Just leaving this here as a kind of PSA: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/not-really-r...
Of course, of course, most people are not like that. But most of us females have run into one or the other, and one is enough.
edit: What I mean is, if you know the feeling of being nice due to intimidation, then you can easily see why people probably even smaller and weaker than you and of increased interest to a broader range of the population might be.. well, nice, as long as they can.
I sometimes meet people, most (all?) of them women, who were not nice to one idiot groping them and woke up in the hospital. Though that are the ones talking about it, which certainly gives a bias. Smile, make yourself small and maybe they go away. Better strategy compared to confronting them most of the time. Is that also true in your case? (Honest question.)
This is awful advice. The article itself is about a series of events where implied refusals culminated over time. An early civilised but clear decline is safer and more effective. I've done what you advise in my early teens in a nexus of bullying (and more) situations and all I've got has been more suffering. You'd rather get beaten up than having such an experience, believe me.
> I sometimes meet people, most (all?) of them women, who were not nice to one idiot groping them and woke up in the hospital.
In Europe? I suppose it's possible in some pathological neighborhoods but I would be surprised to hear it's a common occurrence. But then, I guess, once per lifetime is dangerous enough, as you say.
1 Cole - Children's spontaneous control of facial expressions - Child Development (1986), Saarni - An observational study of children's attempts to monitor their expressive behavior - Child Development (1984)
2 Politeness: Some universals in language usage (1987), Leaper and Ayres: A meta-analytic review of gender variations in adults' language use, Personality and Psychology Review (2007)
3 Campbell - Staying Alive: Evolution, culture, and women's intrasexual aggression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1999)
https://news.yale.edu/2003/03/18/women-smile-more-men-differ...
As a dude, I get told to smile pretty frequently. I don't think this has anything to do with sex most of the time (though there are sexists, obvs).
I don't have citations at hand, but I have seen some studies that suggest that adults treat boy babies and girl babies differently from the get go. So just because the behavior can be traced to infancy does not prove it is genetic.
>In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture