Thursday, March 02, 2006
Email rants
I've said this before, and I'll say it again; QUIT forwarding emails!! Almost everyone dislikes getting that sort of thing, so it's an irritant for them and a counterproductive use of time for you.
If for some unfathomable reason you still feel it necessary to forward stuff, show some frigging sense about how you handle the endless list of headers with 100 email addies each that all too often accompanies these semi-spam epistles. I got one of those saccharine friendship ones recently from someone I've been tight with for nearly 20 years, and I mean a highly intelligent, educated professional woman who should know better, and there was page after page of strangers' email addies prefacing the nonsense; this woman, who's so safety-conscious that even under torture she wouldn't give you anyone's phone # unless they'd told her it was ok, hadn't hesitated to send me and a bunch of other people something with the possibility to cause far more grief for countless strangers. Although I've adopted a policy of pointedly ignoring forwarded things to try to discourage people from sending them to me, I emailed her back to point out that it's NOT ok to pass along people's addies without their permission, and that she needed to delete them all before sending such an email to others. Her reply was that... brace yourself... she didn't know HOW to delete them, with the implication being that that closed the subject!! I assume that what she meant by not knowing how to delete wasn't that she'd never noticed her delete key, but that she doesn't know how to highlight a bunch of text for deletion, but whatever the issue is it doesn't change how this needs to be handled; I told her bluntly that she has to either delete those addies or not forward anything... preferably the latter. No reply from her yet, lol.
The other thing people need to be aware of when they send out bulk emails, whether they're forwarded or just informational letters about their lives sent to everyone they know (most of whom couldn't care less), is that when you CC it means that everyone you send that email to can see the addy of everyone ELSE you sent it to; unless the people you're sending to are ALL family members or a group of friends who all know each other, this is, again, NOT ok. Use BCC instead, as that prevents people from seeing any addy but yours... or better still, write a separate email for each person that includes references to THEIR lives, as letters to loved and liked ones used to always contain.
One of the things I've been doing this year is trying to reduce the time I spend emailing as much as possible. For the 1st time since I got online in 2000, I did NOT send out a "Happy New Year, haven't heard from you, how are you?" email to a zillion people in January; instead, I went through my address book and ruthlessly deleted as many addies as possible, as a symbolic gesture of how I was giving up the lingering non-relationships with folks I used to be in online clubs or forums with and gotten hooked into corresponding with because we were all supposed to be "friends." If I told you how many HOURS I used to spend every day writing emails, you just wouldn't believe it... and mind you, none of those people really added anything worthwhile to my life, they were just babbling about the band we both liked or spewing their problems at me to get an endless stream of support for which they gave nothing in return. There are just a few of those folks who still email me occasionally, and I send replies that are pleasant but not friendly enough to invite more frequent contact; more importantly, I've dropped my previous pattern of replying promptly to people who weren't replying to ME promptly, which slows down the pace a little and gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
There was one person who was emailing me daily, even though she doesn't know me well enough to say anything to me beyond "how are you?" and "how did you sleep?", because she's seriously mentally ill and glommed onto me since she has no real-life friends and I was nice to her, sigh; she just wants someone to complain to every day, and I finally called a halt to it... I had to be VERY blunt, and tell her that she needed to save all that for the shrink that gets PAID to deal with it, that our one-way communication did NOT constitute a friendship, and gave ME nothing of value in return for all the time she was taking up. Because she IS so messed up, I couldn't bring myself to blow her off totally, though, so I still hear from her; I hope I'll be able to detach her from me eventually, but I don't see how yet.
Almost as bad is another fairly unhappy person who writes to me about twice a month; she's started mostly ignoring the contents of my emails and just sending me all new stuff each time. I finally got aggravated enough to call her on it; I replied to a recent email from her with a pointed question about whether or not she'd gotten my last letter, and if so would she please reply to my comments and questions, and I'd then reply to both emails together... and a few days later, here came an email that was an actual REPLY to the previous one I'd sent her, with no attempt to claim that she'd mis-filed it or forgotten about it. I don't know what'd possess a person to keep emailing someone they couldn't be bothered to pay attention to the replies of, but I'm gonna start nailing her every time she does this, and hopefully she'll either get squared away or find someone WILLING to write emails to her that she'll ignore.
