Cancel feminism – someone in the street just said a man was fit by jessiecath, at writing all wrongs 2:03 pm / 02 November 2014
You know that weird feeling when something bad happens on the internet and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, or just walk away and go outside and maybe breathe into a paper bag if you really need to?
Women didn’t need a video of a woman getting cat-called over a 100 times to know that a genuinely enraging amount of sexual harassment still happens to women all the time. But someone made one anyway, so great, cheers etc. As you can imagine, the responses are predictable to the point of mind-numbing tedium, going along these lines:
Women: ‘Welcome to my life lol’
Men: ‘Wow, it’s quite bad actually all that sexual harassment isn’t it’
Some other men: ‘Women stop saying this is harassment it’s not CAN’T WE JUST GIVE YOU A COMPLIMENT!!!’
Some other men: ‘I got cat-called once. Must make a video undermining women’s experiences ASAP’
And that last thing, it has now happened. And I’m really glad, because one thing that we really needed was another video where some blokes undermine the shit time that women are forced to have because they non-consensually have to live in a patriarchal society. (Don’t know if you saw that one recently where it turns out that 99.9999% of domestic violence cases are women beating the shit out of men. I know men are supposed to be emotionally repressed but seriously, how are they managing to hide that that’s what’s really going on?)
So anyway, BORING I know, but it turns out some men still don’t really get it about this cat-calling business. Hey man, just because someone once called you fit when you walked down the street does not mean you are also a VICTIM OF STRUGGLE. There are a hundred other articles about why cat-calling is bad and I am loathe to write another one, and it’s not the oppression olympics, but there is a unique sense of irritation I feel when I hear men claiming that their experiences of ‘sexual objectification’ are the same as those experienced by women.
The first time I experienced this feeling was when Laura Bates was on the radio talking about Everyday Sexism about two years ago. Men fell over themselves to ring in to say that actually once they were shouted at by a group of women and they were very scared very intimidated very upset very distressed etc. I’m sure they were. Jeremy Vine for one seemed extremely bewildered by the whole experience.
But notice a pattern: If a woman doesn’t want <insert thing here> to happen to her, she shouldn’t <insert thing here> (just to reiterate please do not I repeat DO NOT insert your thing here.)
So if I don’t want to get raped, I shouldn’t get drunk. Because if I don’t want my car to get stolen I shouldn’t leave the keys lying around should I/ similar analogy comparing human beings with thoughts and feelings to material objects. If I don’t want someone to hack into my private photos, I should never take photos of myself naked. If I don’t want to get shouted at in the street, I shouldn’t wear certain clothes. All very foolproof gameplans of course, because if you obey these rules bad things will never happen ever OBVIOUSLY.
But aside from the fact that is obviously bullshit, it all operates around the understanding that the onus is on the woman to alter the way she lives her life in order to accommodate the invasive behaviour of men.
Again, when people say that women should take cat-calling as a compliment, they are again trying to force women to live by terms other than their own. ‘NO, that was not a prelude to rape, it was just a compliment OK? YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL.’ (…’I mean I was intimidating you in public by reinforcing the fact that you are seen by men as an interchangeable sexual object but hey let’s not talk about that.’)
Power dynamics, eh people? If a man shouts at a woman in the street, he is reminding her that she is widely seen as a sexual object without a voice or an opinion. If a man shouts at a woman in the street, he is able to make her feel intimidated, uncomfortable, dehumanised, embarrassed, and possibly under threat of sexual violence. If a man gets shouted at by a woman in the street – which, naturally, will be far less often since he is the one who holds most of the power – I’m not sure he genuinely feels that he could be about to get raped or in some sort of physical danger. I’m not sure that he would feel that expressing his reservations about such behaviour would open him up to further abuse.
I see women cat-called on a daily basis. Sometimes I even get cat-called myself, even though I have ‘MAN-HATING WILLY DESTROYER’ tattooed on my forehead. I’ve never seen a man get cat-called – I’m not saying it never happens, but let’s face it, men are not subjected to the fear of sexual violence on a daily basis are they now.
I suppose the last argument left is that old chestnut, the freedom of speech one.
Man: HEY NICE TITS!!!! What, I’m just expressing my freedom of speech?
Woman: Please fuck off sexually aggressive entitled misogynist arsehole. What, I’m just expressing my freedom of speech?
P.S. If you must watch the male alternative to 10 hours walking around New York, watch this one instead.
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