This morning's commute (the 'ugh' edition)

I missed this thread earlier. Very interesting to hear about women's experiences. I haven't read any recent research, but the fear of sexual harassment always featured in research of why fewer women cycle than men. There were other factors, of course, but that was always there.

I think it's fairly inevitable that someone will post something like what thiscocks has posted. Good on the mods for not moderating it out. Apologies for the extreme obviousness of most of the rest of this post, but I think it's worth being obvious about such things sometimes.

It's quite clear that the remarks and actions Lucy and others report are sexual harassment and that they differ from the abuse that male cyclists get in that the latter tend to be about cycling and bike riding (its perceived eccentricity, 'riding in the middle of the road', etc.), whereas the former are about the person herself/the persons themselves, or rather about very superficial aspects of them.

The general rule is, of course, that if you say something to anyone you first have to take into account how well you know them and adjust your remarks accordingly, and the instant jump from not knowing someone at all to remarks that in all their superficiality would only be appropriate in an intimate relationship is what makes them so distressing, along with the frequency with which women have to endure them. I haven't followed all of the links yet, so this may already have been posted somewhere/referred to in something posted before (it didn't seem very prominent on the London Hollaback page), apologies for reposting in that case:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/30/living/hollaback-10-hours-walking-in-nyc/

It gives every man an easily accessible idea of how often this kind of thing happens and, of course, it's not limited to cycling. Reasons why it happens range from male insecurity about their masculinity to peer pressure (often motivated by said insecurity) to the fact that because of gender stereotyping still being strongly ingrained in popular culture, it is seen as necessary to continue popular culture in the same vein. Gender stereotyping, of course, affects anyone negatively.

(It's based on ignorance and revolves around the superficial, and therefore ignorantly accessible, fact that the shape of men's bodies tends towards strength and that of women tends towards beauty (while there are, of course millions of shades of difference within that, the comparison I'm applying is like that between a sister and a brother, i.e. people who are quite similar; of course, there are many women who are very strong and men who look beautiful, but even for a strong woman her putative brother would be stronger if he followed the same exercise régime, and for a beautiful man most likely his putative sister would look more beautiful), resulting in the constant expectation that men should be strong and women should be beautiful and weak; quite apart from what that could possibly mean in respect of personalities, it is quite clear that transferring superficial perceptions of bodies to personalities is at best reductionist and generally very damaging. Everybody has loads of important aspects and little can be more detrimental than trying to live up to a single, fruitless, impersonal 'ideal'.)

However, the kind of harassment that's the subject of this thread affects mostly women. Men get harassed in a different way, and much more rarely sexually, except with remarks about penis size, homophobic remarks, or when sexual innuendo forms part of the powerplay (e.g., "I'm challenging you to a fight and I'm not only stronger than you but also more virile").

It's certainly very important to reduce the incidence of this in cycling, although there are obviously wider social issues involved. The London Hollaback site has a tag for cycling:

http://ldn.ihollaback.org/category/cycling-2/

It is fairly obvious that there aren't many posts there, in any category, it seems. Do people think this sort of campaign works or is the option of posting harassment incidents there not very important?

I don't think that apart from this anyone is currently campaigning actively to give it a wider hearing specifically within cycling, though, so there's definitely work to do. Maybe someone is doing something and I just haven't heard about it. Perhaps the more general initiatives that include cycling among other initiatives are the best way of going about it, though.

Anyway, good thread.