The final pet peeve I have about emails is when people can't wait to hear back from you even when you're writing back quickly, and send a 2nd email, and then a 3rd, and all of a sudden you're writing to them all day long trying to catch up... and then, when you take a deep breath, clear a block of time, gather ALL their emails together and reply to them in one gigantic letter, they take this as their cue to never write back. grrrrrrrrrrr
I'd be curious to know if people in general spend as much time emailing, and IM-ing, these days when everyone (except me) has a cell phone and text messaging, not to mention Skype more and more commonly, as they did 5 years ago; if they ever do a long-overdue comprehensive study of online life, I hope that'll be part of it.
Just as an FYI for my regular readers; in the 2 months since I switched to blogging on alternate days, I've caught up alot on sleeping and my backlogged tasks, but it's not nearly enough, and my pile of unread books and magazines hasn't even been touched, so I've decided, regretfully, to reduce to blogging every 3rd day. This is NOT an indication that I'm burning out or losing interest; I'd still absolutely prefer to blog daily, but I need to get things done, and sleep over 5 hours, more often than every 2nd day... I still hope that once I'm caught up I can blog more often, but either way the posts will keep coming.
If for some unfathomable reason you still feel it necessary to forward stuff, show some frigging sense about how you handle the endless list of headers with 100 email addies each that all too often accompanies these semi-spam epistles. I got one of those saccharine friendship ones recently from someone I've been tight with for nearly 20 years, and I mean a highly intelligent, educated professional woman who should know better, and there was page after page of strangers' email addies prefacing the nonsense; this woman, who's so safety-conscious that even under torture she wouldn't give you anyone's phone # unless they'd told her it was ok, hadn't hesitated to send me and a bunch of other people something with the possibility to cause far more grief for countless strangers. Although I've adopted a policy of pointedly ignoring forwarded things to try to discourage people from sending them to me, I emailed her back to point out that it's NOT ok to pass along people's addies without their permission, and that she needed to delete them all before sending such an email to others. Her reply was that... brace yourself... she didn't know HOW to delete them, with the implication being that that closed the subject!! I assume that what she meant by not knowing how to delete wasn't that she'd never noticed her delete key, but that she doesn't know how to highlight a bunch of text for deletion, but whatever the issue is it doesn't change how this needs to be handled; I told her bluntly that she has to either delete those addies or not forward anything... preferably the latter. No reply from her yet, lol.
The other thing people need to be aware of when they send out bulk emails, whether they're forwarded or just informational letters about their lives sent to everyone they know (most of whom couldn't care less), is that when you CC it means that everyone you send that email to can see the addy of everyone ELSE you sent it to; unless the people you're sending to are ALL family members or a group of friends who all know each other, this is, again, NOT ok. Use BCC instead, as that prevents people from seeing any addy but yours... or better still, write a separate email for each person that includes references to THEIR lives, as letters to loved and liked ones used to always contain.
One of the things I've been doing this year is trying to reduce the time I spend emailing as much as possible. For the 1st time since I got online in 2000, I did NOT send out a "Happy New Year, haven't heard from you, how are you?" email to a zillion people in January; instead, I went through my address book and ruthlessly deleted as many addies as possible, as a symbolic gesture of how I was giving up the lingering non-relationships with folks I used to be in online clubs or forums with and gotten hooked into corresponding with because we were all supposed to be "friends." If I told you how many HOURS I used to spend every day writing emails, you just wouldn't believe it... and mind you, none of those people really added anything worthwhile to my life, they were just babbling about the band we both liked or spewing their problems at me to get an endless stream of support for which they gave nothing in return. There are just a few of those folks who still email me occasionally, and I send replies that are pleasant but not friendly enough to invite more frequent contact; more importantly, I've dropped my previous pattern of replying promptly to people who weren't replying to ME promptly, which slows down the pace a little and gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
There was one person who was emailing me daily, even though she doesn't know me well enough to say anything to me beyond "how are you?" and "how did you sleep?", because she's seriously mentally ill and glommed onto me since she has no real-life friends and I was nice to her, sigh; she just wants someone to complain to every day, and I finally called a halt to it... I had to be VERY blunt, and tell her that she needed to save all that for the shrink that gets PAID to deal with it, that our one-way communication did NOT constitute a friendship, and gave ME nothing of value in return for all the time she was taking up. Because she IS so messed up, I couldn't bring myself to blow her off totally, though, so I still hear from her; I hope I'll be able to detach her from me eventually, but I don't see how yet.
