[Crossposted on "Alas" and on "TADA." The discussion on "Alas" is open only to feminists.]
Bean emailed me a link to this article about the game Hey Baby, a first-person shooter game intended to educate men about street harassment of women.
The game is pretty unplayable as a game — it’s an exceptionally poorly made first-person shooter (“rubbish“). But that’s not the point. Laurie Penny wrote:
Hey Baby taps into the everyday violation of private space that is part of the lives of most women living in cities.
The most subversive aspect of the game is the way it translates what men often see as individual compliments or comments into an atmosphere of sustained threat not so different from that of most first-person shooter simulations, where players understand that violent monsters might lurk around every corner.
Seth Schiesel at the New York Times also found the game to be more of a statement than a game:
At first I found myself somewhat offended. In Hey Baby a man says, “Wow, you’re so beautiful,” and that is license to kill him. It should be obvious that a video game in which you play a man who can shoot only women would be culturally unthinkable, no matter the circumstances.
But as I played on, I came to realize that it is equally unrealistic and absurd to suppose that saying, “Thank you, have a great day” is going to defuse and mollify a man who screams in your face, “I want to rape you,” with an epithet added for good measure.
And that is the point of Hey Baby. The men cannot ever actually hurt you, but no matter what you do, they keep on coming, forever. The game never ends. I found myself throwing up my hands and thinking, “Well what am I supposed to do?” Which is, of course, what countless women think every day.
I can already vividly imagine various anti-feminists focusing on the double-standard (“a video game in which you play a man who can shoot only women would be culturally unthinkable”) and ignoring the rest. But of course, the double-standard in gaming exists because a double-standard exists in real life. Men simply do not get sexually harassed on the street in anything like the way women do. A sex-reversed “Hey Baby” would be pointless and contextless, because it wouldn’t be a statement about an actual, real-life problem; it would just be an excuse to blow away women.
My favorite part of the article Bean emailed me wasn’t about “Hey Baby,” but about a consciousness-raising exercise.
One particular sexual ethics program directed at football players asks them to write on whiteboards what they do each day to avoid being sexually harassed. Most stand around scratching their heads.
Random women are then brought into the room and asked the same question. Furious scribbling ensues. “I stand at the back of the lift to avoid being pinched on the bottom.” “I sit in the back of the taxi and pretend to be on a mobile phone.” “I always scan the train carriage and try to sit with women.” “I wear baggy jumpers and pants when walking my dog — even in the heat of summer.” And on and on it goes.
The women are usually shocked to realise the extent to which they have internalised sexual threat as inevitable and omnipresent. The men are shocked to realise the extent to which women have learnt to manage their safety — almost unconsciously.
For men, this is invisible. For women, it’s so omnipresent it’s routine.
When that double-standard is gone, complaining about the double-standard of “why can’t we have a video game in which men shoot no one but women!” might make sense. Certainly not until then.
49 Comments
The “Hey Baby” game is certainly a unique way of raising awareness and sparking discussion. And for that reason, I do think it has a lot of value. And I very much enjoyed the New York Times article when I read it a week or so ago.
But I don’t think its positive value necessarily invalidates the critiques and concerns about the game. In particular, the double standard that the game exploits is already pervasive in our culture: violence against men is okay, especially if committed by women. So I can understand why people would be upset, and I don’t think they’re unjustified.
I really disagree. “Your double standard doesn’t go away until mine does!” “No! Your double standard doesn’t go away until mine does!”
I don’t see how that gets us anywhere. It just makes everyone pissed off and stubborn, trying to look out for themselves as if it’s a zero-sum game.
But that still does not excuse the notion of escalating from harsh words to actual physical violence.
It seems like this game was made for one purpose, getting people riled up. I’m starting to think that someone was pissed off about how women are harassed on the street (perfectly reasonable) and decided to make a game where they kill such men in order to blow off steam and now people are clamouring to justify it after the fact.
Oh and while we’re trying the be all psychic and head off people’s arguments I’ll go ahead and head off the commonly used one about trying to justify the woman against man violence in this game by invoking the ability to kill women prostitutes in GTA games. In GTA if you play the game out properly you hardly kill any women much less prostitutes (I think in GTA3 you MIGHT kill 4 women in the entire game) whereas this game is specifically designed around the purpose of killing men. Big difference.
People complain about men and their tendencies toward violence so someone thought that developing a game about violence against men would be conscious raising? (As Cessen says female against male violence is seen as okay. Does this mean that male abuse victims could get together and make a game about killing women to “raise consiousness”?) It might work for some people but I honestly do not blame those that get riled up about it. That conscious raising exercise you mention makes more sense and sounds to me like a much better way to get men to notice such things.
Kinda reminiscent of the game Hey Buddy, a first-person shooter game intended to educate poor people about the experience of being an affluent person who is constantly being accosted by panhandlers. Paurie Lenny wrote:
Scheth Siesel also found the game to be more of a statement than a game:
Nobody.Really, are you saying that middle class people have just as much reason to be angry at panhandlers as women do to be angry at men sexually harassing them? Because I see a lot of significant differences there, but apparently you don’t.
A video game is not “actual physical violence.”
You know, it’s my impression that there are plenty of violent video games in which overwhelmingly male characters die by the bushel-load. Why is it that this one is so more bothersome, compared to those others? (Or at least, people seem more bothered by it.)
I have some sympathy for MRA complaints about the disposal male in violent media. But the problem there is the overall pattern — not this one game. And this game, unlike most games, has legitimate reasons that it had to have male victims.
Gipi’s graphic novel “Notes for a War Story” probably fails the Bechdel test. (I say “probably” because I read it a couple of years ago and may have forgotten something, but I’m pretty sure it fails it.) And that’s not a problem with Gipi’s comic. The story in “Notes for a War Story” is all about men and masculinity, and it’s entirely appropriate that this particular story fail the Bechdel Test.
The overall pattern formed by comic after comic after movie after TV show failing the Bechdel test is a problem, because the reason that happens isn’t that stories are inherently better when they’re all about men. It happens because of the cultural tendency to treat male characters and male lives as the default, and women as the exception. So yes, the overall pattern is a problem. No, that wouldn’t make it correct to say that “Notes for a War Story” is wrong for focusing on men.
