severnayazemlya:

rock-a-la-carte said: People in Ireland talk to each other constantly, but I’ve never been creeped on there, even at peak attractiveness - flirted with yeah, but among other things Irishmen don’t disingenuously ‘mistake’ young girls for women like US men (incl white) do

Creeping is preventable, then? I’m surprised – how do they prevent it?

rock-a-la-carte said: I think women get more random interaction not only from men flirting but women feeling other women are safe. But the women (white & black) who talk to me randomly seem to skew quite old, which suggests norms may have shifted over time, or…?

I’m not surprised there. My mother has no problem talking to strangers (or, in one case, cursing out a group of, ah, teens for doing some stupid shit that I can’t remember now), my father says hello to everyone but doesn’t do much beyond that, and acknowledging the presence of people I don’t know well unless I have a good reason to is… not a course of action that registers to me as a thing that is done – what you do is look straight ahead and avoid drawing any attention to yourself.

Uh. On the age thing. Can’t speak to Ireland, but when I was in middle/high school I actually consumed a lot of cultural influence from 1980s Scotland and northern England - I liked Garbage, so I’d read interviews with Shirley Manson where she’d talk about growing up in Edinburgh, I liked Trainspotting so I went to the library and worked through Irvine Welsh’s stuff, in that same library I discovered Vurt and then went through Jeff Noon, also I was into happy hardcore so I ended up picking up all this history about the Summer of Love and British rave culture.

As it stands in the UK you can go to bars at 14 and drink at 16, with some conditions, the impression I got from all the stuff I read is at least in the 1980s it was maybe younger, or younger for beer but not liquor (remember Harry Potter and butterbeer?), or not much enforced (remember Hot Fuzz?), or maybe still.  And the north is all about working drinking class culture after all.

And, I mean, in Scotland at least if you weren’t particularly planning to go on to higher education (working class culture, remember) you’d finish your schooling in 8th or 9th grade and go to work.

So I remember Shirley talking about how like, well, I was 15 and done with school, so off to working as a shopgirl and sleeping around with older men, fucking my boss in the back room, natural as anything. And that seemed to be mirrored in the other accounts. Remember that whole subplot in Trainspotting how Spud goes home with a girl he met in a nightclub and realizes the next morning she’s 14, and they start dating?

So like…

Further on the topic of mistaking young girls: when I was in LA, the first day I started training at my dojo was in early summer. I lived a few blocks away, and was walking down the sidewalk, came up this Mexican high schooler headed the other direction with a nice big juicy rack, after I passed turned to see if the rear was as good, she had looked back and saw me looking and it was like

::hsthh:: (sound of sucking air through teeth), awkward

So I went on to the dojo, started to do my stretches and warmup exercises, and after a few minutes in walks this same girl, wearing a gi and a white or maybe yellow belt. And I’m like

::HSSSSTHHH::, AWKWARD

So I keep doing this and this fireplug of a young woman with a brown was talking to her, clearly had appointed herself the girl’s mentor, “Yeah, you can do it! I know you can, it’ll be great! Come in every day this summer and train hard, and then you’ll be all ready for the seventh grade!”

::HHHHSSSSSSSSSSSTTHHHHHHHHHHHH::