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Comment by djahng | Hacker News Reader

What you're saying is this is how men behave and women should either put up with it and stop complaining, or stay home?

If we're talking about being hit on, then yes: at a bar, no one has the right to not be hit on. If one cannot handle having to fend off unwanted advances in environments where it is appropriate to make your attraction known, then you should stay out of that environment. However, one does have a right to not be harassed. If someone doesn't take no for an answer then they should be handled appropriately.

> at a bar, no one has the right to not be hit on.

Sometimes, people like to go to bars to hang out with their friends or significant others. Believe it or not, entering a bar does not give you the right to run around groping people.

The sexual assault apology in this thread is unbelievable.

I made sure to qualify the context of my comment to make my points as clear as possible. These strawman arguments that inevitably get trotted out get incredibly tired. You're not going to find too many people around here to fall for that argumentation tactic.

Hitting on != groping people and you damn well know it.

The original article was talking about a woman who was groped and assaulted.

To quote the parent:

> It sounds like a lot of this stuff happens at bars during events, not at the events themselves.

No one started talking about specifically being hit on until you brought it up, so either you were talking about what the woman went through and mistakingly called it "hitting on", which is what I assumed, or you're talking about something unrelated to this discussion, which is apparently what happened. Don't get upset when someone tries to bring your unrelated argument back on topic.

Either way, people don't always go to bars with the intent to get some. Assuming everyone is there for that reason is ridiculous.

Rereading the conversation chain I admit to misunderstanding the context of this thread. Reading through a bunch of comments I'm sure context bled between threads in my head (HN's pythonesque block comment structure doesn't help matters). Although I qualified my statements very specifically as I anticipated possibly misreading or missing something along the way.

It's fine. I apologize for coming off so aggressively. I'm just tired of people literally defending sexual assault, and because of that, I end up making all my replies snappy.

Whoa whoa whoa hold it. 'Hitting on' is not groping or sexual assault. I'm sure you didn't strawman that on purpose but it's still a strawman.

It's pretty clear that the issue at hand is harassment, not merely being hit on.

I thought the context was established to be hitting on, as one might do in a bar. The problem with framing it as being about "harassment" is that the term is prone to equivocation in these types of discussions. Some would argue that any attention of a sexual nature would be harassment. This is probably true in professional settings, but the grandparent established the context of discussion as a bar setting. This is what I was replying to.

How to handle actual harassment and assault is obvious: you call the fucking cops. I'm not sure why that warrants a discussion at all.

No, what I am saying is this is how drunk people act, and if one finds it too offensive, then the logical conclusion is to remove one's self from the equation, rather than demanding that the world change. You can't boil the ocean.

There are plenty of bars where, if that's how drunk people act, and the bar staff has any sense, then the drunk people get kicked out. The drunk people get kicked out because it's bad for business, i.e. if people are made to feel unsafe (and I think that's a far better term to use than "are offended") and their only option is to leave, the bar loses the business of many people opting out in favor of one or more drunk assholes. There are some obvious parallels here that, IMHO, only help the argument that bad behavior should be called out and corrected, not seen as a fact of life.

Asking the world to change/ boiling the ocean... Plenty of people get drunk without sticking their hands up women's skirts. The "logical conclusion" is not to remove the women from the equation.

I'd like you to consider just how dubious the utility of the "that's just how things are" argument is when it comes to women's issues.

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