A few days ago I was confronted by a problem-seeker, a man who lives in same apartment building. (See here for the first post about it in case you missed it.) Today I met him again, as I came home from work. It was in the hall, so on “neutral ground”.
At first he tried to ignore me, but of course I wouldn’t let him do that. He didn’t ignore me nude, now he wasn’t going to ignore me dressed. I asked him if there was something he’d like to say to me, because I had something to tell him. He asked if I was going to take my clothes off again. Yes, absolutely, but not in the hall of course. To that he shared that he still thought it strange and wrong. I replied that I still think that staring into other people’s house the way he did is strange and wrong, and that it was his own fault that he saw someone nude in their own house. His response was that this wasn’t true, if I had not gone around naked he wouldn’t have seen me naked. Then I just asked him how he would like it if I were to appear in front of his window, fully dressed, and stare into his house in the same way that he’d employed.
“You won’t see me naked,” he said to that. Well, that wasn’t exactly the point. I just wanted to know if he’d have a problem with it, when I were to stare at him while he sat watching TV, or reading the paper, or doing something else. “Not at all,” was his first reaction, but when I urged him to really think about that, to envision it, he changed his mind: it wouldn’t be very pleasant.
Then I left him standing there with the words: “I don’t mind. Look into my house all you want. But don’t scream at me when you see something you don’t like. I’m right and you’re wrong, and next time I will call the police for harassment.”
