I thought this cartoon by sci-fi novelist Jim Hines was terrific, despite his lack of technical skill:
Then click over and read Street Harassment In An Ideal World, which is very possibly the most delightful cartoon about harassment ever.
And finally, to round out the collection, here’s a cartoon about street harassment I did a few years ago.
I think groping a woman’s breasts would more likely fall under a criminal sexual assault than harassment.
Fair enough, title of post updated.
An act can be both sexual assault AND harassment. That Venn diagram has an intersection.
Grace
Am I the only one who thinks that the suggestion that men be forced to wear women’s jewelry as punishment in the Street Harrassment in an Ideal World cartoon to be problematic and a little on the transphobic side? In my ideal world, it wouldn’t be seen as humiliating for people of any gender to wear femminine jewelry and as such, it certainly wouldn’t be used as punishment. In fact a lot of the suggestions are based on the idea that it is extra humiliating for men to be forced to engage in effiminate sorts of activities, such as My Little Ponies.
-Jeremy
Jeremy: I have zero problem with wearing feminine clothes / jewelry (if I wasn’t terrified of losing it.) However, I’d very much like to not “face final consequences and disappear from mortal eyes” which is I’m pretty sure the joke?
I agree with Jeremy. Also, the voice morphing into a “girl’s voice”. It’s still sexual harrassment if you have a girl’s voice, and I have a girl’s voice, so… I don’t see how it is a punishment or something funny and ridiculous.
Men often take higher voices (“girl’s voices”?) when harrassing me, or ridiculous accents… Then when you make them angry they talk normally again.
Ben, I didn’t say anything about the consequences that didn’t involve men being punished through forced feminization so I don’t see their relevancy to my complaint.
I had a similar response to Jeremy’s. I get the attraction of the make-these-men-suffer-their-worst-nightmare revenge trope, but reinforcing feminization as their worst nightmare doesn’t really challenge the values underlying harassment. It would have been more interesting I think to make their worst nightmare being transformed into the kind of man who is respectful of women, etc.
I thought the point of the little girl voice is that the woman targeted would think that a small girl had just told her she looks great (hence her reaction in panel 3).
I think that the reading of the jewelry gag as being a “humiliate the man by dressing him in drag” gag is mistaken and missing the gag, as Ben said.
That said, I do see how this cartoon can be read as transphobic, and didn’t consider that when I wrote my post. Sorry ’bout that.
Isn’t it inherently humiliating to be forced to engage in behaviors that are strongly opposed to how you self identify?
If your identity is strongly tied up in traditional concepts of masculinity (Anglo-American masculinity, I guess, in some other cultures men do wear jewelry) then yes, it would be degrading to wear women’s jewelry. just like it would be degrading to force a Muslim to shave his beard and walk around wearing a cross, if he sees the cross as an expression of idolatry.
For people who feel strongly drawn to gender reassignment, things are different (just as they would be for a Muslim who freely chose to convert).
But the guy doesn’t have to wear just any jewelry, he has to wear the black jewelry from the game Pretty Pretty Princess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Pretty_Princess
(The black ring is like the equivalent of the old maid card– if you are stuck with it at the end of the game, you lose.)
I think it’s more of an inside joke for people who grew up in the 1990s when that game was popular, not a “forced feminization is humiliating and therefore hilarious” joke.
Now read about why that comic is stupid:
http://forthesakeofscience.com/2013/08/11/this-cartoon-is-stupid/
And for further examples of absurdist reasoning, check with renowned skeptic PZ Myers as he explains why skepticism is a bad thing when it conflicts with his political views:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/18/skepticdoc-m-d/
Copyleft: because it’s hard to read tone in text comments, and because it’s not clear from the posts, could you please clarify whether you are saying:
A – That you agree with your first link that the comic is stupid, and are giving the second link as an additional example of that stupidity.
or
B – That you do not think that the comic is stupid, and are giving both links as examples of absurdist reasoning.
?
I’m genuinely unclear on which it is you were trying to say.
When I told my brother and dad that I was sexually abused by my uncle when I was a kid, they told me -“It is natural……This is nothing.Worse things happen to other girls…..You are taking it too seriously…..”
The first “this is stupid” one says this:
That is plain old wrong, in most harassment cases. Factually wrong. Most harassment doesn’t get reported to the police because most harassment is not criminally actionable.
Speech is almost never criminal although it can obviously constitute harassment; “creepy behavior” is almost never criminal either. Also, even things which ARE technically criminal are not attended to in court unless they are large enough: Yes, the guy who slid his hand over your ass as he got out of the elevator has technically committed simple assault; no, the cops and prosecutor do not want to deal with it in criminal court.
