sexual misconduct

[numbersmom]

@jennypenny "I can't let your suggestion that women who voted for Trump ignored this issue go unchallenged."

And I can't let your rationalization go unchallenged.

I have been a fan of your posts for a long time but this is very personal for me. I have a special needs son, now an adult. A special needs child is a more than life time sentence because they will outlive you. Not only do I have to save for my retirement, but I also have to save for his. When I was faced with who to vote for, I could not rationalize voting for a man and party that wants to take away the very meager supports that exists for our most vulnerable citizens of this country. I worry every day that medicaid/medicare will be cut and my son will have no health insurance when he turns 26. So don't tell me that Trump is prolife. He is anti abortion but doesn't care at all about the people who are already here.

[Riggerjack]

Ok, I have gotten a bit off track trying to define some less defined situations, and haven't really talked about my point yet.

There have been complaints that this isn't taken seriously enough. I disagree. I think the women involved have not taken this seriously enough. Because she makes such a great example, I'm quoting CS from page 1.

Maybe you (CS) just didn't make it clear he should "leave you the fuck alone".
I want to point out that this is victim blaming. This, in part, is why women don't speak up - because they aren't believed. I made it plenty clear. He continued, even after the University stepped in.
1. He knew, fully, what he was doing, and how unwelcome it was, and
2. There were no consequences.

3. Because authority didn't resolve this for you, carry this axe around for 20 years to grind at liesure.

As far as man spreading, that is just as bad as they are making it out to be. Women are pressured to be polite, quiet, pleasant, no matter what unpleasantness is being pushed onto them. The man spreading is sending a clear message of power - "I deserve to have space, and I have the right to take it from you."

Absolutely. Sometimes that is exactly what this behavior is.

Sometimes, it is that I am warm, these jeans don't breathe as well as I'd like, and I have hopes of getting back home and getting frisky with my woman, and that works better if my crotch is both dry and clean. Who are you again, and WTF are you talking about?

Literally every man sits in some form of this position at some time. Using it as an example of oppression removes any credibility from your real complaints. You are smarter than this.

That "it" can then go on to a lot of things - your space, your sexuality, your life.

YES! This is the stakes we are talking about. So it is vital to differentiate between awkward, and preditory behavior. I would say the majority of men here are overly sensitive about misinterpreted awkward. And that we aren't addressing predatory appropriately.

When step 2 happened, or more specifically, didn't resolve this matter, I would fix this myself. Truth be told, I would have just fixed it myself, because I don't trust authority to ever resolve conflict appropriately. People who do seem to be poor observers or slow learners.

If I were forced to be in a lab/office/conference room with this jerk, I would help him understand personal space. In your shoes, I would go to the chemical weapons counter at the mall, AKA the perfume counter. Buy the cheapest, most foul perfume available. Loves Baby Soft comes to mind, arrange to go to the lab with a 3rd party, from here out, we will call this person Bob.

Sit down, with Bob on the opposite side of me from Jerk. When Jerk gets too close, on my right side, I would pull out the perfume in my left hand, and talk to Bob about it as I squirted the left side of my neck, then the right side of my neck, then directly in Jerk's face.

Then turn to Jerk and talk about personal space, boundaries, and how these traditions help everyone.

You have a witness to back up that it was an "accident". If ever there were a problem, you can point to how limited your reach is from the opposing hand, if it were possible to attack someone the way he is describing, well, it would kind of require the "victim" to be too close, wouldn't it? Plausible deniability is the key to completely disarming bureaucratic authority. This plausible deniability is how the jerk got away with his behaviors.

Now you still have the problem of the Jerk. You told him to back off, he didn't. You forced him to back off. Now he will either escalate or actually back off. You have signalled that you are not prey. This can trigger an attack, but that was always a possibility, and at least now, you are prepared for it.

Yes, it would be nice if you never had to deal with this. Please, tell me all about the fantasy world you have where nobody does. But don't confuse this fantasy world with the one we live in.

Women are pressured to be polite, quiet, pleasant, no matter what unpleasantness is being pushed onto them

I have heard this a lot. I don't doubt that it's true.

My first question is who is applying this pressure, and why haven't you told them to fcuk off?

My next question is how would doing as they say benefit you? This seems like bandit behavior. Keeping all the optionality is the purpose of this behavioral norm. But the costs of that optionality are paid by you. And the stakes are high. Why would you accept this?

Who is your enemy, the preditor, or the person staking you out for the preditors?

