8 ms·

The first time I was catcalled I was six. My friend and I were playing dress up and we put on very messy red lipstick and blush. She left to have lunch and home

The first time I was catcalled I was six. My friend and I were playing dress up and we put on very messy red lipstick and blush. She left to have lunch and home and we agreed to meet after lunch on the corner of street, her house was next-door to mine. I guess I didn't wash off all of the makeup, but a group of grown men shouted and whistled at me then quickly drove away. At 11 I went on short runs close to home, I was whistled at most days. When I turned 15 and took the bus to work at a nearby mall, I was often asked if I needed a ride by older men, and often had to brush off comments or offers by older men, twice they had sat next to me on the bus blocking my way out, I had to tell the bus driver and stand up on my seat to climb to the seat behind me. When I first went on the internet I tried asking people about about majoring in Physics and what their work was like, I was in high school and if they found out I was a girl they would usually try to convince me to date them, send a dick pic. I even had an offer from a 60 year old to fly me out to live with them. I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this.

e40 7y ago
I feel like men need to hear stuff like this, just like white people need to hear what black people go through. On the latter, I keep having the thought that in 2019, that comment should not be needed. I feel the same about your comment and how men act. (I say all this as a older white man.)
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Fine with that, as long as the "hear about it" part doesn't involve stereotyping all men (and specifically men) as potential predators.[1] Because that sort of misdirected moral panic can only make things even worse. [1] (See also: "teach them not to rape!" and the like. You can't teach a rapist not to rape - the leopard doesn't change its spots. And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators!)
  - longtom 7y ago
    Historically, the problem was solved by not allowing women in public at all. In nearly all higher cultures, women lived in completely segregated and controlled world. Let's not forget that what is novel is not that a tiny minority of men are sex-obsessed low-inhibition asshats, but what is novel is that women casually sit in the bus right next to them. By this, of course, I do not intend to downplay the severity of some experiences some women make.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      We already have things like segregated, female-only rail cars in Japan. So I'd argue we're slowly going back to that world. Somehow, we'll also develop new "non-predatory", "consent-respecting" sexual scripts that will most likely look a heck of a lot like the old-fashioned rules of public etiquette and courtesy.
    - pergadad 7y ago
      Nonsense. In the upper crust maybe, but in tribes and farming cultures women were.alwqys full part of public society. It changed only with the industrial revolution - smaller families, bigger cities, more distinct gender roles.
      - longtom 7y ago
        No, gender segregated work was pretty common throughout human history: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1069397106297529 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1069397106297529
    - pjc50 7y ago
      I'm not sure where you're going with this argument? It's not even all that true outside of the most patriachal communities of the Yawhistic religions.
      - steakknife 7y ago
        I believe the word you are looking for is _Abrahamic_.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    > And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators! The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is. They don't do it "deliberately" but declare that anything other than a clear repeated "no" counts as consent, which is not right.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      No, the actual issue with so-called "rape culture" is the way it enables predators by providing them with cover, plausible deniability, social support etc. etc. That's why male-hierarchical and supremacist societies like we see in many places outside the West are a huge problem. (And they hurt males also, since sexual predation often targets them too - much like we'd see in the stereotypes about prison rape in the U.S. It's not homosexuality in the modern Western sense but sexually predatory behavior that's masking as homosexuality. The underlying dynamics are exactly the same as when females are targeted.)
    - krapp 7y ago
      >The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is. They're taught by popular culture and outdated notions of masculine identity that the boundaries don't really exist, or that they're just an obstacle to be overcome. Plenty of popular songs teach men that women should consent to sex if a man is aggressive enough or rich enough, or handsome or gets a woman drunk, etc. Rape culture sends men the message that consent is defined by what they want, and that they're entitled to sex, and that there's something wrong with women who don't give it to them (and, conversely, something wrong with men who can't get it at every opportunity.)
    - vsadu 7y ago
      Yeah, maybe. But I'm sure everybody who's not a crazy fuck knows that catcalling a 6 year old is way beyond the boundary.
  - specialist 7y ago
    It's not about you. Oversteer is inevitable. You'll somehow manage. Just like women somehow manage to power thru constant harassment.
scotty79 7y ago
Absolutely horrific. What country/language?
- Ewigkeit 7y ago
  This was in the suburbs of a major city in the US. English.
- pjc50 7y ago
  You could find stories like this from every major city in the world. Most days.
agumonkey 7y ago
No offense but think about the other side. I'm very lightly kidding here, I remember making a female account on a website to assist some girl (say an ancestor of tinder) and remember being washed by a torrent of messages from guys. It was a shock, I never ever imagined it was possible to get so much "attention" in so few. I understood a thing or two about girl's life all of a sudden. I also realized how our world were different, because at that time, on a myspace like website, I honestly wrote hundreds of long and fun message to women and maybe got 3 answers total. Men are frustrated, women are harassed. It's an absurd situation in a way. ps: my story is very slightly related to the thread and your example as I was not a minor nor made a minor female profile. Strangers annoying young girls should be stopped immediately.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    > This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different. No, it isn't like that because the discussion is regarding the same environment. within your analogy, both discussions would have to be about parents. So the one person provides the stated example of watching their parents burn to death while the other explains that their parents locked them in a 48" x 48" x 48" cage and tortured the person for 18 years. (I'm going very extreme here to demonstrate the point.)
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    nonono I didn't meant to put 'both sides' on the same level, especially in the streets.
generalpass 7y ago
> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this. This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing. As in, no woman (online) initiates contact with me. Every woman apparently initiating contact is a scammer and likely not actually a woman.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  It's not "true in both directions" because one of those "directions" is a lifelong experience of harassment and intimidation and the other "direction" is nobody wants to seek you out to have sex with you.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    What is true is that women typically do not understand what men experience online. That was my point.
