If you haven’t seen it already: there’s a video in the news of a woman walking around Manhattan which shows the way men treated her. The woman didn’t initiate any of these contacts. And no, she wasn’t dressed provocatively. Take a look.
The point of the video is to raise awareness about offensive male behavior in order to change it, so naturally you’d expect for everything in the video to be offensive. I agree that some of the comments in the video are inappropriate, but a good bit of it is benign or “gray area.”
Let me explain what I mean: There are a couple of guys in the video who look at the woman and say “DAMN!” (not under their breath, either, but so loud that they certainly intended for her to hear it). That is offensive. Think about it: the guys are showing that they’re sexually attracted to the woman… And at the same time showing that they do not care about her or what she thinks (what if she was offended by the profanity?). Communicating “I don’t give a damn about you” and “I want to have sex with you” simultaneously is disturbing. You don’t have to be a feminist activist to see that.
On the other hand, the video also includes a shot of a guy who said nothing more than “How are you this morning?” and another shot of a guy who said, “Have a nice evening.” No more, no less. Why are these shots in the video? If the point of the video is to raise awareness about offensive male behavior, I can’t think of anything more benign these guys could’ve said (besides saying nothing at all). Should the guys have said nothing at all? I don’t think anyone should be out to create social prohibitions on men initiating conversations. That isn’t a realistic goal for any society to have. It’s also not a goal any society should want. Sure, some women find it annoying for a strangers to say, “Hi, how are you?” twenty times a day. On the other hand, though, not doing that means telling guys to never approach women or start conversations. I don’t think women would really want a world like that (relationships would begin a lot less often if that didn’t happen).
Then there are the gray areas: Some guys speak to the woman referring to her as ‘darling’ or ‘beautiful.’ Is it this an offensive use of terms of endearment towards a stranger? Or is it an innocuous compliment. I don’t know. I think it’s a “glass half-full, glass half-empty” situation. And before anyone posts: “you just think that because you’re a dude!” remember that some women don’t find this offensive: On the Daily Show one of the women interviewed said she was perfectly alright with “you’re beautiful” type comments coming from strangers , and I imagine that represents a reasonably high fraction of female opinion.
Minus the intro, the video in question is about a minute and a half long, and the video is comprised of excerpts taken from ten hours of filming. An important question needs to be asked: How representative is this minute and a half of the whole ten hours? On one extreme, if every single offensive comment was captured, then this video means only that a fairly small fraction of men stand in need of enlightenment on how they treat women in public. On the other extreme, if ten hours of filming produced nine hours of footage that looked just about the same as the minute and a half we just saw, then obviously we have an even bigger problem. Either way, there is a problem, and a problem that ought to be corrected. How do we do that?
