Do men need a license to be allowed socialise (MOD NOTE IN OP)

Seriously, are you for real?

People have spoken out about it in the past week, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them.

Street harassment is huge issue is an issue for women daily.

You seem to think that once women are not murdered, then its ok to harass them a little bit. It's not.

Boys will be boys? Excuses, excuses.

No, it is you who are changing goal posts and being deliberately obtuse.

Street Harassment is exactly what Labre34 outlined above. I suggest you read that post. Slowly, so it sinks in.

Of course you would use discretion but in general a friendly salute is usually ok.

Go back and read my first post on the thread yesterday. It is very clear. Whistling, commenting, which is exactly what street harassment is and clearly described from the thread yesterday and from Labre's post on this thread. You cant isolate bits of it and say, well, that bit is harmless, but this bit isnt. I think you described it all as "banter".

Its harassment, all of it. Whether you acknowledge it or not is up to you Walshb.

Now, I don't really think there's anything else to say on it, the posts here are clear enough and people can come to their own conclusion.

Ultimately the government are turning themselves into a giant HR Department for the ordinary person, but they won't give out tough prison sentences to violent criminals - now or ever.

Men do protect women. Every day of the week.

hey, I’ll probably have the feminists on me for this, but it’s our role to.

It’s part of our DNA and evolution..

Once again the problem is one of different people trying to apply their own individual experience to the world as a whole.

Some people don't want to interact with random strangers when they're out in public, others absolutely crave such interaction. Both things can be true at the same time without either side being right or wrong, but it's impossible to talk about this with such nuance at the moment.

For the craic, during quarantine, I grew a great big bushy beard. Just because there was f*ck all else to do (and I lost a bet, in fairness, in which I foolishly agreed not to shave it until the nightclubs reopened - which was at the time supposed to be five weeks!) 

Now, I got a lot of comments from random strangers about this as I wandered around my local town. I was described, by strangers often yelling from across the road, as looking like everyone from Jesus to Mick Foley (I still don't get the latter or see any resemblance but this was a more or less daily occurrence at one stage). Now me, personally? I'm an extraordinarily extroverted person and the era of social distance and not being able to mingle with strangers in nightclubs etc was abject hell for me - I'm talking, mental health crisis, suicidal ideation level hell. So these random comments from random strangers were something of a lifeblood during quarantine - any interaction at all with someone I didn't know was a gigantic compliment and something which put a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

Now, I totally understand that others don't see things this way, introverted people in particular. They'd rather go about their day without interacting at all with strangers around them, and certainly without those strangers passing comment - even if those comments are positive. Personally I can't empathise - I can't even begin to imagine feeling that way, the more strangers who say hello to me or interact with me as I go about my day, the better - but I can sympathise because people are capable of saying, with words, that they don't want this.

The issue arises when both sides either refuse to or are somehow genuinely unable to sympathise. In this debate, the lads defending it cannot seem to wrap their heads around the introverted perspective in which random comments from random strangers aren't an immediate and automatic day-brightening moment which makes one's day that bit less dull and boring than it was a minute before. Equally, however, those who condemn it are also either refusing to or unable to understand and accept that to some people, yes, it genuinely *is* unfathomable that a random compliment from a random stranger could be literally anything other than a moment in which the world was a little brighter and more colourful than it was a moment ago, when you were walking alone and nobody was talking to you.

Until people can diplomatically discuss these fundamental differences in different types of people (FWIW, I'm an ENFP personality type and I'd hazard a guess that others who adore, rather than detest, random verbal interactions with total strangers probably share the E and the P on that scale as opposed to those with an I or J, respectively) this kind of conversation will always, always, always descend into an angry shouting match. Yes, those who perceive random approaches from strangers in public as "harassment" are valid in their feelings and have some right to go about their day without any such interactions - but equally, those for whom the world would be a bleak and boring place without being verbally approached by strangers shouldn't have to face the prospect of living in a world in which they know they'll never be approached in such a manner again because the introverted crowd have made it illegal.

There has to be some kind of middle ground. The extremism constantly on display from both sides of this debate doesn't achieve anything, and never will.

Thing is it still shouldn't be accepted. Its not a Twitter commentator, it's someone on national radio saying it, and if he said it about any other group who are stereotyped for something, he'd have been destroyed. It shouldn't be acceptable to say something like that.

Yep. Justice system absolutely needs looking at.

this killing has repulsed me, but so have many others. And now people seem to be all awake and active and ready to fight?

only last week I am hearing Joe O’Reilly planning to go for a more free/open prison, and then hopefully release. This monster battered a young woman to death, and I actually think by 2030 he will be free. There is something sick with any society that allows this.

Do you always base your beliefs on scenarios?

I'm sure there was a case a few years ago where a woman was opportunistically killed by a roadworker?

I'll try to find it

It's more than possible to utterly condemn anyone killing anyone else, opportunistically or otherwise, without similarly condemning crass communication. They are not the same thing. Those attempting to create some kind of spectrum in which they are, in fact, the same thing, are simply creating division where there shouldn't be any. And that's the problem

Nobody is going to deny that this murder (and indeed all other murders, opportunistic or otherwise) is appalling and that more needs to be done to prevent this kind of thing from happening and punish those who are caught engaging in it. That unified response utterly falls apart when idiots start saying sh!t like "if you make unsavoury jokes in your private whatsapp groups, or are a loudmouth in public, you exist on the same spectrum as murder". It doesn't help, and that's exactly what people in this thread are questioning. They are orders of magnitude, leagues, worlds, universes apart. One is at most a mild inconvenience to some people and an enjoyable occurrence to others, while one is a horrific, monstrous crime which deserves to have the full weight of the justice system applied to it and those engaged in it ruthlessly punished. Same applies to assault, sexual or otherwise.

You are simply never going to convince a large number of people that words - even rude or unwanted words - can ever carry the same kind of weight as physical violence. A huge, huge, huge number of people simply don't think that way and are perplexed by those who do.

To me this woman was killed by a lunatic.

Gender doesn't come in to it at all. Never crossed my mind that there was some deeper meaning here.

Attacking all men by the media is a nice distraction from the lawlessness our so-called judicial system allows in this country to go unpunished I suppose.

With so many walking our streets with 100+ convictions maybe both genders need to have eyeballs in the back of their heads.

Sure and as far as I know, no serious commentator has agreed with what he said. It's been rejected. That's the end of the story, isn't it? Maybe there are some eejits or trolls on twitter who agreed with him, but no serious people in real life think this is anything approaching a serious thought.

Did BoC not call him out on it, or did he just go along with it like a nodding donkey.

It's a distraction from the real issues I pointed out regarding repeat offenders and/or our so-called judicial system.

We have dangerous, really dangerous psychotics walking streets up and down this country.

That's the real scandal.

This gender stuff is a total distraction from the real problems.

This type of discussion brings up so many emotive issues - if anything, society as a whole needs be looked at.

Over the years TV content has become more violent and graphic. Film rating age limits have reduced. All sorts of content is available on-click. Violence passed as ‘entertainment’ enters the social consciousness.

It’s disturbing that society seems to be degenerating. Whilst I agree that most violent crimes are perpetrated by males there is a deeper issue at play which goes beyond gender.

We should aspire to live in a society which is safe for all and we can look out for each other.

If only every girl was like Lady Bloodbath, then a lot of guys would be taught a lot of lessons pretty fast.