Ta-Nehisi Coates has a post up about eviction, masculinity, power, class, and violence. Near the end he throws in a line about objectification, after observing that the men who cat-call women on the streets tend to be those without a certain kind of power:
Real men objectify women with dignity and decorum.
From the comments (which are often worth reading on his column):
Samquilla: “Real men” objectify women by polite head-patting such as deciding not to hire them for certain positions, not paying attention to their thoughts and ideas, etc., not by yelling cat calls in the streets. That is the province of men who don’t have the power to objectify in a less visible and more socially sanctioned way.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The point I am driving at is that profane exhibitions of power–rioting for instance–are not exhibitions of lower morality. The morality isn’t in the exhibition, it’s in the actual belief. Men who cat-call are not men with less morality then men who don’t, they are–more often–men with the same morality, but with less power. […] My point is we often mistake the display of power for a display of morality.
Feminist Philosophers 
The claim that cat-calling is done by men without power is certainly supported by public perception of, and representation of, cat-calling. If you watch popular television cat-calling (on, for example, Sex and the City), it’s always the working-class man cat-calling the upper middle class woman. There was also a popular video about cat-calling making the rounds on the Internet (including here) that depicted cat-calling in this (actually, pretty classist) way.
As for whether these media representations are accurate? I couldn’t say.
The correct spelling is Ta-Nehisi Coates. You may wish to correct both instances in the post.
Funny. I remember being followed and sexually harassed by University of Texas fraternity predators when I was 17 years old. Five years later, after I got out of the military and moved back to Texas I wasn’t the shrinking violet that they targeted before; but the fraternities were still big on sexual harassment (mostly following women at night when the frats were in a drunken stupor and asking the woman if she wanted to have sex with all of them, or telling her how ugly she was), and committing violent acts like launching blocks of ice from a catapult on their roof at people walking by to shooting out the kitchen windows in the student housing co-op across the street from them.
But they only targeted people who were clearly not wealthy.
I find his statement to his wife “I can’t say what I’d do” and among the comments (“change in feelings came out of a change in circumstance”) to be incredibly honest and comforting, at least to me. One of my favorite writers…
I have never “cat-called” but I’d like to think my equally (or more) terrible actions are not intrinsic to who I really am. I would like to think this about others, too, even if in thoughtless moments I called them bad people, and refused to see their circumstances (even on this board.) But I’m not sure if I like that perspective because it’s true, or just because I want to evade responsibility. I am not even sure my comment here is for anyone’s benefit but my own.
But what he says about circumstances does seem to me a really good perspective. Thanks for the article, Stacey (Dr.?) Goguen.
It’s good for men to consider, but consider a woman who is subject to such harassment day in and day out, every day. Is it necessary for the woman to consider each man an individual when every man harassing women on the street has no interest or respect for who she is as an individual?
I’ve made it a point not to let myself unleash the anger of a lifetime of harassment and leering that started when I was twelve onto a single man; but the behavior deserves nothing but contempt. If a man cannot see that and stop himself, then why should his targets care how feels?
@Sherri. Corrected the typos. Thank you for pointing those out. That was a double failure on my part since I’ve written it enough times that I should know it by heart and furthermore I was literally transcribing it from his website in order to avoid the exact mistake I made. Twice. Yay for possible stereotype threat underperformance in action.
“Is it necessary for the woman to consider each man an individual when every man harassing women on the street has no interest or respect for who she is as an individual? ”
It’s understandable if she doesn’t — we all develop our biases in response to our experiences. But in some sense, I would say, it is still necessary, yes. It is necessary for us at least to try to recognize our biases and if not overcome them then mitigate their effects.
I think there is an interesting point made by the author here, in that it seems he is suggesting that the (enacted) narratives of masculinity offered to children growing up in situations where they are denied power or opportunity perpetuate certain behaviours among men just as much as they disempower women. To me, this just adds fuel to the idea that men need feminism as much as women do!
Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to be operating with a very narrow view of what street harassment is.
I am just as frequently cat-called by men who lack a certain kind of power on The Bowery as I am followed by men in suits in the Financial District.
“Street harassment is a kind of implied violence, a tool most embraced by those who lack the power to set laws, men who are in doubt of themselves. Real men objectify women with dignity and decorum.”
“The point I am driving at is that profane exhibitions of power–rioting for instance–are not exhibitions of lower morality. The morality isn’t in the exhibition, it’s in the actual belief. Men who cat-call are not men with less morality then men who don’t, they are–more often–men with the same morality, but with less power. […] My point is we often mistake the display of power for a display of morality.”
I take this to mean that Coates is saying that street-harassment is a function of a lack of socio-economic privilege. While the point that men across socio-economic strata are on a similar moral level and that we should not forget that this still seems to me to be generous to those that engage in this kind of harassment but, curiously, not at all generous to the women who are on the receiving end of this kind of harassment.
Even if I am not confusing power with morality (which I am not) I am also not confusing the fact that in street-harassment these men seek to define their masculinity and exercise what little power they have on or about the bodies of women. I agree with Coates that the morality is in the belief and I am confused about Coates’ seeming willingness to ignore this belief to articulate what appears to be sympathy for street-harrasers in terms of their relation to power.
I don’t think Coates is arguing that street-harassment is solely a function of socio-economic privilege. I think he’s honing in on street-harassment when it is a kind of back-against-the-wall-lashing-out due to lack of privilege. Whether or not that applies to only a chunk of instances or most of them is an empirical consideration, so you and others might be right that it’s not *most* or a majority of all street harassment.
Anger in response to street harassment is always a valid and warranted reaction no matter what the context. Still, it can be worth parsing out (maybe for some people more than others) whether an individual instance (or patterns) of oppressive behavior is in part an expression of desperation as opposed to something coming from a place of comfortable and stable power.
To switch examples, I have found that in myself that the temptation to use oppressive language in the form of sexist or homophobic insults greatly increases when I am feeling like my own worth is being undermined–usually via misogyny but sometimes just from general doubts as to my basic competence as a person.
Obviously, lashing out and doing something hurtful because you’re scared isn’t laudable. And people shouldn’t necessarily get a free pass for doing it. But it’s an importantly different behavior than someone throwing out those same oppressive insults from a place of comfort. And it’s worth noting that sometimes its more socially acceptable for many of us to respond hostily to the acts of desperation and fear than to the acts of confident entitlement, which seems backwards.
The point though, is that we shouldn’t slip into thinking (and I know I certainly do) that the people who say explicitly misogynistic things are necessarily more sexist (or have a greater capacity for sexism) than the people who don’t–i.e. who haven’t. We shouldn’t think that only the people who do lash out violently are those capable of or willing to lash out violently. There are probably some people who would never lash out in these ways against others, no matter how threatened they feel. But many of us are not those people; we’re just lucky or privileged enough to have never been backed into that kind of corner.
All of this is compatible with the hollaback campaign being an awesome, spot-on campaign, which it is. (http://www.ihollaback.org/)
A real man knows that he *is* woman. That is, S/he is one, regardless of appearance, age, race, preference, whatever.