Biology.

We can’t really escape it.

Not even in this modern and safe environment.  We can remove ourselves from physical harm,  craft our environment so that we reduce environmental and natural risk to a bare minimum.   But we can’t escape our emotions.  Emotions are used by our biology in response to stimulus with the external world.  They are part of the human condition.  They are also very necessary for our continued healthy existence.  Anger, fear, love, lust, sadness.  A veritable spectrum of emotional responses.  We just can’t escape them.

Understanding that we are, indeed, creatures possessing both logic and emotion, we come to noticing the recent video about a woman walking around New York City, showing street harassment.

Naturally, this only shows a little less than two minutes of this woman receiving cat-calling, propositioning, compliments.  A distillation of about 10 full hours of this woman walking around New York City.  The brevity of this footage says a lot about how frequent this behaviour is in her travels.  In no means did she receive all this attention throughout her walk.  It happened only in a few instances.  But that is the intellectual dishonesty of this particular video.  It was never meant to present logical evidence.

It was meant to evoke an emotional response in the viewer.  Here we have a woman, a particularly attractive woman.  A woman walking alone.  Walking through some tough neighbourhoods being accosted by dangerous looking men.  Men want to jump through the screen and try to protect the woman from the harassment.  Women put themselves in that position of alone-ness, receiving what is 10 hours worth of street harassment in just two minutes of watching.

Viewers don’t take in the time frame over-which this all occurred.  Viewers don’t take into context the rarity of such a beautiful looking woman walking through that particular neighbourhood.  The Viewers are left with the impression that for 10 hours straight, this woman was subject to 10 hours of guys breaking social conventions and being down-right creepiness

This is all just emotional puppet-mastery. The Con is Complete.

There are now feminist legislators who are rapidly and rabidly looking to put new laws in place to protect women from such street harassment.  But in all fairness, the street harassment is subjective, and dependent on the woman in question.  She may look at the behaviour as empowering.  She has been able to attract the attention of these men in the streets,unlike other women who may have just passed by without notice.  Again, this is completely dependent on the emotional state of the woman in question and her motivation at the time.

Was this woman in any real and physical danger?

Probably not.

What the video makers are doing instead are promoting the “fear” of being physically in danger.  They are authoring a narrative of  “re-endangerment”.  It is a pretty clever ploy.  And it is this videos ability to play out on the emotions of its viewers that bothers me a lot.

Our emotional state is not necessarily the reality.  Fear of physical danger is not the same as being in physical danger.  But this is the landscape we are in.  There are powers out there that continue to peddle these Threat Narratives, primarily because they allow the writers of these narratives the ability to promote a suitable re-action to the newly presented “re-endangerment”.

I live in Brisbane, Australia, and right now I am having a long weekend, thanks to the G20 Conference being in town.  Earlier this week, we were given the news that Russia had sent several Warships into the Coral Sea (and in International Waters).  I see no threat from Russia in these moves, but many in our press are overplaying the danger these warships present.  This has all the hallmarks of yet another Threat Narrative.  And on cue the press has cultivated the politically appropriate response.  Australian Warships have been sent out to shadow these vessels.

Threat Narratives are so easily recycled.  The Russian Threat to the fledgling colonies of Australia was all the rage back in the 1880’s.  Fort Lytton at the mouth of the Brisbane River was created primarily to stop the threat of Russian Incursion.  I find it completely ironic that 130 years later, FINALLY the Russian are justifying the existence of Fort Lytton!  And even now,  I don’t believe those Russian Warships will make any further moves towards Australian Waters.  There is no real threat.

But in creating a threat, it is the people who craft the threat who benefit from it.  Just imagine the profit that was made by the makers of the old 6 inch muzzle-loading guns that sit idle at Fort Lytton, the Construction companies that were paid good money to lay in the concrete for the emplacements, the officers and men who derived a living from protecting the Colony of Queensland from the spectre of a Russian Incursion into the Capital of Queensland.  Their existence was there not to stop any real and credible threat, but as a way of placating the emotional fears of the populace.

We need to realize that as certain parties continue to craft threat narratives, they slowly shift the goal posts of legally acceptable behaviour.  They are slowly drifting away from reality, into the realms of Emotional Subjectivity.  This hands too much power into the hands of those who will be protected from such emotions.  In this is a real danger of thought policing, censorship and freedom of expression.

Always question the motives of anyone who wants to evoke the emotion of “fear” in you, because they will always “have” a solution that maximizes the power and the profit into the hands of the person who is doing this.