By David Futrelle
If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you probably know about The Ratio, the closest thing we have to an objective measure of the Extreme Badness of any particular tweet. If someone gets many times as many comments on a tweet than retweets and likes, chances are good that most of those comments are telling them that they’re full of crap. The higher the ratio of responses to retweets/likes, the worse the tweet.
Yesterday I ran across the most extremely ratioed tweet I’ve ever seen, posted by a Chicago radio personality — John Willians of WGN — doubting a story of street harassment tweeted out by Amy Guth, also a radio host on the same station. By the time I saw it, the tweet had gotten more than a thousand responses — and only 2 retweets. Reading it, I think you’ll see why.
https://twitter.com/wgnkingjohn/status/1006715276057030656
It probably didn’t hurt that Guth tweeted out a bit of a challenge to her Twitter followers:
Women of internet: my colleague keeps insisting I can’t possibly be telling the truth re instances of street harassment and other comments from strangers. Pls feel free to @ him as many stories of street harassment or commentary from strangers as you’d like to share. Thanks! https://t.co/jV6siaOpR8
— Amy Güth (@amyguth) June 13, 2018
The two evidently discussed the matter on his show yesterday, which I unfortunately missed. I’m sure he learned a thing or two.
And he could learn a lot more from the hundreds of women (and a smaller percentage of men) who responded to his tweet with pointed critiques — and stories of the street harassment. I’ve collected some of the responses that stood out the most to me; you can also plunge straight into the giant thread yourself here.
The critiques were appropriately blunt.
And then there were the stories — story after story, weird and horrible and utterly believable. (I’ve blacked out the names for all the story tweets because, you know, this is the internet.)
An appalling — if not surprising — number of respondents said they started getting creepy come-ons and other varieties of sexeual harassment when they were still children.
Horrifying. And there are so, so many more in the thread itself.
Dudes, if at this point — after #metoo, after Trump’s “pussy grabbing” tape, after countless public revelations — you still doubt that street harassment happens, it’s because of one or more of these things 1) you’re not talking to women, 2) you’re not listening to women, or 3) you give off such a creepy, Men’s Rightsy vibe that no woman feels comfortable telling you about the harassment she’s had to deal with. Fix yourself. Start by reading this whole thread on twitter.
I feel that my situation is uncommon. I don’t get catcalled or harassed. I grew up and live in a pretty liberal place (bay area), so that helps, though I do have friends that do face some street harassment here. I also grew up without looks being pushed as the epitome of female accomplishment. People more often comment on me being smart and nice (good because those are things I value, though maybe that’s why I value them). I think my self-esteem is mostly good, though sometimes I feel slightly insecure about my body (definitely not skinny, but also no one except my mom has called me fat). I consider myself average in terms of attractiveness, but that’s subjective, so sometimes I’m not really sure what to make of it. I don’t thinj of myself as cute because I don’t put very much effort into how I look and prioritize comfort over fashion. I’m a quiet and reserved person, which means I go unnoticed a lot (and fine by me).
Anyway I lived in South Korea for about a year, and there I felt like looks were way more important than it was where I grew up. People would tell me I’m pretty (I’m Chinese American, so I could blend in with Koreans, though I don’t exactly fit their standard of beauty), but when reflecting on it, I felt like I actually preferred not having to think about if I was pretty or not and generally having looks not be an important issue. Reading other commenters discuss liking validation for attractiveness as an effect of living in a patriarchy makes me think that patriarchy had less of an impact on me than typical. Which I count as lucky. This is not the first time I feel like I somehow ended up in some utopian liberal bubble.
A few comments on stuff mentioned here:
If your flirting is treatend by the metoo-movement, that means your flirting is in your opinion easy to be mistaken for a crime. So that are big problems where the person who has that problem should really do some solesearching.
There will be situation were normal interactions make women unconfortable(people are akward), but most cases mentioned in the tread (or by the metoo-debate) are not those cases.
Tipps for women in that situation are helpful because even if we chance society, this won’t go away completly. (How to react in a situation that shouldn’t exist is a good idea) But it is important that the goal is here to get away saftly not chance the world.
Now about the chance, most men will not see a need to chance themselves, because they think “I am not part of the problem”. Another one is “what can I do, to help solve the problem, nothink.”
