Guest Post: An Open Letter to Margaret Atwood by Kristin King

An Open Letter to Margaret Atwood

by Kristin King

Dear Margaret Atwood, 

In a recent op-ed, you asked the question: “Am I a bad feminist?” My short answer, from one feminist to another, is no. My longer answer is that the question itself turns what ought to be a dialogue into a bitter argument. This is poor feminist practice. Your response to #metoo activists similarly polarizes debate surrounding sexual harassment and abuse, when the conversation could instead have turned elicited insights. And strangely, your response inadvertently pulls from talking points that have been circulating recently as a result of a deliberate and misogynist public relations campaign. 

However, the best part of feminism is our ability to learn from our disagreements. In the interest of furthering feminist solidarity and dialogue, I have some comments to make. 

The good/bad feminist divide

Framing the issue as a Good Feminist / Bad Feminist one draws battle lines and sets you up for further attack. It puts on blinders and prohibits dialogue. 

Let me offer a glimpse of my own perspective on the feminist movement, from someone who found feminism in the early 1990s. The first professor who taught me feminist theory was Katherine Stockton. She grounded me in queer issues, disability in the feminist movement, and more. And the next was my creative writing professor Colleen McElroy, who helped me start learning about race with authors such as bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa. My continuing self-education has also included the Combahee River Statement, which considered issues of race, class, and gender both together and separately. 

So I didn’t participate in second-wave feminism, even though I certainly reaped its benefits. But I did watch a rift widen between second-and third-wave feminists. I have seen some second-wave feminists who have succeeded in their goals, perhaps have become acting CEOs in their own companies as you have done, dismiss feminists working intersectionally, viewing that practice as a distraction from the primary issue of male and female equality. 

Skipping ahead to the present, I see that many millennial feminists are broke, can’t afford college, which isn’t going to get them good jobs anyhow. It’s not just that they don’t expect to reach the glass ceiling--they’re not even inside the building. They’re living in sleeping bags out in the cold. 

So there are real divisions between women, based on their lived experiences, and those divisions can be and are being exploited by, in your words, “those who do not wish women well.” 

Into this mix comes your op-ed and the language it uses. I see it using talking points that are also being pushed by corporately funded propaganda outlets posing as media. I assume this is unintentional, so a close examination of what I see might provide a beneficial learning opportunity.  

Using the language of the far-right corporate patriarchy

First let’s take a peek at some of the underlying power dynamics .-The wealthiest and most powerful, white men of course, the patriarchy, are using their wealth to pay PR firms to design and push their talking points, which then end up in popular culture, our everyday conversations. Some of it is misogynist, but the primary goal, I believe, is the aim of holding on to money and power. Noam Chomsky articulated the basic problem of news propaganda back in 1992, in his book Manufacturing Consent, and many people have also been watching the idea of manufactured backlash, as in a recent Huffington Post article, “The Fake Feminism Of The #MeToo Backlash.”  Unfortunately, in our current age, all manner of billionaires and corporations are using social media to spread propaganda that benefits them. And none of us is immune. 

Within that context, I’ll put on my hat of “literary critic” and compare three texts: an article published on a news media site of unknown ownership, an article published by a P.R. company, and finally your op-ed.

On December 13, 2017, the article “The #MeToo Movement Is Destroying Trust Between Men And Women” by D.C. McAllister appeared in The Federalist online journal. The Federalist isn’t a news journal but a series of opinion pieces that feature classic examples of propaganda, such as glittering generalities, straw men, name-calling, deliberate vagueness, and a false framing of the narrative. The journal has a readership in the millions--a guarantee that the ideas it spreads will propagate widely. Who is funding this journal? That’s not so transparent. Reader beware.  

On December 18th, 2017, another article appeared on another propaganda outlet, this one specifically targeted at feminists. The outlet was the site Spiked! Online, which has a long history of manipulating public dialogue, especially in the field of agricultural science. This history is readily available through SourceWatch or through research explained by George Monbiot. Its intention is also clearly laid out in their own words upon launch in 2000, available on the Wayback Machine, “nothing less than the creation of a new language for political, social and cultural writing in the twenty-first century.”

The article itself, “Meet the Women Worried about #MeToo,” includes short pieces written by thirteen different women and selected by an editor for the benefit of those funding the magazine. 

A close read of both articles reveals common messages, or talking points, that the outlets want to spread to the public for general use. Each of these messages stops or deflects dialogue in some way. And each message is reflected in your own op-ed. I’ll just take three to examine: the witch-hunt metaphor, framing as a legal issue, and “real feminists.” 

