Korean poster which has been making it’s way around
Translation:
Protesting sexual harassment and violence against women
ETIQUETTE FOR MEN AT NIGHT
- Remember that your presence can be threatening to women walking alone at night
- If a woman is walking in front of you alone at night, slow down. You walking quickly or speeding up can be and in most cases is threatening
- If you’ve been drinking and are drunk, go straight home.
- Do not pick a fight or aggravate women walking at night
- Do not take off your clothes or publicly urinate
- Be careful to make sure you do not touch or hit someone, even on accident.
- If, late at night, you come to a situation in which you and a woman have to ride an elevator together, let her go up first and wait for the elevator to come back down.
- If there’s a woman in a public restroom (There are Korean public restrooms with no gender or sex markings that are open to all people), wait for her to finish and come out first before using the restroom.
- Report broken streetlights to the police
- Tell other men about these rules and that they have a responsibility to not threaten women walking at night
reprinting, pasting around earth
in like 5th grade they need to start teaching this shit in the US, along with a class on “Girls Don’t Call each Other Sluts and Whores. It Just Makes it Okay For Guys to Call You Sluts and Whores.” But no, really.
Why is a guy taking an elevator ride with you threatening? I have an issue with the “every time you are alone with a man, even for the five to thirty seconds you’re on the elevator, he is going to try to rape you” mentality. I think it breeds fear, rather than caution.
And, really, the main conversation had on elevators is, “What floor?” “Seven, thanks.”
And then you don’t even make eye-contact.
I like some of the other guidelines, but taking it to that extent, at least to me, just implies that men have absolutely no control over their need to have sex with women, even when they’re unwilling, even for the thirty seconds that they’re on the elevator.
I very much appreciate the fact that this flier gives the responsibility of preventing rape to people other than the potential victims, but that one point bothered me. Quite a bit, apparently.
Right, so, I thought it might be worth breaking this down and explaining why I, personally, think the elevator rule is a pretty great one! All the respect in the world for your viewpoint, and YMMV, obviously.
- I’ve spent time in elevators with men late at night, both before and after I was raped. Beforehand, the experience would often make me jittery, uncomfortable, and sometimes panicky, especially if the man I was sharing the car with was significantly larger than me, silent, visibly checking me out, or verbal in an agressive/sexual way. The few times I’ve found myself in that situation since my rape, on the other hand, have been more or less torture. Five to thirty seconds feels a lot longer when you’re running through, in your head, every possible way the person in the car with you could take advantage of your being trapped with them in a tiny room with no exits, no ways for other people to see in, and no places to hide. Five to thirty seconds kind of feels like an eternity when you’re spending every one of them wondering when the person in the car with you is going to hit the alarm button, stop the car, and harm you.
- I agree with you that the idea that men are uncontrollable rape-machines is ridiculous, not because it’s insulting to men but because it takes responsibility for rape away from men who commit it (“Oh,” says Rape Culture knowingly, “well, you can’t blame him for that. Boys will be boys!”). However, the idea that stuff like this is breeding fear rather than caution is, er, kind of unfair and more than kind of wrong. This isn’t….fear that’s being bred? This is fear that exists already, because a whole shit ton of people are getting raped and assaulted on the extremely regular. Like. Seriously. Check this shit out. Google some stuff. Poke around for awhile, and keep in mind that the stuff you’ll find on that site I linked is just stuff from the States. There is a lot of rape and assault. Happening. A lot. All over the world. Right now! For real.
- I know a lot of stand-up, class-act, grade-A, quality dudes who genuinely don’t want to make women feel uncomfortable at night. Like, a whole fucking bunch of dudes like that, who both don’t want to rape anybody and don’t want to make anybody feel like they are in danger of being raped. And while the late-night elevator ride may not ping as a danger zone for you? It does for a lot of people. It does for enough people that it shows up on this widely-circulated, heavily-supported list. And arguing that we shouldn’t circulate information about that fear, to men who want to know how to avoid making women feel uncomfortable at night but don’t know how because we don’t teach it, and for the many many many many women (and others, because not only women get raped, and not only men rape) who already do feel that sharp bite of fear every time this stuff comes up, on the theory that it might increase the fear? Is kind of what’s gotten us into this mess to begin with. The whole, “Let’s not talk about rape because rape is horrible and scary!” thing has produced, er, rape culture. Where rape is something we dance around but don’t talk about honestly, where rape is something we encourage with our silence (by making it seem like something no one will care about), where blame is so often wrongly placed on the victim, not the perpetrator.
So! My vote is always going to be for Plan More Signs/More Information/More Knowledge, rather than Plan Less Fear. Plan Less Fear doesn’t really work, you know? But informing the populace has a long track record of success, on other issues if not (yet) this one. Just my two cents. <3
(Source: dkyubey)