    - krapp 7y ago
      Women do understand what men experience online, because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves.
      - generalpass 7y ago
        > Women do understand what men experience online, It is not my experience with the women I know that they are aware of this. Maybe they think it is somewhat reduced from what they experience, or perhaps they think that the only women who contact men are legitimate, non-harassing contacts, but they are not aware that the actual experience is zero initiated contacts. > because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves. I have observed no massive victim complex. My comment was not intended to "derail" any mentions. I flatly stated my experience and that women are generally unaware of this experience. If there is no interest in considering the experience of a party for whom you have some desire to influence, what is the likelihood of successful engagement? If you want men, who experience no initiated contacts to fully understand that women experience large amounts of harassment, might it be critical to approach them with the understanding that they have a completely different experience?
masklinn 7y ago
> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this. Definitely. It's hard to fathom pretty much any "deluge of interactions" and their destructiveness at scale without having going through. An other common case is online pileups e.g. a random tweet gets retweeted and is controversial enough that people now viewing it want to reply. For them it's just a reply, for the rando it's thousands of by and large useless repetitive and unoriginal message. It's fundamentally a DDOS, and the skeeviness or even maliciousness of the interactions you experienced only serve to make things workse.
csdreamer7 7y ago
When I reconnected with one of my (attractive) female friends from high school (I was 2 years ahead of her) after graduation, in community college. We decided to take a walk together from her house. On the way we passed a construction site on the other side of the street. She looked to the construction workers and seemed baffled. She told me she was she was surprised that they were 'NOT' catcalling her with me walking with her. That opened my eyes a bit. She had walked by them before several times and they had harassed her many times, from across the street. She was either 16 or 17 at the time. I am pretty sure she was not 18 at the time. The age of consent in California.
jimmaswell 7y ago
I feel like we're evolved to deal with this kind of concrete threat throughout the day. Go out into the world, avoid the saber tooth tigers and enemy tribes, gather some berries, go back home to safety, threats are gone. On the other hand, the kind of existential dread many men experience now is something only modern society really made an opportunity to foster. Depression, loneliness, and feelings of abject hopelessness can eat you from the inside out. You feel anxiety as if there's a tiger outside but there is no tiger, you can never "escape" the tiger until you find a partner (and even then your past life can have a permanent lasting effect on you), and being clocked as experiencing all of this makes you "desperate" and less attractive creating a vicious cycle of misery. If I could have chosen I'd rather have been born onto the other side of that experience instead of barely being able to enjoy life up until recently. Manageable specific threats presenting themselves throughout the day that go away when I remove myself from a situation (or mace them or something) instead of going through the motions day in day out feeling increasingly worthless with every failed attempt at reaching out to a potential partner, online or offline. Having too many options presenting themselves to you versus knowing that at least 500 people in a row online deemed you not even worth responding to.
- CPLX 7y ago
  You are presenting a theory that those primitive tribal living environments did not have the same social interactions and dynamics that we have in the present day. But you’re not presenting any evidence so support that assertion. It’s entirely reasonable to assume people then had the same existential dread and fear of social exclusion we had today plus festering wounds, lack of hygiene, and poor dental care.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Come on, the whole point of tribal living as a social structure is that it has way more tightly-knit social interaction than a modern day, Western, late-stage-capitalistic, 'Bowling-Alone' society. OP's theory is entirely plausible, even though the sort of existential dread he posits has little to do w/ gender relations per se.
Balgair 7y ago
> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this. There is a stats model as to why this is. I can't find the reference, so my recollection may be spotty. Essentially, assume there are more men than women in some room. Assume that some percent of either sex will espouse sexist comments at the other sex. Running through the math, you find that women hear more sexist comments than men do. If you plug in some real world numbers (of sex imbalances, sexist remark frequencies, time in various environments, etc) to these percentages and not just some random ones, then something like 95% of women will get some very crude remarks thrown their way nearly every day. Again, I can't find the reference, but it has it's own eponymously named rule to it on Wikipedia (though it's not on that linking page yet for some reason). Basically, one possible reason men don't hear a lot of very sexist stuff all that time is 'because math'. Men need to listen to their sisters, mothers, wives, friends, and coworkers and believe them more often.
- nerder92 7y ago
  This comment was so useful to me, as a man i consider myself to be sensible enough to not be an harasser but it's true that from the standpoint of a white male it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through. I think exactly this is the reason why many mans perceive the sexual harassment and the sexist argument has overkill sometimes, basically it's an issue cause by a low exposure to it. Thank you for this comment, i'll use it as an argument in sexism discussions trying to help other fellow mans to understand it.
  - js2 7y ago
    > it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through. “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” https://youtu.be/b1XGPvbWn0A https://youtu.be/b1XGPvbWn0A
    - Ewigkeit 7y ago
      Yes, this is what it's like. Most of the men seem harmless but when someone starts to follow you it gets scary. This was in a populated area thankfully. A few years ago I attended a women who code meetup and two men decided to try and follow two women home, arguing that it wasn't illegal to walk on the street etc. They had to be threatened with someone calling the police and the women had to delay going home and stay with the group leaving the building before it was clear the men would leave them alone and they could safely walk away.
jdkdnfndnfjd 7y ago
Boo hoo. Shut up.
- dang 7y ago
  We've banned this account, and if you ever pull anything this nasty on HN again, we'll ban your main account as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mirimir 7y ago
Yes, there are enough totally obnoxious men around, in many areas, for any women who happens by to be harassed. And maybe worse, you have the ones who are just subtly obnoxious. Or even unconsciously obnoxious. But then, I'm a guy. However, I have been catcalled and propositioned, by gay men. In clubs, at parties, in restrooms, etc. Rarely, though. And sometimes I flirt, just for lulz. Almost got me knifed, one time. And then there's all the other crap that we all need to deal with from obnoxious guys.