I’d say the same thing about “Hey Baby.” It is sexist, and a problem, that violent video games as a whole treat male lives as more disposable than female lives. That’s a pattern that should be broken, with games that treat the sexes equally. However, “Hey Baby” didn’t do that as a default choice; it did that because it had a specific point to be made that couldn’t have been made another way.
[*] Note: When I say “men,” I am not saying “all men.”
I’m suggesting there are parallel dynamics.
I’d be curious to hear of the experiences of an affluent Western woman travelling in some nation in which she is constantly being begged for money, and learn how that experience compared to living with daily levels of sexual harassment in the West. It’s not obvious to me that the latter would be more burdensome than the former.
I suspect she’d quickly learn how to decline, and eventually ignore, the entreaties for money. And, while she might always experience some level of stress related to the constant entireties, I suspect she’d eventually cease to regard them as a personal affront and instead come to regard them as an irreducible part of life in certain nations with a lot of poverty.
Indeed, here’s one difference between requests for money and requests for attention: The football players would be able to identify strategies they use to avoid requests for money. Specifically, they’d know that you can minimize requests from panhandlers by avoiding places where panhandlers are. Americans largely structure their lives to ensure that they live, socialize and worship among people of their own socioeconomic class. And, as far as they can manage, legislators pass laws making it inconvenient for panhandlers to be in places where legislators want middle-class people to be comfortable to go. In contrast, modernity provides ever fewer environments in which women are isolated from men — for better and worse.
I’d also be curious to hear nominations for places in which gender dynamics are optimal. Some Scandinavian nation, maybe? Saudi Arabia? The US military? Plymoth Plantation? The Vatican? Is the environment with the least sexual harrassment also the environment that people feel has the optimal gender dynamics?
I ask because, absent a more concrete vision of the promised land, I wonder whether a certain level of gender dynamics are a function of nature, not nurture. Perhaps natural selection has trapped both women and men in certain dynamics, resulting in frustrations on all sides. Anger may be a natural result. But I have to wonder that understanding, compassion and patient endurance might not be the better strategy for all parties in general.
As the Hey Baby article noted, “no matter what you do, they keep on coming, forever.” You can shoot ‘em. Or you can understand and forgive ‘em. How to choose? If you conclude that they’re going to keep coming no matter what you do, then you realize that the strategy you adopt isn’t about changing them; it’s about changing you. Given an imperfect world, what’s your preferred strategy?
Socialist Realism in video games?
I sense Amp means to say that he’s not defending the fact that video games treat males lives as more disposable than female lives. That said, Daran has gradually persuaded me that people really do treat male lives as more disposable than female lives. Now, we can study, bemoan, and object to this dynamic. But I’m not persuaded that we should want artists to conform their depictions of reality to match our preferred vision of the world. If most homicide victims are male, I wouldn’t expect artists to depict anything to the contrary.
Here’s a text for consideration:
I sense FilthyGrandeur feels aggrieved, but I don’t have a firm sense of why. Specifically –
1. Does she feel aggrieved by the fact that the man has certain feelings about her (or her body)?
2. Does she feel aggrieved that he let her know about his feelings – that is, that he was insufficiently skillful in concealing his feelings?
3. Does she feel aggrieved that he not merely revealed his feelings, but intentionally did so?
4. Does she feel aggrieved that he was insufficiently skillful in revealing his feelings?
FilthyGrandeur gets “flustered and angry that I couldn’t just exist…” even though there’s no evidence that the man in question was interfering with her existence. I sense her desire to “just exist” refers to her desire to control the thoughts that the man has about her. I don’t begrudge FilthyGranduer this desire; as far as I know, all people have a desire to manage how others perceive them. And as far as I know, all guys eventually realize that they can’t, and they don’t have the right to demand that people conform their view to whatever the guy prefers. I assume women also arrive at this conclusion eventually – until I read discussions such as this one.
In sum, I understand that women live in fear of violence. I also understand that women live in vague, low-grade nausea t at the realization that they are the objects of lust by others when those feelings are not reciprocated. I feel motivated to adopt policies to minimize a woman’s fear of violence. I don’t feel the same motivation to adopt policies to minimize the woman’s nausea.
In short, (many) men DO lust after (many) women, especially women of child-bearing age. Sure, we can strive to teach men to better conceal their feelings. But is that really the best remedy? Is there any room for a candid acknowledgement that (many) men will have such feelings, that (some) men may ask for phone numbers, and that women have the right to grant or withhold the phone number — but don’t have the right to demand that men not have feelings, or not express their feelings?
I’d be curious to hear of the experiences of an affluent Western woman travelling in some nation in which she is constantly being begged for money, and learn how that experience compared to living with daily levels of sexual harassment in the West. It’s not obvious to me that the latter would be more burdensome than the former.
It is. Anecdotal, I know, but in my experience (both in Latin America and Africa and in some really poor parts of the US) is that while panhandlers will occasionally get aggressive, for the most part they’ll take “no” or “not today” or even being ignored with reasonable grace. And if they don’t they’re rarely in shape to do anything about it. The typical casual sexual harasser, OTOH, will keep screaming at you for ignoring his “complement” and often makes aggressive moves such as trying to block the sidewalk as you’re attempting to move on. Also harassers often work in packs, making it more difficult to get away from them. And bystanders are less likely to take the situation seriously, whereas they’re reasonably likely to intervene when a panhandler switches to attempting a mugging.
Because “Hey Baby” is explicitly and exclusively about women killing men for doing much less to the women. Whereas other games are (1) not explicitly intending to make the game about killing only men–i.e. more analogous to the Bechdel test fail in comics you mentioned–and (2) generally put you in a narrative where both sides are trying to kill each other, or place you in a substantially violent narrative in general (spy games, for example, or games where your character is explicitly acknowledged as an evil villain that does horrible things) so resorting to deadly violence makes sense and is explained in the narrative of the game.
And this is not nit-picking. These are important and substantial differences.
“Hey Baby” comes across as an excuse to kill men for being assholes, not as a narrative where killing men makes some kind of sense.
