Here’s an article about a Yale MFA student, who decided to “do something” about street harassment. so she took pictures of men and posted them, and then of course, because she’s a Yale art student, someone else – probably someone who knew someone who knew her – thought This Was Important and wrote an article about the the whole thing. Because she’s “objectified” and “oppressed” and “powerless” and “marginalized” like that.
Go look at the article in the link, look at the men she photographed. See any common thread? These are all working class or underclass men. She’s not only a student at a place like Yale, but a Master of Fine Arts student at a place like Yale, someone who is obviously never going to have to actually support herself or even be able to pay off student loans with what she will earn in her chosen field. Wait. Student loans? As if….
But she’s the victim here, she’s the one on the wrong end of the “power differential”. Don’t you see that?
Here is the history of modern feminism in a nutshell. Here is an elite white women’s movement, starting with the suffrage movement on down to the present day, tarted up as some kind of universalist social justice movement. I’m not a Maoist but… this is someone who needs to be re-educated. Seriously.
There are a couple of cultural tropes at play here:
Women Are Wonderful – There is the inevitable attempt to explain away her behavior, because after all, she must have meant only the best, and after all, that’s what matters, right, her intentions? After all, it’s the thought that matters, right?
So we get:
“The photos are beautiful and captivating—and also difficult to parse (which might be why they are getting so much press—enough that Price’s site is currently down from all of the unexpected traffic). A Jezebel writer praised them for “humanizing” street harassers.”
Oh please. She is “humanizing” them, because after all they need “humanizing”, hate objects for rich white girls that they are.
“Did Price intend to communicate respect (Here are some photographic subjects worthy of your attention)? Maybe, through her work, she was modeling the kind of sympathetic gaze she wished the men on the street would adopt toward her? Or was she turning the tables by objectifying her catcallers? (Now who is reduced to a visual image?)”
What do you think? More to the point, what do those men think? Do they feel respected?
What do you think.
How dare this kind of man have the temerity to try to get the attention of a fine young white lady like her? Uggh! Well at least she’s not calling for this kind of thing to be dealt with the way it used to be, so that’s progress, right? Because she’s just that wonderful.
Oh, and Hypoagency – “Women deserve to go out in public without feeling threatened, embarrassed, or constantly on display.”
This is the same old blaming men for women’s feelings. Maybe these women are so ADDICTED to this kind of man-bashing because they don’t understand the concept of “internal locus of control”. Hypoagency on wheels.
See for yourself. Here’s the entire quotation:
“Obviously, some interactions are not only unasked-for but intimidating and wrong. Women deserve to go out in public without feeling threatened, embarrassed, or constantly on display.”
Here’s the blithe equation of her feelings of threat for external, objective, real threat. Of course people are often correct about the existence of actual threat when they feel threatened, but when you are a person whose gender role is based on hypoagency and a timid, trembling, damseling, dainty parody of femininity, then you should “always and everywhere” examine and “interrogate” your fears, because you can’t ever tell if they are real or the product of your gender conditioning unless you do.
“Price, for example, brings up an instance when a man made a lewd gesture at her and she reacted angrily: “I definitely felt that could have led to something dangerous,” she says. But there’s an openness and generosity in her work that to me also demands mulling over.”
Not so much openness and generosity that it demands much mulling over, because it’s all completely beside the point. She is wielding power over these men and them lying about by calling herself the victim. That’s all the mulling that she is going to get.
Schroedinger’s Rapist – The Schroedinger’s Rapist trope is where this kind of Designated Victim thinking leads a person. SYABM happens to have captured a very good example of that.
Designated Victim – In every instance – circumcision, DV, war – whenever a man is victimized the ultimate and only real victim is a woman. Every time. And if you don’t get that, if Miss Privilege Princess can’t browbeat and guilt-trip into accepting that, well, you’re just a misogynist.
Yes they are all just timid, defenseless damsels so whatever they choose to do to a man is completely justified. I think there is a name in the DSM-IV-TR for this kind of thinking.