e40 7y ago

I feel like men need to hear stuff like this, just like white people need to hear what black people go through. On the latter, I keep having the thought that in 2019, that comment should not be needed. I feel the same about your comment and how men act. (I say all this as a older white man.)

zozbot234 7y ago
Fine with that, as long as the "hear about it" part doesn't involve stereotyping all men (and specifically men) as potential predators.[1] Because that sort of misdirected moral panic can only make things even worse. [1] (See also: "teach them not to rape!" and the like. You can't teach a rapist not to rape - the leopard doesn't change its spots. And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators!)
- longtom 7y ago
  Historically, the problem was solved by not allowing women in public at all. In nearly all higher cultures, women lived in completely segregated and controlled world. Let's not forget that what is novel is not that a tiny minority of men are sex-obsessed low-inhibition asshats, but what is novel is that women casually sit in the bus right next to them. By this, of course, I do not intend to downplay the severity of some experiences some women make.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    We already have things like segregated, female-only rail cars in Japan. So I'd argue we're slowly going back to that world. Somehow, we'll also develop new "non-predatory", "consent-respecting" sexual scripts that will most likely look a heck of a lot like the old-fashioned rules of public etiquette and courtesy.
  - pergadad 7y ago
    Nonsense. In the upper crust maybe, but in tribes and farming cultures women were.alwqys full part of public society. It changed only with the industrial revolution - smaller families, bigger cities, more distinct gender roles.
    - longtom 7y ago
      No, gender segregated work was pretty common throughout human history: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1069397106297529 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1069397106297529
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I'm not sure where you're going with this argument? It's not even all that true outside of the most patriachal communities of the Yawhistic religions.
    - steakknife 7y ago
      I believe the word you are looking for is _Abrahamic_.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > And the moral majority of dutiful, ethical, law-abiding folks don't need to be taught not to be predators! The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is. They don't do it "deliberately" but declare that anything other than a clear repeated "no" counts as consent, which is not right.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    No, the actual issue with so-called "rape culture" is the way it enables predators by providing them with cover, plausible deniability, social support etc. etc. That's why male-hierarchical and supremacist societies like we see in many places outside the West are a huge problem. (And they hurt males also, since sexual predation often targets them too - much like we'd see in the stereotypes about prison rape in the U.S. It's not homosexuality in the modern Western sense but sexually predatory behavior that's masking as homosexuality. The underlying dynamics are exactly the same as when females are targeted.)
  - krapp 7y ago
    >The whole discussion around "rape culture" suggests that a lot of people need to be taught where the boundary is. They're taught by popular culture and outdated notions of masculine identity that the boundaries don't really exist, or that they're just an obstacle to be overcome. Plenty of popular songs teach men that women should consent to sex if a man is aggressive enough or rich enough, or handsome or gets a woman drunk, etc. Rape culture sends men the message that consent is defined by what they want, and that they're entitled to sex, and that there's something wrong with women who don't give it to them (and, conversely, something wrong with men who can't get it at every opportunity.)
  - vsadu 7y ago
    Yeah, maybe. But I'm sure everybody who's not a crazy fuck knows that catcalling a 6 year old is way beyond the boundary.
- specialist 7y ago
  It's not about you. Oversteer is inevitable. You'll somehow manage. Just like women somehow manage to power thru constant harassment.

