[LMB] [SPAM?] Re: OT: stalkers

[Martin Gill]

On 22/05/07, paal at gis.net <paal at gis.net> wrote:
> > Has anyone noticed how much stalking resembles old fashioned romance
> > taken to extremes?
>
> What, you never listened to the lyrics of  the song that includes, "I'll
> be watching you.... Ev'ry breath you make/Ev'ry step you take/I'll be
> watching you... Since you've been gone I've been lost without a trace...
> your embrace... I'll be watching you, I'll be watching you..."  I think
> of it as "the stalker song" myself.
>

Having been (still am) unlucky in love, I've sometimes wondered if
that's the result of me not being "determined" enough.

I've had loads of people (respectable and trustworthy) tell me that
women like to play "hard to get". That if "every man accepted no for
an answer the human race wouldn't exist" etc etc.

For some reason a scene from Lethal Weapon II jumps into my mind at
this point. The scene were Gibbson is in the supermarket and the lady
says "no", and he says "come on, everyone says 'no', say 'yes' be
different", then she says "yes".

This behaviour isn't limited to us humans, often enough in the animal
kingdom the mating rituals start with the female rejecting the male,
who then has to persist, in effect persuade the female to accept him.

I just wonder if stalking, as such, is actually a bi-product of this
behaviour. If you stalk enough you get a mate, if you don't stalk you
lose out. If you stalk too much, you get a jail cell. Admittedly by
the second or third "no" the guy should have the good grace to
sod-off, but if you have the above societal wisdoms running around in
your head, you might keep wondering if the next answer will be a
"yes".

Interestingly enough... the UK law (Harassment Act 1997) on good ol'
Mel Gibbson above would consider his actions as harassment "if a
reasonable person (consider members of a jury) deems what is happening
to you to be harassment" [1] (depending on how "occasion" is defined,
I suspect).

I just wonder if the ladies on this list could answer that... how many
times have you said no to a guy ( a brush off, or ignoring him would
also count as a "no") who you then ended up going out with or even
marrying? Or are these titbits of folk-wisdom just us men trying to
excuse our persistence?

In end, like most things I suspect, nothing is black and white. The
hard part is finding where the line is drawn. What one person might
consider "reasonable" another might not.

[1] https://secure.nss.org.uk/3933/myths.html#THREE (a stalking
charity in the UK, with vast quantities of advice)

--Martin