Fwiw, I’ve always felt ‘equality’ wasn’t the correct aspiration - equivalence seemed a better fit, if a less easy sell.
I’ll take equality, thank you.
Believe me, you’re welcome to it.
See you after 40 years on the commuter train.
For social equality there are just too many factors: personalities, values, income level, intelligence, etc, etc, etc. It did make a damn-fine catch phrase in a lot of movements, but it’s too idealistic to ever expect it to be achievable. I see it as more a rhetorical device to be used politically, then something to actually be taken seriously in intellectual discourse. Rally people up with “equality” then lay down what you actually mean when it’s appropriate.
Yep, I agree. Worked as a tag line in the 60s. Now stuck with it.
That was a staged video with a paid actress. Catcalling behavior is not normal behavior in 99.9% of the U.S. by land area and I have visited many U.S cities and most states for extended periods of time. I have only witnessed it myself a few times in the really aggressive areas of New Orleans and some of it was directed at me by gay males. I just smiled, waved and said 'Maybe tomorrow boys". They just laughed, smacked their black leather chaps on the ass and that was the end of it. Southern Europe is much worse for women. If you pick up accumulated psychological damage from every such incident, you really just need to stay out of the ghetto because that is almost exclusively where that specific behavior happens.
I hate to say it because I am raising two daughters but many women seem to be complaining excessively about situations that they fought for the right to be part of in the first place. If you can’t navigate existing public spaces without feeling in danger or picking up incidental psychological damage from it, you simply aren’t a strong person no matter who you are. Men are at much more danger of getting killed than women are just by walking through a bad neighborhood but most of us don’t lose any sleep over it.
Not all women are weak beings that need to be protected either. Both my mother and ex-wife travel all over the world by themselves and don’t think a thing about it. My mother just sent me her most recent pictures of her lifelong dream trip to Cairo, Egypt and she did just fine there just like she does everywhere in the Middle East every time she goes. There is absolutely no place in the U.S. that is as dangerous or hostile to women as that region but she has pictures hugging everyone in sight. She is a rare breed of conservative feminist though that I hope my daughters will emulate because it seems to be the true branch that doesn’t turn women into perpetual victims for the benefit of others with a distorted and misguided agenda.
Note to self: If you don’t want to be hollered at, just become middle class.
It doesn’t even take that even sven. There is such a thing as catcalling and open sexual harassment but it is not common in the U.S. at all. You could organize a tour around places where it does occur and the geographical areas involved are very limited overall. That is why that video is so dishonest. It was based in poorer NYC neighborhoods that most U.S. citizens will never visit, let alone live in. Most poor and/or urban people don’t witness it regularly either.
You should come to my home town in Louisiana some time. It is poor as hell but people would just invite you in for a meal if you walked through a housing project as an outsider. My current home in Massachusetts (safest city in America) doesn’t have the concept of yelling out to anyone on the street at all and not everyone has money.
NYC is not the U.S. Neither is Boston, Washington DC, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, Detroit or other anomalies. You can find and document some weird stuff in each of those but they are not good examples for anything for the U.S. as a whole and even those examples would be extremely selective and not apply to anything other than that specific city or neighborhood.
That video is a propaganda piece. No one should rationally come to any conclusions based on it. It’s meant to push an ideology; Not educate people on how the world actually works.
Okay, so if I’m gonna be poor, do so in Louisiana. Got it. Except, I live in DC.
I suspect your view of what it is like to be female in various American cities is not as complete as you think it is.
You are a hard-core urban person and that colors your viewpoints. All I can tell you is that the vast majority of the U.S. is not Washington or NYC although people that have lived in those environments most of their lives my think so. I acknowledge that there can be local problems but they are just that - isolated and local issues. The backlash occurs when anyone complains that it is a universal problem that applies to Colorado, Wisconsin or Arkansas. They all have their own problems to deal with but catcalling on urban streets isn’t among those.