Witch-hunt metaphor

The metaphor of a witch-hunt and similar terms is a key weapon used against #metoo. Combing through through the two propaganda articles, it’s easy to find phrases like, “the sexual harassment witch-hunt,” “mob behavior,” “mass hysteria,” and “orgy of female victimhood,” as well as references to the beheadings that took place in the French Revolution. 

This metaphor has an invisible payload of meaning, which is quite intentional on the part of propagandists. Witches don’t exist, and this implies by analogy sexual predators don’t either. Then there is the gendered component, which is perhaps the reason “witch hunt” is used rather than McCarthyism.

In your op ed, when you note that your accusers mistakenly “think I was comparing them to the teenaged Salem witchfinders and calling them hysterical little girls,” it’s worth going deeper and asking  “Why do they think that?” I suggest it’s because somebody with money is pushing the witch-hunt metaphor in order to deliver that exact message. 

Explaining what you did and did not mean by “witch hunt” doesn’t solve that problem, because the implication remains. A stronger move might involve hunting for a new metaphor, or simply diving into the specifics of the core issue with more concrete language.     

Framing as a legal issue

 

Another propaganda talking point is framing an assault complaint as a legal issue and invoking the principles of “due process” and “innocent until proven guilty.” There’s a core of truth here: an accusation of anything requires fair consideration. But there’s also a big manipulation of language. 

Going back to the propaganda articles, the Federalist article complains, “When anything from a naive touch during a photo shoot to an innocent attempt at a kiss is compared to rape” and “men never know when they will be presented at the court of injustice as a ‘sexual abuser’,” it is arguing by implication that an innocent kiss can get a man taken to court. The Spiked article makes similar connections, right down to requiring an act to be illegal before it’s called assault. 

A legal framing puts blinders on us and asks us to ignore obvious facts. First, making a public complaint or talking to Human Resources is entirely different from filing criminal charges. Second, social media is not a court. Third, “innocent until proven guilty” is a high standard that our criminal justice system should, but does not often, provide. Fourth, although the government owes us “due process” in criminal cases, most people don’t actually expect it in the workplace. (Though we should.) 

It’s worth taking a moment to explore due process in the workplace. All workers deserve a fair process before disciplinary action is taken, but most don’t get it. Most people have “at-will” employment, and they get fired all the time for getting sick, failing to smile . . . and for reporting sexual harassment and assault to HR.  The remedy here is a grievance process that requires employers to establish “just cause” and for workers to have access to a grievance process. 

Your op ed unfortunately fell into the trap of using a legal framing, and the focus on “due process” paved the road for an incomplete analysis of the situation. Your note that “[h]is faculty association launched a grievance that is continuing,” actually refers to a union grievance, which will indeed be heard and settled by a higher authority than the university. Because of his union membership, the professor has more due process than most people get. Further, although the workings of the university process are not publicly available, that does not automatically mean they were incorrect. The university is likely legally compelled to remain silent, and also, confidentiality protects both accused and accuser.  

Is it possible to say what we mean without using legal metaphors? Definitely. For instance, perhaps “due process” is best when a case of assault is going to court, but “a grievance process” more accurately conveys what we need from other institutions and the community at large. 

Real feminists

Another talking point, which is revealed in the Spiked article, pits “real” feminists against the rest. “Real” feminism is defined as fighting to be treated as equals in the workplace, empowering women as opposed to infantilizing them, and working together as “women and men of good will” to “fashion more equitable workplaces.” The past history of women dealing with harassment gets a new, macho spin, for “those of us who have spent years metaphorically kicking sex pests in the balls.” And the worry expressed is that all this fuss over harassment risks “turning the clock back on hard-won sexual equality.” 

These statements divide women into two groups: the over-40 crowd who fought for and won equality and the strange younger demographic who thinks winking constitutes harassment, who are “fragile” and lack “robust common sense.” 

This division helps nobody, and so it’s disturbing to see it reflected in your op ed, which ironically divides women into “Bad Feminists” (who are right) and “Good Feminists” (who are wrong). The wrong feminists “believe that women are children,” align politically with misogynists, want to take away fundamental justice from men, are “feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness,” are “giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making,” have an ideology, expect everyone to “puppet their views,” and are now participating in unproductive squabbling. 

