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As I was reading the thread below started by @pointsandcorsi, regarding whether or not progressive women’s political values are motivated by unconscious psychological instincts which may not be legible even to those same women, I found myself reflecting on a particularly vexing conversation which I’ve had with a number of young women, and which has always perplexed me. (For the record, I believe that Points’ original comment was underdeveloped and poorly argued, even if it’s obvious that I share his essential politics and worldview.)
For some background: I’m in my thirties and have never owned a car. I live in a major U.S. city, with a (by American standards) extensive public transit network that can get me pretty much anywhere in the city with minimal difficulty. I’ve had a full-time job for over a decade, I have a number of hobbies and activities in which I participate regularly, and I have a healthy social life, all of which I’ve been able to manage without the use of a personal vehicle. Unlike in a city like, say, NYC, though, the vast majority of people living in this city own cars, and it is definitely considered very strange and eyebrow-raising for an adult to not drive. However, many people here do use public transit on occasion, especially to commute to and from sporting events or concerts. As an avid advocate of public transit during my twenties - I’ve soured on that advocacy post-COVID, as the transit network in my city has been thoroughly colonized by homeless drug addicts, and ridership has still not rebounded to pre-COVID levels - I’ve had many conversations with people in which I tried to pick their brains about why they don’t take transit more often.
When talking to men, especially non-leftist men, they have usually been very frank and unfiltered about their reasoning: transit often smells like piss, there are too many bums, it’s inconvenient and they bristle at the lack of control and autonomy which they would have if driving their own cars. All very good and understandable reasons. When talking to women, though - and I don’t think I’ve ever had this conversation with a woman (other than my mother) who wasn’t left-of-center) - one issue is nearly always brought up to justify their aversion to public transit. 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. (For non-Americans, when we say “trolley” in the U.S. we are generally referring to urban rail transit.)
The ubiquity of this story, told to me in nearly every conversation I’ve had with young women about this subject, has never sat right with me. I have ridden the trolley nearly every day of my adult life, normally multiple times a day. I’ve spent literally thousands of hours on public transit. I’ve taken it at every imaginable hour of the day, through every neighborhood of the city adjacent to the trolley lines. I’m a reasonably observant person, and have gotten into verbal (and in one case physical) confrontations with people acting antisocially on transit - it’s not like I usually have my eyes buried in my phone, avoiding taking in my surroundings. If anybody in this city would have a good idea of what things are like on public transit in this city, it would be me. I can count on two hands the number of times I have ever seen a man sexually harass or proposition a woman on the trolley. Supposedly it is happening to every young woman I’ve ever spoken to about public transit, yet it is so vanishingly rare in anything I’ve personally observed that I am always left absolutely baffled at how this could be happening right under my nose, all around me, escaping my notice. It strikes me as… well, frankly, as somewhat unlikely. Now, it would make sense, just as a matter of probability, for a woman who takes the trolley every day to tell me that at some point she has experienced harassment. However, these women I’m talking to usually say that they’ve taken transit maybe five to ten times in their entire lives - sometimes less! - yet every one has a harassment anecdote (usually lacking in specific details, although to be fair I haven’t generally solicited them) ready to go when asked why they don’t take transit more often, despite the fact that most of these progressive women could be expected to take seriously pro-transit arguments such as climate impact.
Since it strikes me as more than a bit implausible that every one of these women has truly experienced what they say they’re experiencing, I’ve tried to reason out what’s happening here. If my skepticism is unjustified, and sexual harassment of random women on public transit truly is this rampant despite my almost complete lack of perception of it, I’m happy to content myself with that! I don’t want to assume that all of these women are lying or otherwise telling me something untrue/exaggerated. That’s what it genuinely seems like to me, though. So, I’ve asked myself many times: Why? Why lie? Why not just say, like the men do, “I just think public transit is gross and low-status, full of misfits and losers, and honestly I’m just more comfortable driving because it’s what I’m used to and I’ve built my lifestyle around it, just like the vast majority of other normal adults that I know”? This is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. In my idealistic leftist days I used to chafe hard at the open contempt for the underclass, but that idealism has long since burned away and I’ve become acutely cognizant of just how sensible these complaints are. Why do these women feel the need to concoct a narrative of personal victimization and endangerment in order to justify their decisions? What is motivating their discomfort and deflection about discussing their true reasons - and, if those reasons are in fact different from their stated ones, what are their true reasons?
I want to throw out a theory, and I’m sincerely soliciting feedback on it, because I don’t know how plausible it is and I have a number of reservations about it. I’m cognizant of my own biases, and unlike a lot of commenters here I’m generally quite positively disposed toward women - even leftist women, a category which encompasses most of my female relatives and nearly all of my female friends. My theory is this: Riding public transit is a daily exercise in Noticing™️ the true diversity of humans, and frankly of different human groups. I don’t know how things are in Europe, but here in America it is impossible to ride public transit with any frequency without observing consistent patterns of behavior that correlate strongly with specific identity groups. The behavior of black Americans on public transit is notorious and would take willful blindness not to notice - blasting loud music from portable speakers, having boisterous and vulgar conversations with no consideration of volume, sometimes speaking/acting aggressively toward other riders (I’ve told the story here about my public assault on the trolley by a black guy) and a number of other unsavory aspects. Not all black riders are like this - in fact, probably most aren’t! - and not all the people who act like this are black. But, if we’re reasoning probabilistically about people, and noticing patterns, the correlations are unmistakable.
