I met Dr. Shira Tarrant five years ago next month when she attended a book talk I gave in Pasadena, CA. I was thrilled as I’d been following and reading her work for a while and even quoted her book Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power in mine.
Our paths crossed again in 2013 when she participated in a focus group I held in Los Angeles as part of the national study on street harassment that Stop Street Harassment released last year.
Tarrant is so smart and writes about gender in a very accessible way. She is also a very warm, kind and approachable person and I envy the students who get to have her as their professor at California State University, Long Beach, where she is a Profess of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies!
Tarrant’s latest project was editing the newly released book Gender, Sex, and Politics: In the Streets and Between the Sheets in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2015). It contains 27 short chapters written by contributors. Tarrant opens the book by acknowledging that she doesn’t agree with every viewpoint she included – and she doesn’t expect any of the readers to agree with all of them either. Instead, it is her hope to provide “opportunities to think through various perspectives and ideas that we may take for granted or assume to be true…[and] examine our assumptions and presumptions and come to better informed understanding about the politics of sex and gender.”
After I read the book, I found that I agreed with most of the authors, but she was right, a few I had some disagreements with and would have liked the chance to discuss the points in person. I was grateful that several of the authors challenged my thinking and others significantly expanded it.
At the end of each chapter are a list of questions to prompt you to think further about the topics and issues raised and challenge your own response to it and your existing assumptions. This makes it an ideal book for a women and gender studies class, sociology class, or social change class.
The 27 chapters are divided into 5 sections and the short chapters/essays in the first section focus on the topic of gender, sexuality, and social control. Within that section were two short chapters about street harassment. In the first, Hollaback! co-founders Emily May and Samuel Carter wrote about how the Hollaback! organization grew from an idea to a movement. As a sidebar to their essay was a piece written by a former SSH Blog Correspondent Joe Samalin for SSH about the male privilege of not knowing first-hand about street harassment that he and many other men, especially straight men, enjoy.
The second short chapter is by Dr. Kimberly Fairchild and looks at how victim-blaming causes people to feel less sympathy for some assaulted and harassed women. Specifically, “women are judged to be culpable for street harassment and sexual assault because of their sexy dress.” She concludes, “The problem is that if we are apt to blame the victim then street harassment will continue to be considered typical, normal, and acceptable – despite all the negative consequences harassment entails.”
A piece in a later section that relates to street harassment is Alexandra Tweten’s short chapter “Bye Felipe: Online Harassment and Straight Dating.” On her site Bye Felipe she posts women’s submissions of sexism, hate and harassment from men they encounter in online dating and focuses on how that site came about and the main categories of posts she receives. She writes that “the cultural atmosphere that says it’s okay for hundreds of men to catcall any women in public space is part of the same continuum of misogyny that drives men to brutally injure women, as exemplified by the man in New York City who slashed a woman’s neck because she ignored him…There are clear messages in society telling men that they deserve to go on a date with women simply because the men want to and simply because they are male.”
Further, she notes that “Bye Felipe has acted like an immortalized record of catcalling, which links the harassment women see on the street to the same type of harassment they see in their own living rooms, when they are simply online… Until we change the cultural atmosphere, women will continue to receive these hurtful messages online and in real life.”
One of my favorite writers is Soraya Chemaly and she wrote a short chapter called “Slut-Shaming and the Sex Police: Social Media, Sex, and Free Speech.” In it she discusses how like a public street, women on the Internet have to regularly fight for control over their “self-defined image and expression – of ideas, of bodies, of sexuality” and she looks at issues like sexting, online dating, revenge porn and free speech issues. She pulls apart the complexities of needing to allow women (and men) the freedom and right to have sexual agency and engage in consensual sexual behaviors and freedom of expression (e.g. nudity as art or nudity as an expression of one’s sexuality), while also regulating and discouraging non-consensual, harassing and objectifying behavior.
One of the short chapters that was most informative for me was Noah E. Lewis’s piece “Sex and the Body: A 21st-Century Understanding of Trans People.” Noah breaks down what trans people are experiencing in a very logical, clear way. For example: “I transitioned to achieve comfort in my own body. I did not transition because of gender stereotypes, gender roles, or gender expression. I did not transition for the benefit of anyone else. I did not transition in order to be able to express masculinity or femininity, but rather maleness or femaleness. I transitioned not because of my gender but because of my sex.” The really powerful piece concludes with a useful sidebar: “Boosting Trans Equality: 10 Tips for Cis People.”
Tarrant and the 27 contributors show how relevant gender is in our daily lives — from online dating to the experience of walking down the street – and the format makes each chapter easy to digest and ponder while the discussion questions can help guide either internal debate or a classroom discussion.
