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Notes -
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?
Uncharitably, this is just "Bitches be lyin'" written as a more tactful and polished effortpost.
More charitably, you are probably touching on some actual insight but casting it in an uncharitable light (as much as you tell yourself you are trying to be charitable - you don't want to believe women are all lying about being harassed, after all.)
(1) There probably is a lot of redaction in their own recollections going on here. Everyone is guilty of this, not just women. How many people have you known who will tell an exaggerated version of an incident you were witness to and are quite sure didn't actually go down the way they said it did? Are you quite confident that everything you remember, especially unpleasant incidents (like your confrontation with the black guy on the bus) happened exactly the way you remember it? That no one else might reasonably have a different version based on what they saw? And have you never been tempted, even a little, to throw an extra detail or two into a story which then became cemented in your mind as the true narrative?
Probably some of these women's "harassment" experiences were like that - a guy brushed against her, and she shuddered and in her mind, the dude was trying to grope her. Someone looked at her funny and she remembers it as being oggled. She got an uncomfortable vibe on a bus, even though no one actually said or did anything to her, and she felt unsafe which in her mind became "I was harassed."
That probably does explain some of it, but I doubt very much that every one of these women is just outright making things up to hide their true feelings ("Eww, people who take public transit are gross!")
(2) You may indeed be a perceptive person who pays attention to your surroundings, but "I watch what goes on on my buses and I've never seen any women get harassed" is still quite a failure of reasoning. I don't regularly ride public transit, but I have done so many times in my life. I can think of maybe one or two times I saw something I'd consider harassment (and it was very minor, like a whistle or a couple of lewd comments). Most people, most days, on most buses, don't harass people. But if you assume some people on some days will, a woman who rides the bus multiple times has pretty good odds of eventually having it happen to her, even if it's not on a bus you happen to be on. Or you might not notice it, because you didn't see the guy who was giving creepy stares to the woman across the aisle from him, or the guy who sat down next a woman and gave off creep vibes so she moved seats. (And you'd of course question why she thought he gave off "creep vibes" because women lie and make things up so she had no rational reason to think that, right?) So congratulations, you have never personally witnessed a literal sexual assault or a guy committing what you consider harassment. At the same time, you clearly have witnessed a lot of antisocial behavior. Is it possible women experience (and are subject to) antisocial behavior on a level and at a frequency you are not, and that you might not notice all the things that happen that aren't "He literally put hands on her or yelled things about what he wanted to do to her ass"?
Also, would it surprise you if I told you I have never gotten in a fight with a black guy on a bus? Maybe I think you are making that up because it fits your narrative about black people. I have ridden the bus with black people quite often and never seen anyone start a fight.
(3) Yes, a lot of it is probably "vibes." Women know the kind of people who ride buses are also the kind of people likely to harass them or at least make them feel uncomfortable. There is probably a degree of exaggeration or remembering things that maybe didn't quite happen exactly as they tell it to justify the fact that they don't want to ride public transit with creepy gross guys who might harass them, but because of leftist ideology they can't state it in a such a racist/classist way.
So, you aren't 100% wrong here, but you're still reaching for a justification to believe bitches be lyin'.
One thing that may explain some difference between your experience and the OP's experience is that buses are very different to forms of public transportation that have more separation between the conductor/driver and passengers. A public transit train can easily leave someone much more isolated with a stranger than a bus can.
My experience isn't limited to buses. Subways, metro rail, Amtrak, trolleys, etc.
I saw a Black guy try to start a fight last week on the subway… does my anecdote beat yours?
I’ve also had multiple Black guys try to start fights on the bus with me for no reason - I think it really depends where you live and how often you take public transportation.
I never had issues on public transit living in Chicago but I only took it once or twice a week. In both Philly and NYC I take public transit every single day in both cases have run into people attempting to start fights, either with me or others.
No, because I'm not claiming black guys never start fights on the subway. That wasn't even my point - I do not actually doubt Hoffmeister experienced what he experienced.
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Bro. If you know it's uncharitable, then by the very rules of this forum you shouldn't be saying it. Come on man, a moderator should know better than to make this kind of swipe (the second I've seen from you recently, at that).
Amadan: "I'm a mod, not a saint."
Let the mods have a little fun. It's perfectly fine to be a little jocular, this isn't SCOTUS arguments.
This isn't having fun, this is openly breaking the rules. That's my issue.
I don't feel like his statements crossed the line, especially in the context of the overall conversation on the platform. It was couched in a lot of engaging and complimentary verbiage, with a little jab at the end. That seems like something I would find acceptable when I did it myself.
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The rule is that you should extend charity to someone's views (as I did to Hoffmeister by pointing out there are multiple ways in which his perspective can be viewed, and assuming he isn't just arguing that "Bitches be lyin'"), not that you can never suggest the less charitable interpretation might be true.
I would not mod someone for saying "What you said could charitably be read as A, and uncharitably as B" and proceeding to analyze both A and B.
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