Last Friday night after a high school football game, Jazmine Thompson was in a car with three other female friends when Daniel Floyd Williams approached them, asked for sex, walked away, came back waving a gun and fired at the young women. Jazmine was killed . Her life is over. Daniel was charged with second-degree murder.
This is ridiculous! I’m tired of reading about boys and men who think they are so entitled to women’s attention and bodies on the street that they react with anger when the women reject them .
Jazmine is not the first (nor surely the last) female to be killed in such a senseless way by a man. Gender-based violence like this is most often (but not always) perpetrated by a man against his former or current intimate partner, often when he feels rejected or as though he’s lost control over “his” woman. But, as this story shows, such violence happens between complete strangers, too. Here are stories about four other women who, like Jazmine, were murdered by unknown men after rejecting them.
We must all do our part to help end the idea that men can and should prove their manhood and masculintiy through sexual conquests and that rejection by a woman justifies retaliation in the form of insults, physical abuse, and murder. This mindset and behavior must end.
(cross-posted at Stop Street Harassment blog )
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this kind of thing pisses me off so very much. There is no reason for this and its past time we do something about it
I couldn't agree more. When the idea of masculinity as currently advanced makes anger an acceptable means to deal with rejection rather than introspection, then we have a major issue. It's easy for a man to turn to anger in general, but it doesn't mean that this is the default setting upon which we are hopelessly programmed due to simple biology.
Much of the problem is that men are not comfortable with their sensitive, feminine sides and a kind of hyper-masculinity that exists within some groups of men asserts that violence is the only acceptable way for men to process their grief. In another age, it was acceptable for heterosexual men to be more emotive in general and even express some degree of tenderness and affection towards other men, but an irrational, but nonetheless pervasive fear of homosexuality or seeming homosexual has removed that from the equation.
I don't think anyone here is going to argue the premise of this post. Not too many sane people in the world would. So this is kind of stating the obvious.
Not that attention shouldn't be drawn to it or that it shouldn't be said. But what I'd love to see is for everyone who posts with a basic message of "we need to stop violence against women" to offer one idea with regards to how we might go about doing that. You want to see it happen. I do. She does, he does, we all do. Let's poke at the problem a little harder than just saying, this is a problem and it needs to stop, and get an idea or two rolling whenever possible. We might get somewhere in terms of finding solutions, even small or localized ones.
I'm glad you think my post is stating the obvious but I don't think a lot of people put men's street harassing behavior toward women into that context and that's why I wrote it.
Figuring out a solution is the hardest part and it's something I'm still working on. I've been reading Jackson Katz's The Macho Paradox this week and articles by other men who have written about male socialization and masculinity and its impact on gender relations and gender-based violence to try to learn more. Right now I'm feeling pretty depressed thinking about all the ways violence against women is sexualized in the porn, sex trafficking, and even "regular" media industries and how all that contributes to numbing people to gender-based violence and making it seem okay. There are billions of dollars to be made there so of course those industries are extremely resistant to change but we can try to make it not worth their while to exist by not supporting them. I like Bitch and Ms. magazine and Feministing's efforts to call out advertisers etc who are blatantly supporting the sexualization of violence against women and we could all do more to help with those type of campaigns.
As I say, it's something I'm still working on, but these are some suggestions specifically for men regarding street harassment and then here are some suggestions for anyone/everyone about working to end street harassment (especially see #7).
In a book I am writing on street harassment, I spend the latter half working through ways to help women deal with the problem now (offering success stories and suggestions that have worked for other women) and long term suggestions for ending the problem period. In the section I highlight dozens of activists around the world working to end this problem on the local level. I highlight a few on my website.
Do you have any suggestions?
I have suggestions, but you have a lot more and they pretty much cover mine. That's exactly the kind of stuff I'm talking about that we need to see and spread.
Going specific, though, I really think self-defense is not just useful, but critical. I'm a decent-sized guy, I can fight, and I'll rage all over somebody if I see him doing violence to someone who clearly can't defend herself against it. But I've never actually been in a position to do so. The story about the guy who beat down the drunk that hit a couple of women on a street corner- if that kind of thing were normal, it wouldn't really be news anymore. One might think it doesn't happen because violence occurs and no one's willing to stop it, but there really are a lot of people who would jump in to stop situations like that.
They don't, though, for the same reason I haven't- they don't see it. That sort of overt, public violence is rare relative to the total quantity of violence that exists. Every one of us knows someone who has been physically harmed in some way, but how many of us have been in position to stop the violence in progress, whether we had the capability or not? Because so much violence against women happens privately, it's essential that as many women as possible learn to defend themselves, since odds are any violent encounter will occur without anyone around to help them; as this relates to street harassment, one side effect will necessarily be that women are better prepared to handle confrontations with strangers.
I also believe that if you're trying to put out a message to the general public about this, you either need to use a different word than "survivor" or else explain how the term fits. If you ask the average person to define the term "survivor", they'll think of someone who has lived through a life-threatening situation. Talking about someone who has survived assault as a survivor is not really a stretch; we may not equate assault with murder, but certainly any sort of physical violence carries the potential for death, purposeful or accidental. Rape is similar.
But street harassment is on a different level. Is it fucked up? Yeah. Should we take it seriously? Of course. Does the potential for violence stemming from that harassment exist? Yes. But to go by your own words, we're not simply talking about those occasions where harassment spirals into physical violence. We're talking about all of it. Most of it is verbal, which, excepting situations that might drive a woman to the brink of suicide or some other type of literal self-harm, is not something that one survives, at least under the meaning of survival a great many people possess.
This becomes more important if you're especially trying to reach guys with this message. It may be that nearly every woman will understand the concept of "surviving street harassment", even if that might not be the language they would use. It may not. I don't know. But a hell of a lot of guys- good guys, guys who want to do right- are going to hear this and think, "Really? Surviving someone saying you have nice tits? Isn't that kind of overblown?" And when they go there, they begin to take your entire argument less seriously because it sounds like you're trying to overstate your case.
I would think it equally effective to refer to most people who deal with this type of harassment as victims or some such, and save a term like survivor for those who suffer through escalated incidents. "Sue was a victim of harassment from the assholes at the construction site." "Julie survived a run-in with a guy who started hitting on her, then chased her around the block when she said no." You see what I mean? It's not like many people are going to be miffed about you calling someone a victim instead of a survivor- indeed, those terms are used interchangeably sometimes. And while I understand if you want people to treat all forms of street harassment equally, whether they devolve into physical confrontation or not, catcalls and physical violence are not equal. Using the same language to describe women who deal with both will make some people not take you seriously, even if they'd be willing to take the issue seriously.
Tugging apart language usage may seem nitpicky, but in a case like this, that one word could have a pretty dramatic influence on the efficacy of your argument. But, again, if there's a deeper and fully logical reason behind the use of the word "survivor", I'd love to know; not only for my own benefit, but because, as I said, I think you'll need to be able to explain it to those who think you might be overplaying your hand.
would you be interested in talking more via email about this? as i mentioned, i'm writing a book on street harassment (my manuscript due in a few months to my publisher) and one of my target audiences will be male allies and i'm interested to hear more of your opinions. I'm at stopstreetharssmentATyahooDOTcom
I e-mailed you. I assumed the "harssment" in your address was a typo.