Although Depp’s and Dershowitz’s aggressive public tactics are severe, increasingly I see their behaviors aped by less powerful men. Themes of projection and counteraccusation even came up in my personal life recently. A teacher at my yoga studio asked me out, and when I told him that I don’t date older men (he was 57 to my 29), he bulldozed over me, first with his insistence that I was putting up artificial boundaries against a deep connection, and finally with insults. Once the situation escalated, I tried to salvage my involvement in the community by explaining to him how tense and unsafe I felt practicing at the studio as a result of his behavior. I even sustained an injury from the stress. Unwilling to hear me, he said that he would flip my words back on me, and that I was endangering him because of my feminist views of men. He made a false equivalence: I felt unsafe because of a real risk of sexual assault-sexual violence is not just a war of words. He felt unsafe because of the risk to his reputation if I told the truth about his behavior. There is no use arguing or pleading with these types; they are intractable. I blocked his number, reported the incident to the owner, and switched yoga studios.
Kaynak: Thephilosopher1923