And one other think is, we(men here) underastimate the problem. Since we don’t seem to see that much harisment, we think it is a problem of a few cases, how widespread it is is somethink that men have to realise first.
Some of the storys in the tread are very bad, hope all people here have gotten better and are not hurt that much.
I feel like the importance of being attractive has been ingrained into a lot of us from an early age. I remember being told how beautiful my blonde hair and blue eyes were when I was a child, to the point where I was devastated to find out my hair would probably darken as I got older and I have maintained bleach-blonde hair for most of my adulthood, so much do I feel it is somewhat a core part of me. I think it is a bit messed up but I like that I can recognise some of the ways I’ve been socially influenced and continue to be. That way I can process what makes me feel happy and why, hopefully helping me balance my priorities and make better decisions. It seems a lot of people here are struggling with the same thing too and finding solace in awareness. I think I read a piece by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian about the subject a few years back.
Also on the subject of oglers and catcallers:
There are oglers who will look at an attractive woman when she is with a male companion and the male companion notices but not her because the ogler actually respects her more than the ‘perceived ownership’ of the man she is with, if that makes sense. Conversely, an ogler who respects a man’s perceived ownership over a woman will often make her aware but ensure the man stays ignorant. Oglers who make women aware tend to have less respect for women in general. This means that most of the men in our lives only tend to see (what is often considered) more ‘respectful’ or ‘harmless’ ogling – so that is what i think they think we’re complaining about. I dunno what my point is exactly but I was just venting some thoughts
Super long comment warning……
@Dvärghundspossen
I’m glad you said that – on the one side, I know that street harassment has very little to do with looks, but it always feels a bit perverse that as a 37 year old, I barely get harassed anymore by comparison to earlier in my life, but, at least those times when it starts quasi-respectfully, I feel a little flattered along with the annoyance.
As to the point about people on crutches, I can certainly contribute to that…
A few years ago, I ripped the ligaments and cartilage in my knee to shreds. After a full day at school, and an hour having my knee jostled on the bus, and trying to balance my ability to be aware with my level of pain via opioid pain killers, there was the evening a man held the door to the bus shelter open for me when I was transferring to my next bus. And I smiled and thanked him, because I was exhausted and in pain and dopey and just wanted to get home.
And then he followed me around the station, trying to touch me.
And then sat beside me, repeatedly trying to touch my leg and complimenting me, saying I was pretty and not like other girls, and then started to pull up my skirt so he could touch my bare leg.
This whole time, I was telling him to stop, shuffling over on the bench away from him, picking his hand up and putting it back beside him. I looked around the crowded shelter, and no one was bothering to notice, and seemed to be actively turning away, and when I got angry with him, he started to act like the injured party. I was beginning to think I was going to need to hit him with my crutch to get him to leave me alone. When my bus pulled up, he followed me onto my next bus (where I promptly asked for a seat to be cleared at the front, which was granted, and there was no room for him.) If I hadn’t been visibly disabled, I wouldn’t have had this option, and our bus drivers have an unfortunate record of ignoring women’s complaints and fears about safety.
So, yeah. That wasn’t the scariest instance of public harassment-by-stranger I’ve experienced, but even with more anger than fear, even with a “plan” to avoid becoming a victim more than I already was, even though I’ve earned through experience the knowledge that I don’t have to be nice and I will not let a predator flip the script so I’m in the wrong, it wasn’t helping. Then I had to deal with the fact that he saw what stop I got off at. The more predatory the harasser, the more likely they are to pick the weaker looking prey.
The “don’t look at a map in public” rule is also one I’ve learned to hard way (he offered to walk me there, then followed me around, ignoring all the cues I was giving that I’d rather he not, and then started trying to push me to come with him to this “beautiful place” outside the city so he could take my picture, until I finally hid in a public bathroom until I was sure he’d given up.)
I don’t want to dog pile on SpukiKitty, and I do agree we get way too conditioned to not make a scene and give the benefit of the doubt and be polite and nice, but I’m pretty sure there’s not much else I could have done in these situations. I still got harassed, I still had to give up time and energy trying to stop the harassment, and I doubt the harasser learned anything. The thing about predators is that they are predators. One woman reacting aggressively is not going to stop them from this behaviour, it just helps them fine-tune their model victim.
It is the effing worst to feel powerless, but women reacting differently to harassment won’t stop it.