I’m sure you don’t mean it this way, but this was a kind of women-blamey misogynist way of putting the question.
Placating men can often a rational choice: a form of self-defence to protect against setting off an aggressor.
By way of illustration, on Thursday night, I was chatting with a friend at a pub, outside (because she smokes), when a drunk man shambled up to us. “I was thinking the exact same thing,” he hiccuped. As we’d been discussing her brother’s 30’s birthday party, we informed him that this was probably unlikely. But we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long (which was any time at all) about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few moments later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the bar. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said (though probably less coherently). We later agreed she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him. It’s just automatic, as a woman, to do that kind of thing.
Last Saturday, I experienced a similar thing when I went for a run round my corner of Birmingham. It was early on a weekend morning, and the streets that had been full of more-or-less blotto pedestrians the night before were now quiet. When I paused outside a newsagents to stretch, a man sitting at a bus stop over the street from me began yelling obscene comments about my body, (running shorts are apparently a temptation to some. I don’t care if I look immodest in this particular situation). By pure chance, a (platonic, male) friend of mine came out of the newsagents. And because I hugged him (even a 'I’m kind of gross because of running but it’s nice to see you" sort of hug), the guy over the road shut up. The apparent “boyfriend” was enough to make the guy stop being disgusting - but not the fact that he was being obscene, itself.
These are actually forms of male aggression that I think only women see (and not even all women, probably – or at least who may not see it as aggression). But even when men are afforded a front seat to harassment, they don’t always have the correct vantage point for recognising the subtlety of its operation. Four years or so ago, I was sitting in a pub in Oxford with a male friend. Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted up next to her. He was out of it, rather aggressive, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently finished her drink. “Why is she humouring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say the two things I immediately wanted to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”
We have to recognise that sometimes for women, placating men like this is a rational choice, a form of self-defence to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, if not a confusing rejection-non-rejection, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognise.
Louis C.K., who is adorable, and who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-up — spelled out how this works in an episode of Louie (thank you, anonymous American friend of mine), where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together out on a date. “He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to do — she hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing manoeuvre.” Women “are better at rejecting us than we are,” C.K. said. “They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them.”
Now I am NOT saying that all men are particularly aggressive, or anything like that at all. I’m just trying to flag up that on some occasions, women don’t like to say a straightforward “no” because the reaction of a man to that straightforward “no” might not be a straightforward “Oh, ok.” This is one of those moments when, were I remotely interested in Twitter, the hashtag #YesAllWomen might need an outing. As a victim of sexual assault once upon a time I feel I’m in a reasonable place to testify to this.
It is most certainly not because “woman are so full of themselves”.
