The bringing up of Aspberger's is odd to me. Yes, it is an issue, but there seems to be an underlying assumption that the onus is on women to be sympathetic just in case the creepiness is perception on their parts, or a seeming creepiness that would be difficult to unlearn. Does that mean that we need to take one for the team and go back to the embarrassed "I don't want to be mean" discomfort that creepers (and people who are bad at social cues) take for "Well, she didn't say no?"
I spent a lot of my teens and twenties coming to terms with the fact that if I said "No, thank you, I have a boyfriend" (which I said whether I did or not, on the odd assumption that people aggressively hitting on me had more right to not have their feelings hurt than I had right to, say, go to a party or school or work or wherever without sex coming into it) and got a "Bitch!" in return, *I* was not the problem. And I had a dad who overcame some very 50's attitudes to be deep-down feminist, to say "Kid, no-one has the right to touch you or talk to you any way you don't want.
It hit me relatively early (I think I was still in junior high) that too many boys and men have internalized the idea that if they find a woman attractive, she HAS to reciprocate, or she's an evil bitch. Unteaching this would do a lot of good, but it's a LOT to unteach.
I spent a lot of my teens and twenties coming to terms with the fact that if I said "No, thank you, I have a boyfriend" (which I said whether I did or not, on the odd assumption that people aggressively hitting on me had more right to not have their feelings hurt than I had right to, say, go to a party or school or work or wherever without sex coming into it) and got a "Bitch!" in return, *I* was not the problem. And I had a dad who overcame some very 50's attitudes to be deep-down feminist, to say "Kid, no-one has the right to touch you or talk to you any way you don't want.
It hit me relatively early (I think I was still in junior high) that too many boys and men have internalized the idea that if they find a woman attractive, she HAS to reciprocate, or she's an evil bitch. Unteaching this would do a lot of good, but it's a LOT to unteach.
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