In Mexico City's public transport system, sexual harassment is rampant: A 2014 study of 16 global cities found the city's transport system hosted more verbal and physical harassment than any other city's, while a 2016 national survey found that 90% of women and girls in Mexico who use public transit don't feel safe doing it.
Now, UN Women and the Mexican government are trying to fight the problem with a campaign called #NoEsDeHombres (translated as "this isn't manly") that seeks to make men feel objectified, ostensibly so that they suddenly understand what it's like to be harassed and never to do it to another woman again. One of the campaign's stunts: installing cameras in subway stations that zoom in on men's butts and display them in real time on public screens in the stations, as this video from Mic shows.
"In order to generate change, you need to create empathy," Yeliz Osman, a program coordinator with the Mexican UN Women office, told the New York Times of the reasoning behind the campaign. "The idea is that men can get a sense of what it is all like. By creating empathy, we hope that this might change their behavior."
It's a splashy concept, but its effectiveness remains to be seen. This empathy-based approach is analogous with other attempts to make men "feel" what women feel and thus believe the severity of what women go through, from a bracelet designed to help fathers-to-be "feel pregnant" to a "menstrual simulator" meant to induce period-like cramps. And sometimes well-intentioned pro-woman campaigns encourage men to empathize with women by giving them a front-row view of the struggles that women they already care about — their family members, friends, and partners — face, for example by showing them footage of their girlfriends getting catcalled.
But relying on men's empathy to effect change is another way of centering their feelings when what most women want isn't pity or even empathy, but respect. Most cis men will never truly "get a sense of what it is all like" to experience gender-based violence, including sexual harassment. (It is important to note that transgender men experience disproportionate levels of violence and harassment.) They may be humiliated or annoyed by campaigns like #NoEsDeHombres, but they likely won't fear for their physical safety or lives the way countless women and non-binary and gender-nonconforming folks do when they leave the house. (As Margaret Atwood observed, men fear being laughed at; women fear being killed.)
More to the point, though, men don't have to feel what we feel — and we don't have to be their sisters, daughters, or wives — for them to respect our personhood. If a man doesn't already see women as people, it seems unlikely that public embarrassment will reform him. And at the end of the day, I don't care if a dude has felt what it's like to get period cramps or have a stranger ogle his butt. I want him to trust me when I tell him what that's like — then let me take the subway in peace.
More on sexism and harassment:
- Women Share Stories of Sexual Harassment to Pressure Fox News Advertisers to #DropOReilly
- Student’s Online Petition Reversed High School’s Sexist Dress Code
- Meghan Markle Just Wrote a Powerful Essay About Period Shame
Why Is It So Hard to Say Vagina?: