Jake Stika is the executive director of Next Gen Men, a Canadian non-profit that educates boys and men on gender and equality.
There’s not going to be a bylaw officer at the bar. There likely won’t be a cop coincidentally walking by.
But there is always an audience.
In a motion that went before Calgary City Council last week, Councillor Druh Farrell proposed a plan that would have the municipality’s staff take a gender-based lens to the street-harassment laws currently on the books, and explore whether the city can create an anti-harassment bylaw.
Fines for catcallers. Tickets for creeps. In our law-and-order-minded world, we feel powerless without having a big, intimidating stick in the legal toolbox.
My question is: Where’s the carrot?
When the words have been said, the damage has been done. When the sense of safety is lost, it doesn’t easily come back. In the moment when the convenient cop writes the ticket for the deserving creep, it’s already too late to solve the real problem.
That problem is a highly gendered one, and Ms. Farrell’s motion wisely proposes a gender-based approach.
We know that street harassment, in any of its many forms – the passing catcallers, the homophobe on a soapbox, the dangerously persistent dude – is a form of gender-based violence with serious impacts. We know it overwhelmingly affects women and people in the LGBTQ+ community.
And we know the perpetrators are overwhelmingly people who identify as men.
As a man myself, I know that feels disheartening. As the head of Next Gen Men, I work to remind men like myself that we’re not only the problem: We are also the solution.
Part of my education on street harassment, and just how prevalent and repugnant it is, came in 2017. My organization partnered with artist Terra Lopez to help her bring This is What it Feels Like, her mobile public art installation, to the Calgary Stampede.
I surveyed 117 women about whether they had experienced verbal harassment, and what words they heard. I heard that 97 per cent of them knew first-hand what it felt like, but that wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was that 3 per cent didn’t.
The understanding that began to take shape for me, in hearing the accounts of all these women, is that street harassment is almost never about the person being harassed. It’s about the harasser.
It’s about their desire to feel powerful. It’s about them saying, “Look at the impact I can have on this person.” It’s a performance, and it requires an audience. That could be a mental audience, a performance for ourselves, but often enough it’s a real one, a group of flesh-and-blood buddies watching it happen. On the surface, that sounds worse, but to me, that’s where I see hope.
When it comes to ending street harassment, that hypothetical friend is both our carrot and our stick. As human beings, social recognition is a currency we need like we need food and water. The harasser’s performance is a way he learned to seek that. Having the power to withhold it, the harasser’s audience holds the solution in their hands.
They can write the “Not Cool” ticket, which is, in my view, the most potent anti-harassment enforcement tool there is. They are the audience for this play, and the best way they can change the script is from inside the theatre, inside the circle of trust, where their claps and kudos, or boos and jeers, will make it clear whether they’re enjoying the show.
Is a motion like the one being considered by Calgary city councillors a meaningful one? Yes: for the awareness it brings to those who think it doesn’t happen in their backyard, for the validation it gives to victims, and for the tools it puts in the legal toolbox.
But the best remedy is always prevention. The worst time to stop a fight is once fists have been raised. The most effective way to fight sexual harassment isn’t after words are said; it’s before the ideas are instilled in the first place.
It starts with culture, and it starts years earlier than any incident, with how that person learned to express their masculinity.
“Toxic masculinity” is a term that’s tossed around a lot, and has come to represent all the emotional baggage and the brutish, constraining way we’ve defined manhood in the past. In my organization, we avoid the term for a reason: our work aims to teach men and boys that they aren’t broken, that they aren’t inherently bad because of their gender identity.
Toxic masculinity is a performance, not an unshakeable fact or a terminal condition. It’s learned, and it can be unlearned.
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