Almost as bad is another fairly unhappy person who writes to me about twice a month; she's started mostly ignoring the contents of my emails and just sending me all new stuff each time. I finally got aggravated enough to call her on it; I replied to a recent email from her with a pointed question about whether or not she'd gotten my last letter, and if so would she please reply to my comments and questions, and I'd then reply to both emails together... and a few days later, here came an email that was an actual REPLY to the previous one I'd sent her, with no attempt to claim that she'd mis-filed it or forgotten about it. I don't know what'd possess a person to keep emailing someone they couldn't be bothered to pay attention to the replies of, but I'm gonna start nailing her every time she does this, and hopefully she'll either get squared away or find someone WILLING to write emails to her that she'll ignore.
The final pet peeve I have about emails is when people can't wait to hear back from you even when you're writing back quickly, and send a 2nd email, and then a 3rd, and all of a sudden you're writing to them all day long trying to catch up... and then, when you take a deep breath, clear a block of time, gather ALL their emails together and reply to them in one gigantic letter, they take this as their cue to never write back. grrrrrrrrrrr
I'd be curious to know if people in general spend as much time emailing, and IM-ing, these days when everyone (except me) has a cell phone and text messaging, not to mention Skype more and more commonly, as they did 5 years ago; if they ever do a long-overdue comprehensive study of online life, I hope that'll be part of it.
Just as an FYI for my regular readers; in the 2 months since I switched to blogging on alternate days, I've caught up alot on sleeping and my backlogged tasks, but it's not nearly enough, and my pile of unread books and magazines hasn't even been touched, so I've decided, regretfully, to reduce to blogging every 3rd day. This is NOT an indication that I'm burning out or losing interest; I'd still absolutely prefer to blog daily, but I need to get things done, and sleep over 5 hours, more often than every 2nd day... I still hope that once I'm caught up I can blog more often, but either way the posts will keep coming.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Can your brain tell time?
Before I get to the main topic, take a look in my sidebar; I've got a neat new calendar doodad, complete with a coffee monster that looks kinda like Nessie (there's a whole loop of action it goes through, so if it already has Nessie showing when you check it out wait a few seconds and it'll re-start)... and no, I don't know what the stuff in Japanese that comes up when you click where it tells you to means. This was a simple enough addition to make, but it still took a fair chunk of time because that inexplicable wide strip of orange along the bottom of the calendar bothered me enough to make me try to find a way to crop it off; Flash images scale themselves to whatever size table, frame or whatever you try to put them into, it turns out, and, although a programmer would probably know a way to fix it, I was thwarted. For now it's not that big of a deal, but if I'm still bugged by it once the novelty of the doodad wears off I might yank it; time will tell.
