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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.
I have a slightly related tangent story from my days at a psychological clinic. To cut a long story short, one patient was convinced she was being gang stalked by her family (and associates). Whether or not she was actually being gang stalked or not, I don't know. The evidence I saw is consistent with both confabulation and reality.
In any case, this (17-year old girl) patient was terrified to go to school. So she arranged an escort to accompany her there and back. Cue me and another (female) friend of hers, a highly schizotypal, spiritual person who believes in quantum healing and homeopathy, and so on. On our way to pick her up from school, we noticed a man standing outside and smoking (in the no-smoking area). He could have been watching us, or he could have been not. (Having gone to the same school, it was certainly not unusual for older middle-aged teachers to be chain smoking during the breaks.) Our reports to the clinic staff?
"She was being stalked by a man who gave off a menacingly evil aura! He did not fit the setting at all, I'm sure he was up to no good"
vs
"Uh, what I saw was a man standing next to a door. He didn't do anything of note, and I'm not sure if he even looked in our direction. The end."
tl;dr, different people can interpret radically different things into the same observations. Women are generally leaning towards the schizophrenic, neurotic end of the spectrum, and also generally more receptive to propaganda. So it does not surprise me one bit that a world filled with feminist "women are victims!" messaging has women end up hallucinating terrifying delusions of persecution into completely benign events.
Related: I once went to a trade show in Baltimore, and went to a bar to meet a friend of mine with a redneck-y guy from West Virgina from the trade show. The redneck kept telling me I was "lucky [he] came with" every time a black guy walked by. Perception of danger is relative.
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