What does inappropriately look like? What if I'm on my way to my changing room and someone comes out of theirs and stands just a bit too close to me and asks me my opinion on what they are wearing? What if they haven't quite done it up properly?
Mere Tut Tutting, as recommended by Jolyon Hoity-Toity-Priviledge-Person is not the way to go. The appropriate ladylike response when one comes across a man acting inappropriately in the women's changing rooms is to scream. Open your throat, open your mouth, throw your head back and scream like a banshee. Scream until you run out of air, then suck down a quick breath and scream again. Keep on screaming until every customer in the entire shop knows something bad has been allowed to happen in the women's changing rooms.
Instead of being silent and ceding all our spaces, we need to articulate our deep distress in a way that is not easy to ignore.
So let's try shattering the carefully constructed ambience in those up market shopping emporiums with the loudest possible sounds of female distress. Alerting every woman in the shop to the potential danger, and ensuring that perving in the women's changing rooms carries an immediate penalty of shame.
The dismissive pronouncement that inappropriate behaviour will be dealt with after it has been committed is despicable. We all know that in most cases the offender will slip away, and their "appropriate action" will consist of phoning the police, who will arrive after a long delay, look at CCTV footage, take a statement, and phone a few days later to say they have made no progress and are closing the case.
Men making these policies find it all to easy to dismiss the concerns of women. How many of us have written to them, explaining in careful detail why sex segregated spaces, as permitted under UK equality law, are of vital importance to the comfort, safety, privacy and dignity of women? Their contempt for their female customers is so deep that they our pleas don’t register, except perhaps as a faint and distant bleating. We need to find ways of making it a lot harder for them to ignore us.
The loudest female scream was recorded at 129 dB, which should drown out the Christmas muzak. Once traumatised women up and down the country take to proclaiming their extreme distress at ear splitting levels it will become much harder to pretend that women don't really mind by being forced to share intimate spaces with predatory males.
I wonder how many incidents of women vocalising their trauma in defiled changing rooms would be needed before it became less bothersome to return to properly sex segregated changing areas? There is no reason at all that gender neutral changing rooms can't also be provided to avoid excluding those whose gender identity differs from their birth sex. True inclusivity does not dismiss the sex based rights of women!