It might be more useful to think about good and bad feminist practice. Instead of calling names, a focus on practice  opens a dialogue about what we are doing and why we are doing it. What constitutes good feminist practice to me? To you? Where are we similar and different? 

How did this happen?

Your op-ed came at a key moment for the #metoo backlash and dovetailed with talking points that have been chosen by corporations whose business is public propaganda for the world’s most powerful men. Why? I speculate that somebody took advantage of the frustration you have been feeling over seeing a fellow novelist publicly attacked, and that after the talking points they were pushing had a time to saturate public dialogue, offered you the opportunity to put your words in print--but for their own cynical reasons.  

That an author of highly revered feminist dystopia can be manipulated by patriarchy’s PR machine makes this a chilling moment for all of us. Time to step back and look at how social media is not only providing fake news but also twisting public dialogue as it comes out of our own mouths, turning thoughtful commentary into friendly fire. 

What now? 

The simplest solution to the problem of dialogue we don’t like is to ask everybody to “stop squabbling.” From your point of view, the angry #metoo activists should calm down and quit their witch-hunt. From my point of view, I’d prefer that you stop using the term witch-hunt.  But both requests to silence speech are too easy, and they leave us open to yet more manipulation and pointless infighting. 

A trickier but more powerful answer is for us to deepen the dialogue, to continue as feminists have always done and reach across divisions to find common ground. An example of such cross-generational discussion is “Feminists From Three Different Generations Talk Me Too,” which recently appeared on Vox.com. From a position of mutual solidarity, it is indeed possible for feminists to consider the issues on our own terms.  

That brings me back to the issue at the heart of your op-ed--what #Metoo participants should and should not do.

How to stop sexual violence

The real question is not whether or not you are a good or bad feminist, or whether #Metoo posters represent a lynch mob, but what to do with the very real question of sexual violence in our communities.

One group that has been working on the problem for decades is women of color. In particular, a group called Incite! Women of Color Against Violence met in a founding conference in 2000 to discuss how to stop violence in their communities, and it branched off in many directions. A framework for community accountability emerged in 2003 with no clear answers but with groundbreaking ideas and questions. A lot of the strategies and terms that are now surprising many white people, such as “believe the survivor,” came out of that work. But it is a nuanced practice, including other concepts such as “impact versus intent” and sitting down with both parties. That’s very different from someone reflexively sending a “believe the survivor” tweet. 

We have thorny problems to address, such as a conflict between transparency and confidentiality, and also between the need to believe the survivor and to follow a fair process. But I know from first-person experience that they are being addressed. I recently participated in a democratic discussion about how an organization might modify its complaints process to account for sexual harassment and abuse. Even though most of the people in the organization are men, the new survivor-focused process passed overwhelmingly. It looks like the world is ready for a change. 

This is, as you say, an important moment in history. 

Yours for the movement,

Kristin King

Works cited, and further reading 

Atwood, Margaret. “Am I a Bad Feminist?” The Globe and Mail, 15 Jan. 2018, www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/.

Moraga Cherríe, and Anzaldúa Gloria. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. SUNY Press, 2015. Available at http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6102-this-bridge-called-my-back-four.aspx.

bell hooks

Anzaldúa Gloria, and AnaLouise Keating. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Duke University Press, 2009. Available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-gloria-anzaldua-reader.

Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Released 1977, available on circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html.

 “Manufacturing Consent.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Feb. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent.

Fallon, Claire. “The Fake Feminism Of The #MeToo Backlash.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 20 Jan. 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/metoo-backlash-feminism_us_5a621cf7e4b01d91b2552f26. 

McAllister, D.C. “The #MeToo Movement Is Destroying Trust Between Men And Women.” The Federalist, FDRLST Media, 15 Dec. 2017, thefederalist.com/2017/12/13/metoo-movement-destroying-trust-men-women/.

“Meet the Women Worried about #MeToo.” Feminism | Spiked, Spiked Ltd, 18 Dec. 2018, www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/meet-the-women-worried-about-metoo/20639. 

“Spiked Online.” SourceWatch, www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Spiked_Online.

Monbiot, George. “George Monbiot: Invasion of the Entryists.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Dec. 2003, www.theguardian.com/education/2003/dec/09/highereducation.uk2.

Elizabeth Velez, April Sizemore-Barber, and Hanna Chan. “Feminists from 3 Different Generations Talk #MeToo.” Vox, Vox, 31 Jan. 2018, www.vox.com/conversations/2018/1/31/16952380/me-too-second-third-wave-feminism-backlash.

