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I’ve been thinking about all this concern over women, particularly new women, being overwhelmed by messages from men here.
And frankly, something about the conversation annoys the absolute FUCK out of me!
I am ALL for giving women as much control as possible. Filters, blocking, contact preferences, privacy settings, reporting tools…give us all of it!
What I don’t want is control FOR women quietly becoming control OF women!
Because I think we’re conflating three very different things:
Access. Attention. Safety.
A man being able to send me a message is access.
Whether I give that message five seconds or five hours of my time is attention.
And harassment, coercion, threats, stalking or refusing to respect a boundary? That’s safety.
Those things require very different solutions.
If I open my inbox and find 50 messages, I do not suddenly have 50 obligations.
I can read five. Answer two. Delete twenty. Ignore the rest. Block someone. Flirt shamelessly with someone else. Or close the damn browser and go about my day.
An inbox is not a to-do list!
A man’s interest does not require my attention!
His effort does not require my response!
His verification does not earn him greater access!
And his disappointment does not mean something has gone wrong!
This is where the gender imbalance conversation gets particularly interesting.
There are more men here than women. That’s reality.
But watch how quickly a numerical imbalance becomes a conversation about fairness.
How do we improve men’s chances? Who should get greater access? Should verified men get through first? How do we keep women from becoming overwhelmed so they’ll stay?
Do you see the sleight of hand?
We started with protecting women and somehow ended up discussing how to improve men’s access to them.
Women are not the scarce inventory in a supply-and-demand problem!
If ten men are interested in one woman, that does not create ten competing claims she is responsible for sorting fairly.
She can choose one.
She can choose several.
She can choose none.
Nothing has malfunctioned. Nobody has been cheated.
Her attention was never owed to the pool.
And this is exactly why I bristle when female safety gets used interchangeably with female comfort or male access.
One woman may hate receiving 50 messages. Another may love it. Another may delete 49 without opening them and spend the afternoon thoroughly enjoying number 50. 😉
None of them is doing womanhood incorrectly.
Autonomy isn’t creating the perfect amount of attention for women.
It’s allowing women to decide for themselves how much attention they want.
So yes, protect women from harassment. Give us meaningful ways to deal with threats, stalking, coercion and people who refuse to hear no.
But don’t protect me from an unread message.
And don’t turn one woman’s discomfort into another woman’s restriction.
Give women the tools to control access to ourselves.
Then accept that we may not use those tools in ways that make access to us more equitable for men.
Because female autonomy was never supposed to make access to women fair.
It was supposed to make access to women ours to decide!
@lolamayi I really have nothing to add. This is a well thought out discussion of the realities of this site. My constant hope, often expressed with sarcasm, is “do better, be better”
@njtitman ❤️
Thank you, David. And yes…“do better, be better” covers an astonishing amount of territory around here.
I’d just add: give people the tools to protect their own boundaries, then respect the choices they make with them. That would get us pretty damn far.😎
So I guess i’m actually kinda half surprised and half not surprised that there are people trying to tell other women how they should act when it comes to giving men access or something along the lines of that. I’m very big on individual freedom and doing what you believe for yourself is the best! And I have no doubt that every women has experienced some form of harassment at least once in their lives! That’s part of the reason why I typically don’t message women much unless I feel compelled to do so because I don’t want to come across as harassing them or anything like that especially if they’ll have a number of men after them. Again, I’ll reiterate, individual freedom is incredibly important, especially on this wonderful website
Lover Boy, you’re actually illustrating part of my point. You don’t have to be afraid to message a woman because other men may also be messaging her. A respectful message isn’t harassment simply because it lands in a busy inbox.
Send the message. Let her decide whether she wants to answer it. THAT is individual freedom on both sides.
And look at you over here waving the autonomy flag with me. I knew I liked you.😘
I like the premise of give us the proper tools and we will make it happen. So many positives have occurred when women are in control their own destiny.
Come up with some additional tools to use on ABFHeaven. Maybe Michael-Admin can make it happen.Exactly @grogman 😘! Give us good tools, give us choices, and then trust us to decide how we want to use them. That’s really the heart of it for me.
And I think @tuehlykv has always been incredibly open to thoughtful suggestions for making the site better, so if people have ideas for tools we don’t already have, I’d love to hear them. Just preferably ones that give us MORE control over our own experience, not make decisions for us.
Oh now I understand the part of the point you are trying to make! And that is both a reassuring and good point to make is that a respectful message isn’t harassment! I will keep that in mind! Thanks for touching on this subject Lola! 😘
Exactly. ❤️ Now go forth and respectfully message women, Lover Boy. 😘😎
Well Lola i thankfully have not encountered this nonsense because if I recieve any messages I have no interest in or seem creepy or threatening I never reply and just block them and its not like I get hundreds of messages but i have had my share of weird ones. But you have an excellent point Lola.
Exactly, @softandsensual. 🩷That’s really all I’m arguing for, the ability to make those decisions for ourselves. You see something creepy, weird or simply not for you? Delete, block, move along. It’s just not that complicated!
Give women good tools and then trust us to use them. We’ve been managing unwanted male attention since LONG before the internet gave it an inbox. 😉
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