The Frustration Inherent in Public Spaces

Gender Relations c. 2014

Public Spaces

Public spaces exist, but it’s really not clear what it means for a space to be “public.” There is an inherent contradiction in the multiplicity of freedoms which co-exist in such spaces. OK, freedom of speech… but you can’t be too loud (noise complaints), you can’t make bomb threats or scream “FIRE!” if there is no fire, you can’t advertise falsely, etc. You can do those things in private spaces, to some degree, but only if they don’t infringe on others in their respective private spaces. In short, though “freedom of speech” seems simple and clear enough on the face of it, it’s actually quite nuanced and not at all clear how far those freedoms extend, and to what degree private and public entities can engage in diminishment of those freedoms. This nuance stems from concrete and mundane facts of space.

Slightly more abstractly, our actions in public spaces have effects on others who occupy those spaces. No one cares if you make a lot of noise out in the forest or yell “FIRE!” in an empty theatre. They only care if the effect of those speech events impinges upon the ability of others to carry on as usual. Here’s where things get really complicated.

Visibility, Luck, and the Crowd

Some effects of public actions are visible. For example, after you yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre, people stampede, go nuts, knock over the popcorn boy. It sucks. You suck for yelling that. Obviously.

But what if the effects of your public actions are not visible? E.g. being really loud. This generally puts people into a tizzy and makes them kind of miserable, but doesn’t cause the type of chaos or physical damage that bomb threats or terroristical speech acts do. More extremely, public exposure doesn’t actually cause any physical effects, but it’s certainly not something we want people to do because it’s pretty damn triggering [1].

And what about if those effects are unlucky? You tell a lewd joke about rape (which, OK, rape jokes pretty much not OK ever) and someone with repressed trauma overhears -> mental breakdown -> you’re a jerk. Do you deserve punishment? You did something pretty much wrong which had a chance of having this kind of effect and that effect happened. This raises the spectre of moral luck which don’t even get me started [2].

Oh Lord, and then there’s the crowd. When the crowd all does the same thing publically that can be really shitty. E.g. Times Square. A million people in a small space all talking at normal volume and suddenly it’s the worst place on earth. Or gentrification. No individual techie moving into San Francisco is to blame for the housing crisis, but they are in gestalt. How do we even begin to think about their actions? Should they be verboten? That seems awfully restrictive. Tragedy of the Commons yada yada.

On Street Harassment — Attention

It should be pretty obvious at this point that the previous sections were a prelude to discussion about street harassment. There are two elements of street harassment:

  1. Some person is in such a state that they attract attention.
  2. The fact of attention attraction causes people to react.

Not all people who are harassed on the street are women. E.g. men in drag. E.g. fat people. E.g. people with facial deformities, E.g. people engaging in taboo behaviors, etc.

I’m not saying this to diminish the horror of female-directed street harassment which is ubiquitious and terrible, but instead to try to establish a general concept of street harassment.

The attraction of attention is a social act, though not necessarily an intentional one.

  • Given the state of society today, a woman in yoga pants will attract the attention of people around her. There is nothing wrong with being a woman and wearing yoga pants.
  • Given the state of San Francisco today, a very fat person will attract the attention of people around him or her. There is nothing wrong with being fat.
  • Given the state of most American society today, a naked person will attract the attention of people around him or her. There is nothing wrong with being naked in public.

Perhaps it’s weird to refer to being as an act, but it most certainly is. It is the willful occupation of public space.

This is not to assign any sort of blame to women, fat people, or those engaged in taboo behaviors, or anyone else who attracts attention in physical spaces. I stand in solidarity with all harassed people and do not believe they deserve the behaviors directed towards them.