 “Community Accountability.” INCITE!, Incite National, incite-national.org/page/community-accountability.

Sexual Harssment and Public Space

I've understood for a long time-- sometimes it seems like forever-- that many (though obviously not all) instances of sexual harassment invoke, often unconsciously, the binary formula that has its roots in patriarchal social organization, viz., the notion that public space is for men's business and play and that "decent," "respectable" women will stay secluded in the private spaces unless adequately shielded by a man's protection. As a graduate student in history, medieval and early modern Florence provided a perfect model for understanding this. The prostitute was the prototype for women who lived and worked in public space: a sexualized commodity, available to anyone. A woman without male protection must necessarily expect to be insulted if not assaulted.

Later, in the mid-1990s, I read Catherine Gallagher’s inteteresting Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820, and my understanding of the connection developed considerably. I’d long been familiar with the anecdotes about the woman who delivered lectures on the law at the University of Bologna from behind a screen to conceal her identity and thus protect her identity, and knew that very few women in the late medieval and early modern world dared to publish their work under their own names. (Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Artemesia Gentilleschi, and Margaret Cavendish, brilliant exceptions to the rule, stand out as outliers in their audacity and even pride in doing so.) But I didn’t entirely get it until I read Gallagher’s book. Gallagher’s book looks at the development of authorial personae in fiction by women writers in England, dating roughly from Aphra Behn to Maria Edgeworth. Both male and female authors, she suggests, “in quite dissimilar social and economic conditions and across a range of discourses, portrayed themselves as dispossessed, in debt, and on the brink of disembodiment…. [A]uthors of both sexes called attention to their existence in and through their commodification and their inseparability from it. The rhetoric of female authorship differs, in this regard, from that of authorship in general by exaggerating and sexualizing the common theme….As authors, they imply, they themselves are effects of exchange. They do not present their texts as places where they have stored themselves, nor do they portray their authorship as an originary act of creation….Indeed, these authors commonly figured their labor as the accumulation of credit rather than the production of property.” Aphra Behn and her open, public success as a woman writing marked the beginning, really, of Anglophone women publicly claiming authorship (which in her case included writing plays that were publicly performed). And how did Behn fashion that public authorial persona? Gallagher examines how she audaciously used “the metaphor of the author as prostitute to create distinctions between the obliging playwright and the withholding private person, the woman’s body and her self, the stage and real life.” Behn did this as a way in to a role previously reserved for men, allowing the many writing women who followed to fashion other (“feminine”) means for becoming public—ie.,writing—subjects.      

It's been about two decades since I was informed by an sf editor editing one of my essays that the "sexual double standard" is "dead." Really? One of the social premises underlying many instances of sexual harassment is that any woman venturing into public space is subject to sexualization. That is why, of course, women who dare to speak in public space so often become targets for elaborately vicious rape threats. Or slut shaming. Or "doxxing."  Remember the English proverb, "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion"? Women daring to negotiate public spaces (which include, of course, the workplace) are effectively in the position of Caesar’s wife. It's an impossible position for anyone claiming full public subjectivity, of course, since merely pointing out her possession of a vagina can suffice to stain her public integrity and the value of anything she says or does or even her right to speak. Can anyone deny that in our culture all it takes to call a woman's integrity and creditability into question is exposing the fact that she has a vagina is not a cis-male?

I've heard it suggested that sexual harassment has become such a hot issue (an issue that I will remind you was forced into premature retirement by the smearing of Anita Hill during the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee hearings for vetting the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court) because young women have been raised to expect to be treated respectfully and so aren't willing to put up with what women have always had to put up with. I don't think it's so simple. I think that the difference for the second decade of the twenty-first century lies in the stunning, important fact that women are increasingly claiming a place in public space and are consequently transforming public discourse in ways that challenge male entitlement to a serious degree. What else is at issue when evaluations of women’s professional work can be (and often are) smeared by social complaints, which seldom have any place in evaluations of men’s professional work? When the new chief of Microsoft publicly tells women attending a women in tech conference that women shouldn’t be so brassy as to ask for raises? When revealing the gender of the authors of scientific and academic papers results in markedly disadvantaging those identified as women? The implication is that women are in public space on sufferance, as special cases, being given privileges that can be revoked for any one of a number of arbitrary reasons, usually amounting to not in some ways being above rubies.