scotty79 7y ago

Absolutely horrific. What country/language?

Ewigkeit 7y ago
This was in the suburbs of a major city in the US. English.
pjc50 7y ago
You could find stories like this from every major city in the world. Most days.

agumonkey 7y ago

No offense but think about the other side. I'm very lightly kidding here, I remember making a female account on a website to assist some girl (say an ancestor of tinder) and remember being washed by a torrent of messages from guys. It was a shock, I never ever imagined it was possible to get so much "attention" in so few. I understood a thing or two about girl's life all of a sudden. I also realized how our world were different, because at that time, on a myspace like website, I honestly wrote hundreds of long and fun message to women and maybe got 3 answers total. Men are frustrated, women are harassed. It's an absurd situation in a way. ps: my story is very slightly related to the thread and your example as I was not a minor nor made a minor female profile. Strangers annoying young girls should be stopped immediately.

peterwwillis 7y ago
This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different.
- generalpass 7y ago
  > This comment is like if someone said they watched their parents burned alive in a house fire and it changed the person for life, and someone else replied "yeah, but think about the other side, my brother is a firefighter and he works so hard..." Sure, let's minimize the first thing and talk about something different. No, it isn't like that because the discussion is regarding the same environment. within your analogy, both discussions would have to be about parents. So the one person provides the stated example of watching their parents burn to death while the other explains that their parents locked them in a 48" x 48" x 48" cage and tortured the person for 18 years. (I'm going very extreme here to demonstrate the point.)
- agumonkey 7y ago
  nonono I didn't meant to put 'both sides' on the same level, especially in the streets.

generalpass 7y ago

> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this. This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing. As in, no woman (online) initiates contact with me. Every woman apparently initiating contact is a scammer and likely not actually a woman.

peterwwillis 7y ago
It's not "true in both directions" because one of those "directions" is a lifelong experience of harassment and intimidation and the other "direction" is nobody wants to seek you out to have sex with you.
- generalpass 7y ago
  What is true is that women typically do not understand what men experience online. That was my point.
  - krapp 7y ago
    Women do understand what men experience online, because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves.
    - generalpass 7y ago
      > Women do understand what men experience online, It is not my experience with the women I know that they are aware of this. Maybe they think it is somewhat reduced from what they experience, or perhaps they think that the only women who contact men are legitimate, non-harassing contacts, but they are not aware that the actual experience is zero initiated contacts. > because many men have developed a massive victim complex lately and won't stop trying to derail every mention of something women experience online to talk about themselves. I have observed no massive victim complex. My comment was not intended to "derail" any mentions. I flatly stated my experience and that women are generally unaware of this experience. If there is no interest in considering the experience of a party for whom you have some desire to influence, what is the likelihood of successful engagement? If you want men, who experience no initiated contacts to fully understand that women experience large amounts of harassment, might it be critical to approach them with the understanding that they have a completely different experience?

masklinn 7y ago

> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this. Definitely. It's hard to fathom pretty much any "deluge of interactions" and their destructiveness at scale without having going through. An other common case is online pileups e.g. a random tweet gets retweeted and is controversial enough that people now viewing it want to reply. For them it's just a reply, for the rando it's thousands of by and large useless repetitive and unoriginal message. It's fundamentally a DDOS, and the skeeviness or even maliciousness of the interactions you experienced only serve to make things workse.

