Sexual Harrassment in culture (and on the T)

[juldea]

slammerkinbabe writes an awesome article here: http://slammerkinbabe.livejournal.com/1039939.html

Excerpt:
This is the kind of shit that isn't solved by posters on the walls of buses and trains, no matter how well-intentioned those posters may be and no matter how promising of a start they are. Because this isn't about the specific act of a guy pinching a girl's ass on the train, or even about trying to collect accurate statistics on how often girls get their asses pinched by guys on the train, although both of those things are important. This is about the culture that we live in, and it's creepy and it's toxic and it's so pervasive that half the time we don't even notice it. It's about how this bus driver apparently saw nothing wrong with encouraging a random drunk asshole to spew lewd, sexually threatening, abusive remarks at full volume to all the women around him, while continuing to drive around in a bus plastered with signs urging awareness of and zero tolerance for sexual harassment. It's about all the guys who laughed at those jokes and probably never thought about how they were affecting the women around them. And by that I don't just mean they didn't consider how the jokes themselves were affecting those women. I mean they didn't consider the effects of their own laughter. Their laughter made them complicit in what happened; it said that this guy shouting about kidnapping women and pimping them out was a funny thing. Not inappropriate. Not something you'd take a stand about. Just a joke.