All analogies are imperfect, of course, so there’s plenty to nit-pick in the one I’m about to give… but I would suggest that a closer Bechdel equivalent to Hey Baby would be a movie that is explicitly trying to show that women are not important, rather than the marginalized portrayal of women simply being an effect of the culture we live in. I suspect there probably are some movies out there like that, and I certainly think people would be justified in being substantially more upset over those than they are over the more “passive” Bechdel fail in other movies.
Amp:
I’m sure you understand that I was not trying to say that its on the level of real world violence.
But speaking of that and being real and everything. Yes there is a real problem of some men harassing women on the street with rude comments and gestures. So these developers take this real situation, put it into a game, and resolve it by resorting to violence.
So while we can argue over the philosophical points of this is still a matter, real or virtual, of responding to rude and harsh comments with violence.
Along with Cessen’s answers I would say the difference would be if let’s say, Rockstar Games made the ability to kill prostitutes the main point of the GTA games. So to all the people that try to give Hey Baby a free pass by invoking games like GTA I say wait until Rockstar starts making killing prostitutes the main point of the game.
From what I’ve read about Hey Baby, you can choose to respond with a “thank you” and a cloud of fluttering hearts, no shooting required. So you could just as easily argue that, like with the ability to murder prostitutes and run over pedestrians in GTA, the ability to shoot your aggressors in Hey Baby doesn’t make it the essential function of the game for a significant number of players.
I disagree with that argument in both cases. I think both games would lose most of their appeal to their respective audiences without those functions. Granted the comparison would be more fair if Hey Baby had a plot you could choose to play through.
I second Dianne’s anecdote. It is a lot less stressful to deal with frequent panhandler requests than to deal with street sexual harassment. Panhandlers rarely escalate (the last thing they want is trouble with the cops or the locals near their territory), while sexual harassment complaints are often met with “can’t you take a complement?” or “he was just expressing interest–what is your problem?” Harassers know that they pretty much have license to behave as they wish, so they do. I never worry that a spurned panhandler will follow me to my destination, but I have experienced that from a spurned “smile, baby” guy.
I do see your point about men feeling attraction, and women being unable to control how they are perceived. To be honest, I don’t mind being checked out (except in a professional setting, where I expect men to be professional!). I do mind being leered at, treated like an object, screamed at, followed, intimidated, punished for going certain places or wearing certain things, and being expected to be receptive to sexual interest at all times. It is wearying to constantly have to worry about it.
Since sexual assaulters do not come with labels, I have to assume that any man who approaches me for my number may take refusal very badly (hey, it has happened to me and my friends/relatives before up to and including violent sexual assault). This is another example of how the level of acceptance of sexual harassment in our culture hurts all men, especially the non-harassers. I don’t mind being asked for my number in a bar or club. I don’t mind being asked for my number after a conversation in a store/on the street/when out in public. I do mind being asked for my number as a conversation opener. At that point I need to go into evasive action to ensure my personal safety. There is a big difference.
The man in FilthyGrandeur’s anecdote starts with his request for her number. She was annoyed because sometimes she wants to walk around without being reminded that some men see her as nothing other than a penis holster. Being approached by a random man asking for her number means she needs to kick into avoiding rape mode (see above paragraph). Men who ask for a stranger’s number without prior conversation want sex. Men who do this outside of social settings conducive to this are saying I only see you as a sex object and I only care about my desires. They may not realize that approaching a stranger for her number can trigger alarm bells. That doesn’t make it not happen. Men are adults–they should be used to social conventions and delayed gratification. Men who have poor social skills will strike out frequently. And they will annoy others while doing it.
Flip side of desirability.
@Mayday:
Not sure who you’re responding to? Sounds like a strawman. I haven’t heard anyone make the assertion that running down pedestrians etc. is not an essential part of GTA. The sandbox nature of the game is one of its main selling points.
I do suspect that they could selectively disable the ability to kill prostitutes (hell, they could just take prostitutes out of the game) and I doubt it would significantly affect their sales, nor people’s enjoyment of the game.
Removing the ability to kill asshole men in Hey Baby, on the other hand, is pretty much its main selling point.
How does ‘I wish you would give me your telephone number’ translate as ‘I think of you as a penis holster’? Couldn’t it equally well mean: ‘I find you very sexually attractive and I wish we could spend some time together, but in order for anything to happen at all I need to establish contact with you’? Or is that sentiment too something of which a man ought to be ashamed?
Filthy Grandeur has simply imputed what she regards as wicked motives to a man, and then blamed him for them.
@Cessen, sorry, I wasn’t really addressing anyone specific before.
Are all or most of the pedestrians men? If not, wouldn’t you be able to use the game to run exclusively women over if that’s how you wanted to play it? (I actually don’t know. I’ve seen other people play GTA before but I didn’t pay enough attention to it to tell.)
The existence of the fluttering hearts response in Hey Baby would imply that shooting is only half of how you’re intended to play the game. Given that information, which has been excluded from all the posts I’ve seen about it, it looks like the point is to reward the complimentary or unobjectionable men and shoot the “bad” ones. Turning it into an indiscriminate gendercide (or indiscriminate fluttering heart party) is optional on the part of the player.
Again, though, I don’t agree with this reasoning. GTA wouldn’t include lovingly-crafted scenarios where you can choose to hire prostitutes (any male prostitutes, by the way? or only women?) and kill them to get your money back if Rockstar didn’t intend for it to be played that way. That makes it as relevant to whatever point GTA has as anything else, imo. Same logic applies to Hey Baby. The game tacitly encourages murdering prostitutes or street harassers by having those options among the limited few that are available to you, and that’s not really mitigated by saying “well you can choose not to!”
Just FYI, in “Hey Baby” you don’t have the option of shooting men who don’t bother you (there are men who just leave you alone). Only men who catcall you can be shot.
Oh okay, I’d assumed that everyone you encounter is a man who says something to you. Thanks for the additional info.
Thanks to all; this slowly-evolving discussion has prompted some slowly-evolving reflection on my part.
Let me briefly state/restate my current hypothesis: Natural section causes men and women to have different preferences. Post-pubescent (heterosexual) men will tend to want to have sex with women of child-bearing age – without much discrimination. (Heterosexual) women of child-bearing age will tend to be more selective in their sexual preferences. The clash of these preferences will tend to provoke frustration all around.
