Hello, and welcome back to Modern Heartbreak.
With Steven Colbert hosting the lovely Anita Sarkeesian last night on his show, the internet, already abuzz with cries of misogyny, just went full McIntosh.
Anti Street Harassment
A group known as iHollaback decided enough is enough and that women want to make it from point A to point B without being harassed. Fair enough, I too get annoyed by the panhandlers and other pricks that interrupt my buzz when walking around the cobbled streets of Gastown. When you’re baked and wondering which restaurant you’re going to pay $30 for an entree at the last thing you want is some lower caste reject popping your bubble of serenity.
After watching that video it is hard not to notice how so many of the men are disproportionately poor and darker skinned than the average SWPL hipster. When you’re at the bottom of the social rung, any chance to grab the attention from a woman who is normally so far out of reach is a chance to be taken. Rememeber, you only miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take. The truth is if you’re a woman and walking around anywhere in public, you are a precious snowflake and your ability to walk from point A to point B should go without having to interact with anyone lower than you. It is almost like the evil patriarchy invented the concept of the chaperone for similar reasons! Ugh, the outside world is just SO annoying.
Forgive me for sounding uncaring but these same women who are street harassed are also able to use their same charms to get jobs, score other women’s boyfriends, and generally have an easy time climbing social ladders. If life were a video game, being an ugly woman puts the difficulty setting on “very hard”. If you’re a beautiful woman, life is much, much easier as many more doors are open for you and people will line up to help you walk through them. If you are ugly and fat, generally nobody will care if you live or die. It is much like being a homeless male over 40 years old, you have absolutely zero value to society and effort must be made to create value in yourself as your exterior provides you none.
Life is image, image, image
In today’s world, your image is everything. How you dress, how you talk, how you express yourself. From online dating to job hunting, social situations and even your family life, people know more and more about you from your clothing, posture, online presence, musical tastes, who your friends are on social media, the way you use your language and many other traits we pickup on subconsciously. Street harassment isn’t something that is an epidemic for everyone, but instead it is the result of an online culture that increases the invisible social divide between classes. Since the rise of the internet, online dating has exploded.
One of the most common explanations for this can be found in the above article which I have quoted below.
“It can be hard to meet people when you’re busy,” she explains. “So rather than putting
all your efforts into having a night out and hoping you might meet someone, there’s a lot more certainty to it. You look through different profiles and you can send out as many requests as you like. So for me, it’s a much easier way to be actively dating.”
Online dating kills serendipity, the idea that we can have unexpected, pleasant experiences. How can we do that if approaching women in public is seen as threatening and harassment?
“It’s nice to realise there’s a big pool out there,” Katie says. “I live in London and this is definitely a positive as it’s so hard to make connections with new people here. When everyone ignores each other it’s easy to feel invisible, so it provides quite a boost.”
Truth is, the online dating world has been created to allow for greater hypergamy for women and an extension before hitting The Wall. Online dating results in a 3 times higher rate of divorce as well, and we all know how well divorce generally works out for men. The shocking rise in middle aged men’s suicide rates should be more alarming than it is. Remember, suicide has passed car accidents per year in death toll.
Julie A. Phillips, a social demographer with Rutgers University’s Department of Sociology, goes a step further. In a study published in May in the journal Social Science & Medicine, she points to the rise in postwar social isolation that coincided with increases in divorce rates and decreases in marriage. Loneliness appears to take its toll as people grow older, but Phillips said he believes the stage could be set during younger years. “I speculate that the broad social and economic changes introduced in the 1960s may have weakened traditional forms of social integration and regulation for the postwar cohorts, leading to a pattern of rising suicide rates,” Phillips wrote.
Our traditional forms of social integration have been hijacked by the hyper connectivity of the online world, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what will become of Gen X’ers; Generation Suicide.
In the end, it is all about status and social boundaries
If you’re a low status male, don’t harass women. Keep quiet in public, work your 9-5 job and date women who are equally impoverished and on your social level.
Men like Justin Bieber can drive around all day “street harassing” women all he wants. His status makes it so yelling “Hey baby!” or in the following case, “You look like Princess Jasmine” is a compliment, not harassment.
“Thank you so much” she replies.
Street harassment is only street harassment when the male is of lower social status than the female.
