Imagine the following message in a public space: Caution: Area of Frequent Attempts at Reputational Destruction by Females
I have never seen a sign bearing the above message in any public space, nor do I want to. Similarly, I have never seen a sign near a heavily African American neighborhood that says, “Caution, entering an area in which your chances of being the victim of a violent crime are statistically proven to be much higher than in other places.”
And again, I do not want to.
My reasons for not wanting to ever read these things are, or should be, self-evident to any reasonably thoughtful person: it is never permissible in a society that purports to be democratic to have the state apparatus cast moral aspersions upon an entire subset of the culture on the basis of that subset’s immutable characteristics.
And yet, in many municipalities in the US and Europe there is a trend toward posting signs in public transport that, in various levels of explicitness, point toward all men as being gropers and harassers in potencia.
For example, on a recent ride on the transport system of the Catalan Government I was informed, via messages on the wall of the rail car, that public entity will have “Zero tolerance with male violence” in the public areas it administers.
As I write I can already hear the objections of some readers. “Are you saying groping and male harassment does not exist on public transportation?” “Or that you have no interest in stopping it?”
I am saying nothing of the sort.
Of course, it exists and it should not be tolerated.
The question is whether in the attempts to eradicate the problem it is morally and legally responsible to use public monies to single out 49% of the population as constituting a lurking threat to each and every member of the other 51% of the population, with all that such signaling produces in the realm of generating widespread social distrust within the population.
“But Tom, are you suggesting that sexual violence, however defined is not predominantly male-on-female in nature?”
Of course, not.
No more than I am denying—as I suggested with the deliberately provocative passages of this essay—that in today’s universities, with their ever more female-dominated administrations and HR departments, reputational destruction aimed at sidelining or destroying the professional trajectories of rivals for power and privilege within the system is an overwhelmingly female-on-male form of violence, or that one’s chances of being an object of violence are clearly statistically greater in predominantly black areas of the US than in predominantly white ones.
But as I suggested earlier no one, quite rightly, would ever think of using public monies to alert others to the dangers they might face from these two genetically determined sub-categories of human beings in these circumstances.
However, given the tomb-like silence on the matter in our public discussions, it seems most are just fine with having the government signal citizens with the genetic trait of being male as constituting a special threat to public comity.
Hellbound and Down 