Oh, and I've got a couple of eBay anecdotes, too: I got a shirt in the mail today that was folded up so small and tight that it was literally in a sandwich bag, and I feared that major ironing was in my future (and I don't really know how to iron), but I shook it out and it was totally wrinkle-free... it's a vintage shirt of old-style polyester that you CAN'T wrinkle, what a relief!! The other amazing thing was when I opened a package the contents of which were immediately identifiable as an elegant high-end business shirt, black with a little bit of a pattern, and dumped it out only to find that TWO items had been in the envelope, both of the same material. My 1st thought was that the seller had made a mistake and sent me 2 of the same shirt, but upon unfolding them both I discovered, to my puzzlement, that one of them was SLACKS. A note from the seller fell out of them, and said that since the slacks matched the shirt, and she hadn't been able to sell them, she'd included them as a GIFT. I was really excited... until I saw the tag on the slacks, which said they were a size 6, which I might be able to wedge myself into if I wanted to do a tight jeans thing but was a disaster with slacks. Or was it? These were designer slacks, and had that poofy hip thing, so... was it possible? I hurriedly tried them on; perfect fit!! HOORAY!! I put the shirt on too, and, because of the lightweight material and the little pattern it sorta looked like pajamas; if I wear the shirt open, though, with a solid shirt underneath, voila, I've got a pantsuit, a NICE one, that I could wear anywhere but the most conservative offices, plus I can wear the pieces separately for a more standard (non-geek) office.
Here's the BIG thing about this: Both of these items are new with all their tags, which show them as having come from one of those stores that takes leftovers from nicer department stores and sells them at a discount, and the prices they were sold at were, brace yourself, $64 for the shirt and $74 for the slacks, so imagine what they must have originally sold for... and all I paid, even with shipping, was $16.84!! :-)
Hmmmm, my supposedly main topic's gonna look puny after that long "preamble," lol... oh well. Last night, I was having a dream in which I was looking at an eBay auction for a shirt (surprise surprise); there were a bunch of measurements and other #'s I couldn't quite identify all in a block of text, and then there was what I assumed was a price, "4.04," just like that without the dollar sign, and as I tried to figure out if it was the starting bid, the shipping, or what, it kept getting bigger, as if to make the point that it was important and I needed to figure it out... and then I woke up. I glanced at the digital clock; it was 4:04. I thought I was still half-asleep, and having one of my lingering-dream overlaps of computer screens and clocks, but no amount of eye-blinking and head shaking changed anything; it was 4:04AM.
:-O
How did I KNOW?!! There are no grandfather or cuckoo clocks in my home bonging/tweeting at the top of the hour to have given my subconscious mind a hint that 4AM had just passed, and I'd been asleep for hours at that point, so it's not as if my brain was just adding a few minutes to the last time I'd seen; is this a psychic thing, or is my brain keeping unbelievably accurate time, even when I'm sleeping?
Needless to say, we did NOT evolve to tell time in terms more exact than sunrise, just after sunrise, morning, etc, so it doesn't seem possible for the human brain to keep track of time accurate to the minute without conscious effort like counting the seconds (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi... did you ever wonder what people in other countries who've never heard of that state use for this?), but... I've got a long history of waking up a few minutes before my alarm goes off, even when my schedule varies wildly and my wakeup time is all over the map, and also go through phases where I'll wake up at the exact same time every night no matter when I went to bed, not for any particular reason, just waking up, seeing the time, and going back to sleep, and this tells me that something purposeful is going on-it can't all be coincidence. I'm one of these folks that's almost psycho about keeping track of the time, and I look at a clock or my watch constantly; could this have trained my brain to keep unusually close tabs on the time? CAN the organic brain do that kind of time-keeping... what would it base the passing of X # of seconds or minutes on, without a swinging pendulum or vibrating quartz crystal to help it? Can it tap into something in the very fabric of karma that's tied into the flow of time? I don't expect to know anytime soon, but it's an interesting line of thought...
