What You're Not Seeing in the Hollaback Video

Bear with me here, because what I'm saying isn't going to be immediately obvious.

This video is making the viral rounds, and is definitely something important:

But I'm not sure the correct takeaway is what everyone thinks it is.

What does the video tell us? Well, if you're a woman, it may not tell you anything you don't already know. But if you're a man, it should give you an idea of what it feels like to be an attractive woman walking down the street simply trying to mind your own business. It should give you a sense of harassment, of concern for your own safety, of the frustration that accompanies someone else assuming they have the right to intrude on your life just because you're there and have something they want. And at moments, it should give you some inkling of what it feels like to worry that someone might try to physically force you into sexual contact.

And the conversations around the video almost all propose the same conclusion: that men should avoid doing all of the things the guys in the video are doing.

But -- and here's where people are going to ask what the hell is wrong with me -- that's not the correct response.

What???

Didn't the video make me understand what it's like to be harassed?

Yes, but I already knew what it's like to be harassed. I get harassed by survey people in shopping malls and by religious proselytizers going door-to-door. I've been harassed in a grocery store by a guy who mistook me for someone else and got really angry that I "refused" to recognize him.

Didn't the video make me understand what it's like to fear for one's safety in a public place?

Yes, but I already knew what it's like to fear for my safety in a public place. Homeless panhandlers often make me feel that way, although certainly not all of them do. The aforementioned guy in the grocery store definitely made me feel that way.

Didn't the video make me understand what it's like to have someone barge into your space and interrupt your thoughts just because they think they're entitled to do so and have no concern for whether you're currently receptive to whatever it is they want to say to you?

Yes, but I already knew what that's like. For one thing, I'm married, and my wife feels entitled to start talking to me whenever and wherever. Generally I don't mind, but sometimes I feel like I'm just a big ear for her to vent into. As another (more serious) example, I was recently in a game store waiting for my gaming group to arrive, and an awkward young man with no social skills came up to me and asked, "So what do you do?" He did this despite the fact that I was in an isolated side-room at the time and had my nose in a book. I responded minimally, without looking up (in part because I had my reading glasses on and they make the world look wonky beyond about two feet). He didn't take the hint, though, and I ended up having an excruciating conversation with him because he didn't even know how to talk games, and I had to do the heavy lifting of moving the conversation along because if I didn't say anything, he just stood there uncertainly in the silence.

The mistaken-identity guy in the grocery store even gave me a sense of what it's like to fear unwanted sexual contact.

So did I get anything new out of the video? Yes. I got a rough idea of what it's like to worry about all-out rape.

And I'll bet that for most people, that's the only truly new sensation evoked by the video. All of the rest of it -- the harassment, the sense of exploitation and intrusion, the feeling of being a commodity someone wants to use to their own ends -- all of us have felt all of those in different contexts as an unavoidable part of modern living. For heaven's sake, Girl Scouts selling cookies outside of Walmart make me feel that way. If I'm deliberately avoiding eye contact, don't try to guilt me into buying your cookies.

So my takeaway from the video isn't that men need to stop forcing these annoyances on women. It's that we need to create a world where no woman ever needs to worry about getting raped. Remove that fear, and everything in the video becomes enormously more tolerable. In contrast, if we got every man in the world to stop ogling, cat-calling, and hitting on women, the continued threat of rape would remain an unconscionable stain on our society.

Be honest now. If you had to choose between (1) eliminating the constant everyday irritation and energy drain women endure because of unwanted male attention and (2) eliminating rape, which only a subset of women ever experience ... would you really hesitate even a second about which one would more greatly improve the world and the lives of women everywhere?

"But we don't have to choose! We should eliminate both!"

I agree. However, the fact that one form of male-on-female rudeness is associated with sex in no way elevates that rudeness above other forms of rudeness in terms of priority. Everyone should be less rude to everyone. So what if men are carelessly rude to women because they're sexually attracted to them? People are rude to cashiers every day because they feel the cashiers are there to serve them. Political partisans are horribly rude to each other every day because they have differing philosophies. Spouses are rude to spouses every day because the vows of matrimony allow them to take each other for granted.

Rudeness is rudeness. If we elevate sexually motivated rudeness above other kinds of ill behavior, we're contributing to a mystification of sex that lies at the heart of the entire problem. Our society has made sex a Holy Grail that's portrayed as a divine wonder everyone should hope to attain, while simultaneously putting up enormous barriers to the fulfilling expression of one's sexuality. That cauldron of stressed and repressed biological need can't help but make people do crazy and sometimes rude and sometimes criminal things. Until we make sex ordinary, we will never eliminate the misdirected results of sexual frustration.

It is intolerable that our society continues to allow rape to occur. And the reality of rape casts a deep and gnawing shadow when men rudely foist unwanted attention on women. But we should not mistake the shadow for the monster that creates it, because we can't kill that monster by striking at shadows.

If you're a man and you watch that video and you decide you should stop intruding on women's lives and that you should also call other men out when you see them doing it, good for you. You're making the world a better place. But be aware that if that's all you do, you're just whitewashing things. You're just adding a veneer -- and one that will serve as an additional layer of repression for some men, potentially worsening the way they behave in private even if it improves the way they behave in public.

The unseen monster in that video is not sexism. It's rape.

Let's do something about it.