What would you do if you were in this situation?

At this point I'd probably analyze the situation a bit. Years ago I went to this presentation for a thing called orgasmic meditation and the guy related a story where this girl that agreed to do something with him admitted sex is the only way she knows to connect, and they didn't go through with it. By the way, from some recent post from people in the know online it's been revealed that the founder of the thing, who is a woman seems to have some kind of trauma response. I don't remember the details but one thing that was posted was a clip of her kind of saying it's not a problem to have sex with underaged people or something.

Anyway in general I kind of feel some people translate emotional intimacy to physical intimacy, and therefore "being seen" as a person and where they're coming from etc. would kind of translate to flashing/exhibitionism.

 

Technically, if you were uncomfortable with it that’s trauma, and you were traumatized. It wasn’t debilitating, and trauma isn’t automatically bad. When you do push-ups, that’s physically traumatizing to your musculature, and you rebuild to get stronger. In the same way, when you process psychological trauma properly, you learn how to deal with other similar problems and you’re more resilient.

So why did they do it? They probably got the same message that you did. When a male exposes his bits to a woman, it’s bad but when a woman does the same it’s naughty. Or you’re on a double decker, does that mean it’s cheeky and/or rude? They thought they would get positive attention, and they felt safe doing it. So that’s good.
The reason women can get away with overt sexual display in public while men can potentially serve prison time is because women have traditionally been the ones to limit sex on every level. This is because, (borrowing from that evolutionary book I was talking about) sex costs more for women on every level. Men produce a lot of tiny mobile sperm, women produce a relatively huge egg. She risks injury during coitus. She forms a massive life support system in her body, she gains weight and loses mobility which reduces her ability to secure resources and fight or fly from predators, she is at even greater risk for even more injury and pain during delivery. She lactates to feed her child, continuing to invest calories that could have been spent on herself. She can not deny parentage, and her responsibility if the child proves too much for her to handle. In contrast, biologically, all men have to do is 30 seconds of fun times. Women stand so much more to lose, they have the right to say no. They have a right to standards, especially in terms of material resources. They have a right to put their potential mates through an arduous battery of tests, to ensure this mate satisfies her standards, and they traditionally, typically take full advantage of these rights. Not just humans or even primates either. Across the animal kingdom, females have more risk in procreative activities, and females have the prerogative to say no. They say no a lot. When a male makes a sexual advance, especially one that is too much, too soon, there is an implicit threat. It means he doesn’t care about her social prerogative to say no. Since most men are larger and stronger than most women, he could force the issue. This is why it is criminal for men to expose their genitals in public. It’s too egregious a line, he’s demonstrated a total lack of regard for cultural norms, he’s a menace to society and must be formally stopped. Another piece to consider is whether there were any other women on the bus. For all the talk about how men control female sexuality, sociologists have found in developed nations at least, women regulate one another’s sexuality a lot more and they do it through stigma and shame. The theory for why is, women have an interest in keeping the value of sex at a premium. If sex is more common, an individual woman has to work harder or take more risk to attract attention (or keep) from the potential mate they want. Interestingly, the same researchers found women from lower economic demographics are more conservative with sex. It contradicts the right leaning narrative that poor people stay poor because they maintain poverty values. Instead, wealthy women have the capital to ensure that, even if they are impulsive and mistakes are made, they can make that little problem go away. Poor women have less margin for error, they take more risk with sex, so they restrict it proportionately. Men don’t risk nearly as much with sex so they tend to take sexual opportunities where they can. They even create sexual opportunities for themselves, offering to pay money to women to pretend they like him enough to behave sexually toward him, a sort of placating to the libido and an ego boost, all the more pathetic because it’s so clearly based in a lie. Men only turn down sexual opportunity, from brief flirting to the actual deed, when they perceive some risk. A man in a committed relationship, for example, might not want to give his mate reason to fear his commitment to her, or he might believe impulsively looking at other women will degrade his satisfaction with his own present or future mate. So, to summarize an unnecessarily long and detailed post, they did it because they wanted attention and believed they had nothing to lose. Men shouldn’t and usually don’t do it because we have a lot to lose.

I have never been in a situation like this, but I’ve also never lived in a city with enough population density to justify a double decker bus. I’m also from poorer and/or more religiously influenced social circles, so the odds have been stacked against. I have been uncomfortable with how direct women can be, but I am not the sharpest light bulb in the sea when it comes to social interactions, and men tend to overestimate female interest so who knows what was really going on? I can say, in those situations I did what you did and tried to ignore it. I perceived little to no reward and a lot of risk, so it was an easy choice.

 

I can't imagine a bus having two floors!! In all seriousness, I would've reacted the exact same way.