Now, this can be misconstrued to be victim shaming. That is not my intent. I am suggesting that reframing the problem is likely to lead you to a better solution than waiting for someone to fix it for you. Because this is a real problem, faced by real people, dealing with real preditors.

[Riggerjack]

@ jp

Hollywood treats guns in 2 ways, as a vehicle for special effects, and as a magic wand, that makes people do what you want when you point it at them.

You are very familiar with firearms, so you probably think of them as tools.

However, to people just getting started with guns, they are power incarnate. Many women find this power, in their hands thrilling. That thrill is one of the reasons men try to get women to the range.

A good guy wants women to feel empowered. And thrilled. So, a little touching and exploring the possibilities is not unexpected. If it's unappreciated, "hey, she has a gun, it's not like I cornered her." A range is not a bar, but it's not the office, either.

Hitting on an obviously armed woman seems like the opposite of the rest of the complaints here. I would try to help more, but this is the example you gave.

None of which excuses going after a friend's wife, the dude's a creep, keep your distance.

[BRUTE]

The perp sued the university. Text messages were exhibited in court.

doesn't perp(etrator) imply guilt or conviction? seems he was more of a suspect. this case is really fucked up, and probably somewhat representative of the difficulty of these types of incidents.

1.the suspected incident typically happens 1 on 1 with no witnesses
2.both parties have incentive to lie about the truth, because repercussions are so extreme
3.false allegations have similarly harsh effects as the actual suspected crime, or in some cases worse (life spent innocent in prison, or being taken out behind the woodshed by white knights)
4.even a tiny minority of either gender exhibiting bandit behavior (rape, false rape allegations) can therefore poison the well, turning large parts of the initially well-meaning and sympathetic other gender into uncaring/afraid to be targeted bystanders.

it's like "the boy who cried wolf", but with the voices of 3 billion humans counted as one.

there is also a huge opportunity cost for all of human society. brute doesn't care so much for this as maybe others would, because he's somewhat indifferent to the continued thriving of said species, and because no actual crime (like rape or false allegations) happen. but by poisoning the well, the cost of having romantic relations rise dramatically, to the point where probably <1% of bandits on either side have priced 30-50% of the other gender out of the market.

the difficulty in solving this incentives problem is that it's typically impossible to tell if the allegations are true, and both not acting on a rape, and acting on a false allegation, are both terribly unjust. brute intuitively defaults to "innocent until proven guilty", but then again brute is unlikely to get raped (unless he goes to prison on a false allegation, of course) and so unlikely to experience the downside of that concept.

it's likely difficult to ever change the nature of human relationships to introduce witnesses or cameras into the most private part of private life, so the only rational choice is not to play at all.

seems kind of insane, actually. brute wonders how the human species even made it this far with that entire setup.

what might be possible to change, on a systemic level, is the well poisoning through generalizations. even if the rapes and false allegations are unpreventable, brute believes they are actually much less common than the media would have one believe, and if there was a more realistic assessment of the chances, maybe humans wouldn't be as spooked.

in that regard, generalizations don't help. per example:

"Teach women not to make false allegations", the reverse of "Teach men not to rape", implies that in general, most women make false allegations. this is untrue. it also implies that it's the fault of all other, innocent women that the <1% of women make these false allegations.

"Women should take those that make false allegations out to the woodshed" implies that innocent women have an obligation to use vigilantism and extra-legal activities to stop the <1% of offenders. puts weird moral obligations on 99% of innocent women, who are likely not comfortable murdering or otherwise punishing women on very difficult to verify claims. surprisingly, men feel similarly the other way around, even if they're sympathetic and mean well.

the inflation of sexual assault statistics is another thing that doesn't help, as Dear Leader Jacob mentioned. one of the "30% of all college women get sexually assaulted" numbers apparently counted "having been kissed or grabbed without permission" as sexual assault. by that definition, brute has been sexually assaulted many times.

that there even has to be a definition of "classic rape" is symptomatic of inflationary use of the word.

one study reports that about 6% of surveyed men were rapists or attempted rapists, with almost 7 attempts/crimes per rapist. these men were self-reporting and had not been charged with these crimes, so brute would suspect that the convicted rapists are responsible for even more crimes per person. but that's just brute's intuition, 6% simply seems pretty high. maybe brute lives in a bubble of civilized men. not inconceivable.

brute also finds it unhelpful that sexual misconduct is hard to report in "relationship-hours" or similar. with "x out of y humans have been raped", the result is to a large degree a function of life span. "30% of humans in college get kissed without permission" sounds scarier than "in 0.000005% of relationship-hours did a kiss without permission occur".

maybe this is why brute is so defensive about much of the sexual misconduct rhetoric. the only things he sees realistically improving the situation is more conservative, truthful reporting of the facts. and it would only prevent some of the secondary effects like poisoning the well, not the actual rapes or false allegations.