[Edit–Clarence has indicated that the woman in question has a mixed race heritage. Our apologies for the mistake. We’re going to leave this piece up for further discussion.]
- The Woman Card - May 2, 2016
- Frat boy bachelorettes and the invasion of gay bars - April 15, 2016
- “Not my kid….” - February 22, 2016
by 
Are you criticising Waldman’s article or Ms. Hannah Price(the woman who is being written about)? Your article is not clear and if it is about Ms. Price, it seems you are operating under assumptions that do not hold.
Fine young white lady?
“Raised in Fort Collins, Colo., Hannah Price is a photographic artist primarily interested in American minorities. As a mixed-race minority herself, Ms. Price seeks out subjects that she is often stereotypically linked to.”
Here’s a pic of this ‘white lady’. http://www.theartblog.org/2011/10/hannah-price-on-photographing-men-on-the-streets-in-philadelphia-a-new-podcast/
By the way, the guy in the car with the cigar isn’t black, and he doesn’t necessarily look working class to me.
http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/my-harassers
There you can get more of a sense of the woman who is doing the photographing instead of merely through the lens of Waldman’s article.
“HP:
Once a guy catcalls me, depending on the situation, I would either candidly take their photograph or walk up to them and ask if I can take their photograph. They usually agree and we talk about our lives as I make their portrait.”
She’s also not a big baby who expects men to never notice her sexually. I certainly find her attitude refreshing, esp after “Hollaback NY”, which takes photographs purely to make the subjects the objects of the Daily Hate.
You could have learned alot if you had researched your subject instead of trying to make her fit into your larger political memes. The only one who seems to need ‘reeducated’ (God, I hate that word, and I hate the very concept) is you, Gingko, because you don’t seem to know how to do basic reporting.
There was a competition a few weeks ago to “rebrand” feminism with a caption: “feminism is for everyone.”
http://vitaminw.co/culture-society/rebranding-feminism-contest
That certain bloggers are calling attention to the photo piece in a gossipy way speaks to the image problem the contest was addressing.
(Also, the photos thing was covered on a few other blogs, like NPR and Jezebel.)
>“feminism is for everyone.”
>image genders feminism as being for women
…It mocks itself.
Oh, but don’t worry about feminism being for everyone:
The Good Men Project has it COVERED:
hxtp://goodmenproject.com/femmephobia/cc-the-post-feminism-myth-a-mans-perspective/
The first ‘t’ is replaced by an X in order to avoid giving a direct link to that place.
“Ambiguity might be one of this project’s most prevalent themes. It’s been mistakenly referred to as “My Harassers” on some blogs, which Price does not like. Her series doesn’t take an aggressive stance on catcalling; it’s not meant to incite social action, she says. Rather, it’s an observation, a way to react behind the camera lens.
Price’s portraits leave much to interpretation. Not only do we not know the situations in which she crossed paths with these men, but we also have no idea of their relationship. The photos are framed in a variety of ways; the lighting, composition and even positioning of the subjects themselves vary so much that viewers have plenty of freedom to interpret them.”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/10/17/235413025/a-photographer-turns-her-lens-on-men-who-cat-call
you guys got this wrong. She doesn’t call the guys street harassers. Other people forced their agenda here. In fact, white nationalist lite GL Piggy used the “harassers” term. He’s a racist before an MRA. And he’s no MRA, Maybe an MRfrAud like much of the Spear-head crew.
“In the video interview, she says she doesn’t know how the project will affect the behavior of the men depicted: “I don’t think it makes them re-think catcalling. ‘Cause I’m just one person and we’re all different people and we come from different places. I don’t know in their experiences if they’ve had any luck with their catcalls. They probably have, depending on the person, so I don’t think my one instance … makes them re-think about what they’re saying.”
Price’s process went like this: Someone — a man — would catcall her, and she would either snap their photo at that instant or she would ask to make their portrait.
New York artist Tatayana Fazlalizadeh uses posters to combat unwanted cat calls and attention from men in her neighborhood.
