Being Female in Public and #DudesGreetingDudes in 2014

#DudesGreetingDudes You. Me. Playstation2. What? Stuck up prick. #NotJustHello

— Elleanor Chin (@elleanorchin) November 4, 2014

My favorite feminist hashtag of 2014 was #DudesGreetingDudes. I spent a lot more time on Twitter in 2014 and developed an appreciation for the beauty of hashtags. They can be a functional tool for indexing and channeling online activism, but also a distilled form of satire and storytelling. #DudesGreetingDudes was a beautiful example of the latter. #TakeDownJulienBlanc was more of the former. #YesAllWomen was some of both.

Comedian and culture commentator Elon James White launched #DudesGreetingDudes in the wake of the critical reaction to Hollaback’s viral street harassment video in October showing a woman being repeatedly catcalled while going about her business in New York. There are legitimate criticisms of the video, but “That’s not harassment, that’s just men politely saying hello” isn’t one of them. White posted a burst of tweets questioning why, if the urge to greet people is so overwhelming, men can’t just greet each other. Why couldn’t they just direct their concern and gregariousness towards one another instead of women? White did an adept job making two points. First, in no way do men feel the need to impose intimate friendliness on each other in public. Second, men are essentially arguing that women’s desire to regulate their public interactions should be subservient to men’s desire to be social.

These women don’t get it. Y’all just want to say hi. What’s wrong with hi?!?! So let’s just leave them out completely. #DudesGreetingDudes

— Elon James White (@elonjames) November 2, 2014

“Say bruh…where you get that hoodie at? You look real warm and toasty in it. Can I feel it?” #dudesgreetingdudes — Luther Camdross (@BlackTonyBlair) November 5, 2014

Both the video itself and #DudesGreetingDudes are imperfect ways of attacking a complex problem. Showing only men of color catcalling a white woman means you have to breakdown the way race intersects with gender privilege. There are other methodology issues with the video, but does it matter what race the men are or how the footage was edited if you agree that the encounters aren’t staged and don’t look like consensual socializing?

#DudesGreetingDudes also raised the problem of homophobia. Some people using the hashtag apparently couldn’t think of how to do it without being sexual. e.g. “If you didn’t want me to look at your dickprint, why did you leave the house in those sweats?” Explicitly sexual satirical tweets make the point that it’s almost impossible to claim that street harassment isn’t sexual, but complicate the conversation with why men react so negatively and fearfully to the possibility of sexual attention from other men. #DudesGreetingDudes tweets can be completely non-sexual and get the point across that men are highly unlikely to insist that other men “smile” in public and certainly don’t become angry and degrading if ignored by other men.

The Hollaback harassment video also triggered a #NotAllMen response, similar to the hashtag trends after the May 2014 mass shooting in California. Men defending their need to be perceived as “nice,” normal and non-threatening when greeting women in the street is a common response to discussion of street harassment. In other words, despite the fact that yes, all (or a substantial majority of) women encounter some form of misogynistic antagonism, sexual harassment or violence in daily life, we should treat all men as potentially nice rather than potentially not nice. The #YesAllWomen hashtag pushed back against that expectation, showing not just the degree to which women experience violence and have to exercise caution in daily life, but also underscoring how expecting women to essentially “assume non-violence” goes contrary to other socially normal ways of managing risk.

This is the problem of Schroedinger’s Rapist. Women cannot tell a strange man’s intent until the intent manifests, at which point it may be too late. Therefore, women have to develop a way of being in the world that matches their lived experience. To insist that women instead behave in a way that matches the hypothetical “nice guy’s” intent means that you’re not actually a “nice guy.”

Men stalk and kill women for refusing men’s advances. Even those of total strangers, like Mary Spears in Detroit in October 2014. Women get approached and assaulted in public by strange men who view violent and degrading behavior as part of the normal continuum of obtaining sexual access to women. That is the whole business model of people like Julien Blanc; even as #DudesGreetingDudes was trending on Twitter, #TakeDownJulienBlanc cropped up. Julien Blanc travels the world charging (heterosexual) men big bucks for misogynistic “dating seminars,” claiming that they will be able to get laid if they approach women in aggressive and degrading ways. He has published videos of himself choking and assaulting women, particularly Asian women. As a result of public protest, partly from the #TakeDownJulienBlanc hashtag, Australia and the UK both denied him visas.

Street harassment is an expression of male entitlement in public space. Trying to turn the conversation to the needs or intent of the harassers amplifies male privilege, making it about them, and derailing the conversation about the underlying power dynamic. #DudesGreetingDudes cut to the chase: #YesAllWomen deal with the problem of street harassment, because men imposing social interaction on women are not going about it like #DudesGreetingDudes. And while #NotAllMen are Julien Blanc, one certainly is. Even worse, other men are willing to pay him money to try to be like him.

Header image credit: Paul Weaver/Flickr