[Tyler9000]

For every Trump and Moore there's a Franken, Biden, and Clinton. Sexual misconduct clearly knows no political boundaries, and reducing it to a partisan issue only enables the "home team" subset of abusers to continue without any meaningful accountability. I suggest we leave politics out of it and stay on topic.

[Riggerjack]

BRUTE, I think you highly underestimate both the odds of violent rape in general and the ratio of violent rape to false allegations. Look at the numbers in JPs original post.

Yes, the categories and conclusions seem gamed, but the numbers are just too damned high. Reduce them by 90% due to the "dumb activist effect", and they are still too damned high. For what it's worth, among the rape victims I have known, those seem a bit low, but as always, my experience is an outlier.

The false accusations are problematic. When I was younger, I was all for the death penalty for rape. After all, if one can maintain an erection thru a partner crying and saying no, one is broken in a way we don't know how to fix. The sex drive is strong. If one can do this once, it won't stop. So if we can't fix rapists, and we can't stop them, eliminating them would be the next logical step.

But, since then, I have known too many people to grant extermination power to any of them. This may seem contradictory to my pro firearms position, but it isn't. Shooting someone is an entirely different process than complaining to an authority, having a rapist judged, and found guilty then executed. The second option is far more appealing to someone who would make a false allegation.

Victim status is a piss poor trade for the trials and tribulations a rape accuser will go through just to go to trial. Let alone the after effects of violence and rape. I wish I had never met someone who I thought would make such a stupid trade. But I have known too many spiteful, stupid, and powerless people. Think of stalking. It's unquestionably stupid. Hurts the stalker and the stalked. But it still happens, a lot. If only 1% of stalkers are stupid enough to file a false rape allegation, that's too many to ignore.

So yeah, false allegations have to be accounted for in any system. But we shouldn't let the few exceptions be the basis of the rule. Exceptions are supposed to be exceptions.

[BRUTE]

brute must be living in a bubble. he hasn't even heard of a single case among acquaintances or his wider social circle, as far as he can remember, as long as he can remember.

[Riggerjack]

Honestly, neither have I. But I know this is a bubble. It's a bubble I have cultivated.
For the last 15 years or so I have been careful to filter out of my life anyone who isn't very interested in solving problems.

This sounds messed up, and maybe it is. But as folks here have probably noticed, I automatically, and directly attack problems. I want and need them solved. This is because I am very motivated by peace. Anything disturbing the peace should be resolved. So now my life IS peaceful, though outside observations might include "boring". I am comfortable. Life is good. But it is also drama free. Works for me, and my wife, but not for most. This is fine, my solutions don't work for many people.

Before I put all this work into filtering out drama, I was friends with lots of women. Being fairly easy to talk to, and overly familiar with damn near every form of personal horror, I have heard a lot of rape stories. Not a few, a few dozen. When you consider that I am an introvert, a few dozen is a lot.

If you spend time with women, and listen, rather than spending the time trying to get laid, you'll hear these stories too. As often as not it was friends of girlfriends, after the wine started to flow and the fire was burning.

Plus, my background, poor, enlisted, working class, I think these groups are over represented in rape victims. In short, women unfamiliar with personal power. Again, yes, I am aware that this was another bubble.

This is why I recommend direct personal confrontation of dickheads, preferably in an environment that is safe. It's going to be a long time before the weakest among us are no longer weak. Waiting for a systematic change is a sucker's game.

[7Wannabe5]

I have known at least 6 women who have been raped; 1 by a serial stranger, 1 by her older brother, 1 by both of her older brothers (in both of these incest situations, the father was a semi-absentee alcoholic loser), the other 3 were date/acquaintance. I don't know of any false rape accusations one way or the other, but I know of 4 serious cases of false accusations of child abuse made by women against men during divorce proceedings.

Yeah, might not be such a bad thing if global climate change takes homo sapiens out.

[Riggerjack]

Most of the stories I've heard from women were similar in storyline to 7w5's, though rarely so gracefully told.