Price says that taking photographs of the catcallers was a way to address and confront the people who catcalled her. “I’m in the photograph, but I’m not. Just turning the photograph on them kind of gives them a feel of what it’s like to be in a vulnerable position — it’s just a different dynamic,” Price says. “But it’s just another way of dealing with the experience, of trying to understand it.”
Her views are a thousand times more nuanced than the Schrodinger’s rapist crowd.
and there’s this…
“I do think that women are the most beautiful thing on the planet. Women are beautiful. I get it. Men are men. It’s an attraction. … It can be dangerous, but I don’t think it can be something fully avoided and controlled. Just as long as people understand the dynamics of a public expression in that way.”
sounds like something Maggie McNeil might say…
oh, yeah, except for the GL Piggy rant, I am basically doubling what Clarence said…
as far as Piggy…
3. Photographs a woman took of her street harassers. One sentence: “Price moved to Philadelphia in 2009 from Colorado and noticed for the first time that she was getting catcalled.”
http://glpiggy.net/2013/10/24/links-164/#comments
yes the guy does have an agenda, race realism/HBD, phrenology, whatever….
It’s kinda like that whole debacle with the Georgetown student, you “MRA’s” listen to some alter-righty man-o-sphere asshole and take that shit as gospel. Man, are you trying to cut David Fraudtrelle outta a job????
First thing, can you show me where I said she was white? I am missing it. I made a point of pointing out her wealth and privilege, not her race. And I made a point of pointing out the men’s class. Race was para theatrical.
Second thing – mixed race. That means half white. I have no respect for the Jim Crow one drop rule. You don’t see Obama denying his mother or maternal ancestry.
It’s very American to let race shoulder class out. It’s bullshit.
The “artist” is irrelevant, the work is what’s interpreted. These photos are getting play in the marxist leisure class pearl-clutching feminist crowd, so Ginkgo’s critique is acceptable. Out of this context I’m not sure there is much to say, she’s another wannabe desperate to do something “interesting”, who should stop the pretense and do honest ad work if she has any talent
“It’s very American to let race shoulder class out. It’s bullshit.”
I agree with that statement and think that is why feminism’s Patriarchy analysis is wrong on so many levels…
My point was by saying she was “harassed” when she herself uses much more nuanced terms is playing into the feminist game and the HBD’ers game. (There IS a reason GL Piggy said harassed.)
I’ll stand by everything I said as long as GL Piggy and Jack Don-0-van are considered reasonable voices and I’m the lunatic on the fringe. A movement like that isn’t something I want any part of…
I’ve said more about the bullying feminist’s do with the Nice Guy meme than everyone else except for Alek Novy and Mr. Black Pill. If I thought this was bullying of low status men, I woulda said that. Those guys made a move on her and she then asked if she could take a picture. Other times she took candids–you could discuss the ethics of candids I guess.
and as long as GL Piggy and Jack Don-0-van are considered reasonable voices, I’ll strongly agree to disagree and not be part of some dumb movement…
How do you know that these men are working class? They are just a few guys who are dressed in regular clothes on the street. None of them have a fast food uniform on or are swinging a pick-axe or whatever it is “working class” guys are supposed to be doing.
@Clarence:
The fact that there is even a “femmephobia” category tells me I don’t want to read that article.
I did anyway, via a Bing cache, and I liked these bits;
He can’t say what feminism is because he’s a white american dude. But he can say that discussing the matter is…well, it’s not exactly clear. What does it mean to “minimize discourse concerning [the] feminist movement”? Is this a wordier way of saying “derailing”? What if he was gay?
I also like the fact that he thinks that as a man, he’s not allowed to express an opinion on what feminism is. Which doesn’t sound much like equality to me.
How do you know you “fully understand ts meaning or relevance” if you’re not allowed to question it? Heck, there’s a fair amount of disagreement even among feminists about what the movement is. They generally can’t decide whether they’re for women’s rights, equality for all, or equality for all by way of women’s rights, and many seem to slip from one to another from sentence to sentence.
Then again, with all these women who clearly aren’t sure what feminism is, how is a poor sinner pro-feminist male ally supposed to tell? Best just to keep their heads down.
