Billegible recently posted a couple interesting things about stalkers and molesters. They got a lot of comments so I thought I’d try it here.

It is summer here, and as I drove home it occurred to me that my eyes were scanning the sidewalks and crosswalks classifying the pedestrians into groups. According to some sort of Darwinian triage system, anyone identifiably male was exempted from further scrutiny after the first glance; females were then classified and it was not, “Intelligent/dumb” or “good sense of humor/no sense of humor”.

A man I know who was taking a lot of steroids during a bodybuilding phase told me that during that time, he would, when driving, look at each woman and think, “she fuckable? Fuckable? Mmm, fuckable?” So maybe it is a hormonal thing. His case was an extreme, I think, but maybe all males are like this to a certain degree.

I’m not saying I know. One thing, though, I think that whatever impulses a person has, they have them and they are natural and normal. Trying to be a “good person” and not have these impulses is pointless, I think now. You only end up castrating yourself, or otherwise denying parts of your personality that are there.

What matters, is whether or not, and how, you act on those impulses. Like, don’t grab women’s asses, dude. I asked Alpha if men had ever molested here. She said a lot. It was like, background noise. A week or so ago in Italy, someone pinched her ass and she turned around to slap him, and saw it was a toothless old man.

I was riding in a Tokyo subway at rushhour once, and counted 7 people squished up against me. High season for gropers, who are called “chikan” in Japanese. I made an effort not to grope people on the subway. I got groped once, but was unable to relax and enjoy it because I couldn’t tell who was doing it. Japanese women, at least when I was there, seemed to put up with it rather than make waves; foreign women – I heard lots of stories about “anyone know whose hand this is? I found it on my ass,” and women dragging chikan off to the police.

Stalking, though. My personal curse is unintentional stalking. That is, I find myself, quite often, going the same place as some Lone Woman who is walking in front of me. I have to turn left up ahead, she turns left before me. I have the choice of letting her think I’m following her, or taking a different route.

Once I was going to a music store in Vienna to look at a low whistle they had just gotten in. A woman got off the bus in front of me, and went everywhere I did. Left turn, right turn… I went around some trees in the park to get away from her, but she ended up in front of me again, and it looked as though I’d hurried around the trees to stay up with her. It turned out she was going to the music store, too. To look at the very same low whistle.

I ended up buying the whistle, but I swear to god, not because it had her spit on it. I saw her again too, at a whistle workshop. I felt bad.

Worst was a winter several years ago when I was walking with a pronounced limp because I had fallen on the ice and hurt my hip. I am not huge, but wrapped in an overcoat, wearing heavy boots and a thick layer of winter fat, I’m not small either. Every evening, in the dying light, walking to the train station from work, there they were: Lone Women walking to the train station too. Right in front of me. A little slower than I wanted to walk. Meaning I always caught up with them. But couldn’t pass them easily on the narrow sidewalks piled with snow. I tried everything in my efforts not to scare them – because, imagine a limping (i.e. Mad Hunchback) guy huffing and puffing behind you on a dark, deserted street – crossing the street to get away with them (because at first they were crossing the street to get away from me), taking different routes, anything I could think of. I couldn’t walk slower or I’d miss my train… But everywhere I went, there was another Lone Woman. I finally started taking the bus.