Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

The cost of living in a patriarchal society

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On Saturday, a group of teenage boys gang raped a 15 year old girl for two-and-a-half hours outside a high school homecoming dance in Northern California. Police say as many as four teenage boys raped her and probably as many as 15 boys stood around watching, doing nothing to stop it or help her.

CNN is reporting that “The victim was found unconscious and ‘brutally assaulted’ under a bench shortly before midnight Saturday, after police received a call from someone in the area who had overheard people at the assault scene ‘reminiscing about the incident.'”

These boys brutalized her so badly that she was in critical condition and had to be flown to hospital. As of Monday, she is in stable condition. Everything about this incident and its outcome are upsetting and outrageous!! (Including CNN using the passive voice to describe the incident and engaging in subtle victim blaming by printing a quote from someone who said she ended up with the guys of her own free will.)

While one of the police officers investigating the case says he can’t believe not one of the bystanders did anything, I am not. Maddeningly, her damaged body, and likely damaged life, is the outcome of living in a patriarchal society where boys and men are encouraged and encourage each other to be aggressive and prove their masculinity through sexual “conquests.”

In my street harassment book research, I’ve learned a lot about this, including male homosociality, which is the idea that many men are socialized to be more eager to please other men than women and may use women as pawns to prove their masculinity and impress each other. Telling sexist jokes and harassing and assaulting women (particularly gang rape) are examples of this behavior. In the Macho Paradox, Jackson Katz discussed in great length how men may feel pressured to participate in or stand quietly by while their friends participate in sexist and even violent behaviors in order to be accepted and “manly.”

The definition of masculinity in our society is so narrowly defined that actions like showing compassion, standing up to “manly” men, and not engaging in sexist or violent behavior – and telling other men to stop – threatens it and what it means “to be a man.” Some men even harass and beat up other men who threaten the definition (most notably, male members of the LGBQT community). So it’s easier for most men to stay quiet and/or participate.

This all directly relates to street harassment, too. For example, the more than 800 women who took my informal, anonymous online survey last fall said they are more fearful when they are harassed by a man who is part of a group or by multiple men in a group than when a lone man harasses them.

If you ask girls and women how they would feel about encountering a group of guys while they’re alone in a deserted area, I bet the fear of gang rape and assault would be quite tangible, even if the men did not harass them. Why? Because even if we don’t know terms like “homosociality” or “hegemonic masculinity” and haven’t read the theories behind such terms, we know that most men are less like to stop or to listen to women when they are in groups. We know they want to impress their friends and many of them will do that at all costs. We know it’s best to book it out of there as fast as we can before they decide to do anything. And guess what, even if this isn’t true of all men, we don’t know which ones it will be true for. Our safety is not worth the risk of trusting a group of male strangers. (and if you say that’s unfair to boys and men who don’t hurt women, I agree, let’s do something about it!)

Katz and groups like Men Can Stop Rape work on bystander intervention with men, including brainstorming and role playing ways they can intervene when they hear sexist talk and witness gender-based violence. They discuss issues of masculinity and the importance of speaking out even if its scary and emphasize that chances, are there are other guys who feel the same way but are too scared to speak out. It’s very important work and I hope more and more groups will use incorporate bystander work in their efforts to make the world a safer place.

Also, working to ease gender socialization and the values given to each gender and their stereotyped traits is important work and it is something we can all do in our daily lives. We can help make sure men – and women – are not penalized for speaking out when they see something wrong. For example we can  eliminate language like “pussy” “wuss” and “girl” when talking about male behavior that is not “macho” and not make fun of boys or men who show their sensitive side. We can encourage people we know to always stand up for what is right even if they think it will make them unpopular. And we can do the same (This is something I struggle with. When I look back at my life, the times I feel most ashamed of myself are when I was too scared to speak up to someone bullying someone else).

Thoughts?

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Shake your breasts

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In Mogadishu, Somalia, there are Muslim extremists patrolling the streets and whipping people acting “inappropriately.” For men, this means not having a beard. For women, this means wearing a bra.

Someone can look at a man and determine if he has a beard or not. To find out if women “have natural firmness or if there is assistance from a bra,” the extremists are making them shake their breasts and otherwise publicly scrutinize their breasts. The Australian Herald reports this is sometimes being done at gunpoint. The Daily Mail quotes a woman saying,  “

“‘Al Shabaab forced us to wear their type of full veil and now they order us to shake our breasts,’ a resident, Halima, told Reuters, adding that her daughters had been whipped on Thursday. They  are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat.'”

While both reasons for whipping people are ridiculous, at least a man who wants to “play by the rules” can grow a beard and everyone will see that he has grown one.  But women who “play by the rules” and don’t wear a bra still risk being publicly humiliated by this invasive scrutiny to determine whether or not they are wearing a bra.

I’ve never heard of someone being made to shake their breasts because the oppressor viewed a bra as bad — have you? Has this happened or does it happen any where else?

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The real question is why do men street harass?

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“Why Do Men Catcall?” is an article currently on Alternet.org’s homepage.  The topic of why men harass and abuse women makes me mad – just ask my male partner how I behaved toward him during the week when I was writing my chapter on why men street harass women. I’ll save you the trouble and answer: I was a ball of rage generally and toward him if he did anything that hinted of male privilege – so I’m not going to get too into this.

I do quickly want to point out something I wrote in my comment on the story that I think the author misses: regardless of whether men mean catcalls as compliments or not, the act of intruding on a woman’s space to offer an evaluative comment or noise (positive or negative) demonstrates a sense of entitlement and that they think it’s their RIGHT as men to do so.