To put it another way, I suspect that guy who asked for FilthyGradeur’s phone number wanted to have sex with her. I suspect that tattooed biker dude who wolf-whistles at her wants to have sex with her. I suspect that the distant cousin – the one that she knows only because for as long as she can remember she’s sat next to him at the kid’s table during big family gatherings — wants to have sex with her. I suspect that the grey-haired old guy in the blaze-orange vest that has been helping her cross the crosswalk ever since she started junior high wants to have sex with her.
I don’t find fault with the idea that FilthyGrandeur believed that the man who asked for her phone number wanted to use her as a “penis holster.” Rather, I find fault with the idea that this motive is “wicked.” I find his (presumed) motive to be natural – just as I find FilthyGrandeur’s aversion to having sex with every random guy she meets to be natural.
Golly, if we could all simply overcome our Elizabethan prudery and acknowledge these dynamics, we could finally stop turning other people into villains in a vain attempt to assuage our irreducible frustrations! The truth will set us free!
But here’s the rub: I can’t help but suspect that if we could reduce the stigma related to sex, we’d experience a world in which women of child-bearing age were bombarded with even more entreaties to sex than they already are. Similarly, I suspect that most people have a natural inclination toward the familiar, and that minorities of all kinds – ethnic, physical ability, physical size – are bombarded with messages emphasizing their “otherness,” their separation from the norm. Again, while some people may be motivated by animus, I don’t need to assume animus to explain this dynamic. I suspect that many of these dynamics are perfectly natural.
And perfectly stressful. Even if everyone was in complete agreement that I’m an “other,” I don’t think I’d prefer to live in a world in which I’m constantly reminded of my otherness. Truth be damned, it’s not setting me free.
Consequently I try to teach my kids – and try to practice – the habit of overcoming the natural tendency to stare at people with some noteworthy characteristic. Such as a wheelchair. Or breasts. Insofar as I am able I join in the professional norm of faining blindness, gender blindness, sexual orientation blindness. I don’t like the idea of capitulating to fakery. But it’s the best remedy I’ve yet found.
In short, I suspect that certain kinds of social tensions are intractable. Societies create norms for managing these tensions, be they hijabs or wolf whistles or “color blindness.” The choice of norm may be arbitrary, but the need for some norm is not: unvarnished truth is not a tenable social position.
nobody really
No doubt true in a general way. But why do you conclude that this particular difference (young men wanting to have sex with any woman of child-bearing age, young women wanting to have sex with a select few men) is due to evolutionary pressure? I can think of various possible ways of joining the dots between ‘evolutionary advantage’ and ‘libido disparity between the sexes’, but they are nothing more than fantasy. What can you offer by way of compelling evidence?
Why? Really, why?
That’s rather hard to parse (finding fault with an an idea that somebody believed something). Let’s try and clarify. In your opinion would FG be right to conclude that a man who asked her for her telephone number must regard her as a receptacle for his penis and nothing else? Or would that be just assuming the worst of a man who, yes, almost certainly had sex in mind – I doubt he wanted her number for the purpose of selling her double-glazing – but may have had a lot of other things in mind too: a rendez-vous, a romance, a relationship…you know, all those things that men and women get up to, and none of which can be realized without the establishment of an initial conctact?
Motives can be both natural and wicked. If nature and morality always coincided we could dispense with the latter altogether. In this case, if the man who asked for FG’s phone number regarded her to be a penis holster and nothing more: as much lacking in personality and autonomy as a sex-toy, then I would consider that to be a despicable attitude, and him to be a potential rapist.
I think the reason that a lot of men, myself included, refrain from – for example – asking the telephone number of women they hardly know is that they fear to provoke a psychological reaction like the one FG has made us privy to. It’s got nothing to do with thinking that sex is a terrible, terrible thing.
FG was merely reminded of the fact that some men find her sexually desirable. Is that so terrible a fate?
Quite right. But claiming that virtually every man who has ever crossed FG’s path wanted to have sex with her, or that when men ask women with whom they are not acquainted for their telephone number they do so in the conviction that the women in question are penis holsters, – that’s not the unvarnished truth: it’s speculation bordering on libel.
I’m referring to Parental Investment theory, a branch of Evolutionary psychology. The theories remain controversial, but you can find published studies cited at the links.
No. FilthyGrandeur’s account gives me insufficient evidence on this score.
My brief review: FilthyGrandeur expresses frustration with being accosted by a stranger who asks for her phone number. Tom Nolan expresses frustration with FilthyGrandeur’s reaction. Why reduce this guy’s motives to mere sex? After all, they guy might be pursuing a rendezvous, a romance, a relationship. If FilthyGrandeur values these things, surely she can’t object to being the object of repeated requests for her phone number?
Yes, the man in question may very well have wanted a relationship. But I wouldn’t say that assuming the man wanted to have sex with FilthyGrandeur and nothing else would be “assuming the worst.”
First, I don’t regard the pursuit of sex – even if it’s sex and nothing else – to be bad. So yes, when I say the man is pursuing sex I’m making an assumption. But no, absent any negative connotations to that assumption, I don’t see how I’m “assuming the worst.”
Second, for purposes of the current discussion – the extent to which women are justified in feeling aggrieved by being accosted by men – I don’t find a meaningful distinction between men who want a one-night stand, men who want a lifetime monogamous relationship, and men who want to sell her double-glazed windows.
More to the point, I find it curiously Victorian to suggest that we should shun guys who are motivated by mere sex, while smile upon the pursuit of “rendezvous, romance and relationships” – words that, to my ears, drip with sublimated desire for sex. Admittedly, maybe I’ve got this guy all wrong; maybe he’s merely interested in starting relationships, and he travels thither and yon soliciting phone numbers from everyone he meets, male or female, old or young, rich or poor. But if we instead imagine that he’s going around soliciting phone numbers only from women of child-bearing years, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had an interest in rendezvous, romance and relationship – but only to the extent that these pursuits include the prospect for sex. When a post-pubescent guy engages in certain conduct with women of child-bearing age, and not with other people, I begin to suspect that sex has something to do with it.