Always remember, true tolerance isn’t just about expounding on the things that you are most familiar with. It is also submitting to the fact that hundreds of millions of people or more live very different lives than you have any experience with.
I live in the Midwest - and granted Minneapolis is a pretty big city, but when I was younger and took the bus and walked downtown streets, catcalling was an all the time occurrence (as was being hassled on the bus).
A large percentage of our population lives or works in urban areas. (about 80%) This is the norm for women. And since the majority of jobs are also in these urban areas, we don’t have a lot of choice.
How complete is your view on what it’s like to be judged by ability and willingness to provide - or shall we just continue to deny that even happens cos women are so smart men just don’t get it?
You’re wrong, because the use of the word “equal” in this sense is different than the concept you describe.
Ok. But just because every single American woman doesn’t get catcalls frequently doesn’t make it a non-issue. It’s still something that does happen and does suck.
That, and I got catcalled in the Sacramento suburb I grew up in, and the small surfer town I went to school in.
It isn’t. Which is why I’m not walking around telling dudes “it’s not a big deal, quit your whining.”
This particular contract is actually causing me a lot of friction right now. I’m all for doing away with it.
I grew up in a town of 500 people. In Minnesota. I was NOT catcalled - some of my girlfriends were (I wasn’t noticeable enough in high school to get catcalled - a geeky hadn’t hit puberty yet sort of kid - but I had a friend who attracted male attention by existing. She’d get catcalled if we walked through town on the way from her house to mine)
I think anytime you have young men standing around doing not a lot (in my small town it appeared to be standing on the street corner smoking weed - we didn’t have a cop - we borrowed one from the next town who drove through a few times a week or when someone called) - and young women walking by - you up the chances of the young men amusing themselves with some form of “hey, baby.”
In a small town I suspect it can be worse. My friend had all sorts of nasty and untrue rumors spread about her because certain guys thought her attractiveness should translate to her putting out on their behalf. Or because certain girls were jealous of the attention. Who knows, but she was one of those girls. And that meant that the small town catcalls were VERY targeted to what she was rumored to have done with the hockey captain.
My lovely wife gets catcalled all the time, and this has happened in Florida, Hawaii, Texas, California and Virginia (we’ve lived in all of these places due to my military career). It isn’t some rare occurence - she could be pushing her shopping cart in a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt and some guy has made a comment or whistled at her. We live in the leafy suburbs outside DC, and she will be gardening by the side of the road, pulling weeds or pushing the mower and guys will shout from their car window as they speed by (recently, as she was pulling vines off of a utility pole some guy shouted “Poles are for dancing, honey!”). Interacting with a woman like this because your idea is that she’s just there to fuel your male fantasy is shitty behavior, and it ain’t nature - it’s taught. And saying “Quit being a shrinking violet and suck it up-this is what you signed up for when you asked for equality”, is crazy - why can’t our fellow humans walk through the streets without some a-hole saying something sleezy? It’s the a-hole who needs to change, not women.
And the problem with objectifying women in American society is that that is so much of what we see: women are often shown in film/tv/advertising as being there solely for the pleasure of men. This makes it a cultural norm, though it seems to be changing (slowly).
OTOH, pedantic nitpickery on how the rest of the world uses everyday language is highly developed.
I told a friend’s girlfriend that I consider myself a feminist. Her reaction was: “I hope you’re ok with never getting laid again.” I laughed.
I asked her what her opinion was on catcalling due to this thread. She said something along the lines of: “I like it. I feel bad for women and men who are older or not as good looking enough to get catcalled.” I asked her about women who were sexually abused getting catcalled. She said: “I was sexually abused, women need to get over it and stop being victims.” That’s when I started to get upset. I told her I wasn’t over getting bullied at school, how can one expect every woman who’s been sexually molested to “get over it”. She went into a rant about sex not being as traumatic as women would like it to be… or something along those lines. You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your friend’s girlfriends.
There SEEMS to be a lot of women that don’t like feminism. Not that I’m reconsidering my position… I can’t really help how I feel.