After a NYT study found that 63% of NYC suway riders say they have been sexually harrassed, Jessica Valenti published a column at The Guardian entitled “Is segregation the only answer to sexual harassment?” In it she questions whether separate facilities for women are a good thing, and seems to conclude that they are not.
I’m sympathetic to her argument that othering and isolating women by relegating them to separate facilities is problematic. One thing that concerns me, though, is the way she conflates marketing ploys (such as a women only beach in Italy, see e.g. this and this) and women only hotel floors (note account is in a section of the newspaper called “Money”) with a very real public safety concern, sexual assault on public transportation. She is correct that “women should have the right to be safe anywhere and everywhere” and also that a woman who is assaulted in a co-ed subway car may be blamed for being there. But unlike hotels and for profit fee-paid beaches, mass transportation systems are public spaces and women may not have alternatives to using them. Making them safer for women is an important social goal. If providing separate cars for women is cheaper and more effective than substantially increasing police presence, it makes sense to experiment with them. Valenti writes:
When I take the subway now, a bit older and certainly more jaded, I do my best to avoid crowded train cars and instead of silently rolling my eyes when someone brushes up against me, I make a fuss. (Grabbing the offending hand and holding it up, declaring, “Why was this hand on my ass?” seems to do the trick.)
We have all been there, and it stinks. Why not try to do something effective like separate cars, that will be a lot more effective than avoiding crowded cars and yelling at individual offenders. I don’t think I’ve ever been groped on a train or a bus by a woman. In every context that has been studied, women are A LOT safer when men are not around. A while back Heart wrote this about women only commuter coaches in Rio de Janiero:
… News reports covering the woman-only cars in Rio de Janeiro are hard for me to read, because they contain such unapologetic anti-woman, anti-feminist commentary, including from government officials, some of whom decried the cars as discriminatory and unconstitutional. Their logic seemed to be either that officials should address the problem of groping, sexual assault and sexual harrassment in general, rather than ghetto-izing women by creating woman-only commuter cars, and/or that the woman-only cars discriminated against men. Recently men opposed to the woman-only cars have engaged in protests, standing at bus and train loading areas with signs marked “gay,” “hippies,” “men,” and more protests are planned. City officials intend to challenge the laws enacted to create woman-only transportation. In some instances, according to the reports, men have violated women’s commuter spaces uneventfully, but in general, security guards are available to enforce the laws and regularly do so with the hearty approval of the women riding. When Women’s E-News interviewed commuters in Rio de Janeiro, by far the majority of women were enthused about the woman-only transportation, while all of the men queried disliked it.
Well, of course. It either interferes with their groping plans : according to Alternet coverage, there is an online community dedicated to “those who enjoy pressing up against women on crowded buses and trains” which encourages them to leave descriptions of what amounts to their sexual assaults on women on the site for others to enjoy : or it flies in the face of what they want to believe about men, or of the excuses they make for the pandemic proportions of the problem of male sexual violation of women. …
I think Heart has the better argument. Public women-only facilities make a very visceral point about the inability of men to control their violence toward women and they make women safer, two important feminist goals.
–Ann Bartow