BTW, this is why I'm all for legalized prostitution. I'm not pro sex trade, I'm anti-pimp. Though, I admit to thinking free trade is generally a good default solution.

[suomalainen]

@jp, wife and I have talked about this quite a bit recently as well. I can see a bit of the @brute point of view as well as the @cs point of view. I think criminal actions are the "easy" part. Rape/sexual assault are criminal, are violent and are therefore more easily understood by people who don't have direct experience with it.

The more challenging part is the "grey area" of harassment (or when terms are confused/watered down by claiming everything is rape, etc). DW will sometimes get frustrated with me because of the way that I joke about sex, because I'm not being "sensitive" to her experiences. But I guess that's the thing. I'll never really know what it's like to be black. I'll never really know what it's like to be a woman. The major things, sure, I can get. It would suck to be murdered or raped or beaten or to be considered 3/5 of a person or to not have voting rights or jim crow laws. But I don't really know what it's like to be constantly verbally harassed, whether it be demeaned as "a lesser race" or "a piece of pussy" or whatever.

Is there a solution? I don't know. I guess my reaction is that yes it sucks to be in a position where you are made uncomfortable day in and day out. That can happen to anyone with a shitty boss or coworker. For women (or blacks), I think what you're saying is the problem is that you are much more likely to run into a "shitty boss or coworker" type person anywhere you go - work, the store, the street, the park. And there's the underlying, implicit threat of violence that accompanies every harassment - my wife worries about getting raped on the fucking running trail! But back to my reaction, I think the only thing you can do is to foster a culture of speaking out. And unfortunately, it always always falls to the aggrieved (or victim, in the case of a crime) to complain. Does it suck? Yes. Is it unfair? Yes. But you were born into this system and it is what it is. If you want to change it, then you have to fight for that change. Yes, you will have some white knights (maybe fewer and fewer to @brute's point), and you will have some allies. But the victims have to speak out, they have to think the fight is worth it, otherwise, why the fuck would their allies think the fight is worth it? (Reminds me of a joke - what do you call 100,000 frenchmen with their arms in the air...the french army!). For that reason, this new wave of people standing up to their attackers and harassers is good. And refreshing. I hope the momentum can be maintained.

I don't know. These forums are way too dense to keep up with all of the thoughts posted in one thread let alone many of them. I don't know how you people do it. I'm burned out at the end of a day and can't prod the grey matter to digest let alone produce further thoughts. Oblique way of saying that I only skimmed the 140 prior posts prior to writing this response, so this may not contribute much to the discussion.

TL;DR - I feel you, it sucks, but there's nothing else to do but slog through the fight.

[7Wannabe5]

@Augustus:

I understand what you are saying, but think about it this way. It's more like on your 13th birthday you received the blessing/curse of always having a bag of muffins you have to carry around with you. Since you are always carrying around a bag of muffins, it is not likely that you would be continuously conscious of the muffin bag. Consider whether you would like it if your colleagues referred to you as Muffin Boy, or random strangers rudely tried to hustle you for muffins on the subway, or if an individual you hoped might politely ask you to share your muffins suddenly bashed you on the head and stole them.

I think it kind of overall works out that the cost of security/hassle for the muffins almost equals the value of the muffins. So, it makes sense that most men would only be willing to provide "free" muffin security services to women with whom they have, or hope to have, muffin-sharing contract. Therefore, an independent female who did not want to be placing an unfair burden on the publicly funded criminal justice system, would have to take personal responsibility/authority and make plans along the lines of paying a muscular "knight" residing in Riggerjack's former neighborhood $1000 to electrocute the genitals of the individual who date-raped her. Anyways, that's pretty much what I am getting from this discussion.

[Riggerjack]

It's more like on your 13th birthday you received the blessing/curse of always having a bag of muffins you have to carry around with you.

I think that is one of your better analogies.

[7Wannabe5]

@Augustus:

Neither of our analogies are quite right. Rapists are stupider than your analogy would allow. A rapist doesn't steal the whole value of a woman's sexuality, and he vandalizes more than he gets. A garden that she owns is an apt metaphor for a woman's sexuality, and a rapist is a trespasser who just grabs whatever produce he can get while recklessly vandalizing. After he is gone, the woman still has her land, her apple trees, her herb circle, and her cabbage patch, but she has to spend time and energy mending the fence, cleaning up the debris, and waiting for the grass to grow back over the skid marks. So, a rapist takes on significant risk, and receives only very relatively small value compared to what he laid to waste.