Oh, and I've got a couple of eBay anecdotes, too: I got a shirt in the mail today that was folded up so small and tight that it was literally in a sandwich bag, and I feared that major ironing was in my future (and I don't really know how to iron), but I shook it out and it was totally wrinkle-free... it's a vintage shirt of old-style polyester that you CAN'T wrinkle, what a relief!! The other amazing thing was when I opened a package the contents of which were immediately identifiable as an elegant high-end business shirt, black with a little bit of a pattern, and dumped it out only to find that TWO items had been in the envelope, both of the same material. My 1st thought was that the seller had made a mistake and sent me 2 of the same shirt, but upon unfolding them both I discovered, to my puzzlement, that one of them was SLACKS. A note from the seller fell out of them, and said that since the slacks matched the shirt, and she hadn't been able to sell them, she'd included them as a GIFT. I was really excited... until I saw the tag on the slacks, which said they were a size 6, which I might be able to wedge myself into if I wanted to do a tight jeans thing but was a disaster with slacks. Or was it? These were designer slacks, and had that poofy hip thing, so... was it possible? I hurriedly tried them on; perfect fit!! HOORAY!! I put the shirt on too, and, because of the lightweight material and the little pattern it sorta looked like pajamas; if I wear the shirt open, though, with a solid shirt underneath, voila, I've got a pantsuit, a NICE one, that I could wear anywhere but the most conservative offices, plus I can wear the pieces separately for a more standard (non-geek) office.
Here's the BIG thing about this: Both of these items are new with all their tags, which show them as having come from one of those stores that takes leftovers from nicer department stores and sells them at a discount, and the prices they were sold at were, brace yourself, $64 for the shirt and $74 for the slacks, so imagine what they must have originally sold for... and all I paid, even with shipping, was $16.84!! :-)
Hmmmm, my supposedly main topic's gonna look puny after that long "preamble," lol... oh well. Last night, I was having a dream in which I was looking at an eBay auction for a shirt (surprise surprise); there were a bunch of measurements and other #'s I couldn't quite identify all in a block of text, and then there was what I assumed was a price, "4.04," just like that without the dollar sign, and as I tried to figure out if it was the starting bid, the shipping, or what, it kept getting bigger, as if to make the point that it was important and I needed to figure it out... and then I woke up. I glanced at the digital clock; it was 4:04. I thought I was still half-asleep, and having one of my lingering-dream overlaps of computer screens and clocks, but no amount of eye-blinking and head shaking changed anything; it was 4:04AM.
:-O
How did I KNOW?!! There are no grandfather or cuckoo clocks in my home bonging/tweeting at the top of the hour to have given my subconscious mind a hint that 4AM had just passed, and I'd been asleep for hours at that point, so it's not as if my brain was just adding a few minutes to the last time I'd seen; is this a psychic thing, or is my brain keeping unbelievably accurate time, even when I'm sleeping?
Needless to say, we did NOT evolve to tell time in terms more exact than sunrise, just after sunrise, morning, etc, so it doesn't seem possible for the human brain to keep track of time accurate to the minute without conscious effort like counting the seconds (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi... did you ever wonder what people in other countries who've never heard of that state use for this?), but... I've got a long history of waking up a few minutes before my alarm goes off, even when my schedule varies wildly and my wakeup time is all over the map, and also go through phases where I'll wake up at the exact same time every night no matter when I went to bed, not for any particular reason, just waking up, seeing the time, and going back to sleep, and this tells me that something purposeful is going on-it can't all be coincidence. I'm one of these folks that's almost psycho about keeping track of the time, and I look at a clock or my watch constantly; could this have trained my brain to keep unusually close tabs on the time? CAN the organic brain do that kind of time-keeping... what would it base the passing of X # of seconds or minutes on, without a swinging pendulum or vibrating quartz crystal to help it? Can it tap into something in the very fabric of karma that's tied into the flow of time? I don't expect to know anytime soon, but it's an interesting line of thought...
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Are women really naturally less sexually aggressive?
Men are instinctive sexual pursuers, yes, as their genes push them to have sex with as many women as possible, and thus to spread their seed as widely as possible, which is their best chance of passing on their DNA. And yes, women's genes tell them to not rush into wanton sex, but to check out all the available males and pick the fittest ones to have sex with, because those men will give them the fittest children and provide the best for them, giving THEIR DNA the best chance of being passed on. The problem with those biological drives is that in the modern world they're thwarted by clothing that covers the body parts that're meant to be sexual signals, and by the bathing and deodorizing that eliminates the natural odors we respond to, making it necessary for us to use actions or words to indicate the desire for sexual contact. My question is; does the societal "norm" of men always asking for it and women usually saying "no" represent each gender's natural level of sexual aggressiveness or just the idea that a woman should show herself to be "pure" in order to make a man certain that he won't be raising another man's children should she become pregnant? There are still debates raging as to whether or not women feel sexual desire as strongly or as often as men, but let's sidestep those unprovable issues and focus instead on the concept of the behavior of modern men and women under circumstances where they'd feel equally free to show sexual interest; do women show LESS assertiveness than men about trying to get their hands on the ones they want?
