Quote of the day
From commenter violet in a thread at PunkAssBlog (about Sex 2.0, coincidentally enough!)
The thing about staring / oogling is that yes, it’s mostly part of the background, but it’s part of a substantially violent background. We live in a culture where women are constantly told, “be vigilant! he might be a rapist!,” and however problematic we think those exhortations are, they’re in the water, and getting stared at or ogled, particularly by strange men, carries this low-level implicit threat of violence, particularly if you’re a trans woman or a woman of color.
I know this feeling all too well and it’s something that’s damn near impossible to describe to a man in a way that they will really understand, if they are not already operating from a pro-feminist or feminist-allied (a.k.a., non-asshole) stance.
This really gets to the crux of experiential vs. vicarious appreciation of a social movement. Because the feeling violet describes above, the social context in which ogling/staring occurs, and wherein men will complain, “What, I was just looking!” – it’s something that most men just don’t get. And they can’t get it, in that first-person way, because they haven’t experienced it. What they can do is listen to women, believe us and not try to discount our lived experiences. In other words, they can not be That Guy.
I think that’s probably mostly true.
I remember going to the mall and people watching, and eventually sort of noticing the difference, but that’s because I was looking for it. You see people check each other out all the time. Someone attractive walks by, and a head will turn or whatever. But then I’d see someone who was doing a lot more than just looking, and it sort of became night and day. The way that the view lingered way longer than appropriate, or the sort of change in body language, or the ways that someone’s face would change and their eyes would crawl up and down. I doubt I spot it all or even most of the time, but it did make it clear to me the difference in some way. Or, at least, I think the difference is fairly clear to me.