Men know sexual harassment is wrong. Beating them with handbags won’t help

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/27/men-sexual-harassment-beating-handbags-peru

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Recently, a sports company in Peru decided to take on the South American country’s problems with sexual harassment by making a public service announcement in which the mothers of known catcallers got “youthful makeovers” and walked past their sons in the street. It’s a ploy straight out of the Liz Lemon playbook – in one episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s character disguises herself in order to lure her father, who is having a late-life crisis (or “gentleman’s intermission”) into hitting on her. When her true identity is revealed, she is hounded out of the bar for being “disgusting”.

In the Peruvian video, son number one tells his mum she’s got “tasty panties” as she passes him and a friend on the street. “Hello piggy”, son number two growls at the woman who gave him life, food, shelter, love and a place in the world. In both scenes, the mothers turn on their sons, beat them with their handbags and tell them women can wear what they want, while the programme’s presenter eggs them on from inside a surveillance car. The scenes are incredibly staged, the acting barely hitting the heights of a school play. The men plead their innocence and take their beating from their mamas like good boys. Something that could be genuinely funny because of the dark truth it comes from is reduced to a mere joke, which in turn belittles the seriousness of the situation.

Still, the video has got Peru talking. In it, we are told that seven out of 10 women have been sexually harassed on the streets of Lima, the Peruvian capital. In the UK, where nearly 60% of girls aged 13-21 have reported sexual harassment at school or college, we are not so far off. An old-school slice of prank comedy might be a better way of engaging with some men than the “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a woman” video, but really, why do men need to be confronted by women they know in order to realise that saying aggressive things to any woman is just a nasty, lame thing to do?

There’s an often repeated line that some men use about how having a daughter made them finally realise how sexually aggressive men are, and how feminism is really no bad thing. This can often morph into something more dangerous, which is a kind of paternalistic control based on the idea that the father knows “what men are really like”. This ideology is an ideology of fear. It propagates a gender war in the name of older men controlling their younger daughters.

All men do not need to be turned into monsters so that we all see women as mothers, daughters, friends and lovers whether we know them or not. The shaming of the Peruvian men by their mothers just shows us the poverty of some people’s imaginations. The message here is not that we need to take a beating with a leather handbag, but that we need to learn how to put ourselves in the shoes of other people. This means that men need to empathise with all women. This is hard in a society that is not known for prizing kindness, but it shouldn’t be seen as impossible. It’s really not that difficult at all.

And in fact men know this already. When they catcall women on the street, they can’t plead ignorance with any form of legitimacy. They know that what they are doing is wrong, just as they know – but would rather not admit – that when they catcall women in front of other men they are engaging in a homosocial activity, a bit of chest-beating that may bond them to each other, but which damages society for all. Feigning ignorance is the crime – because it is not truly ignorance but buried understanding masquerading as ignorance. Those Peruvian men knew what they were doing was wrong. They and their catcalling brethren can’t plead unawareness anymore.