This Is Just Exactly And Entirely Right

The ever-impressive Captain Awkward cuts to the heart of the issue once more -- two separate issues, actually, because that is how damn impressively she rolls.

Briefly: a young woman writes that her non-neurotypical male acquaintance, who has confessed to an unreciprocated crush on her, continues to text her after she's told him she needs space. 

What oh what to do?  We people -- lady-parts people, social-anxiety people, diversity-valuing people -- we know that's just the start of the question, right? We need a solution that won't hurt his feelings, that we can be sure isn't disrespecting him, that answers his questions and doesn't leave us feeling guilty. These are the implicit conditions for our response, yes?

No, says the Captain. Not just no, but hell no: "Block him and be done with this tedious mess", she advises (bold from the original). 

And regarding the conditions? The beginning of her response is a master class in Everybody Is Responsible for Their Own Shit:

a) I’d like us to all stop associating jerkish behavior and ignoring boundaries with neuro-divergence and then making terrible ableist logic loops about excusing/ignoring terrible behavior. 

b) I’d like us to massively and collectively shift the conversation about Men Behaving Badly away from “What does he intend, are we sure he means to be an asshole?” or “What is he capable of understanding?” and toward “Do I want this/Am I enjoying this/Is this working for me?”

c) [...] I think you can just tell irritating dudes to shove it and expect that they’ll get the message, and moreover, I think we must all practice this important life skill, when stakes are low and matters are small, so that hopefully we may practice it on a large (dare I say national) scale. 

Forever dissecting what a person’s exact intentions are when they do something extremely irritating and/or outright harmful, arguing that things have to cross a certain threshold of both impact and intent before we are allowed to speak up or resist or else we take the blame for the entire situation, and applying a ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standards about people’s intentions to friendships and social connections is a dangerous cesspit of distraction and we need to be done with it. We need, on a massive scale, a reorienting of ethics and expectations about good behavior away from journeys of personal development and back onto the impact of our actions in the world, we need to worry approximately 1% about the well-being and growth and character of creeps and harassers (and racists) and 99% about the well-being and safety of their targets. 

Do read the entire thing.