Matthew Garrett ([info]mjg59) wrote,
@ 2008-02-09 12:27:00
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Entry tags:advogato

When I am at a conference I am unlikely to start a conversation with a woman who I don’t know because it really offends me when I receive the “I’ve got a boyfriend” type response

Doing. It. Wrong.


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[info]ghoti
2008-02-09 01:25 pm UTC (link)
Says the man who hastily mentions girlfriend whenever he sees me even vaguely near him. (Mind, I am very lecherous, so maybe I'm doing it wrong too.)

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[info]secretlondon
2008-02-09 02:05 pm UTC (link)
Well you've ended up married so you are doing it better than me..

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[info]ghoti
2008-02-09 06:43 pm UTC (link)
And one of the first things he said to me was "you know I have a girlfriend?"

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[info]mjg59
2008-02-09 05:41 pm UTC (link)
Well, yes, but you do seem to start every conversation by telling me how lovely and wonderful and handsome I am. Even if it is just an excuse to get me to agree to having my face painted.

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[info]ghoti
2008-02-09 06:43 pm UTC (link)
Well, maybe I am a little doing it wrong.

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[info]uisgebeatha
2008-02-11 01:15 pm UTC (link)
I think you're doing it right IMHO... ;-)

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[info]puzzlement
2008-02-09 01:58 pm UTC (link)
On the upside, I didn't realise until now how very effective this was at scarring conversational partners. But now I know that interrupting people with "I have a boyfriend" is a get out of gaol free card. I will develop a peculiar stare to go with it.

Edited at 2008-02-09 02:00 pm UTC

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(Anonymous)
2008-02-09 04:05 pm UTC (link)
Just in what creepy kind of way do you talk to women if you're used to such a response?

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[info]gerald_duck
2008-02-09 08:08 pm UTC (link)
Well, someone's doing something wrong, certainly. But is it the men being creepy, or the women mistaking an attempt at product promotion for a chat-up?

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[info]mjg59
2008-02-09 08:17 pm UTC (link)
If multiple women are making the same mistake about one guy, the most likely explanation would seem to be that he's not making his intentions especially clear.

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[info]gerald_duck
2008-02-09 08:34 pm UTC (link)
Why is that more likely than women being predisposed to assume a man who tries talking to them with (perhaps insincere or strained) enthusiasm is trying to chat them up?

It feels like insufficient data to me. Possibly some psychologist should try designing a properly controlled experiment.

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[info]king_of_wrong
2008-02-09 08:52 pm UTC (link)
How is that a different point? Any audience will have preconceptions about you, and a ton more after your first impression, and you have to tailor your presentation to them.

If you're consistently being misread by your audience you are - by definition - Doing It Wrong.

Maybe women are predisposed to assume a strange man doing a cold approach is trying to chat them up. So? If your audience thinks you're trying to chat them up, figure out how to telegraph that you're not - a wedding ring, a more formal distance, working from an obvious stall (think the NTL/VerminMedia thing in Lion Yard) rather than walking around the airport accosting people...

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[info]gerald_duck
2008-02-09 09:22 pm UTC (link)
Hmm. At this point there might be confusion about what the "it" is that's being done wrong.

By my understanding, you regard "it" as "successfully promoting the Lenovo range of laptops", where I'm treating "it" as "interacting reasonably with members of the opposite sex"?

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[info]mjg59
2008-02-09 09:29 pm UTC (link)
I've had no difficulty in interacting with women at conferences. Russell has. This tells us that it's possible for women to interact reasonably with at least one member of the opposite sex, with my general experience being that I'm not unique in this respect. If Russell has problems, I suspect that's more down to Russell than women in general.

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[info]king_of_wrong
2008-02-09 10:06 pm UTC (link)
Both. If women think you're trying to chat them up when you're not, there is failure involved: they're not getting the message you want to give. The examples I gave were for the Lenovo guy's situation, since he was having a systematic (and clearly-documented) problem, but the principle is the same in any case...

Some - including me - would argue that there's also a third failure case involved: getting threadjacked from a non-sequitur. Why should it matter that she has a boyfriend? Ignore it, dismiss it, ask if he has a ThinkPad, but don't get all pissy that she's mentioned him because you're not chatting her up, so you don't care.

