“The line between acceptable behaviour and harassment is blurred” on London Tube

This week I noticed a series of ads whilst travelling on the London Underground for Lovestruck, a London dating website. Some are huge and quite generic, on the platform, but I was most bothered by the small ads that are placed inside the carriages above the seats. These have a headline to the effect of “The woman/man of your dreams could be sitting under this ad.”

Almost every woman I know has a story about harassment on public transport – the Stop Street Harassment and Hollaback sites are full of stories from women who’ve encountered men who seem to think that a woman travelling in public is ‘fair game’. I know that anti-harassment notices on public transport are more common in the US than the UK, though for a short time last year there were a few tube posters in certain London boroughs about not harassing women on public transport.

This is why I really don’t get Lovestruck’s tactics – are they really so painfully naive as to what goes on on the tube? Pretty much every time I take a tube in London, there’s at least one creep who either follows you down the platform or spends the entire journey staring at you in a way that means nothing other than ‘I’m undressing you with my eyes’.

The tube is such a key site for this kind of behaviour that any efforts to educate people about street harassment have to focus on it, but how successful will we ever be when it’s simultaneously being billed as a place akin to a singles night? I’m on the tube to get to work/school/whatever, and I object to the fact that I may be sitting under an ad that bills me as an available object. The London Evening Standard has also recently added a little column for people to post those ads like ‘I was on the 8.15 to Watford, blond. You were….’ etc., etc.

Slowly but surely, the tube is being turned into some kind of pick-up joint, and the line between acceptable behaviour and harassment is blurred as a consequence. No, I don’t want you to talk to me, stare at me, or touch me. I want to get where I’m going and live my life. Apparently none of the Lovestruck staff have ever had the same feelings.

I did email Lovestruck pointing all this out to them, but haven’t yet received a reply…[You can contact them too!]

This  guest blog post is by Jen, a student who’s lived in London for five years.