The Trouble with Polite Predators

I received a polite letter the other day:

How’re you doing? … I spent most of the week blissfully happy, thinking of you wishing you were here.

There is no aggression here, so there’s nothing awry … other than the fact that I don’t know this man. I blocked him in 2023 after an endless flurry of bizarre letters. We were never friends, and he’s been apologising for writing apologetic messages ever since:

 I’m not sure what to do. The whole point of this was so I could say things to you other than, “I’m sorry, thank you, and I love you.”

It never dawned on him that simply respecting my boundaries might have been a good thing to do.

> I thought you liked playing the sock game.

I didn’t. I reported them all.

If we could discuss some things that’d be great. If not please don’t block this one. I’ll be good.

He never was. He’d asked if we could discuss some things repeatedly for a year. He insisted on injecting himself into my life no matter how many times I blocked his fake profiles. He knew far too much about me and told me far too much about himself in return. When he wasn’t harassing me, he was trying to get at me through my friends. Then he was perma-banned.

If I lived in his country, I’d be feeling pretty fearful right now.  

Not all harassment is overtly aggressive. Online stalking is a poor comparator to real-world abuse, but not all assaults are blatantly violent either. Not all abuse is obviously forceful, and it’s the polite violations that creep into your bones. Bruises and force are useful labels that tell you exactly what’s happening to you. When there are no bruises, you don’t get the luxury of clarity. By the time you suspect you’re being gaslit, you’ve already lost faith in your own interpretation of events. That’s why abused women often say they wished their abusive partners had just hit them. At least then they’d know what had happened to them.

Azis Ansari is the poster child of coercive assault. One of his victims shared her experience with him in 2018. In the piece, she says she explicitly told him she felt forced. She repeatedly moved his hands away and asked him to slow down. She even said no. She asked him if they could keep their clothes on. Ansari was polite. He just didn’t find her boundaries particularly important.

Soon after the story broke, an anonymous man wrote a Vox piece titled, “I thought I was one of the good guys. Then I read the Aziz Ansari story.” In the article he writes, “Her verbal objections, I convinced myself, were her poetic way of telling me she liked me enough to want to be in a relationship with me. She was telling me to stop. And I didn’t.”

These kinds of “gentle” pushes are a form of violence, but even women struggle to slap a label on them. Coercive predators find it even harder. They aren’t hitting people with closed fists or raping them at knife-point, so they must be one of the good guys.

But if you ignore boundaries, you are one of the bad guys, no matter how “polite” and “nice” you are. If you aren’t stopping when someone tells you to, if you’re pushing through someone else’s self-determination, your actions could be classified as a felony.

People are not horses to break. We are autonomous beings