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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 throw out a related hypothetical that I originally argued about in 1L Crim Law, during the pointless* two weeks we spent learning the law around rape and sexual assault.
I'm on my way home from collecting rent at different properties, I stop at a bar, I meet a woman, we talk, we hit it off, we don't talk about politics because that would be weird, she invites me back to her place for another drink. She's into me, but not super into me, she's not sure if she really wants to sleep with me tonight or just wants to make out a bit then send me home. I'm into her, I'm going to take a shot at getting into her pants while I'm here, but if she pushed my hand back I'd accept it with grace and maybe try again on the weekend, life is long and we'll have many chances to do this.
We get to her place, she goes to get a bottle of wine after settling me down on her couch and tells me to make myself comfortable. I take my jacket off, and then take my shoulder holster off and put my pistol on the coffee table next to my jacket. I always carry when I collect rent, and obviously I'm not about to make out with her with a revolver poking me in the ribs.
She returns with the wine, and sees the gun. Unbeknownst to me, she's very very blue tribe suburban Connecticut, this is the closest she's ever been to a gun, and she's very anxious and easily frightened by nature (made worse by constant exposure to blue tribe propaganda equating guns and gunowners with violence and a steady diet of true crime podcasts). She can only assume that I carry a gun because I'm a violent man, that I put it on her coffee table as an implicit threat to her, that I went to the bar that night with the intention of finding a woman to rape or murder, that my current calm and natural friendly demeanor means that I'm not just a violent man but a total sociopath who enjoys violence, she calculates quickly that her best chance of getting out of this alive is to do whatever I want, to overperform and hope I spare her life.
I know none of this, I just see her return with the wine. She pours two glasses and sits down, slightly stiff but still smiling nervously. We drink the wine, I compliment her taste (which she interprets as more evidence of sociopathy), I begin kissing her and she does not pull away, as my hands wander she kisses me harder hoping that if she cooperates I won't kill her, I just think I'm getting lucky. We make love, several times, I say goodbye and pick up my jacket and my gun and kiss her once more before I leave. I get in my truck thinking I've just made a lovely new friend.
She calls 911 to report that she's just been raped by a stranger who threatened her with a gun.
Now, for those of you keeping score at home, by modern rape law (assuming all the above text could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in court) I did not commit rape, I lacked the requisite Mens Rea for the crime because I had no intent to force her to fuck me, even if she did fuck me because she felt forced to do so by a threat of violence. One can argue about whether putting my gun on the coffee table is merely gauche or irrationally and unusually stupid enough thata reasonable person would know that by doing so I am communicating a threat, but it isn't clear that would affect the legal analysis.
On the other hand, she one hundred percent mentally experienced what happened as a rape, as sex she had while under a threat of violence against her life.
Obviously this is an extreme example, but consider that in outline it resembles the way many women experience subway harassment vs how men perceive it. Women (and many men) often experience threats more vividly than I do, being by nature much more concerned about physical security and much less confident in their ability to deal with a situation. Not only will women pick up on threats that you would brush off, they probably pick up on threats from you that you don't think you're putting out. You don't even notice the other people getting off at your stop, she says a dude stalked her. You brush up against people, she gets groped. You look at her for a few seconds because you think you recognize the patch on her jacket, she gets ogled. That's just how it works.**
*Pointless because everyone knew the prof wouldn't put rape on the final, too much risk of some girl saying it was traumatic for her because it was too close to her own experience, and too culture war-y if you start getting into tough legal analysis of consent, so during that two weeks there was no real accountability if you didn't get cold called. Of course, I chose to do all the reading and argue about it in class anyway.
**Or, a less wholesome explanation more in line with what you're saying, consider that women might be aware of a general meme that women get harassed on the trolly, and some women that do not get harassed on the trolly worry that it would say something negative about them, their attractiveness or their femininity, to say they don't get harassed on the trolly. So they desire to amplify any experience of threat to avoid the idea that they are too ugly to harass or too bitchy to bother with. To quote an old econ professor of mine, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.
This is basically just Dennis's implication process right? Only unintentional. There is an implication of danger (the gun, or being on the open ocean with no way to escape). Given that men are generally bigger and stronger than women, an interpretation would be, that the implication is always there, the nowhere to run or possession of a gun just makes it more text and less subtext, perhaps.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE
Dennis: We’ve gotta pop by the department store, pick up the mattress. I’m gonna get a nice one too.
Mac: The what? The mattress? What do we need a mattress for?
Dennis: What do you mean what do we need a mattress for? Why in the hell do you think we just spent all that money on a boat? The whole point of buying a boat in the first place is to get the ladies nice and tipsy topside, so we can take em to a nice comfortable place below deck, and you know… they can’t refuse. Because of the implication.
Mac: Oh, uh… okay. You had me going there for the first part. The second half kind of threw me.
Dennis: Dude, dude, think about it. She’s out in the middle of nowhere with some dude she barely knows. She looks around and what does she see? Nothing but open ocean. “Ahhh, there’s nowhere for me to run. What am I going to do? Say no?”
Mac: Okay… that seems really dark.
Dennis: Nah, it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me bro.
Mac: I think I am.
Dennis: Yeah, you are. Because if the girl said no, then the answer is obviously no.
Mac: No. Right.
Dennis: But the thing is she’s not going to say no. She would never say no. Because of the implication.
Mac: Now… you’ve said that word, “implication” a couple of times. What implication?
