As she walked the aisles, MR said in an interview, she sensed a man standing close behind her. She turned to confront him and noticed that he was a good six inches taller than her. He was talking in graphic detail about sexual things he wanted to do to her. “You’re so disgusting, get away from me,” she told him, and hurried off to find her friend.

Still, he stayed close, and for a few tense minutes the two of them locked eyes while she waited in line to pay. When at last he left, she thought that was the end of it – until, back outside in the chill of the winter morning, she felt something cold against the back of her leggings.

The man had ejaculated on her.

“I didn’t know how to react. I wanted to kill this man,” said MR, who was 47 at the time, recalling the horror and helplessness she felt as her friend wiped her off with towels. (The Guardian has verified MR’s identity but is not publishing her full name to protect her privacy.)

Hours later, on the advice of a sister who worked in law enforcement, she fished her soiled leggings out of the garbage and took them back to the store to report what had happened. A clerk listened to her account and, not seeming to realize that MR understood Spanish, shouted to a colleague in a backroom: “Tenemos otra.”

“We’ve got another one.”

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    Has it broken down, or is the basic level of degeneracy just amplified?

    I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that society is still at the most advanced level it has ever been, violent crimes have dropped steadily across most of the world. But now when isolated incidents like the above happen, the internet amplifies them into being a bigger deal than it really is on a population scale.

    • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      3 days ago

      It’s a pretty big fucking deal for men to be encouraged and celebrated for publicly ejaculating on women.

      • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        16 cases nationwide. This is not an epidemic. It’s a handful of people on one of the chans egging eachother on. And yes, they are degenerate creeps and should be punished but this is not “A THING”. It’s just more polarizing man vs woman bs.

        • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          A year later, with the lawsuit still mired in preliminary motions and no trial date in sight, Greenberg’s research team has dug up 63 officially documented sex crimes in all – fewer than five a year before 2020 and as many as 18 a year since the December 2023 attack on MR. Sixteen involved masturbation or ejaculation. The company’s attempts to disavow this, Greenberg said in an interview, amounted to “a plethora of stupid arguments” and only underlined what she saw as a pattern of poor corporate governance.

          • stringere@sh.itjust.works
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            3 days ago

            But they’re not defending the gooners. They’re pointimg out that, while this is absolutely disgusting behavior, the frequency, or lack thereof, is not indicative of a social pandemic.

                • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
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                  3 days ago

                  They are directly downplaying the crimes.

                  Comments like this:

                  This feels extremely clickbaitey.

                  16 cases over a year and a half, most centered around the same location, is hardly a “national epidemic”.

                  They are absolutely downplaying the seriousness of these crimes.

                  • blazeknave@lemmy.world
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                    3 days ago

                    I think they’re saying that there were always at least 47 rapey creeps doing this horrific dehumanizing and agency stealing SA act, but now we hear about it strung together.

        • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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          16 documented cases at that retailer alone. The article said nothing about the actual prevalence of the crime, nor did you. So you’re drawing conclusions based on no data.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      But now when isolated incidents like the above happen, the internet amplifies them into being a bigger deal than it really is on a population scale.

      You sound like this guy:

      There’s always room for improvement. Like I thought that was the entire basis of Critical Theory is that there is no end to history, there is no perfect society, we can always improve, and improvement must come through rational and thoughtful critique of the status quo, whatever the status quo may be, forever and ever. Marx’s society in perpetual revolution within itself.

      Sure crime may never be zero, but acting like the solution is to just throw up your hands and say “what’s the big deal if some women are mentally scarred, it’s only a few of them! The world is doing better than it ever has, the arc of history bends towards justice! (editors note: barf) Why would we make the world better just for them?”

      The answer to that question is because they are a part of that world too. Also, these are not the only crimes enabled by how the Dollar empire operates.

    • Wren@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      It’s not isolated when it has a whole online culture devoted to it.

      It happened to me and it’s happened to people I know.

    • ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.com
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      The problem becomes that for all the benefits that instant communications enabled by the internet brings, it also enables people that once would have been the isolated weirdos previously keeping their nonsense in check through public pressure to find each other as well.

      The net effect is that they then feel validated in their actions, same way people in your everyday social platforms get a little bump by doing some recent ‘challenge’ that would otherwise go unnoticed.