Making women into trespassers
Rachel Hewitt makes an interesting point about street harassment and who own public space.
The disappearance of Sarah Everard while she walked through Clapham, south London, at 9pm on 3 March gives horrific shape to the hum of fear that women constantly feel in public spaces. My social media timelines are full of women who are distressed by Sarah’s disappearance, and terrified that it could have been them. Men have asked what they can do to help women feel safer. But what’s needed beyond the education of individuals are urgent political solutions to counter men’s attempts to claim public spaces as their exclusive domain.
Street harassment of women by men is so common that there are no women who’ve never experienced it.
Street harassment is how men mark out public spaces as their own, making women into trespassers on male territory. Behavioural psychologists have observed how male pedestrians crowd women’s personal space at cashpoints and traffic lights, how all-male groups take up more pavement space, and how men make more antisocial noises in public than women, considering it more acceptable to speak on mobile phones at checkouts or in train carriages.
…
By abusing and harassing women, men make public spaces their own – and by entering those spaces, they perceive that women acquiesce to their abuse.
(That is, I think she means, men see women who enter public spaces as acquiescing to abuse.)
Women are meant to be at home, sitting on eggs.
What’s missing from discussions about women’s fears is a focus on men. Men’s harassment and assault of women is part of a sustained, long-term attempt to roll back advances in women’s rights and restrict our presence in public spaces. Some well-intentioned individual men ask how they can change their behaviours to make us feel calmer and safer, and are advised to cross the road to ensure they do not walk behind us at night. But we need solutions that rise above individual behaviour, and tackle men’s abuse and intimidation of women as a systemic problem. This is an urgent frontier for women’s rights.
Instead we have men who say they are women upping the abuse and intimidation.
This is reminiscent of the “asking for it” sentiment; i.e., victim blaming.
As I argued earlier on Twitter when a philosopher I respect rather uncharitably interpreted something I said (No grudge, just irritation.), the logic of victim blaming assigns fault waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too easily. The idea runs as such:
i. There is some action that makes a particular bad consequence less likely.
ii. You do/did/will not take that action.
iii. Therefore, you are at fault, to blame, culpable, etc.
But until the probability is “impossible” (not zero, that’s different*) there is always a lower probability. In the real world, the set of actions we take (T) is always a proper subset of the actions we could take (C). (All T are C, but not all C are T.)
For every bad consequence z, if the set of precautions P against z is nonempty, there exists a p∈P that we don’t take. Since we don’t take p, we are at fault for z. Thus we are all at fault for all bad things for which there are any conceivable precautions.
When your car breaks down? Your fault. Also mine. And my dogs’.
I stubbed and broke my toe the week before last. You know whose fault that is? Yours. You monster.
But surely there are times when we’re justified in assigning fault or blame, yes? Yes, of course. It just requires different reasoning.
* Consider a dart and dartboard in an idealized, abstract space. If your dart hits the dartboard, the probability that you hit any particular point is 1/∞=0. But you do hit one, so things that have probability zero are not impossible.
The same old story. Women are told they don’t get promotions because they don’t network with the others in the office or clients. Much of this networking is done in bars. So a woman goes to a bar to network so she can achieve success. She is assaulted. The resulting media frenzy insists it is her fault for going to a bar. So she quits going to bars. Now she cannot succeed because she doesn’t network with the others in the office or clients.
This serves the additional benefit of making it look like women just aren’t as good in business as men; after all, if they were, they would reach higher levels, right? I suspect that is a feature, not a bug.
One of the horrors of this story is that the “plot” is unfolding like many police procedure dramas, starting with the disappearance of an attractive young woman, then her body being found, with the first suspect being a policeman. This kind of thing – the pretty young woman laughing in a bar, the screams, probably shots of her terror as a captive, then the gruesome scenes in the pathologist’s lab – is constantly dished up as entertainment.
Truth.
That “violence against women as entertainment” (see all seasons of Law and Order SVU etc etc) then kind of ties into “well, it’s not real, so it’s nothing to be upset about/take action on”, and normalising it “what can you do? *shrugs*”, and then, it seeming all so painfully, boringly predictable that you now need to start making these shows with female perpetrators as plot twists, and then that starts seeming normal “look, women do it too, see? Gone Girl, etc etc”.
So we’ve talked about it in the abstract, got bored of it, invented fiction with more exciting dangerous killer ladies, and still not fixed the very dull issue of men killing women with impunity.
Sigh.