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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 think you underestimate the variety of the human experience, both objectively (in terms of how other people might act differently around you vs your women friends) and subjectively (in terms of how those women friends may perceive the same actions differently than you). Just to take some examples from this thread, I'm sure in your thousands of hours riding transit you've seen people of all genders brush up against other people of all genders. If you mentally categorize all those incidents as "someone accidentally brushed someone else, no sexual harassment" but some fraction of the women brushed by men categorize some fraction of those incidents as "he deliberately groped me, sexual harassment" then the apparent gap between your perception and theirs is already explained. It doesn't even need to be that you aren't seeing these events, only that you mentally categorize them differently than the subject of them.
That aside, I think the underlying reasoning is not very good. As best I can tell the basis for thinking your friends are lying is just because their experiences don't match your observations. I perceive the underlying logic as something like
The only way this reasoning works is on the assumption that your experience of doing X is typical, that it is representative of what others experiences will be like. I think this is a bad assumption generally but is especially bad when applied across genders on the topic of sexual harassment.
I also wonder how far you take this logic. Do you believe any women have ever been harassed on the transit you frequently ride? The logic in your post doesn't just work for your friends accounts, after all, but would be applicable to any woman claiming to have been harassed. If you think women have been harassed despite your lack of observation, why can't your friends be in that group?
Finally I do not find your proposed explanations very convincing and expect you would be quite resistant to these explanations if someone tried to apply them to you. "You say you've had experience X, but I've never seen it. You're just telling yourself a lie so you can continue believing in your political ideology in the face of contrary evidence." How often would you say the foregoing sentence described you? Why do you think you know your women friends and their experiences better than they know themselves? On the basis of what evidence?
Well, the 'why do they think random brushing is groping' still needs to be explained, because random brushing isn't groping.
Or maybe one doesn't notice actual groping if you're halfway across the subway car, because it just looks like someone moving slightly and the person next to them moving away a few seconds later, idk
That particular claim is a weird psychoanalytic thing, but most people are very wrong about many aspects of their experiences, so it definitely can happen.
My point is that the distinction between "random brushing" and "groping" is, at least in part, dependent on an imputation of intention to the person making the contact. Whether some particular contact is brushing or groping can be underdetermined by observation of the occurrence.
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