Looking up “shawty” would probably be better. Does anyone actually pronounce the R?
If you bothered to watch the video, you would notice that the idiots behind it view normal social behavior as “harassment.” The VERY FIRST interaction shown is somebody saying “How you doing today?” Another one is “How are you this morning?”
Men have to go through situations that women never experience either. Women want to be recognized as fully capable and confident equals but this video is like documenting a child walking the streets for the first time. I won’t let my twelve year old daughter walk the streets of NYC for a few more years, but, when she does, she will be fully capable of taking care of any threat with just a glance. Her mother is a classy bitch that can stop any man or woman from Paris to Bangkok dead in their tracks with just a simple look because she can and will escalate it from there if anyone ever confronted her :eek:
If this is supposed to be a feminist video, it failed miserably. In fact, it is counterproductive because it documents a woman that cannot even walk the streets of NYC on her own safely. Think about that for a second. Nobody touched her, threatened her or did anything else to harm her. If she is that disturbed by casual comments, she really needs to move where that behavior is much less common.
There are women who move confidently throughout the world with few problems. All it takes is some experience and skill. If women want true equality, you are going to have to learn that quite well.
Thank goodness all these men are here to tell the women what’s really going on. Otherwise they may start to have opinions of their own.
I’ve never witnessed that degree of cat calling before. Yelling out like that is just not done in my city. At least not to my knowledge.
Care to mention what happens after he says “How you doing today?” Is yelling “Smile” at someone who is clearly not interested in engaging with you “normal social behavior”?
I wish the people wanting to argue for their right to harass women on the street would just say so, rather than these tortured and labored faux-arguments.
It is done in your city and every city. Because you haven’t seen it means you haven’t been a target of it or had any reason to see it.
Actually, that IS how most women walk down the street. Ignoring, neutral face, and partly because they don’t want to escalate the situation. It’s great that your wife can stop someone just by looking, but not every woman wants to deal with that. And I saw nothing childlike about what she was doing.
She didn’t say she was disturbed. The video just presented the catcalls–it’s up to us to make the judgment. Though if people were making a running commentary on my body and barking at me to smile, I’d feel disturbed. If it makes someone feel less confident to have to deal with unwanted comments, it doesn’t make them any less deserving of equality.
If a person of color walked down the street in a predominantly white neighborhood decades ago and got hassled for it, would you seriously tell them that if they wanted true equality, they’d need to walk with confidence and demand that they be treated with respect? Or would you think that maybe our society has a problem we need to deal with. We do have a problem when it comes to gender, and it’s not just the video. It’s the rape threats the actress got for participating in it, it’s the people commenting that the way she dresses and does her hair is inviting comments, and it’s the people who think that these were perfectly innocuous, even polite comments.
What if she’s tall, or just not short?
Of course. It’s not the responsibility of those who behave badly to change their behavior – it’s the responsibility of others to learn the Superpowered Stare ™ of Shagnasty’s wife, which turns the bowels of any man to jelly.
Men, keep catcalling… it’s only natural. And the only women who will be bothered/hurt/made uncomfortable by it are obviously weak willed, and therefore deserve it. In fact, you’re doing them a favor – only by making them feel weak and threatened will they ever have the courage to learn the Superpowered Stare!
That is only “normal social behavior” if you completely ignore context. We know this because young men don’t give greetings like that to random passersby on the sidewalk if they’re other men, or old ladies. It’s so clearly a come-on (of sorts).
You do realize at some some guy is probably going to pull his dick out and wave it at your daughter? At some point she is probably going to be followed in a threatening manner? There will be times that in crowds men try to grab her butt, squeeze her breasts or rub their crotches against her? And there may be times where it is not safe for her to call that behavior out? Help isn’t always nearby. I make it a policy to tell off catcallers, under the theory that if they feel free to say dumb stuff to me, I feel free to say dumb stuff to them. But that doens’t always work. Soemtimes I’m in the proverbial dark ally. Sometimes I’m outnumbered. Sometimes they react by esculating things. Sometimes I actually am in actual danger.
Most women have been in a sexually threatened situation. Many, many women are actually assaulted. She is probably not going to relate these experiences to you, but they will happen. It was about twelve that men starting to (jokingly at first) try to get me to go into their car. Obviously I knew not to do that, but it’s still deeply uncomfortable knowing there are people willing to give that a try.
