A question to the women here: do you tend to find it extremely useful that on the Internet, you can generally voice your opinion without being intimidated or threatened with violence by someone who is in your physical presence?
Scifi with aggressive sexuality
- Thread starter JirinPanthosa
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I remember watching a few TV shows that involved a man getting catcalled/sexually harassed by a woman. The male character was clearly annoyed but never in any way felt threatened. Normally in fiction, that gets played for laughs.
Now that was a case in Pakistan (of all places) where a woman attacked a man with acid for rejecting her proposal. But that's extremely rare. Most men don't have to fear physical farm when they ignore catcalls.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/03d1...i-woman-throws-acid-man-who-refused-marry-her
Often, harassment online ends up leading to in-person harassment.
It's frighteningly easy to get doxxed.
Or swatted
THAT TIME THE INTERNET SENT A SWAT TEAM TO MY MOM’S HOUSE
But just read the GamerGate Controversy page on Wikipedia. It's enlightening
That's why I didn't suggest asking them something they couldn't relate to because they lack the female experience. You are right that they don't understand the threat implied when they're catcalled because they haven't experienced the power imbalance in society and possible consequences.
Instead I suggested you could ask them if they want to be stripped of their agency and treated as objects.
I don't think any human being wants to be stripped of agency.
This is the main issue, really. Nobody wants to lose agency and be objectified.
I wish it was that nice. In fact the internet can be a very hostile place. From my and many feminists' experience, reactions on the internet tend to be way nastier than they are offline.
The anonymity the internet provides has sparked an astonishing amount of hate movements and an omnipresent never-ending stream of misogyny in writing.
Whenever a woman dares speak of inequality anywhere on the web... there's almost always a man (or many men) insulting her, threatening her with rape and murder, doxxing her, creating a toxic atmosphere to shut her up.
The internet initially looked like a wonderful safe place for open conversation and equality. Instead we are left with hate movements (like GamerGate) that would have never formed offline. And an astonishing amount of misogyny that is normalized through endless repetition.
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And rather needlessly so; it's one thing to be naive about what "being objectified" really means, but once you actually know the kinds of stories it involves and the way it intersects with all manner of violence and degradation, it should be easy to enough to make the leap that if you wouldn't want that for yourself, you can't justify wanting it for women. If someone can make that imaginative leap via their female relations, they can probably manage it more directly, which is the healthier way to go.
Conversely, if the person in question is grating, deluded, sexist, and voluminously creepy with whatever women they come in contact with, chances are pretty decent that their female relations have to put up with those attitudes, too. In which case empathy-by-proxy is probably doomed.
I just watched a video of Chris Hemsworth describing a visit he made to a prison for background research. The inmates recognized him and in his words 'heckled him. Some of it was all about Thor...but some of it wasn't. He laughed it off but it made me wonder. How would these men who 'don't get it' react if they were catcalled at by other men? Big men...who could hurt them.
As a man who was sexually harassed by a female airbnb host (and went through a complaint process) I can firmly and confidently say I wasn't laughing; I was very uncomfortable. Years back, I was sexually harassed by a gay male(in a non airbnb situation).
In both situations, the person I was residing with had power trip (not too mention mental issues) where they felt if they weren't getting certain attention, they would make the living situation more uncomfortable than it was....or oust me out of the living space.
No, as { Emilia } said, people give their anger and hate free reign on line. When you confront someone in person, they usually have to restrain themselves (either due to seeing the physical cues of the person in front of them or because of the presence of other people).
When it comes to the men who refuse to hear us, or just "don't get" what we are trying to communicate...why don't they see that these views are costing them the company of some of the people in their lives? How do they not see that these views make them unpleasant to be around, so we stop coming around?
Or is it just me who cuts these people out of my life?
I have to say, that is the one thing I love about getting older...I am strong enough now to walk away from toxic people.
In a discussion about police killing black men in the US where the other person was all "well they shouldn't have broken the law.." I have pulled out the "how would you feel if it was your son?" line. No it shouldn't be necessary to make it all about how if a person is "yours" you see them as a human being but frankly for a lot of people it is all hypothetical otherness until you make it all about them. No it's not the endgame of empathy, and yes the message is harmful if it becomes THE message such as in government campaigns that use the "daughter, mother, sister" line. However some people need it to be directly, relatably about them before they can take the step to seeing humans as humans with their own agency. Baby steps.
That's a tiny baby step but maybe it helps sometimes. I still feel it's better to ask men if they would like to be stripped of their agency but oh well...
People who have never felt their agency threatened, appropriated, dismissed.. often have no understanding of what it means to lose it. It's just an invisible privilege.
I think you're severely underestimating the effort and knowledge required to properly understand that question for a man. Most guys like me have no frame of reference for lacking agency or being objectified, so asking that question to a guy, especially one who catcalls women, will either get you a blank stare or a dismissal as nonsense at best. Even reading all these posts here (including thestrangequark's excellent post of her history with catcallers) it's still impossible for me to understand exactly what you mean and I'm actively trying to understand.
@stardream did you watch the video I posted? It'd delicious!
This post doubly ironic given what happened to Leslie Jones just today.
The internet has never been a safe space for women. Beyond the aforementioned "free reign" and the physical threat of doxxing, think about the psychological toll encountering the regular misogyny on the internet has.
This post doubly ironic given what happened to Leslie Jones just today.
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Most men are just so oblivious to the shit women have to endure day in and day out. Starting at a young age, it's like a vice that never lets go. Also trying to make a man understand something by saying "what if it was your daughter/wife/mother," it's likely they are already treating those people in a similar way. It may not be as overt but they are doing it. Let's face it, these men see women as propert. If you want to own something that will obey every command and does as it's told, own a fucking dog.
I think men understand that quite well considering their (reasonable) fear of something like prison rape. I will agree that men have a really hard time time imagining the effects constant objectification (both casual and really nasty) has on women. And how the power imbalances between the genders in society create a much bigger fear in women than they could possibly create in men.
I'm glad many men are open to actually listening to women and our experiences. But you also have those who are still busy mansplaining the whole issue to us, dismissing our experiences and fears.
In my experience, a big problem that many men have relating to the prison rape analogy (and I'm speaking of men who have trouble empathizing with women) is that they can't imagine that they might wind up in prison. Call it privilege, if you like. In a great many cases it is exactly that, especially when you are talking about white men in the USA. What I mean is, sure they know they wouldn't want to get prison raped, but that's something that they don't believe they have to worry about (and they probably won't). Prison rape is the grist for a lot of jokes that people laugh at.
That's all I said.
Again: I don't think it's so hard to understand what losing agency would be like. Being forced to do things and losing autonomy. It's obviously much easier for women to imagine that but that's exactly what we have to get across. We need to make sure that men realize how incredibly awful objectification and denial of agency is. I think we're pretty much in agreement there, @CorporalCaptain.
That's what I think we should focus on: Explaining to men why denying somebody agency is awful. Because we're human beings, too.
Telling men to think of all women as "somebody's daughter" isn't really a solution to that problem. For the reasons many people have explained in this thread.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect men to respect the idea that women don't want this "somebody's daughter/sister/wife" narrative to become dominant because it completely ignores the fact that we are human beings of our own. It is male centric and defines us only through our relation to a man.
Of course men can ignore that and tell women that we're wrong and that they know better and that reducing us to that aspect is wonderful. Which is exactly what the right wing is doing, like that AfD ad @Chilli quoted. I'm not addressing anybody here. I doubt the good people here really want to be "that guy".
I feel like we're going in circles because we're not really disagreeing. Let's just leave it at that then?
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