‘Can. We. Just. Exist!?!?!’: Creep refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer even as woman practically begs him to walk away

There is no shortage of harassing videos spread across the web, as people — typically women — find themselves followed, chatted up, and even touched by weirdos who refuse to accept a rejection.

Some of these ceaseless examples end with scary and even dangerous situations, while others are just impossibly annoying. Sometimes a gal just wants to exist in the world unmolested, and there are certain people who simply can’t accept that reality. So they push, and push, and push until people like TikToker @averymendillo have had more than enough.

The TikTok user joined the laundry list of women grappling with harassment on a daily basis and documented the entire experience so viewers could share in her distress. In a video that has since racked up several hundred thousand likes and even more views, Avery can be seen sunning herself in a public park. A man’s approach immediately set off alarm bells — and for good reason.

The conversation is unsettling from the very start, as Avery’s unwelcome fawner asks if he can sit near her — she politely declines — asks after her boyfriend — why do they require another man to act right? — and finds every excuse to linger in her space.

By midway through the video, Avery is being far more direct, blatantly — but still politely — stating that she would “love it if you could walk away now.” Even that’s not enough to deter her creepy latch-on, who continues to pester her until Avery’s tone shifts into true dismissal.

But did he actually leave her alone, even after all that? Of course not! The unsettling man simply wanders a few feet off, but continues to linger close enough to keep Avery’s skin crawling. She notes that his music — “Raining Tacos” was a weird choice — is still audible as he wanders around in the background, and occasionally shouts in her direction.

Thankfully, by the time Avery abandoned her tanning, it seems he’d given up on his harassment. He didn’t follow her upon her departure from the park, and hopefully the TikToker will never set eyes on that particular creep again. She did have to grapple with a wave of negative comments in response to her video, however, often from those claiming she was far too nice in her responses to the stranger.

A global study on the gender-related killing of girls and women found that a bulk of women who were “intentionally killed” lost their lives at the hand of a current or former romantic partner. That’s on top of “rejection killings,” or killings that occur purely because a woman dares to reject a violent man’s advance. Those make up another wave of femicides across the globe, but they aren’t well tracked. They happen almost every day, unfortunately, and — had Avery responded with the callousness suggested by so many commenters — she might have joined a troubling statistic.

There’s no guidebook on how to respond to unwanted attention, but Avery did her best in that moment. She was polite but firm, made her desires very clear, and was cautious to not be followed on her way home. That’s really the best we can expect in a situation like this, but the negative responses her video earned are a stark reminder of how often the responsibility for staying safe lands in the laps of victims.