The link really has applicability only for those things which are obviously criminal and also which are able to garner an official police response, such as rape. In that context it makes much more sense, but that’s a very very small percentage of overall harassment.
drat. can a mod fix the italics? the last two paragraphs aren’t suppose dto be italicized.
Italics fixed.
I really agree with your comment, except a nit-pick about this:
Even then, I think the link has only limited applicability. First of all, not all rapes are “able to garner an official police response,” even if reported to police. And second of all, there may be legitimate reasons a rape victim could decide not to report a rape to police.
Michael Shermer is being accused of raping one or more women. That is criminally actionable.
Factually.
Michael Hawkins – how is that relevant to what G&W said?
Note: I’m aware there is a backstory that led to Hines creating that comic. But the comic is not about that backstory, nor is G&W’s post that you’re responding to.
I’m kind of interested in the responses (I think mostly from men, though I may be wrong about that) to the “Tips for Improving Street Harassment” cartoon, because my own response is so very different. Most of you seem to be reading the cartoon as a depiction of things that ought (in an ideal world) to happen to men to stop them from or punish them for harassing women. As a woman, though, I read it as things that ought (in an ideal world) to happen to women on the street instead of the usual harassment. Catcalls would disappear and be replaced by friendly interactions. Rude gestures and touches would be gone; stickers, toys, and jeweled birds would magically appear instead. Serial harassers would lose the game, and the girls they were harassing would win.
I’m not saying that the reading that focuses on the male harassers’ experience of retribution is wrong, exactly, but I do think it misses the point of the cartoon, which is about what women would rather be experiencing than harassment on the street.
It may have been unintentional, but Ampersand’s cartoon actually highlights the grass-is-greener problem facing BOTH genders when it comes to sexual attention. Women complain about too much, while men complain about none whatsoever. The man in the last panel isn’t being a jerk–he’s honestly expressing how the equivalent male experience is one of utter invisibility and irrelevance.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-06-03/
It was a direct response. G&W said it was “plain wrong” that blogs aren’t the place to make these sort of complaints because most complaints like this aren’t criminal. First, the “complaint” against Shermer is criminal (hence why my response is entirely relevant). Second, G&W’s points about sexual harassment were a red herring; if anything is irrelevant, it’s talking about sexual harassment when the point being made is that blogs are not the proper venue for rape allegations.
Why aren’t blogs a proper venue to let others know one was raped and by whom?
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Blogs aren’t beholden to any journalistic standards, nor are they easily pressured to remove incorrect or libelous content. Moreover, they beg for the creation of mobs that can only serve to destroy reputations. And on what authority? What basis? We have second- and third-hand accounts that we’re suppose to take on the say-so of someone with a bad history with the accused. Some blogs have started to blur the lines between diary and journalism, but most do nothing like that. Most, like Pharyngula, have no set standards or adherence to journalistic integrity.
Serious crimes are to be reported to security, police, people in charge. Going to a blogger with a large (though shrinking) audience is only done for the sake of smearing a name in a sphere with no given standards of proof.
True. But the flip side of that is, blogs aren’t easily pressured to remove content that is true-but-unprovable.
This is true, and disturbing. A false rape accusation on a blog (or in other informal social media) would be a terrible injustice.
On the other hand, a true rape accusation on a blog could prevent future rapes, by letting women know to be careful never to be drunk or alone with a person.
I completely see why the first possibility disturbs you. I don’t understand why the second possibility (apparently) doesn’t bother you at all.
That’s up to the victim to decide – not you.
Blogs can be much like a conversation among a group of people. If a blog is a conversation then, no, it will not be held to any journalistic standards. Most blogs that I read do not hold themselves up as paragons of journalism. I’ve never noticed Pharyngula claiming it lives up to any journalistic standards and I’ve never expected it to do so. I have come to expect the posts there to present the truth as far as it’s known and I, so far, have not been disappointed.
I see no good reason why I shouldn’t lay out my experience of being raped by person X on a blog. Especially if I believe that may prevent others from suffering and/or if I don’t believe that person X will ever be held accountable by the justice system.
But that’s just me and you aren’t required to hold the same opinion. We’ll just have to disagree on this issue.
If someone posted that for real here, Jake Squid, you would rightfully be upset about it. The assumption you are making is that all claims are 100% accurate.
Kathy, how is Jake assuming that all claims are 100% accurate? It would be as if I said you were assuming that no claims are ever accurate.
In fact, no doubt some claims are accurate and some are not. I assume that both you and Jake realize this.
Ampersand, you modified my post, so it doesn’t come across the same way. Go ahead and delete it if you feel the strong need to change what I posted.
The ONLY modification I made to your post was that I deleted an open italics code which, if I hadn’t deleted it, would have meant that all comments following yours would have been italicized.
I made no other modification to your post at all. If what you see is different from what you expected to see, I don’t know what caused that, but it wasn’t me. Maybe you could try resubmitting your comment?