It’s the kind of entitlement that some abled bodied people may show toward persons with disabilities (ie believing they can push them out of the way if they’re in a wheelchair) or some white people may show toward persons of color (how many African American women have had white people think it’s okay to touch their hair?). Again, a lack of respect by the person intruding comes into play.

If men really wanted to compliment a woman or meet a woman, they would say hello in a respectful, non threatening way etc and as they got to know her, they’d offer her a real compliment, not just something vulgar like “nice ass.” See Shapely Prose’s excellent guest post on this topic.

My last point –  from my research, I’ve found that most women have experienced a scary form of street harassment, such as men stalking, touching, or assaulting them. Why do people who write these types of articles never focus on that reality and why men engage in those behaviors? Instead they always focus on the “hey baby”‘s. They’re related and, really, the conversation should be about all forms of gender-based public harassment and assault, but my problem is that the only conversations I see outside of feminist sites about street harassment only focus on catcalls and whether or not they’re compliments.  It detracts from the larger and more complex experiences women have in public because they’re female.

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New Pink Taxis for Women in Mexico

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Image from the AP
Image from the AP

Women living in the Mexican city Pueblo can now opt to take a taxi driven by a woman. Pink Taxi de Puebla is for women-only passengers and caters to those “tired of leering male drivers.”   Via the AP:

“Some of the woman who have been on board tell us how male taxi drivers cross the line and try to flirt with them and make inappropriate propositions,” said taxi driver Aida Santos, who drives one of the compact, four-door taxis with a tracking device and an alarm button that notifies emergency services. “In the Pink Taxi they won’t have that feeling of insecurity, and they feel more relaxed.”

The fleet of 35 taxis each have GPS, an alarm button and … a beauty kit (?!).

This company is part of a growing trend of women for women taxis cropping up around the globe. In July, one launched in Beirut, Lebanon, and similar services already exist in England, Russia, Australia, Iran, India, and the United Arab Emirates. (Don’t get me started on women-only subway cars and buses…)

The article talks about how the business offers a lucrative job to the women drivers, which is good. But, like with all women-only forms of public transportation, segregation does not mean equality. Women-only public transportation does not stop the men who leer at or harass women who cannot find a woman-driven taxi or need to get somewhere at a time when the women-only buses or subway cars aren’t running (or when they’re already full).  It does not stop men harass women in other public spaces.

It’s easier to make something pink and tell women it will keep them safe if they use it than it is to actually address the problem, and, given the rising trend of women-only services like the one in Mexico, unfortuantely easy is the way many governments and businesses are choosing to go.

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The ugly side of masculinity

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One week ago in New York  City two men approached Jack Price, an openly-gay man, on College Point Blvd while Price was walking home from a deli. The men allegedly called Price anti-gay slurs and beat him. Price escaped, called 911, and is still in the hospital recovering from a fractured jaw and ribs, the collapse of both of his lungs and a lacerated spleen. What the hell!  As of two days ago, both suspected men have been arrested.

At a press conference a few days ago, Council speaker Christine Quinn said,

“news of the attack ‘smacked particularly sharply’ after returning from the National Equality March on Washington the day before, energized and optimistic about equality for the LGBT community.

‘You grow tired of having to do these press conferences, of having to stand up and decry a hate crime against someone because they are perceived to be gay or because of their race or their religion,’ Quinn said.

She continued, this ‘violent, outrageous and unacceptable hate crime’ and others like it ‘rip at the fabric of our decent society’ and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

There have been a string of violent hate crimes and murders  against gay men and transgender women in New York, and the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs reports that hate crimes in the U.S. are at the highest point in a decade.

If you’re in New York, tomorrow, come out for an event organized in response to the Price beating and to rally against hate crimes in general. Saturday, October 17, at 2 p.m. there will be a march on College Park Blvd, starting at 20th Ave, and a rally in the park on 14th Ave, organized by a coalition of LGBQ groups.

Hate crimes against members of the LGBQTI community are often related to gender-based street harassment (and overlap when female members of the LGBQTI community are targeted for both their sex and sexual orientation). In particular, some of the underlying reasons both forms of harassment occur are the same.

For example, men (I can’t recall the last time I heard about a violent hate crime committed by a woman) who commit the crimes may be doing so to try to prove their masculinity (when it’s read as aggression and violence) or to perform masculinity for other men. The latter is especially true when men harass and assault in pairs or groups, as was the case when the two men beat Price.

Another example why men may engage in hate crimes is to punish members of the LGBQTI community for not acting according to the gender the perpetrator thinks they should and therefore for threatening the perpetrator’s narrow definitions of masculinity and femininity.

Similarly, perpetrators of some forms of gender-based street harassment engage in their actions to punish women for not acting the way the men think they should act given narrow definitions of masculinity/femininity (read: superior/inferior). Maybe the woman is alone in public instead of at home (so the men think it’s okay to comment and touch her; “if she didn’t want that to happen she should stay at home”), or maybe she doesn’t meet the idealized beauty standards (making it a-okay to call someone a fat cow for not being skinny – not), or maybe she dared to wear flattering clothing (so the men think, “I’ll show that slut who’s in charge”).

So to cut down on both hate crimes and gender-based street harassment and assault, we need to work on changing the definition of masculinity and pass laws and engage in activism that deters and punishes men who hurt others in an attempt to prove their own masculinity or in an attempt to punish the victim/s for not adhering to strict “traditional” gender norms. Thoughts?

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