People with such beliefs might be potential rapists. People pursuing rendezvous, romance and relationships might be potential rapists. As I learned from Shirley Valentine, every man is a potential rapists. (Ok, if you want to go with a common law definition, maybe we need to restrict the category to every man who can maintain an erection. With medical assistance, that’s a larger category than ever.)
I tend to reserve moral judgments for wrongful motives coupled with wrongful conduct. I don’t see the need to stigmatize lust, even if it’s a lust I don’t approve of, absent some wrongful conduct.
What does stigmatizing lust accomplish? Do you really think that your disapproval will change what people lust after? If that really worked, I expect that there’s be very little homosexuality in the US. Rather, such stigmatization merely causes people to conceal – sometimes even to themselves – what they want. I suspect that’s unhealthy; I think we’re better off to acknowledge our lusts and deal with them.
Perhaps “stigma” wasn’t the best word here; maybe “mores prohibiting frank discussions of sexual attraction” better fits the bill. I’ve been advocating a frank acknowledgement that many men will want to have sex with women of child-bearing age. If a woman started with this assumption rather than the contrary assumption, she’d have no basis for surprise when she receives confirmation with respect to any given man. (“I’d like your phone number.” “Well, duh.”) But if society promoted such a view, then men would have less cause to fear that a woman would respond with surprise or shock if he made a sexual advance – and that fact might well trigger an avalanche of such advances.
Wouldn’t I love that kind of adulation? Then I imagine I have it: I’m a movie star, and every three minutes someone asks me for an autograph or takes my picture. If I refuse, I know the people I reject will go away complaining, “Gosh, I just wanted to tell him I’m a fan. Typical movie star, all stuck on himself. Thinks he’s too high and mighty to talk to us regular folk, I guess.”
In short, yeah, I can imagine being surrounded by strangers expressing their adulation could become wearing. Apologies to Mae West, but too much of a good thing can kill you.
Speculation? Yes.
Libel? That depends on whether you think that the desire for sex, or acknowledging the desire for sex, is bad. Generally I don’t. And I suspect we can’t reduce the issue much beyond that.
nobody really
I’m glad we’re in agreement about this. By the way, if FG had other, better evidence to support her contention that the man who asked for her telephone number regarded her as a body-to-be-used and nothing more, it’s a pity she didn’t tell us what it was.
Filthy Grandeur, by her own account, became furious to the point of near-inarticulacy because a man she didn’t know asked – obliquely – for her telephone number. All I did was point out that she had no just cause for anger. She attributed to the guy a bad attitude and a bad motive which he may or may not have had in reality, and then took offense at what there is no reason to suppose was more than a figment of her imagination. He almost certainly was interested in having sex with her, but the notion that he ‘saw her body for his own consumption’ (i.e. regarded her as a freely available object for sexual gratification and nothing more) is not born out by the story as she relates it.
It doesn’t follow that, just because I point out that somebody has no good reason to come to certain conclusions, I am frustrated by those conclusions. I merely think that they’re unjust.
According to FG, he asked her once – indirectly – for her telephone number, and she said ‘no’.
Me neither. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with two people negotiating their way to an encounter which is purely sexual, no emotional strings attached. But to regard somebody as a penis-holster and nothing more – that is, as lacking personal autonomy – is a reprehensible attitude and likely to lead to reprehensible behaviour. That is what the man in FG’s story is accused of – as I say, for no good reason.
A man is unlikely to rape a woman if he recognizes her right to sexual autonomy. My point was that you cannot both recognize a person’s right to sexual autonomy and at the same time regard them as exclusively an object of sexual gratification.
If the view was prevalent in society that asking a woman out of the blue for her telephone number was no big deal, then that avalanche would be just no big deal multiplied by a larger number. In our society it is viewed as no big deal for cars to stop at red traffic-lights – and the result? My God, cars can be seen to stop at red traffic-lights at every hour of the day in our big cities! Still no big deal, right?
Would you renounce the fame and wealth which movie stars (and some other public figures) enjoy in order to obviate the troublesome adulation which fame and wealth sometimes bring in their train? Do you think that, by and large, sexually desirable women would be happy to forego their attractiveness in order to evade the attentions of men – men who have the gall to ask them for their telephone numbers?
Mods, please fix these italics!
Yeah, I managed to get the italics switch off-kilter; sorry. Now that the mod gods have managed to get the comments numbered, maybe we can get one of those nifty edit-after-you-post buttons? Or, lacking that, a preview button? Not to be greedy or anything….
(Don’t you love making moderators dance? All you have to do is offer them bits of cheese or a modicum of reasoned, topical conversation, and you can get them to run through all kinds of mazes. Hey, let’s all start submitting link-filed posts on the merits of progressive taxation while commenting about how much we like the color mauve, and see how long it takes for Barry to change the background!)
*sigh*
No.
I’ve read through this entire thread, and it’s amazing to me how many times this complete misreading has been repeated. The entire debate has been based on it, and it’s just not true.
Filthy Grandeur made it perfectly clear why she was upset. The man’s exact words, upon being thanked for opening a door for her, were “i only did it so I could get your number.” A few sentences later FG writes, ” it just exemplifies, to me anyway, the many subtle ways that men like that (not all men, mind you) see my body for their own consumption, and being polite only goes far enough to hit on a woman.”
Do neither of you see why this is, at the very least, a little rude? Do you not see how it reflects badly on this man, that he admits to only performing a courteous gesture because he finds a woman sexually attractive, and wouldn’t have done so otherwise? If the man wouldn’t have opened the door for FG absent sexual attraction, then doesn’t that indicate that her sexual attractiveness is all that really matters to him?
Interesting how differently people can read things. I agree with Chris that at least one party to this conversation is misreading the situation. But that might be the full extent of our agreement.
Yes, I do so see that. Which is precisely why I don’t take the statement at face value.
Rather, given the context, I take the statement as a pick-up line – a brief, contrived, somewhat ritualized means by which a man looks for an excuse to signal that he finds a woman attractive, ideally in a manner that displays cleverness, in order to initiate a conversation. I read the line to say, “I find you attractive – and here’s proof of my sincerity: I’m holding the door for you, something I don’t ordinarily do.”
