Woman walking the streets of NYC w/hidden video. Constant sexual harassment?

I forgot to include something important in my unscientific observations.

A man who is OK as an individual can turn into a jerk when in a group of men. Pack mentality, hence the cliche "Men are dogs."

 

I've seen it happen many times. I'm a guy, but I don't understand why being 'accepted' by other guys is so important to some guys. This relates to this thread--How many of the harrassers were in a group guys? That's certainly no excuse, but it is a factor.

 

Definately. I've been around both kinds. I was usually the guy who said something like, "You've never seen a woman before?".

 

There is nothing that will get you kicked out of our guild faster than harrassing women. We're fine with crude humor, we tease each other relentlessly; but have zero tolerance for harrassment.

Not a lot we can do about general chat (you block it, don't you?).

 

Genuinely I ask, what does that reality look like to you? How can men be made accountable for their speech?

By excluding white men, the makers of the video trafficked in a few longstanding, particularly damaging stereotypes of men of color. Pointing this out isn't in any way an attempt to diminish the experiences of women who have been harassed by men in the street. As someone who doesn't see the rights of men of color and the rights of women as mutually exclusive, I don't understand where you disagree.

Personally, I think the video is especially instructive to guys like myself who don't catcall and those who don't get how prevalent an issue it is. I don't think it's been brought up here but generally, men don't catcall women who are accompanied by other men, we don't see it and we certainly don't experience it like you do. To that end, the video has been especially enlightening and illustrative.

As a native New Yorker, I can assure you that the social and political dynamics of a white woman walking down the street in any of these neighborhoods can't simply be reduced to a few buzzwords and a 2 minute video. Let's destroy the patriarchy, let's strive toward making the world and more fair and equitable place but let's also not pretend that politics ends at the limit of our experience.

 

New York City is one of the most crowded cities in the world. If this video were not spliced together you would see her passing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people on the street and only once every five to six minutes would one person say something to her, and according to this video there's a good chance it would be "hi" or "have a nice day god bless". That's based on their own claimed statistics. This video doesn't show how prevalent street harassment is, it shows how prevalent it ISN'T.

What it DOES demonstrate clearly and so very damningly is just how far we've failed to come when it comes to issues of race and class. This video is an almost pornographic celebration of one of the most ancient racist tropes in American culture.

As of today somewhere around 30 people have had knives and syringes mailed to their homes, bank accounts hacked, income withheld, lost jobs to racist harassment, had the police and emergency services tricked into going after them, and phonecalls, texts, and emails threatening to their lives and families. The amount of racial slurs and worse thrown at them has become too much to universally track at this point.

The victims of the worst of these attacks have primarily been women or minorities (including LGBT+), and the most prominent public figures condoning and encouraging these attacks have primarily been wealthy white men.

Conversely gamergate supporters have taken it upon themselves to stand against inappropriate behavior to such a degree they have an organized campaign to shut down abusive accounts literally faster than the other side can tweet about them and have tracked down serial offenders even in other countries, working with the FBI and local law enforcement to do so.

You are right on one thing: gamergate is an almost perfect example to use here. It's the ultimate representation of how prejudice and bigotry can be perpetuated by those masquerading under the banner of "social justice", how it can be co-opted and used to oppress and control people through fear and disempowerment, and how outrage and clickbait playing off of negative stereotypes about lower class individuals and social pariahs can be used to plaster over that.

Just like this video's own math proves street harassment comes from a vanishingly small minority of people even in NYC, just like it perpetuates the ancient racial-panic over black men being a danger to white women. It's viral profiteering playing off of every negative stereotype in our culture, and worst of all our own good intentions.

It is an unfortunate facet of human nature, regardless of what's in your pants, that none of us is as dumb as all of us.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-K_Cyxjf8A&t=0m25s

 

I know the question is directed to Snowy, but I'll give my answer. People who hear such comments need to speak up to let the harassers know what they're doing isn't OK. Think back to the days when we used to frequently hear fag, retard, nigger, porker, and the like. Those terms are still used, but to much a lesser degree these days. If a guy makes a comment such as "I'd hit that!", and then gets shot down by his friends he might learn not to make such comments. Women could also confront men about making such comments. Obviously a woman by herself would need to be careful about doing so.

 

You can't have it both ways. You can't have comics like this where everyone rightfully eviscerates the idea that it's acceptable for women to be inundated in sexual harassment all day long, and then have a video of the real world that everyone gets outraged over which shows that it really is an extremely rare and small minority of people that say anything in the first place and even then many of them really are saying "hi" or "have a nice day god bless" and getting labelled as catcallers.

To crosspost from elsewhere:

And something else to point out... this very thread, and the massive mainstream moral panic over this video, disprove the very claims its trying to make. If society truly was that hostile to women nobody would give a fuck when you posted a video of it. Instead everyone is falling over themselves to make ever more extreme and hyperbolic condemnations unsurprisingly only of men over this our greatest civil rights issue of the new millenium.

As one of the only people to honestly address the issues of race and class in this put it:

But of course no good experiment wants for replication... so lets see what happens when you repeat the experiment with an attractive man and another attractive woman in a different location... particularly not spending a majority of her time in locations crippled by generational poverty, gentrification, and racial oppression.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75aX9mlipiY


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXdMAXaMicc


We see a woman being left alone, and a man getting catcalled. Once again clearly demonstrating that this is not a gender issue, this is not about "men" and how much "men" suck and how much "women" are victims of "men", this is an issue of why an extremely small number of people out of the thousands upon thousands of non-catcallers behave so differently from everyone else.

But that's not useful. That doesn't start a moral panic that lets you brand anyone asking hard questions as being a catcalling misogynist neckbeard creep. It doesn't let you strengthen your control over women through fear and messages of disempowerment, divide people by pitting women and some (usually wealthy, usually white) men against "undesirables".

And it would force people to start confronting issues of poverty, race, class... the sort of things that might have people asking questions that are uncomfortable with the wealthy elite that have found a wonderful new tool for manipulating people in "social justice".

 

Do douchebaggery and asshattery count as mental health issues?