So, the reason why men in general might want to consider being white knights is that rapists cause reduction in the supply of a resource that some might already find over-priced. I would estimate conservatively that every 1 rape results in the loss of at least 100 sexual opportunities/encounters that would otherwise be available in the general pool for men who are not rapists. If 1/6 of women experience rape at some time, and 5000 encounters is the average sexual life, rapists effectively raise the price of sex for the average man by at least 1/3 of 1%. This might not seem like much, but if the average single man spends $250/month on dating, this represents at least $500 cost over course of sexual lifespan. Ergo, please correct me if my math went wrong, it seems to me that any altruism put aside or considered purely as secondary benefit, it would behoove any man to invest the equivalent of at least $500 worth of life/energy/risk in "White Knight" behavior work/deeds.

[nestbuilder]

I appreciate JP for initiating this thread given her respected standing in this community. As this community - at least the frequent forum posters - appears to be dominated by men, I can't say I am surprised by how quickly the thread was directed toward attempts to explain male psychology and biology, accounts of being blue-balled and/or given mixed messages, the cost/benefit of bystander males not speaking up, and my favorite, that women just need to assert themselves more when confronted by creeps. The greatest concern seems to be how the current rise of public accounts and shaming will impact interactions between the sexes especially with regards to how men's behavior will be perceived and whether there will be negative consequences for them. Whether or not intended, these tangents sure diminish the OP's original statement and demonstrate a lack of interest in exploring/understanding the perspective of women and the reasons this watershed is happening right now.

"Sexual misconduct" is difficult to comprehensively describe as it ranges from the seemingly benign to the traumatic, it so entangled with so much in our culture and has largely been dismissed or ignored by the general public through most of our history. I can only imagine for a man it must feel like a firehose of complaints right now that mix together previously accepted behavior and language norms with acts of physical violence and everything in between. And not to mention, women are not perfect either.

Maybe just stop applying static theories/frameworks and stop trying to explain "why" so hard and instead just listen to some women for a while until you really start to see from their perspective. This is incredibly intricate stuff and that no doubt has a profound influence on all of us. Most women, including myself, continue to dig through the layers only to reveal new insights that hid in plain view all along. I could recount my own personal experiences but it just starts to feel stupid after a while - x times I was cat-called/jeered, x times I had a professor or boss hit on me (one of them was 80 and I was just 20-really?) and then danced the minefields of how to reject without losing my job or standing, x times I was approached by men I did not know masturbating (one time going 60 mph down a Wyoming interstate while I was driving back to the Midwest by myself, he boxed me in - sounds funny huh, but it resulted in me scouring every rest stop the rest of the drive with the intention of bashing in his headlights with my ice axe for taking away my sense of freedom and security), x times blah, blah, blah. Seriously, talk to some women, many women if you can, and just listen. You might have to pry a bit because honestly some of the less traumatic stuff is so common you actually forget it is remarkable and have just tucked it away somewhere.

Hence the firehose. We have had nowhere to spew it for so long, even among other women as trust me, "boys will be boys," "locker-room talk," etc. has been a refrain for so long you just learn to silently file it away as you think it is "just the way things have always been." It will take some serious forensics to sort out the relationship between culture and behavior, benign and violent behavior, biology and psychology, power and sex, and so on. But if we know anything, it is that there is no simple explanation.

I listened to Amy Poehler's "Yes, Please" while biking across the country last fall. The book was pretty entertaining and made me laugh out loud quite a bit. A quote that seemed both hyperbolic and true and now seems very relevant:

When talking about what men and women fear most: “Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death”.

Just a thought.

[The Old Man]

So, the reason why men in general might want to consider being white knights is that rapists cause reduction in the supply of a resource that some might already find over-priced.

Chivalry is dead. Women/Feminists killed the concept. A white knight is a "nice guy" which women despise.

The price of sex is if anything on the way down. Porn...huge amounts are free. Escort prices (USA) are down. There is far higher "contact" in strip clubs today, so the price is way down. Camgirls...comparatively recent, don't know the trend. Prostitution prices in Germany are at rock bottom levels. Air travel costs have collapsed bringing into range the entire world for sex tourism.

Over-priced... where? Tinder has vastly simplified the process for the attractive men. Sugar Dating has simplified it for the wealthy men.

[7Wannabe5]

@Augustus:

I'm nodding on cold formula myself, that's why I said to check my math.

Gotcha. Depredation of the commons that is too low-level to impact most decision-makers.