Similarly, you see the worst of mental illness, degenerate behavior by obvious drug addicts, and a variety of unsavory realities that threaten the liberal dream of egalitarian universalism. You see people who have no hope of ever being anything other than the underclass, and whose plight seems difficult to credibly blame entirely on external systemic factors. And I think that for a lot of young women, they just can’t handle this. It’s too much of an epistemic injury. It produces far too much cognitive dissonance. And so they can’t be honest - maybe not even to themselves - about it. Maybe they’ve truly convinced themselves that they’ve been personally harassed! Maybe they had a friend or relative who experienced this, and they incorporated that anecdote into their own internal narratives about their own lives. Human cognition is certainly malleable enough for this, and I wouldn’t even guess that this is a characteristically female phenomenon, although it’s plausible to me that it would be.
Am I missing something here? Do other people believe that all of these women (I’ve probably had this conversation with roughly two dozen of them) have been individually harassed on public transit, and I just have never noticed it? Despite being here every day of my life for over a decade? What is going on?
I'm going to offer up several counterpoints to what seems to be the consensus here and say I think the gap you're seeing between male and female reporting could very well be because 1: Women are higher in neuroticism and risk-aversion then men are, and 2: they're raised in a culture that tells them to fear unwanted sexual advances and that they are uniquely at risk of experiencing it, whereas men are not taught the same thing. This could definitely lead to them perceiving a greater variety of actions as "harassment" than men and causing women to have a greater fear of sexual harassment in public, even if they are in fact not uniquely at risk. Additionally, it's entirely plausible that due to this women are also more likely to remember and recall bad experiences that men would simply forget, widening the gulf between men and women on this topic. As a result I think a big part of what you're seeing doesn't necessarily have to reflect a difference in male and female experiences.
There's abundant evidence that males are less likely than females to conceptualise of sexual comments and experiences as abusive or harassing, and that they disclose less about these experiences. For example:
"Widom and Morris (1997) found men were much more reluctant to label child sexual experiences as ‘abuse’ than women (16% compared with 64%). Fondacaro, Holt and Powell’s (1999) study of male prison inmates also found that 41% of those who met the criteria for contact child sexual abuse did not consider their experiences as ‘abusive’ ... Other research that has linked men’s identification as a survivor of child sexual abuse to higher levels of psychological distress suggests that perceiving early sexual experiences as non-abusive may be a form of protective denial for men shielding them against painful memories (O’Leary and Gould 2010; Steever, Follette and Naugle 2001). This may mean that ‘nondisclosure is actually more adaptive for males than is disclosure’ (O’Leary and Barber 2008:135)."
And:
"The disclosure of child sexual abuse and the response the victim receives are integral to how a victim experiences the aftermath of abuse, and to their recovery (Lovett 2004). While there are some similarities in the patterns of disclosure for males and females, most notably a tendency towards non-disclosure and delayed and indirect disclosure, the research also points to some significant gender differences. The main differences are that males are less likely than females to disclose child sexual abuse at the time of abuse, and that when they do disclose, they take longer to do so, and make fewer and more selective disclosures (Gries, Goh and Cavanaugh 1996; Hébert et al 2009; Hunter 2011; O’Leary and Barber 2008; Priebe and Svedin 2008; Schoen et al 1998)."
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/CICrimJust/2014/14.pdf
Other sources seem to indicate a similar male unwillingness to report. This is a report investigating men who have been forced-to-penetrate women (through force or coercion). It notes that the vast majority of them did not tell the police, nor did they tell friends and family about it. "The majority of men did not report being compelled to penetrate a woman, either to the police or to friends and family. The reporting rate to the police of 1.7% is even lower than the reporting rate for women who have experienced serious sexual violence, which stands at around 15%. The extremely low reporting rate in compelled penetration cases suggests a clear lack of engagement by these men with the police and criminal justice process."
"The great majority (80%) of men did not disclose their experience to their family or friends."
https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/forced-to-penetrate-cases/files/2016/11/Project-Report-Final.pdf
Now, this one is simply an off the cuff Reddit post so make of it what you will, but this poll asked people "Do you consider dirty jokes that make you uncomfortable to be sexual harassment?" and it allowed people to specify their sex and their opinion on the topic. 21% of men said yes, as compared with 52% of women. Of course, this doesn't really specify the type of joke in question or the circumstances the joke was asked in, I'd wager that this poll actually understates the gender difference and that the men who answer the poll are likely thinking of more lewd and severe types of jokes than the women who answer the poll as it takes more to make them uncomfortable in the first place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/polls/comments/ravyfb/do_you_consider_dirty_jokes_that_make_you/
In other words, it's hard to know if what you're hearing actually represents a real difference in risk of sexual victimisation, or whether it simply reflects a difference in perception of events experienced and/or willingness to tell people about it. The problem is that there is a cultural phenomenon where it is increasingly encouraged for women to view their experiences with men as as harassment, assault or rape, whereas we do the exact opposite for men. Pair that with male baseline lower neuroticism and greater stoicism, and things start getting harder and harder to untangle. And while it's difficult to get reliable prevalence estimates because of the aforementioned litany of problems regarding measurement, reporting and recall, I will say that there's a lot of data we currently have which indicates that sexual victimisation isn't particularly gendered. Here is a Reddit post I previously made on the topic.
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