In the late 2000s-2011, there were video art-pieces from a different Yale MFA graduate, Laurel Nakadate.
She went on Craigslist dates and videotped her experiences (which didn’t reflect well on the men). There’s a similar class dynamic going on with a Yale person using ‘non-Yale people’ as subjects in a certain way.
http://youtu.be/Iot1-y9O4Po
Well, I do love the photos. Very nuanced, as teh Bastard said.
(Thanks for clarifying, Clarence. )
When gay guys hit on me, it doesn’t bother me at all. Everyone has the chance to at least try it on.
I was very boyish and even a bit girlish in some respects when I was younger. This attracted a lot of men to me. Sadly this also meant that girls where not interested. (Or maybe I was lucky.)
As a man you have to play the aggressor chaser to even have a chance of getting a short term lay. Females have it easy, anytime they want casual sex, they can find it online or go to a bar. Females are lazy in the romantic sphere and expect guys to do all the work.
It’s also a fine illustration of the feminist definition of harassment as “sexual attention from someone you DON’T think is hot, wealthy, and successful. When it is, it’s flirting.”
So.. by claiming to be interested in gender issues, what you really mean is you hate women. Every article I see on this website is how women are evil princesses and how men are the real victims. This is a sad “reality” you choose to live in.
“So.. by claiming to be interested in gender issues, what you really mean is you hate women. ”
Traditonalgender roles, feminism =/= women
“Every article I see on this website is how women are evil princesses and how men are the real victims. ”
That will change when there are no more evil princesses vicitmizing men.
“This is a sad “reality” you choose to live in.”
Oh, yes, do presume to tell us about our reality. We’re all ears. I am sure you are used to being considered the expert.
If you have anything fo value to contribute to the discussion, unlike your comment, stick around. Otherwise go off and whine somewhere else.
This article sounds like a feminist version of a ghetto tour http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/bronx-ghetto-tours-offered-real-bronx-tours-canceled_n_3324815.html The idea that an Ivy League educated woman who grew up in suburban Colorado would serve as the arbitrer of street life in a low-income section of Philadelphia is kind of preposterous.
Indeed. Tricia’s comments also seem a bit like the Women are Wonderful trope. In some people’s reality, saying women aren’t always and uniformly wonderful is misogyny.
tamerlame: As a man you have to play the aggressor chaser to even have a chance of getting a short term lay. Females have it easy, anytime they want casual sex, they can find it online or go to a bar. Females are lazy in the romantic sphere and expect guys to do all the work.
Unless you don’t want an aggressive man and want to be the aggressor yourself, of course. I always preferred to “do all the work,” and believe it or not, there are a significant number of women like me.
DDH,
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This goes back to the Madonna-Whore crap. I was always unconvinced that dichotomy explained much, and now I realize it may describe the situation in Mediterranean cultures. Well, that’s not us.
@Tricia:
You mean like this famous article about how evidence indicates men are actually half of all rape victims and women 40% of all rapists? Which starts off by linking to a previous article about how a culture of gynocentric victimhood limits women, including erasing their agency?
You know, you could’ve actually asked instead of assuming. Then there wouldn’t be egg on your face.
Code Blue, Code Black.
Tricia, the main difference is, folks here will argue back with you. I have been nasty as shit on this blog, and I am still not banned. Feminist blogs rarely allow MRAs to post, much less argue (or I’d argue with em over there! haha!)… I used to get upset when they’d ban them, since I was usually just getting warmed up. I enjoy arguing “first principles” with MRAs, since I think they serve to clarify what we have won and lost; as well as what is still up for debate. Examples: few MRAs are anti-abortion, anti-birth control, etc… this signals an area in which we have obviously won the argument, and the changes wrought over the last 4 decades have also been positive for men in many ways. But MRAs may argue about “paper abortions”–thus clarifying certain specific existant-objections even further. This is educational for feminists.