However, I would note that although nobody can ever see the full extent of the garden, the fact that your experiment included a female that was horny, smiling and actively engaged indicates that what you do see or what you wish to see is not what a rapist sees or what a rapist wishes to see. That's why it is a senseless, stupid, wasteful crime. "It's not about sex, it's about power" is not entirely accurate, but it points towards something that is true. Like one human sees a book and wants to read it, and another human sees a book and just wants to burn it. Maybe the truer statement would be "It's not about sex, it's only about power."

[bryan]

@nestbuilder, you should post more!

I've definitely gotten the most insight out of this thread from the Muffin Keepers.

Many comments seem uncharacteristically daft (i.e. not striking a rich vein) for this forum.

Can we stop w/ the "white knight" talk? Seems like a pretty pointless digression/minutia.. the Muffin Folks are _not_ calling for a return of Chivalry (as that basically ensures the entire system of there being "black knights" and "damsels in distress to be won").

This behavior may or may not be "white knighting" (politically loaded and probably carries meaning that may not be applicable e.g. aiming to win a damsel or going to battle against black knights).

Especially considering the anecdotal stats of sexual assault happening in circumstances where there are no white knights present (e.g. family, power structures like workplace, or a secret operation). Harassment may be more public and it seems here where some newer social response may work (e.g. shaming, giving a bad work review and denying promotion or firing, kicking/banning them from your bar, etc)?

Ideally they are practiced in the art of refusal (truly an art.. any lessons out there?) to prevent the escalation or wasting of time/energy.

danced the minefields of how to reject without losing my job or standing

Can any experts on the matter help everyone else out here on what strategies work for that? Anything allies or friends can do to make it easier with low risk?

Instead of the gold analogy, why don't we just muse on other parts of the animal kingdom? How would we stop bunny, otter, anatidae, dolphin rape (if we were also that species but w/ intelligence or if we were humans controlling the experiment)? Why/how are some species more egalitarian between the sexes (since that seems to be were humans want to go?)?

[7Wannabe5]

@nestbuilder:

Excellent post. I think of myself as kind of bouncy tough, so I hold the fear for my DD26. I will personally hunt down and castrate anybody who messes with her. I have no fear of jail time, just an opportunity to read that pile of Russian novels I have back-logged. Maybe we should just give up on looking to the men for support, and form a "Grandmas with Guns" anti-rape militia? It's only been 150 years since Annie Oakley proved that the gun was a tool that evened things up. Maybe we haven't explored the full possibility matrix of that option. My DS29 is very polite, so I don't fear that he will get hit in the cross-fire.

@General Snoopy:

You may be right about the price being down. I am just judging based on the numerous complaints that I hear.

I am very familiar with "nice guy" theory, and I think it is largely true, but a "white knight" is not a "nice guy." A "jerk" is also not the attractive opposite of a "nice guy." The old school ideal is the man of "steel and velvet." The "nice guy" is lacking, or perhaps perceived to be lacking, the "steel." A white knight, almost by definition, is not lacking in steel. IOW, a "nice guy" is a kind man who makes the common mistake of modeling the characteristics he wishes to find in a female in order to attract a female. He thinks along the lines of "a woman is soft, so I should be soft around women." Some women have the same/opposite problem. They just need to gain some perspective. Also, sometimes a "nice guy" is actually not very nice. He is just a guy who thinks he can score a female who is otherwise way out of his league just by being very courteous and helpful, particularly he will be available as an empathetic listener if she is having any trouble with the "jerk" she is currently dating. Meanwhile, the females who are in his league are invisible to him. Boo-hoo. Cry me a river.

One thing I realized more fully as the result of this discussion is that I do have unspoken expectations of some level of "white knight" service when I am dating. For instance, I would not choose to walk around downtown Detroit by myself after dark, but I routinely do it when accompanied by a man I trust.

[bryan]

One thing I realized more fully as the result of this discussion is that I do have unspoken expectations of some level of "white knight" service when I am dating. For instance, I would not choose to walk around downtown Detroit by myself after dark, but I routinely do it when accompanied by a man I trust.

I would hardly put that sort of thing in the category of "white knight," though. A friend/SO providing protection/security is just an everyday, normal thing. White knight is more often a stranger (or acquaintance; no trust established) to the damsel; these days it is a derogatory term (in the same vein as SJW/PC culture, which might explain some comments here and my desire to get away from the term). For examples, search youtube for "white knight(ing)" or whatever other verbs/adjectives you like.