not to be rude. So do moms. So do the idiots making the sexist games that let boys view females as bobbies and expendable. We are not either. We are a human, period.
Thank you, Wil, for speaking out.
I am teaching my three sons to have respect for women and girls. Hopefully, my example to them in how I treat their mother speaks even louder than my words. Both Charlotte and Wil deserve it, so “high fives” to the utmost!
Scalzi didn’t say that first. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good that he’s amplifying it, but it wasn’t John Scalzi who put her ass on the line to promote the YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter.
Thank you Wil!
My 8 year old daughter happened to be looking over my shoulder when I watched Charlotte’s vine yesterday. I didn’t stop it for a few reasons. I knew I could easily get away with explaining cunnilingus as something sexual and I would explain more when she was older (she knows the basics). Most importantly, I was ok with the fact that she understands that men can be dicks and that she doesn’t have to accept that behavior from anyone…EVER. Her simple response: “I hope Charlotte knows it isn’t her fault. People should care about each other more.” And then she went off to play computer games.
High five your 8-year-old for me, would you? <3
Aren’t women just as responsible for teaching their children how to behave? And aren’t most men raised by women? So why single out men as being responsible for teaching other men to treat women with respect?
We should all be raising our children to treat people with respect but I never hear anyone suggest that we need to teach our Daughters to treat men with respect…but they certainly do need to be taught that nowadays.
How about singling men out as being responsible for treating women with respect?
It doesn’t matter how hard a woman tries to bring her boys up to be decent men, if they spend all their formative years around other boys and men (to whom, strangely, they seem to be far more willing to listen than to women) who treat women with disrespect.
The reason you rarely if ever hear about treating daughters to treat men with respect is that you rarely hear about women sexually or physically assaulting men. Yes, it does happen. About 1/100,000th as much as the other way around.
How about not blaming the victims here? How about blaming the men who are guilty of this behavior — instead of blaming their mothers for not bringing them up properly?
By blaming the victims, YOU also are part of the problem.
The statistics disagree with you. Domestic violence in which “severe violence” is employed is committed twice as often by women as it is by men. Attacking spouse/partner with a knife or a gun is done four times as often by women compared to men. (Morse, 1995) The same research also showed that inter-partner violence was initiated twice as often by women as by men.
Then why not address those men specifically and tell them not to be dicks, rather than all men?
Um. no. Your statistics are incorrect.
Though the incidence of domestic violence has decreased in recent years, women have remained consistently around 80-85% of the victims of intimate partner violence and men are around 75% of the perpetrators.
From the US DOJ of Study Intimate Partner Violence, 1993–2010:
“The data in this report were developed from the Bureau
of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization
Survey (NCVS), which annually collects information on
nonfatal victimizations reported and not reported to the
police against persons age 12 or older from a nationally
representative sample of U.S. households.”
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ipv9310.pdf#page=2
84% of spouse abuse victims were females, and 86% of victims of dating partner abuse at were female.
Males were 83% of spouse murderers and 75% of dating partner murderers.
— Matthew R. Durose et al., U.S. Dep’t of Just., NCJ 207846, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Family Violence Statistics: Including Statistics on Strangers and Acquaintances, at 31-32 (2005)
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/fvs.pdf
“In 2000, 1,247 women and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner. In recent years, an intimate partner killed approximately 33% of female murder victims and 4% of male murder victims.”
— Callie Marie Rennison, U.S. Dep’t of Just., NCJ 197838, Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief: Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, at 1 (2003)
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ipv01.pdf
It’s all well-and-good for you to say “Then why not address those men specifically and tell them not to be dicks, rather than all men?” Well, women ARE doing that. They are also asking the men who aren’t committing the violence to speak up with the men who are — because as I said above, strangely those men are more likely to respect and pay attention to what is said by other men, than what is said by women.
If you’re not one of those men, why are you getting offended?
Um, no, they’re not. Hell, even the statistics you cited showed your earlier proposition of 1/100.000th the incidence to be complete bullshit.
The one study you linked to that wasn’t a 404 turns out to be based on crime statistics. Well, what a surprise that a justice system with a clear and well-known history of gender profiling in abuse cases is finding more men guilty of battery than women. /sarc
No they aren’t. They are speaking to “men”, not “men who commit crimes”.
Well that’s funny, because you had an incredibly negative reaction to an earlier comment when it was suggested that those mothers who aren’t committing the violence actually put in some work to make sure their deadbeat sons and daughters don’t grow up to be violent criminals.
Strangely enough, a good sign that you’re a bad parent is that you raise your children in this way. For that reason, you women should really tell other women to stop having children if they’re not competent in the child-raising business.
If you’re not one of those women who’s raised a man or woman to be a wife or husband or childbeater, then why were you so offended?
I dont agree that the “best kind of boy” is a feminst geek boy. Why can’t my conservative Lacrosse Jock son be a best kind of boy? Why couldn’t my goofy apolitical Bass Player Football Jock son be a best kind of son. I’m saddened that a category of a best kind of boy now has been created that none of my well behaved sons will fit into. Can we just stop with the categorizations of people?
men never mistreat anyone, by the very definition of what it means to be a man. boys and adult children are the ones responsible for this type of behavior. Dads that are men, raise their children properly.
My son, who’s name is Wesley, yeah, no real coincidence at all, is a very respectful guy. We are proud of him for that an many other things. Please, be respectful, and for the love of all that is sacred, Don’t be a dick. High five, Wil.