This hate on men of color has got to stop.
The “street harassment” problem has arisen recent years largely due to the rise of young, college-educated Whites gentrifying urban hellholes. While more Whites and Asians are moving in, not all of the non-Whites are moving out. Thus, we have more women who spent four years learning gender theory coming face-to-face with virile minorities who give zero fucks about urban elf etiquette. Now we have a street harassment problem…
The reason to place the blame on White males is easy: they’re the only ones who will listen to this drivel, and their subjugation is the intent of feminism. That’s why rape culture and Gamergate dominate the feminist discourse more than street harassment. It’s much easier to conjure up villains when you’re dealing with gamer nerds and frat boys. It’s a lot harder when the perps are the lovable victims of White oppression. The intentional campaign to paint this as an issue that extends to all races and classes (when it doesn’t at all) then makes perfect sense. Otherwise, you’re left with an issue that would make great propaganda for those creepy racists.
This is when feminism and racial truths collide. If feminism has continually promoted the notion White men are the ones to fear, one video demonstrating that’s not the case can cause some consternation, to say the least…
Additionally, there’s the question of how to stop this supposed menace. The group behind the campaign, Hollaback!, wants the state to ride to their rescue and arrest these men. This is rich because the same liberals who want to end stop-and-frisk now demand police to arrest Black men for shouting unwarranted compliments. That idea would quickly backfire and create another outrage movement—this time from Blacks rather than privileged women. It’s also unlikely to ever be enacted. But it does show, once again, that independent women always resort to the “men with guns” option when it comes to dire threats.
Needless to say, street harassment presents a major dilemma for feminism. While most of their subjects of choice are abstract (like rape culture) and affect few women, if any, street harassment has an impact on a large swath of women and is an immediate threat. I have little doubt that it’s terrifying to have swarms of Black men accost you on a daily basis and threaten you with rape. I understand that because it’s not a feminist issue. It’s a race issue. While society tells you to move to the big city straight out of college, all of America’s problems stem from Whites, and you have nothing to fear in regards to non-Whites, street harassment tells you otherwise. This is the effects of living in a multiracial society where you’re not allowed to express racial truth. So you go along with the feminist explanation—but you know deep down that it isn’t true.
Ray Sawhill: The presumption these young-women SJWs seem to make is that every place on earth ought to be like the cute, ultra-safe, well-policed little lib-arts campus where they majored in Womens Studies. Well, welcome to the larger world, honey. It’s a jungle out here. Deal with it.
For all her self-righteousness, she really is being racist. Many black and Hispanic people have a different way of being out in public and on the sidewalk than many college-educated whites and Asians do. They don’t just use the sidewalk as a way of zipping from one place to another. Instead it’s its own place to explore, enjoy and be in. And part of that is interacting with strangers and passersby — flirting, razzing, calling out, teasing, being friendly, meeting, chatting up … If you put down people who view sidewalk life that way, then you really are kind of putting them down for who they are, which in this case is black and Hispanic.
Not that some guys can’t be crude, assholish or dickish on the sidewalk, of course. But objecting to guys who call out things like “Nice day” or “Looking good” … How thin-skinned and self-righteous can you be?
A lot of this SJW baloney is middle-class white young women being angry at the world for not conforming to the values and expectations of middle-class white young women. Hey, honey: we don’t care. Some of us even think that it’d better for you to learn how to adapt to the real world than for the real world to conform to your narrow fantasy of how things ought to be.
Sheltered girls (and the PC fanatics who have brainwashed them) are taking over the media, and they and the larger team they represent are having an impact on our customs and laws, Lily. A new era of Puritanism, thought policing and topdown control may be descending on us. It’s quite a horrifying spectacle. Why would you be surprised that some people are bugged by it? What amazes me is that more people either don’t recognize what’s going on or aren’t bugged by it. Freedom of thought, speech and behavior are nice and valuable things, you know? Once they’re gone, they’re hard to recover.
The Puritans don’t always win, Lily. It goes in cycles. And we certainly aren’t more Puritanical now than we were in 1780. Thaddeus Russell’s “A Renegade History of the United States” is great on how we won many of our freedoms.
You have trouble with the idea that people can and should be able to freely approach each other while in public, Joe? Granted that some of the guys in the vid were obnoxious, many of them weren’t. (“Nice day!” is harassment only by the standards of an over-touchy hysteric.) And do we really want to take away people’s ability to hand out flyers, ask for change, try to interest you in their favorite political cause, and strike up friendly conversations while out and about?
Life in many neighborhoods in NYC has always been like this, Jessica, just as life in Rome and/or Paris and/or Istanbul is what it is. In point of fact life in Manhattan these days is markedly more polite and safe — not to say bland and suburban-esque — than it’s been in many, many decades. If it’s a drag for you, or you find it a pain in the ass, that’s perfectly fine and I sympathize. I don’t love everything about life in NYC either. But these SJW campaigns aren’t just about expressing reactions, they’re about demanding political changes of a sort that radically impinge on basic freedoms and rights. And *of course* blacks and Hispanics are many times more likely than whites and Asians to make smoochy sounds and call out things to you as you pass by. For one thing, living on and interacting on the sidewalk (instead of viewing the sidewalk as nothing but a path from one place to another) is part of their culture, just as flirtation-and-romance is a part of Parisian culture, and trying-to-get-you-to-buy-something is a part of culture in Istanbul. For another thing, working-class and poor men haven’t been as pussified as middle-class and college-educated men have been so they’re more out-there so far as coming on to women goes.
Joe — If we let public policy be guided by what naive, spoiled young women say makes them comfortable and uncomfortable, we’re in for a big narrowing of what’s permissable in our lives. Besides, isn’t coming-to-the-big-city about expanding your opportunities, brain and horizons? But what we’re running into regularly these days is naive, inexperienced (but bossy) young women insisting that the city conform to their fantasies of niceness and politeness. Why should we stand for any of that?
I’m not making it political, Jessica/Joe. The SJWs are making it political. They aren’t just saying “Hey, it gets to be a lot,” or “Lordy, how crude some guys can be” or “Good Christ, life in the big city can be a drag.” I have precisely zero problem with people’s personal reactions to the world around them, I generally find them very interesting, and I generally wish a lot of people would be nicer and more courteous (not to mention more peaceful and less greedy) than they are. But in fact this *is* all part of an ongoing political tendency, and it’s one that’s threatening to impinge on some very valuable freedoms. The same class of PC-brainwashed people who are making and marketing vids like this one are moving up the ladder in the media, in academia and in government. That’s why it’s important to respond to them.
I’ve been walking the sidewalks of NYC for 35 years (and I do a *lot* of walking, very deliberately so). The fact that no one catcalls me doesn’t interfere with me being very observant, let alone sympathetic to other people, incuding (amazingly enough) women.
But naive, bossy young white women who want to scold poor and working-class dark-skinned New Yorkers into behaving like pussywhipped college-educated whiteguys? No, I’m not very sympathetic to that. New York City’s street life is part of what makes the place colorful, and not-suburbia, and I value NYC’s vitality a lot more than I do the feelings of overprotected, PC-brainwashed SJWs.