OK, sorry – maybe it was an HTML thing.
The first part was between two of these characters on the left: “”, so: “<>” . If you don’t see the word “testing” below, my apologies.
<>
Some of the above post was also deleted in the middle. It looks like this board doesn’t like the “greater than” and “less than” signs.
As they used to say on the old Saturday Night Live, Nevermind.
No worries. I hope the lost comment wasn’t too time-consuming – I hate it when that happens!
Serious crimes are to be reported to security, police, people in charge.
Ah, then we can add two more panels!
“I reported it to the police” –> “How could you ruin a person’s life like that? It wasn’t SERIOUS enough for that, and now some poor misunderstood person is staring down the barrel of a police investigation that could destroy them. You should have handled it quietly and informally, not made a federal case out of it.”
“I didn’t report it to the police because I didn’t want to escalate to that level” –> repeat all the comments about credibility/not serious/if you were telling the TRUTH you’d name names and point fingers officially.
but Ampersand’s cartoon actually highlights the grass-is-greener problem facing BOTH genders when it comes to sexual attention
Hey, good job namechecking one of the myths used to minimize and shame male abuse survivors – that men always want sex and are always on the ‘famine’ side of the equation, so clearly what happened to them can’t be that bad.
That bullshit aside, this is not about ‘too much sex’; this is about harassment and assault, which is unwanted, and that has zero to do with how sexually active or conventionally attractive the person harassed might be.
I’m sure some people will say that. But some people will take pretty much any position; that doesn’t mean they’re all equivalent. Reporting rape should be the default, and for the complainers the response is pretty reasonable: “if Jill says that Joe raped her, of course she should be reporting it to the police. After all, it’s a felony!”
Alternatively, there’s always civil court. In civil court, there’s only a 51% standard of proof, “more likely than not” (I know you realize this.)
Well, yes. Rape is a serious crime. It’s a serious enough crime that we should be resolving it in some sort of official manner after some sort of investigation: we don’t want people who are rapists walking around; we don’t want people who are victims to remain unassisted.
It’s certainly true that social pressure to make official accusations (and not informal ones) will have two bad effects: first, they may deter some people from reporting some rapes; second, they may result in innocents who are officially accused of rape. But those are both acceptable consequences in light of the larger systemic improvements to justice and enforcement.
That said, ‘pointing fingers officially’ should be limited to the cops, and not to some random civilian appointee, such as a school official.
Some cops and DAs can be very mean to rape victims, and going through reporting a rape – let alone a trial – can be extremely traumatizing. For that reason, I’m not comfortable saying that a rape victim “should” report to police. The rape victim is the person best situated to make that call.
This, from Skepchick, is worth a read, concerning why rape victims might be reluctant to reports rapes to the police.
gin-and-whiskey @36, you’re discussing “what are the obligations of a crime victim to society vis-a-vis reporting and preventing future crimes?”, which, while an important topic, is not what I or the previous commenter was talking about.
Michael Hawkins said that if someone is the victim of a “serious crime” – in this context, sexual assault – it is wrong for them to have the allegations posted on the Internet, and instead they should report it “to security, police, people in charge.” My response is that this will not prevent excuse-makers from blaming the victim. Reporting to the police? OVERREACTION/EVEN MORE HORRIBLE FALSE ACCUSATION, where the victim should have handled it informally. Not reporting to the police? YOU MUST BE LYING OR YOU’D HAVE MADE AN OFFICIAL REPORT.
The issue here is that there is a contingent that does not want to believe sexual assault happens, out of some combination of emotional community loyalty (“if I admit this happens, I have to admit my happy shiny alternate community is imperfect!”) and rape apologia. That’s what the cartoon is illustrating: that no matter what the victim does, it will always be The Wrong Thing, because the real goal is to shut hir up.
(I mean, look at the Rene Walling/Readercon situation, where there was no dispute about the harassment – there were uninvolved witnesses, Walling admitted what he had done – and yet there was a tsunami of apologists, ranging from personal friends who said that it must be a lie because he’s a good guy and blahblahblahcan’thearyou to the “well clearly he has Asperger’s” contingent (he doesn’t) to people who simply announced that the facts MUST be different because “there are two sides to every story”. (Yes, and sometimes one of those sides is complete bullshit.)
Re civil suits, you know as well as I do that most lawsuits of that type aren’t going to happen in the first place, because the harasser/rapist simply doesn’t have a lot of personal wealth that would make it economical for a lawyer to take the case on contingency (as would happen virtually all of the time). Insurance doesn’t cover intentional torts. Unless there was a third party potentially liable (say, the harasser was traveling on behalf of a company, or the convention where it happened actively enabled hir behavior), there’s just not going to be enough damages to support a lawsuit.