With the montage video of a woman enduring street harassment repeatedly while walking in New York City making the rounds, I'm reminded of a movie I watched with friends in 2004 and the surprise in cultural norms it presented.
In The Stranger, Orson Welles is a Nazi hiding as a professor in America. At 12 minutes in he speaks to a group of young, educated, friendly men when this happens:
Watching this ten years ago gave my friends and I a big, awkward laugh because of how absolutely inappropriate this was, yet it was treated as a normal everyday event. I'm not sure what the norm was in the mid 1940's, but this scene always appeared to me to be a dipstick for society's progress.
I've looked and it's been extremely difficult to find the demographic profiles of a modern street harasser, but I imagine it has slunk back to the uneducated and ill-mannered. This is a serious problem that we shouldn't accept or tolerate, and it shouldn't just be the feminists who speak out against it.
I've looked and it's been extremely difficult to find the demographic profiles of a modern street harasser, but I imagine it has slunk back to the uneducated and ill-mannered. This is a serious problem that we shouldn't accept or tolerate, and it shouldn't just be the feminists who speak out against it.
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