What brought this to mind was a music video that showed a very common thing; a bunch of girls getting onto the stage and flinging themselves onto the band members, in some cases so many girls per guy that the latter were no longer visible except maybe for the tops of their heads, or even got dragged down to the ground. Before you say "so what?" ask yourself this; have you ever seen a FEMALE performer get mobbed and clutched at onstage by a bunch of GUYS? No. Have you ever wondered WHY? It's not like guys can't get onto the stage; they're bigger and stronger than girls, so they'd have an EASIER time of it if they wanted to try. Can you even IMAGINE a bunch of guys jumping onstage and group-groping a female performer? No? Does this disparity make it seem like women are LESS sexually aggressive than men?
You might argue that those girls aren't trying to have sex there on stage, and, although they ARE climbing on those guys because they're attracted to them, you'd have a point; as someone who spent a reasonable amount of time backstage and hanging out with musicians, however, I can assure you that, given the chance to approach without the threat of being dragged away by a roadie, girls line up to wrap themselves around the performers in the least subtle ways imaginable... and the equivalent thing does NOT happen to female performers from their male fans... so WHO is more sexually aggressive?
I myself, in my rocker chick days in the 80's, wouldn't hesitate to get inside a musician's jacket with him, put a hand in his shirt and fluff his chest hair, or fondle his butt right out on the Sunset Strip or in a club... and, although they'd have the expected male physical response to this, they'd be FAR less bold in return, even with girls who were doing more extreme things to them than *I* was willing to do in public in front of my friends. Looking back, it's amazing to realize that very young women, teenagers even, were more aggressive than much older and more sexually experienced men, but that's the way it was... and most likely still is, since women in general are far more open and forceful in their sexual pursuit nowadays than they were back then.
I've even read that younger women are getting SO aggressive that men are being intimidated into impotence and falling back on Viagra at ages when you'd expect them to be, er, granite-like at the slightest provocation; I think the idea of women being less sexually aggressive will one day go the way of the old myth that women don't enjoy sex.
This topic brought back a memory of one time when I WAS pretty thoroughly groped out in public by a man; he wasn't a musician, though, he was a drag queen, although out of drag at the time. No, really, lol. I snuck up behind him and covered his eyes; he could have gotten away easily, but like most people he wanted to guess at whose hands those were instead. He tried to persuade me to talk, but he knew me well enough to recognize my voice, so I gently shook his head in refusal. He attempted to get his boyfriend to give him a clue as to my identity, but I shook my head at him, so he nodded to me, grinning, and declined to help out. Thinking he was clever, my victim started trying to figure out who I was by feeling around behind him... which would have worked really well with quite a few of the men he knew, as he was young, hot and active. He groped my groin, but failed to make the connection between the lack of, um, protrusions and my not being male, as he assumed I was another drag queen and had male parts tucked away; it's hard to say who was more amused at that point, his boyfriend or my husband... I stood my ground without flinching, although I rolled my eyes dramatically. The moment of truth came when he grabbed one of my boobs, braless under a thin t-shirt, leapt away with a shriek of "Oh my God, that's a REAL breast!!" and spun around to confront me; I, and all the observers, were laughing uproariously as he gaped at me in shock. "I can't believe you let me DO that!!" he squawked; I replied, "Hey, that was probably my last chance to get felt up by a hot 25 year old." "I can't believe I touched a TIT" he marveled, looking at his hand as if he expected it to have been marked by the experience; "Yeah, and then some" I reminded him... he looked vaguely faint. My final volley was, "That's probably the freakiest 'sexual' thing you ever did, huh?"; he had to laugh and agree... and then made the point that it'd be the ONLY such incident EVER in his life.
