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San Francisco Man Stabbed after Intervening

March 15, 2016 By HKearl

Via SF Gate:

“A San Francisco man who tried to intervene when his friend was being harassed was stabbed with a kitchen knife Wednesday outside a grocery store in the Mission District.

The victim, age 30, had just exited the store about 4:30 p.m. when he saw an apparently intoxicated man harassing his female friend, a store employee. The suspect, a 57-year-old man also of San Francisco, was being “vulgar and rude,” said Officer Carlos Manfredi, a police spokesman.

The 30-year-old told the man to knock it off, Manfredi said, and the two got into an argument, which soon turned physical.

The suspect pushed the younger man and stabbed him several times in the leg and upper torso, then ran away, police said.

Paramedics arrived at the scene of the stabbing near 14th and Folsom streets and transported the victim to a nearby hospital. His injuries did not appear to be life-threatening.”

I’m grateful he took a stand and I wish him a speedy recovery.

It’s so hard to know what is the “best” way to respond to harassment one experiences or witnesses, we have a split second to decide. You never know when it may escalate.

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Filed Under: News stories, street harassment Tagged With: bystander, harassment escalation, male ally, san francisco

Street harassment and the Beauty Myth

June 8, 2011 By Contributor

Noami Wolf is a preeminent figure in debunking society’s convenient truths. In The Beauty Myth she explores the relationship between the rise of beauty products and gains of the women’s movement in society. While street harassment has always been an issue, I think the way we perceive beauty has a powerful effect on the mindset behind it. This is a great resource for male allies who wish to understand the burden and pain placed on women by the corporate beauty industry.

Women put up with beauty critiques in the workplace and then walk home to cat calling at the end of the day. In the stores they are greeted with beauty pornography all around them. It transmits the following value: to be beautiful is to be liked.

Naomi Wolf summarizes this as “….’beauty’ is defined as that which never says no, and that which is not really human…’”

This encourages the behavior of men to treat women in public spaces as objects to be critiqued and scored. If women react to this kind of treatment in a negative way they are “bitches” or “difficult.” They failed the inhuman test.

Wolf goes on to say that “he gains something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.” Men will often sit on the sidelines or cheer their friends on when committing street harassment.

Beauty does not always translate into attraction. Wolf describes attraction as a deeper value that involves elements of people’s personality, desires, and interests. Beauty is purely visual. A main theme of the book is how advertisers manipulate women into being insecure consumers of beauty products, creating a visual distance between men and women. Men start to view women as “the other” and treat them as such. A cat call on the street sets up a boundary of the” looker” and the “looked.”

Wolf gives a charge to her readers: to grow up free of these boundaries and unite in sexual understanding.  Male allies can work to “grow up free” by rejecting the stereotypes of their own gender and to stand up against dehumanizing acts that the beauty myth perpetuates.

– Sean Crosbie

This post is part of the weekly blog series by male allies. We need men involved in the work to end the social acceptability of street harassment and to stop the practice, period. If you’d like to contribute to this weekly series, please contact me.

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Filed Under: male perspective Tagged With: beauty myth, male ally, naomi wolf, objectification, street harassment

Musings from a 21-year-old male ally

March 9, 2011 By Contributor

I am 21, male, and very grateful to have many strong female influences in my life. They have taught me so much about what it is to be a woman and go through the day-to-day experiences of verbal assault, unwelcome advances, and other explicit perverse behavior. My heart goes out to all of you that have had to suffer the immature, uncivilized conduct of what I hope is a minority of men. That said, I am still a man, and understand first hand the biological and societal conventions of men.

My story is short, and rantings long. I have devoted much time to educating myself about the differences of men and women in an effort to understand and improve my own social capabilities.

Riding with my aunt and female cousin in a cab in NYC one afternoon, we came to a stop light somewhere in SOHO. A group of men in their early twenties were waiting to cross. They were clearly staring at my female companions and my mind painted an image of a group of apes puffing out and beating their chests, making loud screeches, and throwing grass around (a la Tarzan) in a sort of primal routine meant to attract a mate. I positioned myself to block their view of my family and gave them a look that said, eloquently enough, “fuck off.”

Unfortunately this seems to be as far as a lot of “civilized” people have psychologically evolved. Our long evolved biological inclinations for mate selection and reproduction are so influential that our recently developed social structuring cannot compete. Some of the problems I have witnessed or experienced include:

Men are inevitably rejected at some point when first exploring intimate interactions, and without proper coping mechanisms, cognitive dissonance leads to justifications such as “she doesn’t like me, so she must just be a bitch” and other thoughts that can build up and lead to self loathing and increasingly more damaging interactions (abuse, rape etc.)

