How is that "making it clear ... that he did wrong"? "Unnecessary" is not "wrong". Unnecessary means just that - not required. Not mandatory. Optional.

"Sir, you were not required to grope me". "Really? Oh, sweet maiden, I did not realize that I was not required to grope you..." "No, sir, you were not". "Oh, then I am so sorry".

@Sabby The man had an ounce of a brain - he sure did. And a pound of chutzpah, too. Maria said "no". He persevered. She did not leave the scene. So he proceeded. He is smart in the "street savvy" sense and not in the "rocket scientist" sense. A person would pursue his goals if he sees no obstacles on his path. It is that simple.

In terms of how this man would react to an email with a sarcastic tell off - why bother learning it? You send a tell off and put his email in your email's blacklist. Which is where he belongs - such men are the equivalent of spam if not worse than that. Trash/spam. But at least there is a hope that he would behave better next time around, whereas after receiving "it was unnecessary" he will simply move on on the next, similarly naive, target.

TBH, I was surprised to read your account, Maria, because in this account you are like a sweet "girl next door" from the middle of American nowhere and not an urbane independent gal from the Big Apple. In California, we are usually told that we are spoiled rotten by courteous fellow drivers who yield to one another as well as by the pedestrians who actually cross the streets at appropriate places (!!!) and thus would never be able to navigate the streets of Manhattan, what with fearless cabbies and ubiquitous jaywalking. I had no idea that there are such naive sweet tender souls in NYC. But then I have not watched sex and the city - maybe it was covered in that series.

@Maria, I think that "onward and upward" is very possible for you, but, after extracting useful lessons from what happened. Having another incident of groping followed by tepid apologies is not what any friend would want for you. If you find yourself in a situation where you yourself cannot behave assertively, quickly imagine that you had a best friend by your side, gutsy and protective. What would you do in the presence of such a supportive friend? That is exactly what you need to do. If you do not have a good friend, imagine a fairy godmother by your side. I bet that had you imagined a fairy godmother by your side when you could not make the guy understand that "no" meant "no", "ciao" would have been the last word he would ever have heard from you.

I am not sure how we even got to here from the book discussion (I have not read the book), but it is alarming that women keep saying "no", as if on a mission to educate men, rather than safely and promptly leave the scene.

If I were a teacher and had a student, who, after reading a paragraph several times, would not be able to answer even general (to say nothing about detailed) questions on the paragraph, I might read the paragraph out loud to him, to test whether he is an auditory learner rather than a visual learner, and try other tricks, and might eventually escalate the issue to the principal of the school or the learning disability specialist so that they would handle it. I would not keep telling the student to read the paragraph he is not getting over and over again because it is futile. The scenario in which W keeps telling "no, no" to M but does not leave the scene is not very different; the only difference is that a student is unable to comprehend the meaning due to a learning deficit while M is simply being rude, inconsiderate, after instant gratification, and perhaps even enjoying getting the upper hand (ok, now I see how this incident got woven into the thread about dominance).

A tell off email with immediate blocking of all M's contact addresses and numbers electronically is that way of saying "No, I have the upper hand. You might be taller, and you might be stronger, and I am petite and fragile, but I am still telling you that you are a pathetic loser". Hopefully this would make you feel better because the last word would be yours.

Some email clients allow a canned response to specified email addresses. If that is possible, the email client would be bouncing M's emails back with "you blew it spectacularly and your messages will automatically bounce back to you without my reading them"l. Not all email client have that functionality, though.

I hope the difference between "it was unnecessary" and "you blew it spectacularly" is crystal clear.

handing it over to people who have read the book to bring everybody back to the topic of the thread.