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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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I take public transit a lot, often in New Zealand, but also a little bit back when I lived in Los Angeles. I have not been harassed as far as I can remember, although if the incident was minor then I might easily have forgotten it. There was quite a lot of street harassment in LA, and incidents from that context are thus more likely to have stuck in my memory than any small additional experiences during my less frequent public transit trips.

There are a number of possible explanations for the phenomenon that you outline. Without knowing more detail it's hard for me to guess which ones are more likely, but here are a few of them:

  • Some harassment is comparatively invisible. Groping can occur out of line of sight. Someone with astute social skills can box someone into a conversation out of politeness and then start quietly bringing up sexual topics after the rest of the car has got the impression that the conversation is polite chit-chat. And so on.

  • Harassment does not occur at random. If you are, in fact, an alert traveller, and this is visible to the people around you, and you look like someone who would intervene if you saw something, then you may be carrying a little anti-harassment field around with you. Thanks, if so! But this would mean that your experience would drastically undercount the level of harassment that occurs under other conditions.

  • Some of the women you are talking to may be conflating "I have heard stories of harassment on public transit" with "I have been harassed in public, although not on public transit, and do not wish to repeat the experience" and may therefore give replies like "I have experienced too much harassment to want to use public transit." This could be true, strictly speaking, even as it implies that they have been harassed on public transit when in fact they have not had that precise experience.

  • People often have a tendency to retell stories with themselves in the main role, even when they heard it from someone else. Think, like, urban legends, where people will retell it and swear it happened to them because that makes for a better story. This just seems to be a thing people do. Some people may therefore be telling you stories that are not, strictly speaking, their own.

Thank you, this is a quality reply and addresses a lot of my reservations in a very credible and cogent way. Much appreciated.

Some harassment is comparatively invisible. Groping can occur out of line of sight. Someone with astute social skills can box someone into a conversation out of politeness and then start quietly bringing up sexual topics after the rest of the car has got the impression that the conversation is polite chit-chat.

Both my mother, my sister and my wife have been stalked from the subway home. My mother was chased so she had to run and the pursuer pull the handle to her door and hit the window.

I'm not sure incidents like this could be noticed by someone just riding on the train.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The original comment way above concerns male-on-female harassment on public transit. You're talking about stalkers following and threatening women when they're alone. These are markedly different issues.

From OPs post:

Nearly every young woman I’ve talked to has told me that they have been harassed, catcalled, ogled, or even stalked - literally followed! - by one or more “creepy” men when they’ve taken the trolley.

People often have a tendency to retell stories with themselves in the main role, even when they heard it from someone else.

I wonder to what degree this explains statics femists cites regarding the prevalance of rape and domestic violence. Perhaps a closed loop is formed when stories with such themes are promoted by feminists, both true and fictional, as represetative of reality only to be then considered by women to have happened to then. False memories are real thing, harms of which have been pointed out by Sagan.

I would think that this sort of story appropriation would be more likely to happen in a conversational format than in a formal survey, but I don't know. Are there surveys of urban legends where people tick "yes this happened to me" in appreciable numbers?

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