I've been very clear for some time (since starting the WisCon Chronicles, in fact) that WisCon has been developing into an interesting public space concerned, above all, with issues of access (especially, but not, with regard to gender). When I first attended in the mid-1990s, it felt to me like a semi-private space—a little pocket universe one could visit as a refuge from everyday life. Now I see it as a mix of public and private space, where small, brief private spaces thread and intersect the public. It's still, for me, its own unique space, a place of warmth and generosity, but it has become, as well, a vibrant public space where things happen that reverberate and generate and engender and transform, sometimes in ways that entail discomfort. (Change is like that, no?)  In short, I’ve come to see it as a laboratory for change rather than a clubhouse: for me, the very ideal of a feminist space. Above all, it's a place where women are encouraged to claim public space. And that's why the issue of sexual harassment is such a serious one for WisCon. If we (meaning all of us in this culture we live in) are to learn to accept and value women's contributions as easily and fully as we do men's, the double standard, which rests on the assumption that visibility in public space strips a woman of her respectability, has got to go. And that means, of course, that most sexual harassment that occurs in public space must be recognized as an instrument intended to instruct women that they can exist in public space only as sexualized objects, never as speaking subjects. 

ETA: After posting this, I read about the latest threat leveled in the Anita-Sarkeesian silencing campaign. Sarkeesian is scheduled to speak at Utah State University. Staff members there received a threat of a massacre if Sarkeesian is allowed to speak. Sarkeesian, the threat writer claims, "poses 'everything wrong with the feminist woman' and that is why she is being targeted. “She is going to die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU.” It's all about expelling Sarkeesian from public space, and fantasizing her reduction to an inarticulate, whimpering markedly female body. What is wrong with "the feminist woman"? She speaks in public. 

Funny uncles

Sunday I told an old friend my family's multi-generational saga of rape and incest.  Most of it, anyway.  Into her silence at the end I asked, "Aren't all families like that?"

"No," she replied.  "No, they're not."  But I think our science fiction family might be.  At least a little.

The incident that my assertion above will bring immediately to mind for you depends on when you're reading this.  At the time I'm writing it, that's most likely the sexual harassment a congoer underwent at Readercon.  It wasn't the first incident of its kind.  It won't be the last.

I met the Readercon offender when he served as MC for the Carl Brandon Society Awards ceremony at Arisia in 2011.  I'm not shocked that he's someone I know.  That's how this sort of thing works.

The encounters that affront me are more often racial or cultural in nature than sexual.  And the people that hurt me, that stun me with their ignorance and blithe insensitivity, their privileged cluelessness, are my friends, my role models, my elders.  My tribe.

Here are two names.

Statement by Readercon's ConCom

In the wake of the mass resignation of Readercon's Board, Readercon's ConCom has issued a statement vis-a-vis the Readercon Board's handling of the sexual harassment issue, overriding the Board's decision by permanently banning Rene Walling from attending. The ConCom also apologizes to Genevieve Valentine and Kate Kligman and notes:

by damaging the convention's reputation as a safe haven where harassment is aggressively discouraged and appropriately dealt with when it happens, we have upset many people who care about the convention and undermined our efforts to make the convention more inclusive and diverse. Women, members of minority groups, and younger people are often especially vulnerable to harassment, and many have been understandably put off by the perception that harassment is tolerated at our convention; we cannot claim to be welcoming them while creating an environment in which they feel unsafe.

We offer our heartfelt apology to everyone in our community who trusted us and has been hurt by our breach of trust; to everyone who once felt safe at Readercon and no longer does; to those who have linked Readercon's reputation with their own and now feel tarnished by association, especially our past guests of honor and anyone who has officially or informally promoted the convention; and to those who love Readercon and are heartbroken to see its leaders acting contrary to the convention's best interests.

The statement also promises to take future specified actions to address the general problem of sexual harassment. If Readercon implements all the steps they are proposing, that con will be a trail-blazer in the way WisCon has come to be. 

Men and Women in Public Space

The outrage du jour is tired, tedious, and old-fashioned, however dressed-up it might be in new language. The "Open Source Boob Project," for all its claim to hipness, once again figures women's bodies as property (a practice commonly known as sexual objectification). The point is not sex--it never is--but the terms on which women negotiate (or are allowed to negotiate) public space. It's the same issue that arose when the POTUS put his hands on the German Chancellor at a high-level public function. Do white men figure themselves as property? The thought never even crosses their minds.