csdreamer7 7y ago

When I reconnected with one of my (attractive) female friends from high school (I was 2 years ahead of her) after graduation, in community college. We decided to take a walk together from her house. On the way we passed a construction site on the other side of the street. She looked to the construction workers and seemed baffled. She told me she was she was surprised that they were 'NOT' catcalling her with me walking with her. That opened my eyes a bit. She had walked by them before several times and they had harassed her many times, from across the street. She was either 16 or 17 at the time. I am pretty sure she was not 18 at the time. The age of consent in California.

jimmaswell 7y ago

I feel like we're evolved to deal with this kind of concrete threat throughout the day. Go out into the world, avoid the saber tooth tigers and enemy tribes, gather some berries, go back home to safety, threats are gone. On the other hand, the kind of existential dread many men experience now is something only modern society really made an opportunity to foster. Depression, loneliness, and feelings of abject hopelessness can eat you from the inside out. You feel anxiety as if there's a tiger outside but there is no tiger, you can never "escape" the tiger until you find a partner (and even then your past life can have a permanent lasting effect on you), and being clocked as experiencing all of this makes you "desperate" and less attractive creating a vicious cycle of misery. If I could have chosen I'd rather have been born onto the other side of that experience instead of barely being able to enjoy life up until recently. Manageable specific threats presenting themselves throughout the day that go away when I remove myself from a situation (or mace them or something) instead of going through the motions day in day out feeling increasingly worthless with every failed attempt at reaching out to a potential partner, online or offline. Having too many options presenting themselves to you versus knowing that at least 500 people in a row online deemed you not even worth responding to.

CPLX 7y ago
You are presenting a theory that those primitive tribal living environments did not have the same social interactions and dynamics that we have in the present day. But you’re not presenting any evidence so support that assertion. It’s entirely reasonable to assume people then had the same existential dread and fear of social exclusion we had today plus festering wounds, lack of hygiene, and poor dental care.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Come on, the whole point of tribal living as a social structure is that it has way more tightly-knit social interaction than a modern day, Western, late-stage-capitalistic, 'Bowling-Alone' society. OP's theory is entirely plausible, even though the sort of existential dread he posits has little to do w/ gender relations per se.

Balgair 7y ago

> I think men have no idea that girls and women experience this. There is a stats model as to why this is. I can't find the reference, so my recollection may be spotty. Essentially, assume there are more men than women in some room. Assume that some percent of either sex will espouse sexist comments at the other sex. Running through the math, you find that women hear more sexist comments than men do. If you plug in some real world numbers (of sex imbalances, sexist remark frequencies, time in various environments, etc) to these percentages and not just some random ones, then something like 95% of women will get some very crude remarks thrown their way nearly every day. Again, I can't find the reference, but it has it's own eponymously named rule to it on Wikipedia (though it's not on that linking page yet for some reason). Basically, one possible reason men don't hear a lot of very sexist stuff all that time is 'because math'. Men need to listen to their sisters, mothers, wives, friends, and coworkers and believe them more often.

nerder92 7y ago
This comment was so useful to me, as a man i consider myself to be sensible enough to not be an harasser but it's true that from the standpoint of a white male it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through. I think exactly this is the reason why many mans perceive the sexual harassment and the sexist argument has overkill sometimes, basically it's an issue cause by a low exposure to it. Thank you for this comment, i'll use it as an argument in sexism discussions trying to help other fellow mans to understand it.
- js2 7y ago
  > it's very complicated to fully understand what women goes through. “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” https://youtu.be/b1XGPvbWn0A https://youtu.be/b1XGPvbWn0A
  - Ewigkeit 7y ago
    Yes, this is what it's like. Most of the men seem harmless but when someone starts to follow you it gets scary. This was in a populated area thankfully. A few years ago I attended a women who code meetup and two men decided to try and follow two women home, arguing that it wasn't illegal to walk on the street etc. They had to be threatened with someone calling the police and the women had to delay going home and stay with the group leaving the building before it was clear the men would leave them alone and they could safely walk away.

jdkdnfndnfjd 7y ago

Boo hoo. Shut up.

dang 7y ago
We've banned this account, and if you ever pull anything this nasty on HN again, we'll ban your main account as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mirimir 7y ago

Yes, there are enough totally obnoxious men around, in many areas, for any women who happens by to be harassed. And maybe worse, you have the ones who are just subtly obnoxious. Or even unconsciously obnoxious. But then, I'm a guy. However, I have been catcalled and propositioned, by gay men. In clubs, at parties, in restrooms, etc. Rarely, though. And sometimes I flirt, just for lulz. Almost got me knifed, one time. And then there's all the other crap that we all need to deal with from obnoxious guys.