I’m a pretty independent person. I regularly travel solo in very underdeveloped areas, often for months on end. It takes a lot to scare me. But confidence isn’t any kind of guarantee of safety. I have been threatened. I have been scared for my safety and for my life. I have had some pretty bad things happen to me, and I have been pretty close to a lot worse (and I’m not one to take a lot of stupid chances.) I’m not a fragile flower and I understand what risks I take on, but all things equal, I’d rather not have these risks. And in my own country, where I feel like I say, I’m going to advocate for a social convention that is better for women.
Wanting guys to stop yelling dumb stuff on the street doesn’t make us weak. It’s obnoxious, and it’s perfectly normal to want people to stop doing pointless, obnoxious stuff. We want people to stop talking on the phone in restaurants and to stop sitting next to us when there are empty seats on the subway and stop wearing stinky perfume. Hollering is also sometimes initmidating. Spidey-sense isn’t real, and we don’t have a reliable way to tell who is just mouthing off and who is trying to test our bounderies.
Stranger rapists generally aren’t looking for a good fight, they are looking for an easy, low-risk attack. That means they generally don’t jump out of the bushes. They generally do something small but obnoxious-- stand too close to you, say something inappropriate, whatever. If you don’t object, they try another little violation. After that, they know what they are up against and decide if you look like easy prey. Self-defense classes can teach you how to react to these, but it’s just not easy to know what is a dumb violation of bounderies and what is a threatening one. By the time the threat is overt, it’s probably too late to get out easily. So women can be a bit touchy about these small violations.
This is a lot for one post, but my main point is, don’t speak for your daughter. It’s easy to tell someone that they feel safe when you aren’t the one who could get hurt.
:dubious: A come-on is “normal social behavior”.
Following a women closely for several minutes is not “normal social behavior”. And if shouting “Damn!”, “Nice!”, “Lookin’ good, baby!” is normal, then what’s normal should change. It used to be “normal” for black people to step aside on the street if a white person approached, and for black people to endure racial slurs, etc.
“Normal social behavior” is not a defense. Many things that have been “normal” have been very bad.
Joke all you want with intellectually compromised responses. The fact remains that there are women, including all of them in my family, that can navigate through all of the U.S. and even most of the world without a problem. We have posters like Even Sven that can do that as well. Any strong woman or man should be able to do that. If you can’t, it means you aren’t really equal. This stuff irritates me when people claim that they can’t do it because of some superficial and external constraint. It isn’t that hard unless you are literally locked in a dungeon somewhere. My own mother is huge in the Middle East and Asia. She just hops on a flight from Dallas to Dubai like it is a road trip and never has any problems.
I will say it now because it needs to be said. There are weak people among us who will complain about anything they can latch on to. There can never be a good solution because the problem mainly exists in their minds only and make themselves intentional victims of something. It is not responsible to support that behavior. You can love the person but not their flawed views and utter lack of self-sufficiency.
But that isn’t just a come-on, either.
An obnoxious thing to say about a video that’s all about raising outrage over dark skinned men supposedly “harassing” a white woman. It also used to be normal for a black man who even looked at a woman with her skin tone to be killed.
Excuse me?
I have taken no small number of risks, and I have not always skated through them unscathed. Take enough risk and occasionally your number will be called.
Confidence buys you little. Strength of heart buys you little. You can weigh risk and decide to take it on anyway, but that doesn’t make the risk go away. I am a big advocate of women, and really anyone, travelling, but I’ve known a lot of bad things happen to a confident, indepedent, strong people. Safety comes from caution and luck, not some kind of special moral fibre.
Two things – what did I say that’s obnoxious? And are you saying that the men (several of whom were white, as I noted a few times after multiple focused re-watches of the video) were not harassing her?
Oddly enough, some people tend to get upset when they perceive somebody behaving in a rude manner. Ignoring someone who’s talking to you is defined as being rude by virtually every parent of a small child since the beginning of time.
I was trying to use you as an example of what a self-confident woman would do because I think it is justified. Take that as a compliment because it is.
There is always risk in life. There are no morals involved in my argument. I was just arguing against the unnecessarily timid because life can never be fully child-proof. It is much easier to adjust your own behavior or outlook than it is to enforce a band on innocuous behavior.