Is it a clumsy line? Sure; most pick-up lines are. But this interpretation strikes me as so obvious I can’t envision a contrary one. Can someone offer an alternative hypothesis about why this guy would start a conversation by volunteering negative information about himself?
On the flip side, Tom Nolan concludes that FilthyGrandeur has overacted to the man’s entreaties – or, at least, that FilthyGrandeur has not articulated all the parts of the story that prompted her reaction. But just as I don’t take the man’s words at face value, I don’t take FilthyGrandeur’s reaction at face value. That is, I surmised that FilthyGrandeur’s reactions must be evaluated in the context of a world in which she is often the object of unwanted attention.
By this point, of course, we’re no longer discussing FilthyGrandeur or a guy in a gas station; we’re discussing two characters in a text. That said, it might be edifying if FilthyGrandeur would share some additional thoughts.
I’ve been offering similar arguments to Tom Nolan. However, he has me pondering if my view is needlessly reductionist.
Assuming the man is not going to solicit phone numbers from everyone he encounters, he needs to devise some targeting criteria based on the limited information he has about people he is just meeting. He will likely rely on senses that operate from a distance — sight, hearing, smell. Even a guy who is solely interested in how a woman feels will probably rely on his senses of sight, hearing and smell, because the act of acquiring information about people by feeling them is prohibitively burdensome to all concerned. In sum, the information a person uses as a screening criteria may not be the sole information the person cares about; it’s just the information that most easily acquired and analyzed.
Assuming the guy uses sexual attraction as part of his screening criteria, I’d conclude that the guy cares about something related to sexual attraction. But that doesn’t lead me to conclude that sexual attraction is all he cares about. That is, sexual attraction might be a necessary, but not necessarily a sufficient, criterion for his attentions.
Chris
You may have been through the entire thread, but the very part of FG’s comment which you cite shows, begging your pardon, that it is true. She is absolutely not heaping opprobrium on this guy for having bad manners – it’s the not the bad manners she loathes but rather what, in her view, those bad manners reveal. To wit:
It is this attitude which she finds reprehensible – that he regarded her body as an object for consumption – and there is no reason to think that she finds such an attitude any less offensive when shrouded in conventionally good manners. Quite the opposite, I should say.
So no, I don’t agree that FG’s point has been missed.
But to take you up on a point which is more yours than hers:
In my view, saying ‘I only did it to get your number’ would be at the worst a little rude, at best highly complimentary. If a woman were to do me a small favour and then, when I thanked her, said, ‘Hey, I only did it to get your number’ I’d be more flattered than anything, irrespective of whether I found her attractive or not and irrespective of whether I went ahead and actually gave her my number. And in the (highly unlikely) event that I caught her surreptitiously checking our my body – well, I think I’d be in a good mood all afternoon!
I actually agree with nobody really that there is nothing wrong with doing somebody a favour because you find them sexually attractive. But finding somebody sexually attractive, wanting to have sex with them, regarding sex as the paramount reason to approach them, is not the same thing as regarding them as a sexual-object-to-be-consumed, a ‘penis holster’ as Jane Doh so vividly put it.
@nobody really – Are you aware that you’ve framed your argument in such a way that there’s an inevitable conflict between what women as a group want and what men as a group want and it’s obvious (to you, somehow) that the solution is for women to accept what men want and stop complaining that the resulting behavior makes them uncomfortable, angry, or afraid? So basically, if there’s an inherant difference between what men would naturally prefer to happen and what women would naturally prefer to happen, the solution is that society should move more towards just accepting what men would prefer to happen and just not worry about the fact that in general that is not what women would prefer to happen? The fact that you’re attempting to frame this as a sort of utopia in which people are no longer ashamed of sex is irrelevant, and rather misguided – even women who love sex and have a high sex drive don’t generally enjoy being randomly approached by strangers asking for sex, much less when it turns into outright harrassment and those strangers then refuse to go away.
What you’re proposing is not actually a change in society in terms of direction, only in degree – it’s pretty much the situation we have now, just more so. Which is not something women as a group are very happy about, so I’m not sure why you think moving society even more firmly in that direction to the point where women aren’t supposed to even complain about it is something that women would be at all inclined to go along with.
@ Tom Nolan – Of course you’d be flattered rather than alarmed, or annoyed, because you are not accustomed to thinking of women as people who are likely to physically harm you if you don’t do what they want. So a compliment is just a compliment. For women, things look very different.
Basically both of you are engaging in this discussion as if the context in which women have very good reason to be alarmed when strange men approach them wanting sex did not exist. Some reading material that may be useful.
http://kateharding.net/2009/10/05/would-it-kill-you-to-be-civil/
http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger’s-rapist-or-a-guy’s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced
Yes – that is, that’s my working hypothesis.
Well, see, that’s the problem right there – why don’t you feel that women’s anger or discomfort are urgent matters to attend to? Once again you seem to be assuming that hey, someone has to be uncomfortable, so it may as well be women. Why? Why isn’t men modifying their behavior an option? Note that no one is saying that men shouldn’t feel attraction towards random women – what we’re talking about is what they do with those feelings.
I don’t mean to sound indifferent to women’s anger or discomfort. I mean to say that 1) I regard a woman’s feelings of physical threat to be more pressing, and 2) I don’t advocate policies to mitigate the anger and discomfort of one party at the expense of the anger and discomfort of another party.
I find the message of the Klan and of apportion opponents make me angry and uncomfortable, but I don’t advocate efforts to silence them. After all, Klansmen and abortion opponents seem to be pretty angry, uncomfortable people themselves. But I do advocate policies to stop the Klan and abortion opponents from threatening, or engaging in, physical violence. In short, when I’m in public I expect to be protected from physical violence, but not from feelings of anger or discomfort.
Oh, absolutely, that’s an option. And women altering their attitudes about being accosted in public is an option. I advocate both.
And I expect my advocacy with prove to be equally effective on both accounts. I recognize that women have every incentive to be cautious when being approached by strange men. And I recognize that men have every incentive to approach women. Absent some structural change that recognizes and addresses the incentives of all parties, I don’t expect any change in behavior or attitude, my advocacy notwithstanding.
But let me hasten to clarify, please to not regard this as a statement that you should not complain. Complain away; knock yourself out.
