No, I indicated the question of if this is WRONG is a dead horse. It is. Clearly. But there’s no suggestion or indication of what to DO about it.
A few people on here have said to react to it. Frankly, I live in a relatively small area. Under 100k people. There’s no WAY that behavior would be acceptable around here, and the only time you’d see it is perhaps from some idiot drunk kid. @chgoliz posted a video about a guy at a club, and, taking someone home… I’m a dude in his 30’s, married, with two kids. I didn’t go to the damn club when I was 21, let alone now. These just arn’t situations and circumstances I see. And, while this may be commonplace in New York or wherever, there’s many of us, scores of us, who live elsewhere. Is that privilege? I don’t know. There’s plenty of bad things that happen here. For instance, Racial disparity in arrests in this town per capita are near the top of the country, an issue that I’ve gotten heavily involved in, because I can see a direct way of doing so (campaigning for changes in leadership in relevant offices, restrictions on police, etc). Yet I ask legitimate questions, if phrased in a manner reflecting my general depression to yet another likely mudslinging fest, and, all I get is accusations of privilege.
If it continues to be a problem, then you need to continue saying it is a problem. Martin Luther King didn’t hold one rally to inform people of the problem and then go away because he didn’t want to keep beating a dead horse.
Are you denying that it’s TRUE? Or that it’s a much more common response for when a woman posts something on YouTube than when a man does? I’ve posted several things on YouTube over the years. I’ve never once been threatened with rape.
Christ, wake up. The cultural problems are real and you can’t wave them away with phrases like “new-agey quazi-feminism.”
I lived most of my life in rural, southeast New Mexico. I lived in a town with under 30,000 people. I experienced sexual harassment in high school and as an adult. In high school, when boys would make unwanted sexual advances and I would report it, I would get “Boys will be boys”. As I aged I learned not to take it. Know where talking back and telling these boys/men to shut up got me? A rumor spread around a small town that I was a lesbian.
So don’t tell me small towns are any different. I live in a city now, I have also lived in London. It has happened to me wherever I go and it’s unacceptable.
However, I am finally glad that people are actually talking about it and not longer making excuses for it or ignoring it. If you are too blind to see, that’s your problem and not mine. It’s not a dead horse, it’s a serious issue that has been swept under the rug for too long. And if you don’t want to read about it or hear about it fine. But that doesn’t mean others don’t.
Mostly I was trying to rise to the challenge somebody else threw down, the “why are we still all talking about this when there’s nothing new to be said”. Sorry if it failed…
The alternative is to not talk about it at all which certainly doesn’t seem like a good idea. Unless you’re thinking there’s a way to talk about it some but not too much but I don’t know how you would quantify discussion on a subject across the internet and whether enough people have actually been part of that discussion or at least are aware of it.
I kind of get the point you’re making in that for the at least the last 20 years I’ve been hearing that cat calls is a form of harassment and just kinda generally a douche bag thing to do and I think a lot of people are aware of this which is your point about the dead horse. With that said there are still a lot of guys yelling out cat calls at that dead horse.
And then you said that, and zikzak responded to it. So your opening post where you doubted any value in people bringing up or at least discussing this issue got a harsh response, and when you had an actual question about it you got a better one. See what’s up?
There is a bit of semantic difference between “a parade” and “parading oneself”… though, since she very clearly wasn’t doing either one, it doesn’t really make much difference here.
I wonder what his interpretation would have been if she’d been jogging or plain speed-walking. Makes it rather difficult to have a “guarded” manner, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Hey, it’s an option, right? But that’s actually an old tired idea, never mind.
I guess I just don’t understand why people want to be voluntarily involved in something that apparently enables some unknown number of schmucks to spew disgustingly high levels of hate at them. Meh, I don’t do the twitters, so obviously I am talking out of ignorance here. But I’ll point out that on bOINGbOING, there’s a pretty low amount of incivility and prejudice, despite a fairly high level of tolerance (yes, yes, I know it’s not perfect). So why not just talk somewhere else instead of twitter? If the community over there is being spoiled by losers, why not leave and let them stew in their own juices? “Vote with your feet” for some platform that lets you exert more control over your inputs?
You know, I could live in New York, and I purposely don’t, because of exactly the sort of thing the original video shows - that environment is inherently and pervasively inimical to my happiness, and I have the luxury of being able to choose to live elsewhere. Doesn’t everybody have the luxury of avoiding twitter? Isn’t the majority of this hate being delivered by that platform?
Well, if you look at the breakdown of problem solving:
Recognize that a problem exists
Determine what the problem actually is
Investigate the cause / source of the problem
Account for variables
Imagine possible solutions
Determine the best solution for the problem
Implement the solution
If needed, analyze failure and go back to #6
If you’re frustrated about nobody actually moving past 1-2, then I feel your pain. For anyone who spends a lot of time thinking of ways to fix things, “raising awareness” sounds a hell of a lot like “let somebody else figure it out”.
The problem is that with social engineering, your solutions largely rely on mass adoption of a particular idea- Which makes boosting the signal more in line with step 7 than step 1.
I think this leads to a fundamental disconnect where women largely feel like men don’t want a solution, and men feel like women want to magically fix everything without actually going through the steps.
There’s also the basic mechanics of how rights and freedoms happen, which generally fall into four basic scenarios:
They are taken by force, which aside from the obvious drawbacks, usually just ends up with the oppressing of the former oppressor by the formerly oppressed. This tends to be the method guys usually think of first, which explains a sizable amount of the defensiveness. People have a hard time understanding that freedom is not a zero sum game.
They are granted by the power structure, which has the regrettable side effect of legitimizing the power structure’s authority to grant those rights to someone else. ie: They appear not earned, but given out of the goodness of their worthy and superior hearts.
They are gained through a long process of small battles, give-and-take, and public opinion, which may be the best way, but is tortuously, unacceptably slow. We managed to do away with lynchings and segregation, but we’re a long, long way from racial equality- and this is after practically 200 years.
They are prearranged for that society, which seems counter to the idea of how they come about, but I’m specifically talking about colonization and subculture: The idea that a group who wants certain rights will just go somewhere else where they can have them in peace. Again, worked for the pilgrims, but there are obvious drawbacks- Least of all, that there’s nowhere right now to go.
While men are worried about women taking away their rights to gain their own, it looks like feminists expect the third method to work with the efficiency of, but none of the drawbacks, of the second. Again, this feeds into the fundamental disconnect where men feel forced to fight back and women feel like they’re being ignored.
So, yeah- It’s frustrating to hear about again.
Just my $0.02.
*Edited to include the fourth mechanism for gaining rights.
