
Acknowledging public sex changed how walkers interacted with Paris - Thevet
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/between-streets
======
Mathnerd314
I wonder how likely one was to get mugged walking the streets at night as
opposed to being propositioned. It's not clear that night-time streets are a
"public space" at all. I'd buy his notion of "public sex" if it happened
during the day and prostitutes were mixed in with the vegetable stands, but
the examples seem very weak.

~~~
lazyasciiart
It's a very short piece - perhaps he includes more in his book > Public
City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-
Century Paris.

~~~
Mathnerd314
I looked through the Amazon preview and couldn't find anything interesting.
The whole book seems to be discussion of historical sources within the decency
vs pleasure kind of framing. If he does discuss the fact that prostitution
happened mostly in the evening when there weren't many people around I expect
it would be a few paragraphs at most, and quickly forgotten in the course of
the book, since his focus is mostly on male prostitutes / pederasts.

------
lgeorget
A very tangential point. I would not translate "violenté" by "violated". It
simply means being the target of violence, getting harmed. The author states
that it doesn't imply a sexual assault yet reads a bit too much into the
original text.

Edit : actually, the French language has evolved since then and back when the
letter was written, "violenté" could indeed mean (sexually) violated, like our
modern "violé". My bad.

------
xrd
If you just admire the historical imagery for what it is, it's an amazing
article.

Really, how can you resist this: "the boulevards are currently a veritable
court of miracles planted in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah, and soon all
promenades on them will be forbidden not only to honest women who have not
been able to show themselves for a long time, but also for men who should not
have to be at odds with rascals."

------
colanderman
> “an honest man can no longer walk […] without being accosted by women who
> engage in revolting touches

Sounds like sexual assault. The author's take:

> the unwilling participation in a public sexual culture threatened the urban
> experience as imagined by privileged male pedestrians.

…? Freedom from sexual assault is an "urban experience as imagined by
privileged male pedestrians"?

Maybe I'm missing something but the author's several tangents about patriarchy
come across as totally non-sequitur in this article. Sure, male privilege is a
thing, but what does it have to do with not wanting to be insulted/assaulted
while out walking for the evening? What is the author's point?

I'm sure there's a point to be made about "women have had to endure such
indignities, look at how men react when they are forced to too" but if that's
what the author is trying to say, they're sure doing it in a ham-handed
manner.

EDIT: After re-reading a few times I _think_ the point the author is trying to
make is that _even_ privileged males, who typically could control the public
space, were forced to reckon with the change in culture?

~~~
ip26
_Sounds like sexual assault_

Given the author's lack of concern, I think they are very opaquely alluding
that the man must have secretly enjoyed it, therefore not sexual assault.

 _That these encounters bothered him enough to write, that they stayed with
him after he moved on, highlights the ways sexual solicitation created new
feelings and emotions that were anything but momentary._

~~~
ComputerGuru
It’s not rape if they were aroused by it, right?

(Once upon a time I wouldn’t have needed to put a /s here.)

~~~
mirimir
That's arguably one of the worst things about rape. Your body can betray you.

------
Causality1
>he was accosted by two young men with cheeks painted with makeup, who claimed
to know him and who asked him to buy them some drinks. Langangne refused,
which led the two men to launch a series of insults at him.

>As an employee within the Ministry of Finance, Langangne seemed to expect
that the streets were in some ways “his.”

Ross' reaction is quite bizarre. If a woman wrote a letter complaining about
being catcalled and verbally abused in public, would you accuse her of
"expecting that the streets are in some way hers"?

~~~
colanderman
Ya I don't understand the author's thesis either. Is he trying to claim that
the aggressive/invasive "public sex" culture depicted is just a different
urban culture that is perfectly acceptable and valid but for some privileged
males' self-centered ideas? Like, "suck it up dude, you're in gropingville
now, get woke and deal with it"?

Maybe the author is going for some sort of meta thing. Like, "let's apply
feminist theory _reductio ad absurdum_ to show that groping is OK!" If he is,
I'm not smart enough to understand it.

~~~
angry_octet
You got it. The flâneur is knowingly intruding into the space of the street
workers, but bringing his bourgeoise morality with him.

He also says (without evidence) that the complainant is likely a customer of
the male prostitutes rather than an observer, who happens to have had a bad
encounter. I really don't know where he gets this from.

~~~
zaroth
His evidence is quoted directly from the letter where the letter writer says
the men who accosted him might have confused him with someone they knew.