Kinda cool in a way, don't you think? ;-)
What brought this to mind was a music video that showed a very common thing; a bunch of girls getting onto the stage and flinging themselves onto the band members, in some cases so many girls per guy that the latter were no longer visible except maybe for the tops of their heads, or even got dragged down to the ground. Before you say "so what?" ask yourself this; have you ever seen a FEMALE performer get mobbed and clutched at onstage by a bunch of GUYS? No. Have you ever wondered WHY? It's not like guys can't get onto the stage; they're bigger and stronger than girls, so they'd have an EASIER time of it if they wanted to try. Can you even IMAGINE a bunch of guys jumping onstage and group-groping a female performer? No? Does this disparity make it seem like women are LESS sexually aggressive than men?
You might argue that those girls aren't trying to have sex there on stage, and, although they ARE climbing on those guys because they're attracted to them, you'd have a point; as someone who spent a reasonable amount of time backstage and hanging out with musicians, however, I can assure you that, given the chance to approach without the threat of being dragged away by a roadie, girls line up to wrap themselves around the performers in the least subtle ways imaginable... and the equivalent thing does NOT happen to female performers from their male fans... so WHO is more sexually aggressive?
I myself, in my rocker chick days in the 80's, wouldn't hesitate to get inside a musician's jacket with him, put a hand in his shirt and fluff his chest hair, or fondle his butt right out on the Sunset Strip or in a club... and, although they'd have the expected male physical response to this, they'd be FAR less bold in return, even with girls who were doing more extreme things to them than *I* was willing to do in public in front of my friends. Looking back, it's amazing to realize that very young women, teenagers even, were more aggressive than much older and more sexually experienced men, but that's the way it was... and most likely still is, since women in general are far more open and forceful in their sexual pursuit nowadays than they were back then.
I've even read that younger women are getting SO aggressive that men are being intimidated into impotence and falling back on Viagra at ages when you'd expect them to be, er, granite-like at the slightest provocation; I think the idea of women being less sexually aggressive will one day go the way of the old myth that women don't enjoy sex.
This topic brought back a memory of one time when I WAS pretty thoroughly groped out in public by a man; he wasn't a musician, though, he was a drag queen, although out of drag at the time. No, really, lol. I snuck up behind him and covered his eyes; he could have gotten away easily, but like most people he wanted to guess at whose hands those were instead. He tried to persuade me to talk, but he knew me well enough to recognize my voice, so I gently shook his head in refusal. He attempted to get his boyfriend to give him a clue as to my identity, but I shook my head at him, so he nodded to me, grinning, and declined to help out. Thinking he was clever, my victim started trying to figure out who I was by feeling around behind him... which would have worked really well with quite a few of the men he knew, as he was young, hot and active. He groped my groin, but failed to make the connection between the lack of, um, protrusions and my not being male, as he assumed I was another drag queen and had male parts tucked away; it's hard to say who was more amused at that point, his boyfriend or my husband... I stood my ground without flinching, although I rolled my eyes dramatically. The moment of truth came when he grabbed one of my boobs, braless under a thin t-shirt, leapt away with a shriek of "Oh my God, that's a REAL breast!!" and spun around to confront me; I, and all the observers, were laughing uproariously as he gaped at me in shock. "I can't believe you let me DO that!!" he squawked; I replied, "Hey, that was probably my last chance to get felt up by a hot 25 year old." "I can't believe I touched a TIT" he marveled, looking at his hand as if he expected it to have been marked by the experience; "Yeah, and then some" I reminded him... he looked vaguely faint. My final volley was, "That's probably the freakiest 'sexual' thing you ever did, huh?"; he had to laugh and agree... and then made the point that it'd be the ONLY such incident EVER in his life.
Kinda cool in a way, don't you think? ;-)