Women have a much greater investment in child bearing than the man, they carry the child, breast feed, etc. They have to be much more selective, and may have to reject so many advances that their rejections become reflexive and callous. It may appear rude to a shy nice guy that gets up the courage to talk to her but has no social intuition.*

Many men are so starved for physical intimacy that they try force a romantic relationship with a woman they are attracted to without bothering to look for things that really matter in a relationship, like compatibility, shared interests, good conversation, or what is often vaguely described as “chemistry.”

These issues are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of aspects, techniques, and rules of social interactions that need to become mainstream knowledge so that women can feel safe, men can experience more positive relationships, and society as a whole can function better.

– Nick W.

*[Editor’s Note: Or the women have faced so much harassment that it’s hard to distinguish “nice guys” from harassers. Too many seemingly nice guys turn into harassers, stalkers, or even abusers later.]

This post is part of the weekly blog series by male allies. We need men involved in the work to end the social acceptability of street harassment and to stop the practice, period. If you’d like to contribute to this weekly series, please contact me.

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Filed Under: male perspective, Stories Tagged With: male ally, street harassment

A male ally in New Delhi, India, speaks out – part 1

February 23, 2011 By Contributor

[Editor’s Note: This is part 1 in in a 3 part series. You can read parts 2 and 3 later this week]

These are real life stories. Narrated as it happened.

I was at the super market getting late for work and needed to pick up some milk. This is a super market that I frequent often and I know most of the people who work there by their first names and they know me well too.

This new girl had joined recently, like a month back and wasn’t very sure how to handle customers, especially male customers. She was on duty at the check out counter, and I could see a couple of rough looking guys getting their groceries checked out by her. One of the guys stood to the left side and started to hand out the stuff from the cart and the other stood to the other side with a huge sack in his hand.

The girl started to bill the stuff and pass them on to the other guy to put them in the sack. In a couple minutes, while I was looking at them trying to figure out what their intentions were, the other guy then lowered the sack to the floor and opened the top of it and requested the girl to pop the stuff in it. The girl threw in the vegetables but for other groceries she obviously had to bend  from the waist a bit. The guy holding the sack lowered the mouth of the sack a little bit more and very happily ogled inside her shirt each time she bent down.

Needless to say, this incident angered me. There were other people behind me in line who were getting irritated because the girl was doing a slow job, or so they said and the other counters were still closed.

The guy passing out the stuff from the cart bent over to pick up something from the very back of the cart and that was when I saw the ID hanging from his neck. He was a Delhi Police officer. They both were Police officers. (New Delhi, Capital city, India)

That was when I did what I do best. I kept my milk on the counter and moved behind the counter to help her out everything in the sack.

The two cops were angered by this, and humiliated too. They managed to figure out I guessed what they were up to and that must have embarrassed them somehow, or so I’d like to think.

After that, they moved out real quick and the girl still had no idea what those two had been up to.

Another guy who worked there figured it out and murmured me a thanks, and I sure hope he did coach his new comer colleague how to handle such customers from now on.

I remember another incident very vividly. I was standing in line at a fast food pick up place. There was a young teen girl standing in line ahead of me and some guys standing a little away towards the right. Apparently those guys had already ordered and were waiting for their food to be packed. The girl in front of me placed her order and stood to the side. I ordered and I moved back too. The girl was wearing a tee and jeans and a jacket, with no skin visible. The guys standing a bit away were constantly staring at her, and they must have been in their 40’s at least. Pretty soon, the girl became aware of their stares and became a little uncomfortable too. I didn’t know what to do or how to react, so I just moved from where I was standing and stood between the guys and the teen girl. The teen girl was petite and the guys ogling at her couldn’t see her anymore standing besides me so they soon lost interest.

The guys got their food and left, the girl got her food and left. She did not look back or anything, but I’m sure she realized for a moment that there are some good folks in this planet. Very few, it seems to me though.

[Come back tomorrow to read Part 2]

– Tbg

@TbgDgc

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Filed Under: male perspective, Stories Tagged With: India, male allies, male ally, New Delhi, sexual harassment, street harassment

“Even as a man, I cringe at street harassment”

June 21, 2010 By Contributor

Even as a man, I cringe at street harassment. I can’t help but hear kissing noises or whoops or vocalized honks. There was one time years ago when I heard some street harassment going on, but my response was to turn to the harassers and make flirtatious gestures at them as if they were calling out to me. I think that was enough to silence them, at least for a moment.

– Mr. MRS

Location: New York, NY

Share your street harassment story today and help raise awareness about the problem. Include your location and it will be added to the Street Harassment Map.

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Filed Under: male perspective, Stories, street harassment Tagged With: male ally, stopping street harassment, Stories, street harassment

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