It’s as good as analysis of a single stand-alone 1850s letter gets. That is to
say, it’s a narrative based on a massive string of assumptions and contextual
clues.

~~~
angry_octet
Well that isn't evidence, that can barely be called conjecture. If it had been
buttressed with references to other contemporary documents (arrest records,
diary entries etc) it would have some weight.

~~~
zaroth
Hence my second paragraph?

------
angry_octet
Whatever the merits of the author's scholarship, which I am fortunately
unqualified to assess, I "feel" that the "English" "language" has been
"violated" by the excessive "quotation marks". I can almost hear the author
talk with air quotes.

~~~
inimino
There's nothing fortunate about being unqualified. The quotes are not air
quotes, they are actual quotes (in translation) from the letters he is
discussing.

Edit: there are some exceptions to this around paragraph 7. Anyway, discussing
the finer points of the writing style doesn't seem worthwhile.

~~~
angry_octet
I suspect being qualified would in this case involve doing an MA in an
esoteric field like gender studies in post revolutionary France, having a
large education debt and poor writing skills, but at least being in-group.

The author isn't quoting to reference that the words are verbatim (which they
are often not eg [1]), but because he wants to identify as someone who
disagrees with the subject's world view, to diminish and mock them.

I comment on the writing style because it is jarringly poor and detracts from
the argument. I thinks we are allowed to make such observations, but you are
free to refrain from spending your time on counter arguments.

Ugh rate limiting is killing me. Is it like 3 posts per hour or something?

[1] >> The “violation” felt by thee two men at the attention of female
prostitutes disrupted their ability to move about the city as they so chose,
but it did not necessarily put into question their status as potential
clients. Insofar as these “assaults” may have elicited a sexual response, they
may have heightened their awareness of their status as sexual beings even as
it challenged their gender privilege.

~~~
dahart
> I suspect being qualified would in this case involve doing an MA in an
> esoteric field like gender studies in post revolutionary France, having a
> large education debt and poor writing skills, but at least being in-group.

The author of the article has a PhD in history and is a professor of history
at Loyola, which took less time to Google than commenting. Your comment feels
like it crosses a line, your speculation doesn’t make your argument more
right. Justifying your opinion with imagined reasons makes it less likely to
be valid, and reflects poorly on you.

> I think we are allowed to make such observations, but you are free to
> refrain from spending your time on counter arguments.

You are equally free to refrain from posting negative, subjective, and
somewhat off-topic opinion. You can also expect such opinions to find valid
disagreement. Your suggestion that you are making “observations” suggests you
believe your opinion to be true, and I don’t doubt you think you’re right, but
from over here it looks to me like either the subject or the author’s style is
bothering you, not that the writing has any quality problems.

While you are “allowed” to make any observations you like, others are allowed
to disagree. The guidelines here at HN do ask that you stay on-topic, and more
importantly ask commenters to not speculate or to make ad-hominem arguments
against other people. So, your comment is not exactly following the
suggestions of what should be allowed.

Here are the specific guidelines that I believe the first sentence of your
above comment crosses:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive,
not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says,
not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
m0nsoon
“ many Parisians began to see sex everywhere they looked. Encounters premised
on these forms of sexual knowledge created a new sexual public.”

Oh my, another reverse sexist propaganda piece written by a sophomore at
Wellesley.

~~~
dang
" _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
Overtonwindow
This is a title that raises an idea: What’s the possibility that Hacker News
might ignore limited punctuation to improve titles?

~~~
dang
Title and punctuation department here. I don't quite apprehend your concern;
can you elaborate?

~~~
tom_mellior
Semi-related question: Do you still take the "original title" rule seriously,
and if yes, what's a good way to refer articles that don't follow it? For
example this popular post from yesterday doesn't have the original title or
anything close to (or better than) it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21082757)

~~~
dang
For sure we take it seriously. The best way is to email hn@ycombinator.com if
you see a problem.

In the case of that post, the submitter had emailed about it and we suggested
that title as more informative than the original. Happy to hear feedback if we
got that wrong!

~~~
tom_mellior
"ImageNet for Code" is not a good title, I think, because I was mostly
thinking of ImageNet of a dataset, not as an ongoing contest. Removing the
"challenge" from the original title was not useful IMHO.

~~~
dang
Good point. I've put the challenge back in the title. It's a bit of a monster
now, but oh well.

