When this fall’s rampant #MeToo movement rippled overseas, it found a far superior French hashtag—#BalanceTonPorc, meaning “squeal on your pig”—and an already pending piece of legislation.
A new law, first proposed over the summer by President Emmanuel Macron’s secretary of gender equality, would make catcalling a crime. At 34, Marlene Schiappa is the youngest member of Macron’s cabinet, and her actual (English) title “State Secretary to the Prime Minister for Equality Between Women and Men” pretty much says it all. “The idea is to establish a fine, as well as a process and an amount so these fines can be imposed on the street harassers,” Schiappa told Politico Europe earlier this week. In an interview with NPR back in August she described inspiration from her own girlhood, recalling how she and her friends were besieged by the opposite sex: “We took alternative routes, out of our way, to avoid the bands of boys.”
But the law, which would require a police officer to have witnessed the offense, won wider notice just as the peak season for street harassment was winding down. In mid-October, as the Times’ Harvey Weinstein exposé set off an apparently ceaseless cascade of bad news about prominent men, Schiappa’s campaign to crack down on abuse and street harassment gained a new currency.
Similar proposals to tighten laws against street harassment have a habit of cropping up in American cities—where those pesky Constitutional liberties of ours have a habit of swatting them down. In France as well practical hurdles to the law remain, including deciding on a definition of the crime.
But, politically anyway, the social and ideological barriers to enforcing a new fine on catcalling will be harder to overcome. The worst of Paris’s street harassment, reportedly, takes place in neighborhoods heavily populated by North African and Middle Eastern migrants. The new fine, if enacted, would disproportionately punish these growing minority populations—migrants’ rights groups cite inevitable disparate impact in their protests that the crackdown stems from xenophobic prejudice.
The proposed measure would be “excessive” according to Gary Baker, president of gender justice NGO Promundo and co-author of a recent study on street harassment among Middle Eastern and North African communities. “Educational campaigns, encouraging bystanders, particularly men from the same communities as those doing the cat-calling, to speak out against other men who use it, and reaching young men in school,” Baker explained in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “are all likely to be more effective than a law.”
Not too long ago, the American left contorted itself in response to the same question now facing France. Could, or should, our states and municipalities devise a punishment for men who whistle after women in the street, call unwelcome pet names after them, or follow them the length of a block making lewd comments about their appearance? A 2014 campaign to crack down on catcalls followed a viral video from the advocacy group HollaBack—in which an attractive young woman walked through the city, ceaselessly whistled after and, at one point, tailed for blocks. That same year a survey reported 65 percent of women reported having experienced some similar form of street harassment.
Calls for stricter ordinances to punish these behaviors, or at least the enforcement of existing ones, crowed from all corners. Liberal feminists and law-and-order types came together—and then so did civil libertarians and class-conscious activists, to call out their jurisprudential nincompoopery. Northwestern sociology professor Laura Beth Nielsen, author of License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy and Offensive Public Speech, penned a legal justification at the time that managed to align street harassment with cross-burning. “Although,” she explained to me in an interview Wednesday, “the courts don’t always see the parallel.”
I asked Nielsen whether we’ll see the criminalization of catcalling reconsidered in the U.S. any time soon, given the sticky racial politics of the subject. In response, she cited, as anecdotal evidence, a conversation she’d had in which Emmett Till’s lying accuser featured prominently. “When you think about creating a law in any area that’s new, you have to consider who’s going to be on the receiving end of the legal attention,” Nielsen said. In interviews she conducted for her book, “Quite a number of people of color said, ‘I don’t favor restrictions on racist and sexist hate speech because I know who would be getting arrested if this were illegal.’”
While we may re-litigate in the virtual public square, chances are, we won’t legislate any time soon—if only because the public mood hasn’t reached its boiling point yet. Plus, we’ve got a First Amendment keeping our speech free. And by recent accounts, the hostile environment on our American streets pales in comparison to what Parisian women increasingly have to put up with.
Another argument against a law like this, one that any modern woman fatigued by the news of the day can probably appreciate, is what Nielsen calls the “autonomy paradox.” A fine for catcalling, plucked out of context, does look a little like a relic from the Temperance era. “In the olden days,” as Nielsen puts it, “you couldn’t swear or spit in front of a lady. Those laws either went away, or aren’t ever enforced.”
A new, paternalistic law to shield us from indecency doesn’t exactly empower womankind—a problem women tend to realize for themselves, Nielsen recalled from her field research. The best answer to a social problem like street harassment lies not in law, but in the eye-opening public campaigns that grab our attention every few years or so and predictably inspire calls for a new legal penalty.