Again I ask, can we find any actual examples of societies in which better gender dynamics exist? Men and women have been living together for a while now, so we should have some experience with the subject. If we’re not actually living in the best of all possible worlds already, surely we could find an example of a better world – somewhere?
As an aside, I’m intrigued by the subtext of this discussion. In brief, some people seem to think that women should be surrounded by a sphere of autonomy, exercising discretion over the extent to which the world may intrude upon them, even when in public spaces. I’ve generally associated this “sphere of autonomy” model with men. Conversely, as much as men may lionize the ideal of this sphere of autonomy, they find that they are drawn by biological forces to seek out the company of women – company that they acknowledge they cannot demand, yet cannot resist. Our common law, built on Enlightenment ideas, defends our right to be free from the intrusions of others, but does not defend our right to food. In short, the sphere of autonomy model provides a reasonably good foundation for law, but a pretty poor model of the actual behavior of actual biological beings.
(Standard disclaimers: Yes, men also desire autonomy, even when in public spaces. Yes, women also seek out the company of men. At the margin, however, there appears to be a conflict between the degree of desire for autonomy/desire for affiliation by women and men in general.)
NR, I disagree with your assumption that men who catcall are “seek[ing] out the company of women.” There are a lot of ways that men who are serious about seeking romance or sex with women can effectively go about it; they can go to bars known for being pick-up spots, they can go to singles’ events (there are tons in any city), they can go to church, they can use the personals, they can use craigslist, etc..
Catcalling is an expression of hostility and power-over. Pretending that someone yelling “nice ass!” out a car window at a woman on a bike is “seeking the company of women” is genuinely ridiculous, and will not lead to any intelligent conclusions at all. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not discussing the issue, you’re obfuscating it.
I don’t find much constructive about catcalling on the street; perhaps I should have said that earlier.
That said, I wonder if Amp is confusing this thread with the thread about his cartoon; I have cross-linked posts about them. This thread has tended to focus on challenges arising from guys trying to initiate discussions with women (while acknowledging that there’s no bright line between such behavior and more overtly abusive behavior).
Whatever the relationship between men accosting women and men catcalling to women, they seem like different problems to me. CasssandraSays cites Schrodinger’s Rapist to articulate the challenges of men initiating discussions with women. That post does not ask guys to sacrifice their interests in order to promote the interests of women. Instead, it asks guys to understand women’s perspective in order to understand that accosting women is — with a few exceptions — a poor strategy for promoting the guy’s interest.
In contrast, it’s harder to imagine how to alter the behavior of cat-callers because, as Amp observes, people who engage in catcalling will probably not be deterred by the realization that catcalling is a poor strategy for initiating a relationship. (This was addressed briefly in Outrageous Fortune. Day laborers in the back of a pickup truck lustfully call to women to climb aboard; the female protagonists ignore them and ponder why anyone would engage in such behavior. Honestly, has anyone ever accepted such an invitation? Later, as the protagonists are running from the villain, the pickup truck stops at a red light and the laborers resume their entreaties. Much to their astonishment, the women eagerly climb aboard, thank the gentlemen for their kind invitations and start conversing. The laborers are dumbfounded, like a pack of dogs that finally caught the car they were chasing and now don’t know what to do with it.)
In that other thread BASTA! hypothesizes that men engage in catcalls in part out of frustration of a biological drive. Seems plausible to me; I’d be curious to hear other ideas about what motivates such behavior, why it seems to correlate with gender and, most importantly, what could be done about it.
As a point of departure, I understand that both men and women engage in catcalls in strip clubs. I’d guess that male strippers regard it as flattering, and certainly as evidence that they’re succeeding at putting on a show. I wonder if female strippers have the same reaction. Moreover, I wonder how the dynamics of catcalls in a strip club differ from catcalls on the street, and how the dynamics of catcalls by men differ than catcalls by women.
I’d guess that cat-calling by a group of guys promotes a sense of camaraderie built through a shared transgressive experience. It’s not really communication aimed at the woman; it’s aimed at the peers, with callous disregard of the woman. In contrast, cat-calling by a lone individual seems creepier. Not at all sure what can be done about either behavior. But if you’re seeking my disapproval, you have it.
Cassandra
So far as I can tell, FG’s complaint about the man who indirectly asked for her telephone number had absolutely nothing to do with the possibility that, should she refuse his advances, he might rape her or otherwise punish her. Let me quote once again what she actually says:
FG considers it reprehensible that a man she didn’t know made a pass at her and checked out her body when he thought she wasn’t looking. I, by contrast, wouldn’t consider it reprehensible for a woman, or a man for that matter, to make a pass at me or, believing I wouldn’t notice, to check out my body. The difference between us arises not from a putative fear on FG’s part that men might assault her were she to refuse their sexual advances, but rather from her stated belief that a man who surreptitiously checks out her body and makes a pass at her must regard her as an object to be consumed and nothing else – whereas I don’t equate lustful glances and clumsy propositions with a complete lack of respect for the autonomy of a sexually desired person.
Who’s right, do you think, FG or me?
NR: Okay, I misunderstood what you were talking about. (Although to be fair, the OP of this thread is clearly about catcalling and sexual harassment.)
On second thought, the only reason we’ve gotten catcalling mixed up with a genuine (albeit it unwanted) attempt to hit on FilthyGrandeur is not because FilthyGrandeur posted about it, but because NR brought in FilthyGrandeur’s quote. And now we’ve discussed it at length without FG herself being here to comment on what she thinks, which is less than ideal.
Looking at FG’s quote, I’d say that — assuming, for the sake of argument, that this was a genuine pick-up line, and not just random harassment, although as NR correctly says there’s no bright line between the two — the guy acted like an asshole not because he tried to pick her up, but because he tried to pick her up in a situation that wasn’t right for it. She hadn’t given him any signals of friendly interest at all, and he wasn’t in a situation where he could reasonably expect that any woman there was potentially interested in romance (unlike, say, a pick-up bar or a single’s event). He’s acting with perfect indifference to her feelings.
For this thread, though — more importantly — I think the result of NR bringing in the story has been to muddy the discussion. I’ve been thinking of this as a thread basically about sexual harassment (which is, after all, in the OP’s title), and I wonder if I’m not the only one.