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[info]king_of_wrong
2008-02-09 08:38 pm UTC (link)
Since he was only going for Thinkpad users, one might assume that he was "checking them out" (and probably breaking the "three second rule" in the process) before attempting to make contact. If his body language was nervous on top of that...

Clearly he fails.

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[info]hub_
2008-02-09 05:28 pm UTC (link)
You forgot the premade answer:

"Cancel/Retry/Abort ?"

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[info]fiona_kitty
2008-02-09 06:20 pm UTC (link)
I really wish taxi-drivers and random men at bus stops would adopt this strategy.

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[info]pavanne
2008-02-09 11:33 pm UTC (link)
I don't think it's unique though. I'm often the only woman under 40 in a conference room, sometimes the only woman of any age, and I *do* think men are less likely to strike up a conversation because they don't want it to look like they're heading for the girl. Once I've been seen in a few conversations with other participants, everyone gets comfortable with being seen talking to me - so it's just a matter of getting those first few conversations out of the way.

This observation may be based on paranoia or the fact that I'm too junior for anyone to make speaking with me a priority. It may have nothing to do with gender perceptions at all.

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[info]mjg59
2008-02-09 11:52 pm UTC (link)
I'd agree that there's some level of base paranoia that any attempt to talk to a woman in a male-dominated environment (such as most technical conferences) is going to be interpreted as an attempt to hit on her, but my experience has been that that doesn't mean that all such attempts are interpreted in that way.

On the other hand, I'd be interested to know what sort of proportion of people talking to you at this sort of thing seem to be doing so because you're female?

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[info]pavanne
2008-02-10 12:19 am UTC (link)
A few older women make a point of talking to the younger ones, I think. Not obtrusively, but just slightly supportively.

There are a few silly old buffers who will make mildly unsuitable compliments and engage one in a boring monologue on their pet issue, droning on (I think) for far longer than they would to a young man.

But the vast majority of delegates are completely professional, engage me on conversation relevant to the conference, and would treat me exactly the same if I was male. They might remember me a bit better because females are a rare species, but that's all.

Also, I would regard it as extremely bad manners to acknowledge the possibility that someone was chatting me up at a conference, unless they went rather beyond striking up a conversation. I'd just keep turning the topic back to the conference subject if someone was trying to be too personal.

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[info]mjg59
2008-02-10 12:27 am UTC (link)
Interesting. I wonder whether the different demographics at Linux conferences (generally young, a large proportion of hobbyists) skew the observed behaviour here. A moderate amount of the conversation does tend to go beyond the purely professional, which I suspect means it's easier to give the wrong (or sometimes perhaps even the right) impression.

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[info]perligata
2008-02-09 11:52 pm UTC (link)
I'm less concerned by that blog entry than I am about some of the responses. To wit:

I’ve certainly had women react very stupidly from time to time — not least, crossing roads and stopping until I’d gone past as if I was a rapist or something, just because I happened to be walking on the same street behind them!


I can sort of understand an innocent man getting his feelings hurt by this, but he must be a completely ignorant tool to realize that women don't do this because they are sadistic wenches, but rather because they have a legitimate reason to be cautious.

Pretty much everything about that post and its replies screams "TARDBUS!"

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[info]mjg59
2008-02-09 11:58 pm UTC (link)
Which leads me to an almost completely unrelated thought that occasionally keeps me awake at night - if I'm walking along a narrow sidewalk at night and a woman is walking in the opposite direction, should I move to the street side (thereby ensuring that they have enough room to remain on the sidewalk, but forcing them to walk between me and a wall and therefore reducing their ability to decide how far away from me to stay) or move to the wall side (giving them more ability to avoid me, but potentially forcing them to walk in the street)?

Being a man is hard.

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[info]pavanne
2008-02-10 12:29 am UTC (link)
I'd probably prefer you went for the wall side.

From the female perspective, one feels guilty about being nervous of some harmless guy who has the perfect right to walk down the road, but one is very slightly on-edge in that situation. It isn't anything personal.

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[info]perligata
2008-02-10 12:51 am UTC (link)
Ditto everything in this post. I would also say walking briskly like you are definitely on your way somewhere could be useful as well.

The other night I had a similar situation to the one I posted about above: I was happily walking down the street in my fairly safe neighborhood. I was alone, it was about 10:30 (this was after we had dinner, actually!)

