
An App to Help Women Avoid Street Harassment - rosser
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/09/an-app-to-help-women-avoid-street-harassment/279642/
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inothernews
The original hollaback website encouraged anonymous reporting and allowed
anonymous photographs to be displayed of men that were alleged to be engaged
in street harassment.

But there was no verification any of the alleged activity occurred.

And there was no way for a wrongly targeted person to have their photograph
removed.

That doesn't seem like a tool meant for the US, though it seemed as though it
would fit in quite nicely in East Germany.

Regardless, hollaback always received lots of good press and this article
shows it still does.

But how did that original hollaback app with its anonymous reporting, no
verification, and no appeal differ dramatically from reddit's /r/creepshots,
or from the deservedly lambasted titstare app?

Topologically, they seem like identical apps.

Has the new launch addressed these problems?

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lolwutf
Agh. Time to be an insensitive East Coaster for a minute...

At what point do we start expecting members of society to toughen up or start
considering their sensitivity/anxieties symptoms of psychological issues
requiring clinical treatment?

An iPhone app for catcalling?!?!?!

Let me lead this debate right off with: yes, I understand there are instances
of street harassment that occur which are tragic, illegal, senseless, violent
and I firmly agree all of those should be stopped.

But for the sub-tragedy-level issues of 'street harassment': really?!

Here's a solution: Empower yourself!

If you're worried about physical harassment, carry a taser/pepper
spray/knife/gun. Start working out. Take a self-defense class.

If you're worried about psychological harassment, take a good hard look at
yourself and your life and work on your self-esteem, see a therapist, work out
(two birds, one stone, with that). Figure out how to look in the mirror and be
confident in what you see, no matter what others say (it may be hard, I know,
but no one can do this for you but you).

Do all of those things, and you'll surely walk around with far less fear of
'street harassment'. In fact, I'm fairly confident the majority of people with
such anxieties who employ the above tactics will find much help for their
problems.

Encouraging people to use an iPhone app to remedy this will only perpetuate
the cycle of helplessness in society.

Put bluntly: do you think some drunk idiot on the street who's catcalling you
cares that you're writing him a bad Yelp review on your iPhone app? No.

Does an iPhone app fortify your psyche or physical security? No.

I'm totally sympathetic to unchangeable things people suffer from in life
(physical disease, psychiatric disabilities). But to the extent that is
possible, you should always seek to empower yourself. And an iPhone app does
nothing (long-term) to empower your psyche or physical security. (And
promoting it as a solution does nothing but further weaken society, as whole.)

~~~
asveikau
Speaking as another insensitive east coaster[1], I kind of disagree. As a guy,
I still remember specific times in my youth when I realized that women simply
aren't allowed access to many places, situations, or neighborhoods that I can
walk through without problems. They face harassment, if not real, physical
threats to safety in many situations which routinely seem mundane to me, and I
catch myself taking for granted all the time. Coming to terms with this is
already a bit of a head-trip as a guy, but now that I have a baby daughter it
is all the more relevant. So, if someone wants to write an app, I'm not going
to knock them.

[1] In fairness maybe I've gone soft for living out west in the last 5 years,
though I continue to have my share of cultural clashes with people who can't
take a joke or just take the whole world too seriously.

~~~
lolwutf
Hey, another one!

Right. Well, I don't want to open a can of worms but:

a.) biologically, men simply are predisposed for greater physical strength
than women. So, with that, comes the consequent precautions one would have to
take in life, as a less physically powerful being (in short: you can't walk
through scary neighborhoods with scary creatures, as easily).

That said, it's NOT banishment to a lifetime of powerlessness. Anyone can get
a taser/pepper spray/knife/gun and quickly gain the upper-hand in almost any
situation.

So there's that..

b.) I don't doubt they face harassment. Catcalling has been going on forever,
seeing as the primal urge to have attention of another whom you desire is
fairly deeply rooted. That said _if you are psychologically unable to cope
with it_ , my feelings are that you'd benefit from treating your psyche, a
bit.

Improve your self-esteem, confidence, see a therapist. The tools exist.

All of this said, I'm not envious of this aspect of the female existence. But
I refuse to believe an iPhone app is the solution.

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overgard
Maybe I'm dense, but I don't get how this helps to avoid "street harassment".
It just seems like a way of reporting "someone made me uncomfortable" to
people that can't really do anything about it. Yay.

I just don't get the point of it.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Sounds to me like a traffic map, avoid the red areas.

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geuis
I've got a controversial point of view on this topic.

Premise 1. Sexual harassment, as a term, is a relatively modern one. The
dominant position of males in most societies has been so for thousands of
years, though the extent to what we would identify as abuse _now_ varied(s)
from society to society.

Premise 2. In modern Western society, and increasingly in other societies
influenced by the West, sexual harassment is a sociological behavior that is
now considered negative for the most part.

Based on these two premises, I argue several positions. First, the behavior
identified as sexual harassment stems from some part of genetic influences on
cultural behavior. Second, we are not mere genetic automatons and our culture
has a huge influence over the expression of behavior in individuals. Third,
changes in culture, over long periods of time (centuries) will cause sexual
selection preferences that result in mild but significant modifications of
genetic predispositions to certain behaviors in the members of a human
society.

At a high level, the recognition of sexual harassment as a point of contention
in modern society is important. It is a sociological phenomenon. If the idea
has enough influence to influence the mating behaviors of enough people over a
long enough period of time, we will the changes genetically towards
individuals who are more biased towards being less aggressive towards women.

In the meantime, if this is something we want to see happen more permanently
in our species, we must keep up the fight against this crap for a long time.
Right now, we have to choose intellectually that its bad to discriminate and
harass. And if that's a good evolutionary fit for our survival, then our
future generations of offspring will be much kinder and gentler souls by
default.

~~~
jeremysmyth
Unfortunately, this is not how it works. Two reasons:

\- Firstly, our culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary timescales become
entirely irrelevant to it. The various cultural changes since suffragetism,
and the various civil rights marches, the legislation that comes after the
leading wave of equality but comes _before_ the general public social changes,
all of these things have happened since then, at a rate of more than one
significant change per generation. This, in evolutionary terms, is an
eyeblink. Gender equality is, as a _concept_ in the western world, less than a
hundred years old. Four generations is _nothing_ , even in labs that study
mutations and evolution in an accelerated way.

\- Humans have something like 90-95% infant survival now. Evolutionary
pressures are substantially less than they are in any other species, and less
than at any time in our past. Not only are cultural changes irrelevant to
genetic changes at our timescales, but they have _even less_ effect than they
would have had if we mutated (and died) more often.

So, it's a nice argument, but it has absolutely no merit.

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unono
This is good stuff. Even better would be small cameras that can be worn around
the body so the incidents can be recorded.

Yelp has already demonstrated why crowdsourcing is so important. The public
often rails against the government, but most of the bad stuff is done by
everyday people and they need to be held accountable.

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001sky
"The candidate who supported stop and frisk (and racial profiling) for a
decade launches your app... and that's a good thing?"

~~~
001sky
"Girl’s Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies"

