Episode 299: Equal Treatment
on November 3, 2014
and modified on July 6, 2018.
Here we go – a fresh new comic for your enjoyment. I wasn’t planning on continuing with the catcalling theme, but suddenly it seemed like everybody online started talking about street harassment — prompted, of course, by the viral video from Hollaback. So of course Gyno-Star had to weigh in on the topic (some more). And look, she arrived at the perfect solution. See what we can accomplish when we all work together for equality?
Didn’t expect that. Laughing so hard!
😀
Would it even be catcalling if people on the street just randomly handed out compliments like that? There’s a difference between “Morning beautiful” and “Nice rack!” and between “Looking good square jaw” and “Nice package! Are you smuggling an epileptic ferret?”
I guess to the point of the strip, catcalling is sexist and sexually demeaning, and just saying nice stuff isn’t, but only if you’re doing it to everyone.
There’s still a significant difference between the experience of a man in this situation and a woman. Women face a much greater risk of physical attack from men than either men do from women or men, but much more importantly, women live with a much higher level of fear of physical attack than men will ever know. Much of that fear is an irrational reflex, but it is a real experience. A woman having a strange man engage her in a public place with a comment about her appearance will likely trigger real phobic reactions in her that are extremely uncomfortable. Regardless if he meant it as a compliment or not, it’s rude to pointlessly trigger intense fear reactions in someone just going about their business. It’s like someone in public pointing a gun at you for no reason. It’s rude however well intentioned.
I’d say that, even if we remove the fears of physical attack (which are real for many women), there’s still a power dynamic at play. To a large extent, public spaces are still men’s spaces, and there are ingrained cultural attitudes about women as ornaments or objects. A man giving a woman an unsolicited compliment is asserting his dominance in the public space and asserting her object status. It’s demeaning, even when it’s not explicitly threatening.
My solution to public places being men’s spaces is instead of building all those phallic skyscrapers, start building them down into the ground to create yonic spaces. You’d have to plant some foliage around them to keep people from just falling in though. Not too much mind you, maybe a little triangle of hedges at the top, or maybe just a big painting of a butterfly.
Ha. I support this but it will cost more than my equal opportunity catcalling solution.
My solution would be to teach all women deadly ninjitsu. That would level the playing field somewhat.
“Hey baby, nice >jugular slice< *gurgle gurgle*"
Well I don’t know about you but I definitely plan to use that ferret line.
I’ll bank it. I’m sure I can find a use for it and many more like it. 🙂
Smile, fella, flip that tie!
Aw, you’d look so much cuter if you’d smile, bro.
My mother and I once had a long conversation about how, as society gets more equal, we’ll see men being as degraded as women as well as women being held aloft as high as men.
You may be right. Women can’t seem to gain any kind of ground without somehow losing something in exchange. I read how, as women gained enough money to buy matching wedding rings for husbands, men started buying engagement rings as well as wedding rings for their fiancess. It’s as if every gain merited some kind of sign that men were still superior to women. “Oh, you’ve got more money as a result of pay raises? Well, I still make more spending cash than you, lady, and here’s the swag to prove it!”
Oddly enough, our conversation was about pornography and the rise of magazines oriented towards showing off men without any clothes on.
Pornography is a whole other issue and I don’t have problems with it because, unlike the catcalling, pornography really is equal opportunity. There is porn about practically everything from naked men, naked women, granny porn, pedophilia, whipping (flagellation), whipped cream, bukkake, etc. The idea that porn objectifies women is too narrow minded; it can objectify EVERYBODY. One magazine I saw had a man cumming on a woman’s face. You could see the woman’s face in every shot but the man’s face disappeared to be replaced by a random body part. (No surprise; she was beautiful and he was butt ugly.) If objectification means to be reduced to an object then I would say that she remained human and he became an object. I had the feeling that, if it were possible, the photographers would have asked him to detach his penis, leave it on the table and come back for it in the morning. So who’s the object now? ;D
Well, you also have to understand that this was two decades ago before the internet became a vast data base of women’s bottoms :p
According to Pinker in the book How the Mind Works, the main market for magazines with pictures of naked men consists of male homosexuals, not women.
Yay! I think all women should go around town catcalling at the men from now on. It would be a massive power shift in our favor.
In the second panel and first bubble of the third he WAS treating her the same as a man. IE “Just take the compliment” & “grow some thicker skin”
This is a good tactic. Treat women differently from men, and when they call you out on it, defend your right not to listen on the basis that you don’t listen to people of either gender. Equality!
That is an interesting tactic. Completely ignore what I wrote and go off on your own tangent.
I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure equality does not involve receiving special treatment or being handled with kid gloves.
Hell, even though you drew the damn thing the comic is displaying what I was talking about in my previous comment. The 2 guys being called out just raise an eyebrow and continue on their way.
LOL
SMH
Nobody ever cat called me when I was young and good looking… Now I’m older, fatter, balding and my legs just don’t look as nice as they used to.
I’m totally gonna say that to my Boss tomorrow.
Let us know how s/he responds.
Which of the above did you plan to say? : D
Equal treatment means equal discomfort? Seems legit. 😉
Feminism isn’t a buffet, the bad comes with the good.
I’m not sure how such an independent-minded cartoonist manages to be so very fashionable-timely; but even if it required successfully squaring the circle, I have to approve.
Pure coincidence in this case.
I also find that in a world where thousands of superhero comic artists seem to be competing to over-exaggerate superhero figures and costumes until they become almost porny, Gynostar’s TOTALLY METAL outfit is fresher and more pleasing than it ought to have to be. IMHO.
You know she’s not keeping that, right? She’ll be back to her a-feminist-drew-it-so-it’s-totally-different painted on suit in a comic or two depending on how long Cohen feels like dancing around the point.
Her suit wasn’t even that skin tight. You do realize what your saying is complete and utter bullshit?
heh, i got to admit as a guy its been a while since i got catcalls and yet i still wear my thong >_>
You need to work on how you’re shakin’ it.
…..and if that doesn’t work check your local animal shelters for epileptic ferrets.
So why is it that Gyno’s feelings trump the man’s feelings? He felt like complimenting her. Why can’t he express that? Gyno can always ignore him.
Ignoring men who behave that way doesn’t (always) work. Have you read what happened to Mary Spears when she rejected a man who was talking to her? He opened fire and killed her and wounded other bystanders. Even the presence of her fiance wasn’t enough to deter him. Imagine what lone females go through and then re-consider your questions.
Crazy will be crazy, being afraid of that one case just shows you work on feelings instead of statistics.
Ah, I see your point. Let’s ignore feelings (but I thought that’s what we’re trying to rectify) and think about statistics. So one man shot a woman who rejected him. Big deal! It’s not like there are men out there hounding women, harassing them or slashing their throats. Wait a second…
There’s a difficult balance to strike between complimenting a woman and harrassing her (and it doesn’t always have to do with her feelings about the guy – or specifically what the guy says). Best to either get to know the woman first and see how she reacts to compliments (and make sure what you’re saying IS a compliment; hint: very few women view “nice rack” as a complement; the few that DO may still take offense if a stranger says it but not if a friend does) or just say nothing at all, than to risk offense.
I like elbowing people out of the way in crowded places. People tell me it’s rude, but why should their feelings trump my feelings? I really enjoy getting places faster. The people getting elbowed can just ignore it.
By video do you mean the one where a woman films herself walking for 10 hours and only manages to get less than 2min worth of harassment footage, most of which is a serious stretch to call harassment?
Geewhiz, You have to understand that in NYC, many people walk *a lot*. So even if it’s 10 hours of walking, that could be like the first few days of a week.
It’s a difference in local culture. It’s totally different from some places where people can just go through the special drive-through harrassment window or not. This is why moving to a car-obligatory suburb from NYC makes many people gain weight.
No amount of harassment is acceptable. There’s no minimum amount that women are allowed to be upset about. If she walked for 10 hours and got one comment, that’s one comment too many. Still, we could call that one comment an anomaly. So the question you’re really raising is: Is this a common enough occurrence to qualify as a problem?
There are at least 2 ways to answer that question. First, if she received 100 catcalls in 10 hours, that’s 10 catcalls per hour. Say most NYC women walk at least 20-30 minutes a day (and that’s a very conservative estimate; 10 minutes to the subway from home, 5 minutes from subway to work, plus return trip). So you’re talking about an average of 5 catcalls per day. Every. Single. Day. So the video itself debunks any assertion that it’s not enough catcalling to warrant a problem.
But there’s a second way to answer the question about how often this is happening and whether it’s a problem. You can ask women. And then you can listen to them.
And there you hit on the real problem: Communication. What one person sees as “harrassment” another sees as a “compliment,” and yet another as “a dire insult.”
If you don’t know a person, and thus have no clue how they’ll react, best not to say anything beyond a simple greeting (and even then you can sometimes get into trouble – but those truly are outliers)…
Ask a woman? LISTEN?! What kind of misandrist nonsense is this? We should be talking about facts* rather than opinions!`
* Like the fact that women should just grow a thicker skin!
` Like the opinion that one comment every six minutes is actually rather frequent.
(/s)
I see the videographer is claiming that ‘street harassers’ often don’t bother to make sure that they are in front of a hidden camera, have good unobstructed views, and avoid background sounds that can interfere with the hidden mic’s quality of sound pickup.
So if the quality of the video strikes you as being only the fraction of possible video and audio that turned out relatively well when people didn’t know they were being filmed, there may have been a lot more that didn’t make it into the final cut of the video.
http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/2kkiex/hidden_gopro_camera_reveals_what_its_like_to_walk/clmf4wb?context=3
That’s a very easy claim to make. Unless she releases footage with these totally real off camera guys speaking you should be skeptical.
Love it ^^
Thanks!
Oddly enough I went out catcalling on Halloween night.
Took half an hour; the poor dear was panicked at all the people and noise, and I had to coax him down out of a tree.
When I go catcalling, I actually call cats: Perry, c’mere!
I suggest listening to the song ‘Standing There’ by the Creatures (an offshoot project of Siouxsie & Budgie from Siouxsie and the Banshees). It pertains to exactly this subject.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Still catching up, but the last two had me laughing out loud embarrassingly. This is such a good comic! I’m also amazed by how much Very Serious commentary there is. Well done, Rebecca!,
Aww, thank you! So glad you’re enjoying it. 😀
Please tell me that last line was sarcasm.