There was a man walking up the street towards me, hanging close to the wall, and he stopped to look in the window of a store. I was sketched out by this, so as I walked past him, I turned around to make sure he wasn't going to "make a move". When I turned around, I discovered there was a young man walking directly behind me. He was only like five feet away!

I did the standard white yuppie woman gasp-and-move-purse-to-front move, accompanied by brisk walking to my front door, and I remember that, in addition to being really scared, I was also really angry at him (assuming he wasn't going to do anything) for not realizing why that would make a woman nervous and then doing something else. I suspect he probably thought I was overreacting or "acting stupidly", but quite honestly, he can suck it if he thought that. I had an x60 in my purse and I wasn't going to let anyone take it from me.

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As a man
[info]Chris C [blondechris.com]
2008-02-10 12:48 am UTC (link)
I generally just cross the street entirely. I figure that the relatively minor effort in crossing an empty street at night for the sake of assuring someone that I'm not going to kill them is worth any perceived loss of face in seeming weird or something.

(oh, and it's "pavement".)

- Chris

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Re: As a man
[info]perligata
2008-02-10 12:52 am UTC (link)
Thank you for doing this!

I have seen men do this before and I always appreciate their thoughtfulness, and then become very sad about the state of the world.

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Re: As a man
[info]mjg59
2008-02-10 12:55 am UTC (link)
Yes, but she's American.

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[info]puzzlement
2008-02-10 06:24 am UTC (link)
I also vote wall side. This is trumped by walking with another man who has headed the other way; the most nervous making situation of all is walking between two men who are clearly walking together. (I am relatively insensitive to this stuff, but being made to walk between members of a group sucks.)

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(Anonymous)
2008-02-10 02:14 pm UTC (link)
There are three incarnations which happened to me (as a man).

Around my home we have some pretty small streets where you have to walk on the street. As I had to go to train pretty urgently I had to overhaul the woman walking in front of me. Now how to do that and not scare her?

A similar one to that is, how to behave if youre walking behind a women, and have the same way for quite some time? Walking behind her the whole way feels like pursuing her, and overhauling has the risk described above.

And a last, not that strongly related version is, how should a man between 20-30 behave if he is walking by some street prostitutes (Unfortunately I dont know if their is a less discriminating description for that in english)? You dont want to walk to close because they might think your attracted, but walking around them in a wide circle and pointedly not looking in their direction is excluding them from "society" even more...
(Living in Berlin, this unfortunately happens quite often...)

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Miss Random says...
[info]puzzlement
2008-02-10 10:01 pm UTC (link)
Firstly, all of this is much more alarming either at night, and when the woman is otherwise alone on the street. If there's a bunch of other people around, just get on with your day.

I don't find it very frightening when men walk past me. Just stay out of her personal space where possible, as you probably instinctively do for everyone anyway and if by the necessity of passing her you have to enter it, get back out again quickly. If you've noticed women getiing jumpy, I suppose the thing to do is to try and make your footfalls louder as you're coming up to pass. Maybe she'll turn to look, especially if you're running. Just get on past. What worries most women, as far as I know, is persistant closeness.

If you have to walk behind a woman for a long time, I actually recommend overtaking as above. If you can't, and she's turning to look back at you, don't make extended eye contact, but after a couple of turns you could say something like "just headed on up to Something Street" and maybe shrug and stand there for fifteen seconds or so while she gets a lead on you. But German body language is different, so I'm not totally sure. Again, what she would probably prefer is to not have the sense that you could grab her easily: the further away you are the better that is for her.

I'm not sure about prostitutes (the term is relatively neutral in English, at least considering the status of the job, some call themselves "sex workers" instead but it's not widely adopted). I gather most men who aren't interested treat them much like other street vendors or people handing out pamplets in the street: they don't make eye contact, they make small but not major efforts to not have their paths intersect, if the person starts hassling them for business they say "not interested" and get out of there. This seems reasonable to me: they are marginalised, but in the moment probably the best you can do is not marginalise them any more than you would other people who sell things in the street.

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[info]lnr
2008-02-10 06:35 pm UTC (link)
I vote keep left (or right in countries where they drive on the right). That way whoever ends up having to step into the road is the one who can see the cars coming.

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[info]allbery
2008-02-10 09:20 pm UTC (link)
This post made my day. Thank you. Thank you in particular for making it to Debian Planet soon enough after the original post that I had some advance warning of the idiocy I was about to read and didn't hurt something.

(I also have never had this problem.)

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