The Hard Hat in the Room
Street harassment is obviously wrong but there is a very large elephant in the chat room as well. That the “oppressor” role in these stories is of the gender (and likely class) that actually constructed the street upon which Acts 1 and 2 are played should at least be mentioned, no? The classic scenario here is construction workers catcalling, or unemployed men hanging out on the street and harassing middle to upper class women on their way to jobs that most likely do not involve difficult manual labor. In the cause of ending˜ street harassment, no one is complaining about medical doctors or 50-year old academics. That the victims of catcalling will never know what it is like to work on a construction site, or to be an unemployed male in the streets should at least be a factor in the discussion.
That a day working as a roofer in the summer heat might be worse than an offensive catcall is at least something that should be mentioned, and that it is not mentioned points to a less than stellar dynamic underlying the issue, which of course are the race and class issues. It’s no coincidence that a large number of lynchings occurred because a black man “street harassed” a white woman. How much of this issue is “how dare a working class man speak to me that way?” If he approached you politely, with perfect grammar, political sophistication and a strong sense of feminist empathy, there are two things we would know to be true: he would not be a member of the lower or working class, and his approach would not be considered harassment. That hardly seems a coincidence. Ryan Gosling can hey-girl anyone he wants. That there is no reaction to this might be the most telling fact in this entire discussion.
How much of this issue is “how dare a working class man speak to me that way?”
Perhaps the larger issue here would be focusing on how we can get women to represent 50% of the people whose bodies are used to construct our buildings and streets. When women represent only 7% of the injuries and deaths in the workplace and a disproportionately small number of those sleeping on the streets, perhaps just a little empathy towards those who are — literally — crying out at them while in this position is in order? Is it possible that these men are, subconsciously, trying to share their pain with women? Does anyone really believe we’d be having this discussion if women made up half of the people shoveling asphalt for a living? Isn’t that a more significant accomplishment than a woman in the Oval Office? Shouldn’t it matter that neither you nor I have ever physically seen a woman riveting girders in the hot sun? Shouldn’t it matter to the boy who will grow up to do the riveting?
I haven’t decided yet if evaluating women’s progress by how much they have to physically endure in order to create our world is fair or not. I’m not sure if the fact that every building and every street are still constructed by men shows that much of women’s progress is an illusion — as far the men who do the physical labor are concerned. And something tells me that robots will get there first, and that they will need to speak politely to women as well.