Dennis: The implication that things might go wrong for her if she refuses to sleep with me. Not that things are going to go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will.
Mac: But it sounds like she doesn’t want to have sex.
Dennis: Why aren’t you understanding this?
Mac: I don’t…
Dennis: She doesn’t know whether she wants to have sex with me. That’s not the issue.
Mac: Are you going to hurt women?
Dennis: I’m not going to hurt these women!
Mac: Oh okay.
Dennis: Why would I ever hurt these women?
Mac: I don’t know.
Dennis: I feel like you’re not getting this at all.
Mac: I’m not getting it.
Dennis: God damn... (looks over at woman shopping nearby) well don’t you look at me like that. You certainly wouldn’t be in any danger.
Mac: So they are in danger!
Dennis: No one’s in any danger! How could I make that any more clear to you? Okay. It’s an implication of danger.
Mac: (Stares silently at Dennis in response)
I always see people, even on the Motte, talk about how women are constantly fearing that they're at risk of getting the killed if they don't comply with men. Then they go along and do everything they think the men wanted them to do (based on no concrete evidence), and then blame men for their own stupid, interpolated to the nth degree, actions. Often, they even blame individual men who didn't intend anything in the first place.
I can't stand this. Men are not mind readers, and most men are not bad people who would take advantage of women like this. At some point, we have to say that the woman was irrational, and wrong to blame innocent men for her own decisions. If someone is terrified about something with no evidence, and they act based on their fear, they don't get to blame random people that they've projected their fears onto.
Is there no evidence? I would suggest that the OP and Dennis are correct. There is an implication, always. And if you are weaker than the other person then it likely behooves you to consider that at all times. They cannot know if the person will act on said implication or not, but it should be factored in to the assessment. Social behaviors are not decided on an individual basis but a group one. No point in pretending that isn't true I feel.
You cannot blame someone else for something they aren't even cognizant of.
"sorry officer I didn't know I was speeding"
At the end of the day, "making a woman uncomfortable" is verboten and human society has long shaped itself around sexual differences like this. The topic under conversation is just way #109.
Could it be you just don't think women's comfort is all that important? That could be discussed for a millennia and still be unresolved.
I hold a similar stance to haroldbkny, and here's my reasoning. Note, this is coming from someone who is small and short in stature and would absolutely be crushed by most other men around me in combat - no one has any obligation to be continuously cognisant of themselves around me or anyone physically weaker than them, as long as their behaviour isn't actively intended to be intimidating. People need to come to terms with their fears and manage them appropriately, they cannot continuously walk around expecting to be coddled by others. Especially when what makes people intimidated and uncomfortable is poorly defined and basically requires people to do mind-reading in order to reliably avoid these situations. You can't use other people's feelings as a yardstick for socially acceptable behaviour because feelings are inherently by their nature irrational, mercurial and difficult to predict, and if these are the standards which are to govern male-female interactions the only reliable way of avoiding accusations of wrongdoing is to stay away from women.
I believe that female baseline greater neuroticism, rather than any rational risk assessment about their probability of being physically victimised, is a bigger driver of the difference in reactions between men and women, especially considering that women are no more likely to be violently victimised than men (if anything, the reality is the polar opposite of women's feelings). I also think that our reactions to this are related to a protectiveness of women that we simply do not have for men. There are intra-sexual strength differentials too, but it's not very common to see this logic invoked in a scenario of physical power disparity between men. Virtually all discussion about physical strength differences are forever about how men can accommodate women and how men are to blame if women do something idiotic out of fear, it's never applied in an impartial manner.
And perhaps I would be less annoyed with this expectation if our ideas surrounding women in our current society were full traditionalist, which would make it at least consistent. But they're not. I have to act in line with the modern progressive ethos of women being just as Strong and Powerful and Capable as men in contexts where it would benefit them, then accept "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want" in contexts where this reasoning could be used to justify special favours for women. Our modern attitudes surrounding women are this incongruent mish-mash of "Women Can Do Everything A Man Can Do" ideology as well as traditionalist ideas that prioritise their protection and require men to defer to their sensibilities, and these beliefs are selectively invoked to benefit women. It allows women to capitalise on the upsides of both strength and weakness, and avoid the downsides that these perceptions would normally entail.
Thanks, I agree with this largely, just one minor nitpick:
On more traditionalist, or traditionalist-friendly places like the Motte, they may say "But women are so weak and incapable and afraid, and are uniquely capable of being made to do things they don't want". But when it comes to actually dealing with progressives and feminists, it's even more insidious. For 100 years, people were pushing towards women having more rights along with responsibilities like men. Then the 3rd wave feminists came along and started to push back on this. They started insisting on special privileges for women. They claim that this is not because "women are so weak and scared" but because "men are evil and privileged" or "society uniquely hates women". I cannot abide this explanation, because I still see so many privileges for women, where women are already elevated over men.
So for this example, they'd claim that men need to be constantly cognizant of not making women uncomfortable, not because women deserve special consideration, but because women have historically been oppressed, and men and society don't care about women's feelings, and men need to correct this.
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I think if women want to be treated like adults, and have the privileges of men in modern society, then they should have corresponding responsibilities, and they should not get to lean on antiquated notions that their comfort and dealing with whatever irrationality they have has to be prioritized over other people's interests. If women still want such consideration, we should not pretend like they're not being treated specially.
Note before people accuse me: That's not to say men don't have irrationality too. But IME, men don't usually expect the rest of society to make it their problem.
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