This is to establish the fact that the act of being in public has an effect on those around one which is a function of:

  1. one’s personal attributes
  2. the attitudes of the society one is part of towards those attributes

This is to establish the fact that people gawk and point at a naked man walking down the street because of the combination of:

  1. The fact that he’s naked
  2. The fact that most people aren’t naked and public nudity is taboo

On Street Harassment — Reaction

Similarly, the reaction that people have to their attention being drawn is a function of:

  1. Their personal history/upbringing/acculturation
  2. The predicted effects of that reaction

Why do people talk to women in public? This question is not easy to answer and I think is the source of a lot of angry discourse around the question of street harassment of women. Theories I’ve heard tossed around:

  1. Men desire to establish a power relationship with the women around them. They harass because they want to ensure that women know they are less powerful. (this is the standard feminist belief)
  2. Many men are undersexed/undertouched and are desperate. They harass because they are inarticulately attempting to make a connection. (standard PUA/men’s-rights belief)
  3. Some men think it’s “normal.” Cultural differences in gender interactions cause awkward interactions between people for whom it is normal to talk to every woman in public and women who are not used to being talked to in public. They harass because it’s how they were “taught to act.” (standard progressive class theorist response)

A unifying theory would be that it’s all of these, though not necessarily simultaneously. That it varies from person to person. Each person whose attention is attracted responds to that attraction depending on their own personal matrix of psychological factors.

My attention is drawn to women, but I don’t harass them. Why? Partly because I’m afraid of interacting with strangers full stop. Partly because I have a lot of female friends who’ve told me about their struggles with harassment. Partly because I just don’t have the energy. I can say that my urges at least are a function of my state of mind, and that it changes over time. E.g. when I’m single and very lonely I certainly have a much stronger urge to talk to women in public. E.g. I used to be less sensitive before I had heard of women’s struggles with these problems.

On Street Harassment — Synthesis

People attract attention to varying degrees and people react to that attention to varying degrees. It’s a complicated world because the ways people attract attention and the ways people respond to that attention are based on a billion factors, many of them unintentional or not originally derived in the person who attracts or reacts.

A person who grew up in culture A and then acts inappropriately in culture B is not a bad person, however they can be part of a problem and I think that it’s here (or close to here) that we find the deep source of disagreement and discord in discussions on street harassment. Some people attract more attention than they intend, some people respond in ways that cause reactions that they don’t intend.

There are some genuine questions here which society is now struggling to answer. Questions such as:

  1. How should a person who wants to engage with another person in a social space go about this? Concretely, if I’m attracted to a woman, how can I act in a way to avoid causing her bad feelings while still probing as to whether she wants to engage with me?
  2. How do people act to attract attention in unintended ways, and should they be made aware of those ways? This sounds so victim-blamey, but it really isn’t. A 13-year-old boy or girl who wears lipstick may not understand the cultural significance of lipstick — how do we tell them (or do we even tell them?) without intruding on their freedom to express themselves?
  3. To what extent does gender expression in any form (here including drag and all sorts of alternative/queer gender expressions) act as a call to action? Is femininity per se a call for attention? Is masculinity per se a call to aggress? What exactly is gender and how does it interact with public spaces?

[I’m sure there are others, but I’m pretty tired]

Hope

I am glad that there’s been more discussion in which women who have been harassed have had their voices heard. I think that one of the ways that we can change the matrix of response attitudes in a positive way is by helping people understand what effects their responses are going to have. I understand why there’s a great deal of anger in all of this, and I think it’s totally 100% valid.

I just hope that on the other side of all of our angers we can reach some conclusions about how to occupy public spaces without pissing each other off all the time.

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[1] Though something about this always kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Public obscenity laws seem important in a certain sense (don’t want old pervert exposing himself to children) but they also seem really lame in another sense (women can’t walk around topless WAT!?!). They always seem to be written relative to the mores of a society and those mores are generally pretty lame. Kissing used to be “obscene” in Japanese culture, gay fucking is “obscene” in many places to the point that it’s punishable by death, etc. etc. etc. Don’t show your goddamn ankles you harlot!!! Oy.

[2] DFW RIP.