Sorry, I have nothing substantive to say, just a vague feeling of thanks and encouragement directed at this post.
Here are some of the things that I think the video were trying to accomplish:
[ul]
[li]Highlight street harassment, by showing examples of bad behavior[/li][li]Raise awareness of the problem[/li][li]Motivate behavior - either through individual change or societal pressure to change[/li][li]Seek donations[/li][/ul]
All of that seems great. Unequivocally people should not be subject to harassment of any form. If a person either by action or inaction has communicated that they do not wish to engage with another person those wishes should be respected. Do you think this has been accomplished with the video? A little bit, yes, but I’m guessing the distraction of race overtones was not an intended part of the presentation. Including interactions like people saying hello, or the panhandler in the same category as the guy that followed for 5 minutes, that’s a distraction.
Here’s the main problem that I have with the sentiments in the thread. There is this idea taken to the extreme. If everything from innocuous minor social interactions are treated the same as overt threatening behavior, the call to action fails. Yes the people in the video were mostly jerks. That doesn’t mean they were all threatening or harassing. If we called every murder an attempted genocide it would be inaccurate. It doesn’t mean that the murder is somehow okay or it’s an excuse for murder - it’s just not genocide. To do that would be to cheapen the meaning of the word and belittle the suffering of actual victims of genocide.
Look at the definition of Street Harassment from one of the sites linked (pdf):
Ignore the catcalling on the street of passerbys for the moment. So essentially, if someone tries to hit on another person, at the supermarket, library, or even the book club, and the other person feels annoyed, that’s street harassment. Simply asking someone if they are free for a cup of coffee is the same as yelling obscenities, propositioning people as they pass, or outright rape. It’s hard to take that type of classification that offers no distinction seriously.
Condemn people catcalling, I’m totally in agreement. It’s not cool. If my kids did that, I would be ashamed and feel like I failed in some way as a parent. Then I would probably smack them upside the head for being idiots.
Somehow saying that merely inviting a person to socialize in an appropriate setting, saying hi to a person as you interact in a building, or opening a door, talking with someone in line at the supermarket, or having a casual small talk conversation on public transportation like a bus or a plane? These are normal and any attempt to treat these in the same category as the catcalling falls flat, IMO.
I also find it quite sexist that people have this idea that women can’t be talked to based on some archaic notion of chivalry. If that’s how a person wants to live their life that’s fine but it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to conform. It’d be as if you call out a person as unsophisticated for not following the Oxford Style Debate Rules while talking about sports at a pub.
Who wants to treat it the same? Putting in the same or similar categories, when the categories are broad and would include all kinds of legal and not legal behavior, doesn’t mean it’s being treated the same.
I don’t see how social groups like the book club qualify – but for public places between total strangers in urban areas like Manhattan, then yes, getting someone’s attention and engaging them in unwanted conversation can be (very mild) harassment. Continuing the engagement after one party has made it clear they’re not interested is escalating the harassment.
But yes, if I’m walking down the street in Manhattan, and I try to stop a woman passing by and ask her out, I’m harassing her (in a mild way). I wouldn’t do that, and I would encourage others not to do that, because it has a significant likelihood of making her feel uncomfortable.
Those things aren’t the same, and that definition doesn’t mark them as the same. But they all might fall into the same broad category, just like slapping a stranger’s butt and raping someone are both in the category of “sexual assault”, and picking their pocket or stealing their car are both in the category of “theft”.
If the setting is appropriate (like a book club), ask away.
As you interact? Of course you can greet those you interact with. You can even say “hi” to your neighbors without it being harassment.
Who says opening a door is harassment?
This one is a little tougher… it’s probably okay to make some inocuous comment like “long line, huh?”, but asking someone out because they’re stuck there as a captive audience can definitely be harassment. Here’s how you know if it is or not: say something inocuous (“sure is crowded today!”), and if she doesn’t respond, don’t continue. If she does respond with interest, then it’s probably okay to say something a little less general. And stop when she stops showing interest – if she wants to keep talking, she will.
They definitely can be in the same category – when someone’s a captive audience, like on a train or bus, you should be very careful. It’s not right to try and get their attention just to talk – but if they smile at you, or say something to you, then it’s okay to smile back and say something inocuous. But I try to be very careful because women are hit on/harassed so often in places like trains and buses, and I make it a high priority to not make anyone feel uncomfortable if it can be avoided.
I think that’s kind of the secret – prioritize not making women (or children, and men, for that matter) feel uncomfortable. Make that an important point to consider when interacting with strangers… I find it very easy to do.
I’m sorry, but there are plenty of adult men handing candy out to children from vehicles, and it’s perfectly okay. Here’s a video of exactly that. Safe for work (mild language)…
Knew guys that used to do it all the time…
Regards,
-Bouncer-
Heffalump and Roo, as if on cue, Bouncer comes in with exactly the type of argument I was making fun of. What is the point in trying to seriously engage with people like this? They aren’t interested in actually having a discussion. I think it’s perfectly fine to expose the flaw in their argument, since they aren’t actually interested in responding to the actual discussion at hand.
LOL. The first funny thing in this thread. What a G
Thank you. I appreciate that.
It probably doesn’t seem fair from the perspective of those women who are the unwanted recipients.
As to whether it’s fair on a societal level, that’s where I think the cost/benefit analysis comes into play. Does society benefit more by keeping the social custom at the expense of the women who are experiencing the issue? Obviously, there are no easy answers.
No argument from me on that if the objective is not to argue or engage. I just don’t think they’re useful to persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree.