There've been moments in my life when I've felt such rage at experience a constant stream of groping, leers, and insolent remarks that I've found it almost impossible to resist the urge to knee every one of the jerks in the groin. In my mid-twenties, the term "sexual harassment" and the theorization that accompanied it didn't yet exist. It was a constant feature of my life, though, and I had long understood that its point was humiliation of girls and women, to demonstrate to them that in public spaces and institutions they have no right or expectation to bodily privacy-- which white men, of course, do. (Needless to say, I had learned that this was also true in private spaces-- at home, where family members or their friends could infringe on that privacy with ease.)

For centuries, the attitude has been that a woman out in public without an appropriate male to protect her is fair game. Feminists' insistence that they don't want or need owner/protectors seems not to have made a dent in that attitude. And so, in my mid-twenties, finding myself sexually harassed by the professor I TA'd for, I had two choices. (These days I'd have three choices. But since we did not have the term "sexual harassment" back then, my university, not surprisingly, had no policies for dealing with it.) So I could go to either my advisor (the harassing professor's sworn enemy) or the chair of the department for help, or I could handle it myself. Both the chair and my advisor were men. I couldn't stand the thought of begging their protection and thus being treated as a piece of property the harasser was poaching on, and so I decided to handle it myself by replacing his public acts of aggression with my own.

In short, I humiliated him as he was lecturing and caused him to falter and then end his lecture prematurely. It was a risky ploy. For one thing, if he hadn't been so insecure, he could have called my bluff and made me look bad in front of our students. For another thing, he was on my doctoral exams committee. The result, however, was excellent. Though he expressed biterness at my undermining him before our students, the sexual harassment ceased--even the lascivious leers. When a few months later I took one of his courses, he made a practice of firing a dozen or more random questions at me during each class meeting. Although this arguably constituted a form of hazing, I much preferred it to sexual harassment and suspected that my taking it without complaint would make my prelims go easier. (It did.)

The lesson? Rage is the appropriate response to outrageous beahvior. I don't think any other experience of sexual harassment I've had so drove home the point to me that it's all about whether a man thinks a woman has the same place in public space as a man does. Sf conventions, like universities, are public spaces. Although here in the US feminists have forced the issue of allowing women entry into public space (and this was certainly one of the most significant achievements of second-wave feminism), we haven't yet managed to change the terms on which women are allowed to negotiate public space.

Links to a few of the many feminist posts on yesterday's outrage:

mystickeeper's I find it highly amusing that his username is ferret
Rachelmanjia's "A proposal to crush the button-enabled sexual harassment proposal"
Micole's post
Liz Henry's The Internets Work How They're Supposed To"
Misia's A Modest Proposal: the Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project"
Oursin's The ick just keeps on a-coming and Invizbel soshul contrakt
Vito_Excalibur This Is Not a Joke. This Is Not Satire. This Is Not a Test.

Safety in Public Spaces

Last week Mexico City announced it would be setting up women-only buses as a response to increasing sexual harassment. (Mexico City has long had women-only cars on the subway.) This week Jessica Valenti, guest blogger on the Nation's blog, questioned the logic of creating women-only spaces for their own protection. She quotes herself writing in the Guardian on women-only spaces:

There's no doubt the harassment women face in public spaces needs to be addressed - whether it is on the street, the train, or even the internet. We've been subjected to regular catcalls and groping for far too long. But while the idea of a safe space is compelling, this international trend - which often comes couched in paternalistic rhetoric about "protecting" women - raises questions of just how equal the sexes are if women's safety relies on us being separated. After all, shouldn't we be targeting the gropers and harassers? The onus should be on men to stop harassing women, not on women to escape them.

Betsy Eudey, director of gender studies at California State University, says that while some single-sex environments could be beneficial - locker rooms where people are expected to be naked are an obvious example - she finds that "segregated spaces only enhance division by sex, and prevent the necessary actions needed to make public spaces safe and welcoming to all".

And then she notes that

Katha Pollitt, in an interview for this article, said that she doesn't think that the rise of women-only spaces will excuse society from confronting harassment and violence, but instead offer a small respite for women in a male-dominated world.

"Obviously, there would never be enough women-only space to accommodate all women all the time - half the subway cars or half the hotels…Women-only space is just a little breathing place for a few women every now and then."

Valenti, however, wonders whether women will be blamed for their harassment when they chose not to use the "safe" space provided.

I have some ideas on this subject myself (qv, for instance, a certain scene in Stretto), but I'm more interested in hearing how the issue strikes you-all.