“Hello, you look beautiful today.” — How did white women become the most oppressed people in America?
The last few days a video has been making the rounds which claims to show a woman experiencing “street harassment” 100 times in 10 hours on the streets of New York City. It has been posted, reposted, blogged about, argued over. Some men have claimed it’s not that big of a deal, some women have claimed that the male perspective is invalid because they could never possibly imagine what it feels like.
Here’s the thing — it doesn’t matter your gender, it’s clear that harassment is definitely a bad thing. On the street, or anywhere. No one should feel like it’s okay to shout sexually explicit or threatening things at another person. And really, no one should have to experience that. But, by definition, someone saying “hi” to another person on the street isn’t “harassment”. Go look up the word, I’ll wait here.
It doesn’t matter if the person saying hi is only saying so because they find the other person attractive, or even if ten other people said hi beforehand. It still doesn’t meet the definition of harassment.
What’s been most surprising to me, is most of the stories I’ve read have accepted outright that the video shows harassment. That idea isn’t even questioned in the slightest. It is taken as fact that the mere act of communicating with someone else on the street qualifies as harassment. I have seen it labeled as a type of oppression, that fighting against it is fighting for liberation, that it dehumanizes and objectifies women. This seems a bit dramatic to me. I should let you know that have been known to speak exclusively in hyperbole, so when I am criticizing someone’s verbal flourishes, realize that it carries a bit of weight.
I’m going to say something controversial that really shouldn’t be: “Hi, how are you doing today?” is not the same as “Hey, nice ass!” Mistaking it as such is the liberal equivalent to a conservative Baptist equating dancing with sex. It’s an extremist interpretation of reality, based on fear, that completely subverts the intellect, and makes rational discussion impossible. It takes an extraordinary amount of privilege to even begin to make this mistake. Don’t believe me? Go explain to a child soldier in Africa, or a woman being stoned to death in the Middle East that you feel persecuted when someone says hi to you in public. Let me know what they say.
Somehow, an attractive, middle-class white woman walking through the streets of New York is being heralded as the poster child for oppression in the world.
I’m sorry. No.
Not even a little bit.
Middle-class white women are not the most oppressed people on the planet. They’re not the most oppressed people in America. Hell, they’re not even the most oppressed people in that video. If you want to see oppression, go find one of the black men sitting on a stoop and have him walk around in her neighborhood for ten hours with a go-pro. If he makes it ten hours without being harassed by the police or arrested, it would probably be a miracle.
What has been heralded as a video that shows a tale of oppression, objectification, and dehumanization is exactly that. Only the star of the show isn’t the one being dehumanized. Nearly everyone else in the video is. One of the funny things about oppression, is that the oppressed are almost never the stars of the show. They don’t walk down the street confidently, camera pointed at them, being groveled at and begged for attention. Unless you believe that movie stars are the most oppressed people in the world, this should be obvious to you. This type of treatment is generally the explicit role of those with power. All she had to do was be filmed walking around the streets of New York for ten hours, and she is internationally famous. The subject of thousands of blog posts, hundreds of news articles, and heralded as an icon. Thousands of men and women have rushed to her side in support. You may not be surprised to find out that this is not the way the world works for the powerless.
Whether she realized it or not, that woman was the most powerful person in the video. Even if taken at face value, as a critique of sexism, the men are groveling at her feet. She ignores them, and the only recourse they have to defend their ego is to lash out. Aggression is the tool of the weak. It is the lowest form of power, practiced by those as a last ditch effort to save face and reclaim some tiny bit of power in the face of powerlessness. Is it right? No. But it is definitely not the preferred tool of the powerful.
If we set aside the story we’re told, that this is a video about sexism, and look deeper at the video, a more insidious story unfolds. These are not simply men. They’re poor men of color. The lowest value male that a middle-class white woman can imagine. These are, quite literally, the most oppressed people in the country, and they’re being used as the villains in a narrative that has been played out over and over again throughout history. It’s a racist story in which the oppressed are cast as the oppressors, and in which those with power convince themselves they are the victims so that they can rest easy knowing that when they attack they are justified.
When someone says hi to you and you ignore them, you are the one dehumanizing them. You do not see them as a person, but an object. An object that has been created out of and justified by fear. You do not see their humanity, you do not see their struggle, you do not see their background. You do not see a human being, you see nothing but a scary monster. That is what dehumanization looks like. It does not look like “hello” or “have a nice day”. It definitely does not look like “You are beautiful.”
Imagine for a moment that all of the men who spoke to her were tall, white, rich, high-value men in suits. If that were the case, this video would not exist. Because this isn’t really about gender. It’s about culture, class and race. It is thousands of privileged white women living in an echo chamber who have managed to convince themselves that they are the victims, supported by a legion of white-knight men who believe that they’re the good guys, saving the damsels in distress from the brutish savages. It’s a compelling story. It always has been. It was compelling when Americans used it as justification to lynch black men in the early 20th century, leaving them hanging from trees. It was compelling when it was used as an argument to outlaw marijuana, cocaine, and opium. All the product of moral panics that claimed minorities were raping white women and had to be stopped. It plays into our deepest fears, leaves us unable to think rationally, and gives us the moral justification we need to commit horrible atrocities.
It’s the 21st century and this is still happening. And it’s still considered valid. Even worse, it’s being touted by the liberals — those who are supposed to think and question. But they’re not thinking and questioning. They’re so wrapped up in fear that they’ve inadvertently become the embodiment of nearly everything they claim to be against.
What is really being said in this video is “I believe that I am entitled to walk through a minority neighborhood in the most densely populated city in America and never be spoken to by males who I find to be of lower social value than myself.” And it isn’t just the video that’s saying this. It’s the entire discussion about cat-calling.
It is wrong, and it is sexist. But more importantly it is racist, classist, xenophobic tripe, hiding behind the fact that hating men is completely socially acceptable. In the 21st century misandry has become justifiable, and even virtuous. We live in a world where it is accepted that all men are potential rapists, lower class men even more so — and as such, they are less than human, and little more than monsters which inhabit our worst nightmares. The mere utterance of a word from their lips, even the most innocuous of hellos is one the most heinous things we can imagine.
So watch the video again. Realize you’re watching the objectification and dehumanization of actual thinking, feeling, living, breathing human beings. But the one in the middle is not the one being oppressed.
The problem isn’t that too many people are saying “Hello, you look beautiful today.” It’s that not enough are.