The various “big feminist blogs” invariably say MRAs are “derailing”–and they often accuse any hapless man with objections of being MRAs– even if he never heard of MRAs (thus converting him on the spot, if he is so inclined). I have rarely seen MRAs actually “derail”–they usually are just diametrically opposed to whatever the subject is, which is not “derailing” –but flat-out arguing. I think arguing is a good thing for the politics of everyone involved. Echo chambers are bad, and lead to a cultish environment in which everyone just agrees. Boring.
I can’t think of any feminist blogs that allow MRAs to post, and I think that is a damn shame. It seems they could at least designate some threads as “MRAs okay here”? Some very personal threads could be marked as “feminists only” or “women only” or whatever it is. But the blanket exile just makes for a rather boring echo chamber.
BTW, I think this is also true of MRA blogs in which no feminists dare post –and those that do– get called nasty names like hag and so on (AVFM). Someone called me “a declawed cougar” on AVFM, and I didn’t even post there! I can only imagine what would happen if I did. I nearly have several times, and thought the better of it. (Vicious pile-ons can serve as effectively as banning, as a deterrent.) This blog doesn’t pile on as badly, and it is small enough that you can handle the pile-on; it isn’t hundreds of them, as it would be on AVFM.
So if you object, say something. No shaming tactics, it doesn’t work and just pisses people off.
Try it like this:
Why is princess an insult, while prince is a compliment? See how pervasive misogyny is? 🙂
Daisy:
Since when is ‘prince’ a compliment? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used in real life to describe someone who wasn’t actually descended from royalty. How would the scenario you mention even work? Would people go ‘wow, he’s such a prince,’ or ‘man, that was such a prince move when he saved those kittens’?
Are you sure you didn’t mean [The Artist Formerly Known As] Prince? Because in that case the answer is sweet purple motorcycles and ‘When Doves Cry.’
And ‘princess’ becomes an insult here because it describes a type of person molded by a culture that sets a very specific image of ‘princess’ up as an ideal. It also functions as an ordinary descriptor, and is still used to express a manufactured ideal in many spaces (in which its associations are of course considered positive). As you are no doubt already aware, the people for whom the term has the most negative associations are probably either the Jacobins or one of the early Russian revolutionary groups.
DDH,
“I can’t think of any feminist blogs that allow MRAs to post, and I think that is a damn shame.”
I can’t think of many that allow YOU to post! I wonder if there is any commonality….
“”I think arguing is a good thing for the politics of everyone involved. Echo chambers are bad, and lead to a cultish environment in which everyone just agrees. Boring. ”
Well there’s the pattern and the commonality.
On the princess/prince thing, “prince” would be a very daring insult in a culture with mama’s boys in stead of the one we have with Daddy’s Little Girls. And I am well aware of how cruel this can be on girls who were not spoiiled or protected by their fathers. But it goes farther than one or another person’s family dynamics. It goes to general cultural assumptions and values set on genders. One area where this disparity is especially obviuous is in our scripts around romance and sexual relationships.
In our culture, the princes say to their princesses, “Nos morituri te salutamus.” Being called a “prince” normally comes along with the realization that you just got friend-zoned by someone who had just used you for everything you had to give.
When I was a kid, I really hated and did whatever I could to avoid stories and cartoon with princes and princesses, I mean at that age (around 7-10) I wanted to be big so I could become a astronaut, a pilot or at least drive trains (sigh) I did not wanted to hear/read/see stories or cartoons about prince who save the helpless princess so they can live happily there after. I mean come on, the princess kidnapped by a dragon? A DRAGON? are you serious? what in the name of heaven would a dragon do with a princess? and why didnt he eat her? beside she wasnt even in danger, she got food, clothes and lots of time at her hands; the stories were absurd, come on. And why should I admire the prince?
Nah at that age I didnt want a princess, I wanted grow up fast so I could fulfill my dreams, Rambo, Arnie, Bruce Lee […] they were my heroes not a boy dresset in blue with tigh pant and a stick in his hands (the prince).
