In the days following the Easter weekend, many women took to Twitter to detail the horrors they’ve experienced after rejecting unwanted advances from men.
With everything from being verbally accosted to threats to physical violence and even death, these women bravely shared the tales of what it’s really like to not be interested in someone and because of it put your own life in jeopardy.
Men, of course, took offensive to being identified as overly aggressive and at times dangerous and told women that they were merely overreacting. Their responses which varied from telling us to “get over it” and questioning our standards.
Just because men haven’t seen it happen, that doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s as real as these tweets and the many shared by others.
Those sharing their stories on Twitter join countless others engaging in the extension of the conversation centered on masculinity, it’s fragility and the fact that women are sometimes killed because of it. Killed just for rebuking a man’s advances or simply saying “no.”
Steve Stephens murdered an innocent 74-year-old grandfather, Robert Godwin Sr., and blamed his girlfriend Joy Lane for the brutal act, which he filmed and posted to Facebook.
But Stephens’ murderous actions did not mark the first time a woman has been blamed for the harm of herself or others.
Last summer, a young woman was killed because she wouldn’t dance with a man during Brooklyn’s annual J’Ouvert Carnival. A woman was stabbed to death because she refused to give her man her phone number. A young mother detailed on Twitter last year how she was stalked via social media when she didn’t comply to the advances of her uber driver.
The extremes men go to when expressing anger when women aren’t interested in them are dangerous. They always have been and as long as men don’t find issue with their aggression in response to being rejected, it always will be.