Can someone help me get my head around this?

[ReallyAngryBeavers]

I'm white. I accept white privilege is a thing I benefit all the time from (even when I don't realize it). But I feel really uncomfortable about this particular article

Can a woman telling off a harasser "be privileged"? Does she owe it to him to listen to his "side"? I'm really uncomfortable with it because it seems to be ignoring male privilege in a one on situation and that the men involved have put themselves in the situation they are in.

Interesting.

Reminds me of the video where the woman walks through and gets loads of hassle. I watched it and saw a woman getting loads of hassle. Others watched it (mainly men?) and noticed that the men hassling were mainly (all?) non white and so the video was racist and should be disregarded.

Well yes it was racist if they did that BUT women like me watching it didn't notice that it was non white men but that it was MEN and this chimed with our experience.

I live in London which is fairly diverse and if asked who I have been hassled by I would say MEN I wouldn't even think of what race / nationality / other subset they were. They have one thing in common, all of them.

For this example I think that I don't know the US well enough to fully comment. Race issues are different / bigger / etc than here. Making videos / posts on the net showing only one type of man harrassing is inflammatory obviously. And I would question why. All men do it. Is it just that the person making the video lives in an area where there are predominantly a certain type of man?

Because the FACT is that all men all over the world do this and worse irrespective of race, class, wealth, country, anything.

I do believe that the police in some areas (UK also obviously) will use laws to harrass non white people esp males but that for me is not a reason not to have the laws it's a reason to sort the bloody police out. Which we should be doing anyway the things that have happened in the UK around racism esp with the Met - and continue to happen - are a fucking OUTRAGE.

Rant over!

Agree sardines and also I loved that video, and I'm angry that because the marketing guy who edited it chose to edit so there were no white males that it has kind of voided it's message. People now just see it racist propaganda and it should just show that any one with a penis thinks they have a right to have a go. I don't know if it was intentional or not.. my guess is unintentional bias (he saw black men as scarier and white men like himself as being no threatening )

With the Cards Against A Harassment woman I don't think she is editing out white males so I think the comments in the article that are being made about her are unfair. They comment that she uses areas that are more likely to be inhabited by men of color. But it also sounds like those are just the places she is.. In her life. So I'm not sure how she could do this in any other way? I have no doubt that if she spent her time walking past building sites full of white men and or wandering around Wall St that she would get equal abuse. And I doubt that she would be OK with it because they are white. I've never found anything thrown out at me by a white male on a street to be particularly enticing

I'd like to hear more about black feminists perspectives about being a black woman and I do try and listen and share things I think are interesting.. But I don't think anyone should be policing women should be policing how another woman deals with a harasser (that she should have listened to a man (Jared) after he catcalled her- she owed him no time). It just always makes me feel a bit "what about the menz".

I do believe that the police in some areas (UK also obviously) will use laws to harrass non white people esp males but that for me is not a reason not to have the laws it's a reason to sort the bloody police out. Which we should be doing anyway the things that have happened in the UK around racism esp with the Met - and continue to happen - are a fucking OUTRAGE.

And yes to this. I'm American and there are a disproportionately high rate of black men being arrested over white men.

This should mean: Stop arresting black men for being black and having the temerity to walk through a white neighborhood.

This shouldn't mean don't make violent crimes illegal: it means start arresting and prosecuting all the white men who are committing violent crimes.. stop letting them off! Don't railroad black men in situations where you have little evidence. That's how you handle it. Not ignore the victims and don't have laws against things..

YY and the point that while things are shit for women generally they are often shitter for minority women (whether the minority item is colour, nationality, wealth, disability etc etc etc intersecionality innit).

Thing is as a white woman I can get angry about sexism misognyny on my own behalf right, then I can get angry about stuff that I am not the target of eg Met treatment of black men but it's down to the people directly affected to say how it is and what needs doing and me to support, talk about, call for change etc but not to try and lay down any terms or say "yeah i really get it" because I don't do I and I never will.

Which is why men need to STFU about issues around how women are treated quite frankly.

Sorry I seem to be in tangential rant mode on this thread!

You know what though anti-feminists making items that are racist and saying they are feminist would be a great way of discrediting us. Much better than the current idea of saying "but men have it bad too". Hope they aren't reading this

The location is a big thing here, it's the US that is about and the article which has it's own race problems ditto the UK. But the point is here this is global it has nothing to do with race country wealth anything. Go to Jamaica and teh street harrassment will be mainly perpetrated by black men, go to India and it will mainly be Asian men, go to a non urban town in Russia or Sweden or Germany or England and it will be white men etc and so on

To try and make this about anything other than sex is a massive diversion.

If anyone wants to see another (funnier) take on the catcalling phenomena, this is Jessica Williams from the Daily Show (you guys might not know her. not sure how many people watch it over here)

Sorry I'm coming back to this late - I just don't seem to get any time to enjoy myself contribute to the important debates on MN...

FuckOffGroundhog - So how do you think we get fundamental change?

No idea - wish I knew. Our society seems desperate to just gloss over difficult problems. Change the words used and everything will be OK.

But then I look at something like smoking.

It seems to me that these days everybody really does believe that smoking is bad. Even die-hard smokers genuinely seem to be ashamed of their habit. That's the sort of fundamental change we need.

but of course it's not quite the same - smoking kills smokers. Misogyny doesn't kill misogyinists...

Do you disagree with the woman from cards against harassment's approach? Personally I think her "here is a little card to say you've hurt me" and also the tiny little needling fear that they will be shamed on social media seems an excellent approach.

For me there are two parts to this -

1. Handing out the cards. No problem at all with this, she can hand them out all day as far as I'm concerned.

1. The videos and Publicising the'experiment'. This is where I think you have to engage your brain and think about the point you are trying to put across and how to make sure you succeed in that. Sure, I completely believe that in the locations where she filmed, she was only harrased by black and latino men. So I think she should have then gone to somewhere else where there were a majority of white men and filmed some more interactions before publishing them on the web.

Then it would be very clear - men (of all colours) harrassing women rather than being perceived as just black and latino men.

Love the Jessica Williams clips btw.

Good points Peckhampearlz I also went and read all the comments in the article and a couple of them also made those same points and in a way that I hadn't got from the article.

I think basically I wasn't seeing the wider scope because it felt like (to me) the the author was seeing this woman as privileged in her actual interactions with the men in each individual situation. Which I disagree with.. I don't think you can be privileged when you're scared of real violence.

But I can see now that intentionally or unintentionally (and I'm sure it probably was unintentional) she was perpetuating stereotypes about "scary black" guys going after white women which the media does love. Part of the problem is stuff goes viral now when people least expect it..and a pet project to tell men to stop being dicks is suddenly picked up by every media outlet.