About the princess, well I dont know any women/girls who wants to be or treated like a princess, most of the time women around me stresses to show me how good and independent they are. So I guess the princess trope is something that comes from the society, the traditional part, where women should only look pretty and guys do all the work. Yawn.
Hiding, when I was growing up, “you’re a real prince!” was a compliment for any man who acted gallantly or politely. I think it is/was more commonly used in certain ethnic groups, Italian and Jewish specifically. (It was frequently used by one man, addressing another.)
Just a couple weeks ago, I used the term in a movie review on my blog, referring to “our young prince”–meaning the attractive, good-hearted protagonist.
When I was growing up and boys had goofy haircuts we’d poke fun and call them Prince Valiant.
Laurie Anderson just wrote an obit for her late husband, Lou Reed, calling him a prince: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/31/lou-reed-widow-obituary-laurie-anderson
He was indeed.
Daisy:
Huh. Half my family’s Italian (and that’s hardly uncommon in this area), but I’ve never heard anyone say that before. Conversations I have that involve the word ‘prince’ tend to be about either Machiavelli, Revolutionary Girl Utena (highly recommended if you haven’t seen it; just be warned that you have to sit through a fair number of joke episodes before it gets to the really good stuff), or Purple Rain. Live and learn, I guess (why do I feel like that’s the name of a musical number I don’t like?).
Mr Supertypo:
I can’t remember liking any stories like that, either (I was always more of a Sherlock Holmes fan). Then again, I can’t think of any modern ‘prince saves princess’ story that’s actually been made for or marketed to boys. I know plenty of women whose childhoods seem to have been completely filled with the stuff, and a lot of them don’t seem likely to put down the Disney princesses any time soon. Neil Gaiman had an interesting bit about the differences between boys’ and girls’ fantasies in one volume of The Sandman (the one with the Cuckoo, I think), that appears to hold true at least as far as popular media is concerned.
I remember “He’s a prince of a guy” as a complimentary thing to say. I haven’t heard it fro anyone younger than my father, who passed a couple of years ago.
I don’t recall any stories about princes directed at boys since the Narnia series. Classical stuff such as the Iliad that mention princes as heroes are no longer part of the curriculum or the standard books boys read. They aren’t taught as classroom literature and they are not in school libraries for boys to read on their own.
When I was a child they used to show me lots of old disney shows and my mother used to read lots of classics to me. But beside that, Im Italian I grow up on the streets of Napoli (Naples) and I have never heard before the word prince in the local slang unless it is strictly used for a royality or the famous singer. I think there is also a cigarette brand named like this. But the word princess is used for a very young elegant girl (infants only) and thats it.
If somebody use the word ‘ prince ‘ to a boy its for indulting purposes, as naive and effeminate. Thats the meaning I see behind that word. But what do I know…..
“But what do I know…..”
Mr. Supertypo, actually quite a lot because that information bears on how the term is used in Italian-American settings, very directly since Neapolitans are so prominent in that culture in general in the US.
And welcome, by the way. I forgot to welcome you when you first commented.
My childhood was also filled with the romantic prince-saves-princess type of story (at least as regards movies), but that is almost certainly because I was perhaps the second quietest of four children and the only boy. There wasn’t really time to wait for me to come up with an opinion of what movie we should watch as a family, so it tended to be either girly or universally appealing. This applied to most things we did as a family, actually: there were the things for girls and the things for everybody. The boy stuff was either only with my dad or solitary.
I do not know if it’s just me or if everybody else encountering issues with your website.
It appears as if some of the written text within your content are running
off the screen. Can someone else please comment
and let me know if this is happening to them as well?
This could be a issue with my web browser because I’ve had this happen previously.
Many thanks
Welcome, Margo!
Thanks for mentioning that, because I am having problems adding links to the articles and I don’t know why, and there may be a connection. I suspect in my case it’s a new version of Windows that is causing the problem. It is always a good bet to blame Windows, but in your case, who knows. I will be talking to Typhonblue tomorrow night and we will see what we can find. I’m not having that problem, so it may be on your end, but as I say, I don’t have enough information or expertise to say.
Anyway, hope you stick around!