hollaback

Male social and sexual invisibility is real. Gee, do you think this could be related to street harassment? By default, if men don’t affect “confidence,” read women’s minds and know if they are attractive to them beforehand, risk socially and all the rest of the garbage that women apparently demand of them in order to successfully fulfill a female imposed role they never even asked for, they fall into a social chasm that doesn’t even exist for most women. Those men disappear. Nobody cares. Nobody is going to throw them a life preserver. It’s that same invisibility which is probably at work when people fail to recognize that men being three times as likely to be homeless is actually a gender issue.

I mean this is like white supremacists making videos about how they’re afraid of black people and rattling off violent crime and incarceration statistics. Seriously, there really isn’t a difference between that and what you’re doing. In their case and in yours, there is no real attempt to understand why crime would be higher in minority neighborhoods that have been devastated by red lining, deindustrialization, and neoliberalism, just as there is no attempt by you to understand why the social landscape women have created for men and the incoherent nature of the role they have saddled men with would produce something like street harassment.

There’s no “love” and revolution. All I see is bourgeois white women’s bigotry and ignorance.

Answer this question: Why is it your humanity which is in question? You’re constantly reminding us that “women are human beings,” as if anybody suggested that they weren’t. Why isn’t it my humanity that is in question, since I’m the one who will be more likely to be accused of “harassment,” and being “rapey,” or “creepy,” when I attempt to navigate the moronic gender role that women have imposed if I expect to have anything resembling a normal social and sexual existence.

Please explain. So far as I can tell, I’m the one who has to remind people that he is human, not you. Nobody will ever accuse you of predation and criminality based on your gender. No airline is going to adopt a policy that won’t allow you to sit next to unaccompanied children. Nobody is going to creep shame you on the internet for taking pictures in a public park because they thought you were a pedophile taking pictures of children to jerk off to later. It’s my gender that is assumed to be dangerous, less than human, in dire need of policing, deconstruction, and relentless scrutiny, not yours.

The root cause of street harassment is a female imposed gender role which men never even asked for. Street harassers are like muggers in a failing economy. They are street harassing you because they are sexually and socially invisible in the same way that a mugger is mugging you because he’s powerless in a failing economic system. Street harassment is a sign of male powerlessness, not male power, just as surely as mugging is a sign of powerlessness rather than a sign of power.  The mugger does not feel he is “entitled” to your wallet, but you certainly feel “entitled” to a civil society, even though you don’t bother to ask why it would prove to be less than civil.

I actually appreciate the nuance in your position here, but you’re still pretty far off the mark. You can’t seem to recognize that gender is a dynamic and you also can’t seem to recognize the role that male threat narratives and damseling of women plays in the development of institutionalized racism.  If you do recognize this, then why not do a video on it?

Wasn’t Emmett Till a “street harasser?” You realize there is a long, long history of middle class and upper middle class women (like yourselves, presumably) pointing out the bad guys who end up coerced by the supposed good guys. It’s irrelevant if the bad guys are designated by race, class, religion or nationality. In fact, one might even start to wonder if this segregation among men into good guys and bad guys in order to protect women isn’t how oppressive power structures are constructed in the first place.

Why not start asking how *women* impose masculinity?  You realize that if you follow that rabbit hole down to the bottom, you’ll actually be putting the very foundations of feminism itself in doubt?

You guys seem to believe that the mystical, nefarious, unseen patriarchy wizard produces such commonly observed male behaviors, but in reality, they’re the result of an intergender dynamic. Women are half the culture, so if you want to stop street harassment, then why don’t you start asking serious questions about women’s contribution to the construction of masculinity? You act as if men get to decide what women want and expect of them.  Men are alot less powerful, privileged, and free than you imagine.

Do you know why women get street harassed?  It isn’t because men are “sexually entitled,” it’s because if men don’t actively go out and seek relationships, they die alone, are cut off entirely from any meaningful social existence and things which are basic to human psychological and emotional well being.  It’s precisely because they are raised in a way in which they are told they are not entitled, not to sex, your body, or even any meaningful existence in a social world where they have healthy relationships with other people.  They are instead told to “man up” and climb out of the social chasm they will fall into by default, one which doesn’t even exist for women until they are old.

That’s the context of male socialization and this is where their identity is formed.  Given such a fucked up situation, it stands to reason it will produce social dysfunction, like street harassment and men who view women as the enemy or an object to be conquered rather than a person to relate to, especially when it is the case that forming relationships with women, for an incredibly large portion of the male population, is made into an incoherent uphill battle by women who refuse any reciprocal responsibility and who punish respectful, timid, or socially awkward men who actually abide by what women like yourself prescribe as healthy male behavior.

Indeed, I suspect that you’ll find a lot of street harassers themselves became that way after being routinely ignored by women.  Negative attention is, after all, better than no attention at all in their case.  And we all understand that a guy who is attractive to a woman will be deemed “confident” while a guy who is unattractive will be labeled a harasser or “creep” for the same male behavior.   We do understand that right?

Now would you like to explain how you like “confidence” in a man who makes the first move again?

Curiously, you didn’t think that aspect of this was important enough to include in your video. So, while I’m sure it’s comforting and emotionally satisfying to whine about how men are evil degenerate predators and engage in the condescending and bigoted mommy politics of shaming, as you have done here, men are actually a product of a culture what women have actually imposed.

And no, your little perfunctory disclaimer about men being victims sometimes that you tossed in as a side note doesn’t mean anything.  Sorry.  If you want to solve a problem, like a social problem, you look for its underlying causes.  Only feminists and racists, as in the case of violent crime in minority neighborhoods, refuse to do this, because they prefer instead to assume that the bad guys are simply making bad moral choices rather than asking what context produces so many men making so many bad choices.

You’re whining about something only women have the power to change.  Stamping your feet at the injustice of street harassers to remind them that it’s wrong solves nothing.  Did you not realize that they already know it’s wrong?

Since you refuse to recognize that women are half the culture and provide the most important aspects of the social landscape in which male identity is formed, my question to you is why I should give a flying fuck about street harassment?  Seriously, why should I care?  What purpose could the conversation possibly serve if there is no possible solution to it?  And how could there be a solution if you refuse to recognize the origin of the problem?  How do you solve a problem whose origin you refuse to admit?  Oh that’s right, you’re not actually interested in solving the problem, but in whining, demonizing, shaming, and attention whoring.  Yeah, sorry, I have better things to do.

In the end, you’ll be old and nobody will look at you.  You’ll be as sexually invisible as most men were their entire lives. Then you’ll complain about the beauty myth, objectification, and male imposed standards of beauty, so I fail to see why I should care about how horrible you think it is to be sexually attractive.  I no loner give a fuck, sorry.

Fourteen year old “street harasser” Emmett Till, murdered by the Klan for whistling at a white woman: