In September, guest poster Thúy-Lan Võ Lite of Equal Writes wrote about India’s Ladies Specials, ‘a new set of eight female-only commuter trains to combat the prevalent harassment female passengers often face’ just commuting to and from work on a daily basis. This is in a climate of increasing numbers of rape, kidnapping and abduction, torture and molestation cases over the past few years.
But harassment on public transport is far from being a problem just in India. Transportation catering only to women is popping up around the world more and more, from Bangkok to Moscow. For instance, in the Mexican city of Puebla, there’s a new service comprised of thirty-five taxis which not only service just women but are driven exclusively by women. From the American AP:
Each pink taxi comes with a beauty kit, a GPS system and an alarm button.
[…]
“Some of the woman who have been on board tell us how male taxi drivers cross the line and try to flirt with them and make inappropriate propositions,” said taxi driver Aida Santos, who drives one of the compact, four-door taxis with a tracking device and an alarm button that notifies emergency services. “In the Pink Taxi they won’t have that feeling of insecurity, and they feel more relaxed.”
As women increasingly move about outside of the private sphere, it’s this sort of tactic that aims to quell some of the inevitable pushback from those men who aren’t too keen on the idea and those who want to exercise their ability to grope and cat-call and otherwise harass their fellow commuters. And as the American AP says, it’s not just passengers benefiting from these services. With a focus on employing women drivers, the Puebla program will ‘undeniably open up to Mexican women what has been an overwhelmingly male profession.’
So, women only transport sounds like a good idea all up, right? I don’t think it’s the ideal solution.
Firstly, we must ask, which women do these measures aim to protect? A little alarm bell goes off in my head at the mention of ‘women only’. The phrase has a long and nasty history of transmisogyny, as perpetuated by the feminist movement. Of course, in the case of the women’s transport options presently under discussion, this is speculation: I don’t know how trans inclusive any of these services are. But all too often it is not made explicit as to whether ‘women only’ services or spaces or what have you are for all people who identify as women, or only certain kinds of women. This regularly has the effect of trans women being left out in any case, because asking for clarification in itself carries the risk of hostile reactions, and the substantial risk of being disappointed, even where the service/space might otherwise be open to trans women. It’s a poisonous loop.
Secondly, women only (whatever that means) transport is a stop gap. These transportation services don’t get to the bottom of the problem: the feelings of entitlement that harassing men have. As Thúy-Lan Võ Lite says of the Ladies Specials, ‘It’s great that these trains are giving women a safe space. But it’s also important to note that the Ladies Specials are only a temporary solution; for real social change to occur, something must be done to stop the catcalling men.’ As long as women’s bodies aren’t considered our own, and until whether they may be touched by others or not is entirely at our discretion, measures focussing just on women are insufficient. In the meantime, to get back to the question of ‘which women,’ these forms of transport protect only some women and only in the particular context of commuting. As I mentioned above, these are most likely cis women; in terms of private modes of transport, only the few who can afford them; and I don’t know how accessible any of these services are for disabled women, but I don’t have high hopes. The women without the means of accessing this transport are left to make do with the unpleasant systems they have (assuming they can). And the wider social problem of men feeling entitled to women’s bodies, on transport, accessing basic services, in social situations, wherever, remains unchecked.
Thirdly, and this is a minor point compared to the kind of thing we’re talking about here, but the pinkification of the Puebla taxis is a bit nauseating. ‘Here, go pink! And have some make up while you’re at it. That’s what girls like, right?’ (See tigtog on the phenomenon of pinkification.) And let’s not even touch the inclusion of a beauty kit. I’ll let Vianeth Rojas, of the Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Puebla, say it: ‘We are in the 21st century, and they are saying women have continued worrying about beauty and nothing more […] They are absolutely not helping eradicate violence against women.’ Throwing pink at a problem doesn’t solve it. It just sets women up as a cute little subgroup.
But all that doesn’t negate the increased safety for commuting women (if, as is most likely, only some women) and all those who have come to expect inappropriate behaviour from taxi drivers and fellow commuters are aware of how vital that is. The women using these new services doubtless find them very useful indeed.
These new systems only address the problems of harassment in part, both in terms of not getting to the bottom of the problems around men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, and also in only catering to certain – the most privileged! – women. Nevertheless, they’re an interesting idea, and their increasing prevalence will, one might hope, increase awareness of the need to solve the problems commuting women face.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/10/pink-taxi-pink-bus.html
The necessity of distinguishing the women’s taxis from other taxis makes sense, but there’s no need to make them pink.
I think we’ve been around this before: men like harrassing women. The only way to get them to stop is with a radical redesign. They won’t stop on their own, so the best women can do is figure out ways around them.
And I think it’s a point worth making time and again, hence my making it! I think it’s also important to take whatever approach we can to protecting marginalised people, and women only transport, while very useful, does not get to the bottom of things. So let’s get radical.
“They won’t stop on their own, so the best women can do is figure out ways around them.”
I’m not sure I’m entirely a fan of this sentiment, unless I am misreading this comment. The implication seems to be “well, we can’t stop them, so we might as well work around them.” And that seems, well, rather defeatist to me.
I think what Chally is getting at here is “yes, measures like this are good, but as a stopgap.” Because the real problem here is not “men harass women so women need safe transport” but “men harass women and this is tolerated by society.” We need to get at the roots of the behaviour to try and eradicate it, while also keeping people safe.
Segregation as a solution? When has that ever really helped solve a problem? Victims shouldn’t have to change their behaviour to be safe, just like how I shouldn’t have to “cover up” in summer if I don’t want to get cat-calls (because it gets freakishly hot in Australia).
Like Chally said, we need to “get radical”. And this isn’t it. Radical would be say, taking allegations more seriously while also making it easier to report someone. And if someone has been reported as a groper by x amount of people, then they should be banned from using the service. The abusers should be inconvenienced, not the victims.
I guess the pink thing is a marketing tactic. An irritating one, but if gets people’s attention, I can deal with it.
While it’s true vehicular segregation is not a perfect solution and it is bound to exclude some people like transgender women, who says an imperfect solution is necessarily a bad solution? I think an imperfect idea is still better than none. Until that radical thing happens, I’d like to be safe.
Where I live, public transport is so dangerous for women, that most women I know would prefer not to take the cab alone in broad daylight. No woman who can help it would even take any form of public transport at night, alone or otherwise. Sometimes it’s even dangerous to wait at the bus stop or taxi stand at night. That pretty much means, if you haven’t got a car, you take your chances. It’s nice to have the privilege of criticizing this idea, but living where I do, it’s a life and death thing.
It’s nice to imagine a world with zero violence against women and essential that we should strive for that. But let’s get real. How long is that going to take, and how many women are going to die in the meantime? So while I’m waiting for that revolution to happen, I’ll just take the pink cab and live another day.
Dawn, I’m not quite sure what you’re objecting to as that’s pretty much what I said in the post.
Here in my city, women travelling alone on buses or streetcars at night can ask the driver to let them off between stops, so they don’t have to walk as far to their destination. Which can help people feel safe and all but…I always wonder about their definition of “women”, and which bodies the transit commission considers worth protecting, and from whom.
Agreed on the definition of “women” and who needs protecting. Some of the most vicious things I’ve seen on public transport are adult men picking on teenage boys.
While the train cars are a good temporary solution, the taxi service makes me angry – harrassment on public transport is mostly coming from other passengers; harrassment in a taxi is coming from an employee of the taxi company. Why the hell do we need segregated taxis rather than a zero-tolerance program for taxi drivers?
The only radical solution I can think of is to keep men indoors at night.
And zero-tolerance programs for taxi drivers: Does Mexico even have sexual harrassment policies? Not to mention other countries where sexual harrassment is a way of life.
I’ve read about these before. One concern I have is how it will affect the women who still take the non “women only” buses. Will they be viewed then as “asking for it” – fair game? If they are assaulted, will the fact that they “chose” (whether it’s an actual choice or not) to ride with men be used against them. It seems that instead of investing all that money in new women-only buses and trains, it would have been better spent hiring lots of female police and security guards to patrol the cars. This just feels bit like capitulating.
I’m not very interested in these ideas
(putting aside that I’m a man, but who still likes safe public transport, since it’s a public good in economic parland)
It’s that these ideas never work. There is a typical initial burst of enthusiasm, then the programs languish in the morass of lack of funding and derision and then a new initiative is created for the problem that the society in general doesn’t have a true interest in solving. The issues involving women only passenger cars in Japan somewhat informs my opinion. In the end, what really happened is that the institutional sexism was reinforced (as with the aforementioned pink and the chikans found other places for harrassment. Meanwhile the women’s only service only happen during very specific times with not the greatest service during those operating times. It’s very expensive and inefficient to do a true parallel service for women.
In general, these problems and solutions have been around as long as passenger rail has been around.
Just a note from a first person perspective – “Ladies special” buses have been there in India for atleast a few decades. Though they are comfortable, free from groping hands, etc., there are not enough buses to cater to all the women who have to take the bus. And transphobia is there – though these women are allowed on the bus, they are subject to glares and derisive comments.
I’m particularly struck by the concern expressed by maggie. Right now, there are not enough buses, so most of the women still take the non segregated buses. But if there are enough, there is a high probability that any women who steps on a non-segregated bus will be harassed. We need an end to institutional sexism, not stop gap methods.
Rather than having vehicles that are open only to women, how about having vehicles that men are restricted to?
I mean, the end result is *exactly* the same, but by thinking about it differently, you end up with not “the default is the train where men harass women, and women are special flowers that need their own train”, but “the default is only women are allowed on trains because men are assholes, and men need their own special trains because they can’t be trusted.”
Then, of course, men object to being restricted to their own special trains, and the burden of proof falls on men to prove that they are not assholes and will not create a nuisance to other passengers if they ride the train. Also, if the default is that men are restricted to specific trains, there will be a lot more equality in the system — women are not in charge of anything, so if women get their own special service it will be inferior. But give men their own special service that they have to use, and because men are in charge of everything, even *though* they are getting their own special service they are forced to use as a punishment for being assholes, they will still ensure that they get at least half the available transports… but the default is still that men are forbidden to ride trains unless they’re special trains that allow men, and since that’s the default, at least half the available transport will fall into the default and be available to women only.
It puts the burden back on men. Not “women are special snowflakes who deserve extra care”, but “men are antisocial assholes who create problems for other passengers”, and force men to prove they’re not.
Also, taxicab drivers who are male should be required to have a recording running in their vehicle to make sure they don’t harass female passengers.
I just find it so outrageous that time and time again, the fact that men prey on women is used to restrict *women*. Hello, we are humans, we kill or contain predators — we don’t hide from the human-eating tiger, we go out in the bush with our guns and kill it. Why is the fact that men prey on women not used to restrict *male* behavior? Yes, it’s totally unfair to pick on people because they share a gender with rapists, but it’s also totally unfair to pick on people because they share a gender with *victims*, and given that victims don’t cause bad things to happen and rapists do, if you have to penalize one group or the other, doesn’t it make more sense to penalize the group that contains the rapists rather than the group that contains the victims?
Sure, we need an end to institutional sexism. But we also desperately need stop-gap methods. The lengthy discussion on what it means to “go radical” and how to change society to keep men from harassing is a pretty good sign – we don’t know how to do that yet, and it’s going to take some time and work until we do. In the meantime, women are still getting harassed and threatened, and it’s no good to leave them in that position while we figure out how to change the way men view and interact with women.
We can’t just create “ladies’ cabs” and pretend we’ve solved the problem, but we also can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Unless we determine that the existence of these cabs and buses actually hinders the progress of societal change, we need to do everything we can to keep women safe while we address the big problems.
ACG, I’m all for stop-gap methods when they work.
Segregation of sexes in transport has never worked, otherwise we’d already have a consistent, long-term services for women. All they exist for is to extinguish sentiment when people are more fed-up or when the problem is openly worse. They ultimately stop challenges to the institutional sexism in transport by pretty much as Alara Rogers suggests–by empowering women a little bit through lousy choices and burdening them even more for the results.
That’s why this sort of thing is bad.
What I’m worried about is that if many women use women’s-only services, those that do not will be faced with disproportionate harrassment. If you’re the only woman on a bus full of men because all the other women have caught the pink bus (which you can’t catch because of, idk, a timetabling issue, or because you’re kind of butch and you’re not sure they’ll be okay with that, or because you just don’t know about it) then that one lady is going to have all the negative attention focused on her that would normally be spread out a little – or worse, there would just be more of it because the men know she’s “invading” “their” space, because if she didn’t want to be harrassed she could have just caught the ladies’ bus, right?