But tbh, I haven’t been sure who’s trolling on this issue. For instance, is the guy on the CNN piece trolling? Why would he go on a national TV show and be misogynistic? All he got was bad press that gets worse every passing day. Or why would the Fox news host say:
Was he trolling too? The views seem so polarized, I can’t always tell who’s commenting in good faith.
Well, look. I’m glad to see you get what I’m saying. I wonder how many parents who get upset about a stranger offering candy out of a minivan would get upset about soldiers offering candy from a tank?
There are a lot of people who think that soldiers operate under circumstances that we should take into account. I’m glad to see you aren’t one of them. I’m glad to see that you think soldiers should be treated exactly the same way as everyone else. If a soldier can give out candy from a tank, then people should be allowed to give out candy from a minivan. You keep fighting the fight. You keep telling everyone that soldiers trying to give candy to a child in a war zone is no different than some random dude driving around giving candy to strange children from a minivan. Good for you!
Huh? No, giving a negative response to an ostensibly friendly greeting is rude for everyone. It has nothing to do with being a woman. It’s bad because the other person is ostensibly not trying to make you feel bad, so it’s rude to make them feel bad.
Are you saying that, if you said “good morning” to some dude, and he, for example, rolled his eyes at you, you wouldn’t feel he was being rude? I sure would. If he wasn’t in the mood to reciprocate, I’d expect either a non-response or a half-hearted one–the same thing I would expect from a woman.
I can understand the idea that people should be free to criticize such things. I think it would actually do a better job at fixing the problems with people who don’t get social norms if they could actually be told when they are violating them. But the problem has nothing to do with sexism.
(I do agree there is a problem in which any response from a woman being taken as meaning she is open to a romantic/sexual interaction. That’s why I don’t necessarily assume a woman is having a bad day if she doesn’t smile back at me when I smile at her. But I think that comes more from desperate men than chivalry and deference. It’s yet another example of some people ruining it for the rest of us.)
And the guy on Fox was trolling by my definition. He knew that she didn’t like the catcalls, and that people were upset about the catcalls. He said it for the reaction. That said, he probably does believe what he said and what he implied–that catcalls should be acceptable. Or, at the very least, he was appealing to a conservative base in his audience that believes that.
And this is the part of your parody that bothers me. Why can’t we discuss the individual components separated out? It’s not like saying that greetings are okay means what happened in that video is okay. Someone made a claim that even friendly greetings were harassment, and I and Bricker both disagree with that. We both have made it very clear that we do agree that what happened in that video was harassment.
To use your parody, it would actually mean that someone says giving children candy was itself creepy, regardless of the context. And that’s just stupid.
The greetings that are harassing are such because of context. There’s the way it’s being said, the reaction to a lack of response, the body language of the person saying it, and probably other cues I can’t articulate. The greetings that lack this are not harassing.
The one context that doesn’t matter is the woman’s past history of harassing responses. To use your analogy, you just offering candy in a neutral situation doesn’t become creepy because the child actually has been abducted by someone offering him candy.
In this aspect, I think your parody is a strawman, refuting arguments that weren’t made. And, by choosing parody, you just hide the strawman so no one can point it out.
A satire of people who hit on women on the street: Homeless Millennial Survives By Picking Up Women Every Night | Bustle - YouTube
Just a nitpick–I don’t think anyone said it rises to the level of harassment. (I myself, for sure, was explicit in saying that even if I think people should lay off the “friendly greetings,” I wouldn’t call it harassment.)
I am not sure whether this observation is completely to the point, but I would set that aside, myself, because I disagree with you in the first place: I think the child having that history could make an otherwise-uncreepy act into a creepy one. The person who made the later, innocent offer, thereby bringing up unpleasant memories, should properly feel an obligation to make amends or otherwise fix the situation if possible.
What’s important in all this isn’t what the candy offerer intended but instead the effects the offer had on the kid. As they say, “intent isn’t magic.”
To move it to a more neutral parallel situation. If I am talking to someone about my age (36) and ask them what their parents do for a living or something, and it turns out their parents are dead, I should feel a need to somehow make up for bringing this bad memory to their mind. (A simple apology usually suffices here.) This doesn’t mean anyone should be mad at me for mentioning his parents–after all, it’s not typical for 36-year-olds to have lost their parents. But it does mean I did a bad thing, even if completely unintentionally, and if I’m a good person I feel I should do something to make up for it. (Meanwhile, if I’d asked a 102-year-old the same thing, it would make sense to criticize me for asking the question even if somehow my intentions were perfectly innocent, because I should have known this would be a bad question to ask. Similarly, the candy-offerer in the parody posts should know what he’s doing when he offers the candy, we feel this so strongly we tend to doubt his protestations of innocent intent.)
You start out by saying we should be allowed to detach individual pieces from their social context, then you proceed to tell us that we have to consider the social context. This response is incoherent.
Just further evidence that this is a problem of culture – and culture can be changed.
Well, it’s confirmed. White people are more polite and less creepy.
I mean…“cultural differences, economic disadvantage, blah blah blah”
There were multiple white catcallers in the original video.
Your sarcasm, it, it devastates me. It’s almost as if you think I care! But that must be good! Because you care! You care about me! I am so validated by that! And I care about you too!
Regards,
-Bouncer-
ps: It HAS been entertaining watching you dig this rhetorical crevasse you now live in. Cause ditch, hole and even grave just don’t give your level of effort at bullshittery full credit. Well done!
Holy moly, I actually thought your post about the people who hand candy out was playing along with BrightNShiny. Just to clarify, are you saying here that you considered that post to be an effective rebuttal of the parody’s point?