Oh, well.
This, I agree with entirely.
Whoops.
In my own defense, I imported this story from a thread entitled “On ‘Hey Baby’ And The Invisibility Of Managing Sexual Harassment (Invisible To Men, I Mean)” over at Alas, A Blog. (I hope Ampersand never realizes how much Barry Deutch is plagiarizing from him.) I figured if it was sufficiently relevant for that thread, it would be sufficiently relevant for this one.
Well, as I noted in Post 28, we aren’t really talking about FilthyGrandeur and a guy; we were talking about two characters in a text.
That said, I fear I’ve missed out on some point of netiquette regarding trackbacks or pingbacks or something. How is that supposed to work?
Damned if I know. Let’s not worry about it.
@Tom Nolan – FG considers it reprehensible in the context described in great detail in the Shroedinger’s Rapist post, which is the context in which women live our lives. So, how you as a man would feel when confronted with what looks like the same situation is irrelevant, because it’s not really the same situation at all. Context is key here.
I think what we’re really arguing here is the question of whether it’s acceptable for men to approach random women in a way that makes it clear they’re seeking sex in situations in which there’s no reason to assume that the women may also be seeking sex (the coffee shop, the bus stop, etc.), which is why we’re calling it street harrassment. No one has proposed that men can’t approach women in a sexual way in contexts where that’s part of the normal social contract (clubs, bars, singles events, etc). What I think FG was getting at is that most women would prefer not to be approached in a clearly sexualised way when we’re just going about our business and not in the market for sex at that moment. And yep, I agree with her – that is in fact the preference of most women, as you can see from reading any comments thread on this, and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation at all.
There’s also what Amp said – in most cases catcalling isn’t actually intended as a means to get sex so much as a means to demonstrate greater social power than the woman being harrassed, or possibly as an expression of frustration at not having the power to insist that the woman you’re catcalling give you sex just because you want it. The first motivation is clearly not one that any reasonable person should be at all sympathetic to. The second I can see why some men are sympathetic to, but the thing is, if you go with being sympathetic to that you’re essentially advocating a solution where men are allowed to vent their frustration at the expense of women’s sense of comfort and safety. Which isn’t a reasonable thing to expect women to be OK with – adults in general aren’t allowed to just vent our frustrations on other people, we’re expected to be able to control those impulses and behave in a socially acceptable manner in public.
And like others have said, that kind of random public approach almost never leads to sex anyway, so it’s not even defensible on the “well sometimes it might work” grounds. All it does is make women pissed off and defensive, which furthers a social situation in which women don’t want to talk to any men they don’t know. Which isn’t really a positive outcome for anyone, except the assholes who just wanted to vent to prove that they could get away with it and who like watching women squirm in discomfort. Any time I see a man defending that sort of behavior, given the usual outcome, I have to wonder why. What are you getting out of advocating that this be allowed to continue?
CS
It’s a matter of principle, not context. It is either right or wrong to assume that, because somebody has sexually propositioned a person, they must regard that person as a sexual consumer-durable lacking all autonomy. Furthermore, my point of view- though it may be irrelevant to you – is evidently relevant to me whenever I have to make a moral adjudication of somebody’s behaviour. What would you have me do, adopt principles that I set no store by just because somebody tells me that my own are unacceptable? If I’d been prepared to do that I would never have objected to FG’s assertions in the first place.
Excuse me, but that is a very counter-intuitive way of interpreting what she actually wrote, which was that a pass from a man she didn’t know (and who surreptitiously checked out her body) indicated perforce that he must regard her as a body-to-be-consumed. If she’d really wanted to say what you say she wanted to say, she would have said it, right?
She didn’t say what you’re agreeing with.
And even if she showed up here and agreed with you that women don’t like being approached for sex when they’re ‘not in the market for it’, it wouldn’t make any difference because that’s not what I took issue with.
Do you mean the cartoon? What has that to do with my dispute with FG? Ampersand’s cartoon shows a woman whom he has deliberately depicted as dowdy (presumably to exclude the possibility of their being any genuine sexual interest on the part of the men harrassing her) being bullied by a bunch of misogynists. FG merely describes an encounter with a man – whom she is quite certain was sexually interested in her – who made a pass at her and sneaked a glance at her body. He might, I suppose, have been motivated by the same desire to bully and humiliate women animating the male characters which haunt Amp’s cartoon – but why assume this to be the case? After all, FG herself hasn’t suggested any such thing.
Who is advocating that it not be permitted to continue? Would you and FG be in favour of a law preventing men from making passes except in certain localities designated by the ‘social contract’?
But to answer your question: I’m not getting anything out of it, beyond the satisfaction of arguing against the punitive attitude towards sex and the early stages of courtship implied by FG’s stated opinions (her stated opinions, mind you, not others that you think she might agree with).
Shit, I wrote ‘their’ for ‘there’. Shit.
What? No. No, not at all.
Just to be clear, Amp – are you disputing that you drew her dowdy, or are you concurring that you did draw her dowdy, but not for the reason I gave? Because it doesn’t seem to me that a single one of the learing, sneering, jeering exemplars of the male sex you’ve included in your cartoon is interested in this poor woman as an object of anything but contempt, and I assumed that the burden of the cartoon was that such behaviour had nothing at all to do with sexual attraction. However, that point could hardly have been made if you’d drawn a pretty, big-busted blond woman slinking her way in a revealing dress through the same dude-ravaged urban landscape. Which was, I assumed, your reason for making her dowdy.
In my mind, the character is (and was intended to be) “normal-pretty” — not dowdy, but also not looking like a model in a beer commercial. I agree that she’s not a “big busted blond slinking her way in a revealing dress,” but I don’t think the only alternative to that is “dowdy.”
OK, we’ll have to agree to differ – for me a woman with a narrow face, long nose, tiny eyes and (what looks like) lank hair would definitely fall into the ‘dowdy’ category. But perhaps I was influenced by the unappetizing colours and the desolate urban landscape around her…maybe she is normal-pretty after all.
“It’s a matter of principle, not context.”
No, it isn’t. That right there is where your argument goes off the rails.
Cassandra – I think we have said all we can usefully say to one another. Good day to you!
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