Will,

1) Actually, I think even if the ban on wolf whistles, cat calls, and other such entreties did pass the voters, it would not be content neutral, and would fail fairly readily (but it might be a nice few months or even years before the court processes finished).

2) Within one local police jurisdiction, how will you distribute the scare resources and opportunity costs devoted to higher order? Distributing by desire shown for such in a referendum creates a perverse incentive; distributing by property taxes and other abilities to pay makes the ability to live by community-endorsed standards (as judged by the results of a referendum) the provence of the wealthy.

3) I'm fairly dubious of the capability and willingness of the police and judicial system to follow through with accusations that such a law has been violated. He-said, she-said (perhaps with few eyewitnesses around, or at least few that can be found again) and possible difficulties tracing the perpertrators, it's hard to justify spending many resources on these cases. (That said, I'm not sure how much voters would pause to consider the legality and practicality of such a referendum before enacting it.)

Amanda: internal debate it is then.

The question is not so much how street harrassment does in an up-or-down poll or referendum-- badly, I would think. The question is how many dollars for police officers, how many streetlights, how much governmental supervision of street life, how much possibly-overzealous persecution of marginal populations, how much money for first and fourteenth amendment lawsuits, and how many social welfare dollars for those with no other place to go the city is willing to put out.

As with all things, the answer is that with scarce resources and opportunity costs we might decide to make some areas more orderly than others. [This is importantly different than making some areas dramatically safer than others-- of which I do not approve.]

One trouble with uniformity is that there is disagreement about what sort of uninvited banter constitutes harrassment and what amount of such harrassment ought to be shamed or punished. And if there is a uniform standard there is no particular reason to believe it will be yours, unless you are lucky enough to be the median relevant voter. So think of the Ellicksonian solution as a sort of second-best-- given uncertainties, misunderstandings, pluralism, and scarcity, I think it is likely to be better by almost anybody's lights.

[I will give the last word(s) to the two of you unless one of you says something particularly egregious.]

Will,

Re: Your response to PG and me:

I highly suspect, that if you put the question to a vote---shall wolf whistles, cat calls, and other forms of street harassment be permitted in this vicinity---that the women voting would select NO over 90% of the time; even if the men were evenly split on between YES's and NO's, the measure would sail through (but of course, men are disenfranchised at a higher rate than women, and they tend to die younger, and the old vote in strong numbers). And I think the problem would still persist.

Sincerely,

- Amanda

PS: It's been a while, my friend, since we had an intrablog dispute. It is my favorite place for disagreements.

UPDATE: So far as categories go, I've been street harassed more on rural streets than on urban ones. But I've also spent more time on rural streets than you have and, perhaps, than PG has. Nor do I recall any such instances from either of my two brief trips to New York.

In response to Amanda's and PG's posts on street harrassment, I offer a few thoughts on my own. For predictable social reasons, I tend not to be propositioned on the street as often as the other two are, but I hope my comments are not worthless, even if they are not original.

I agree wholeheartedly with my boss Robert Ellickson's argument that we should have pluralism in street culture. Some people want very orderly, quiet, streets where nobody is out of line. Some people like skid rows, and the comparatively low degree of official or unofficial rulemaking. Still others prefer something in between. What Ellickson proposes is basically a system of zoning, where red-, yellow-, and green- zones would divide the city into comparatively less- and more- intrusive regimes of public order-keeping. See Robert C. Ellickson, Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and Public-Space Zoning, 105 Yale L.J. 1165 (1996).

While I share the practical and constitutional misgivings that some critics of the article did, and also the concerns about how to lay the zones down in a satisfactory way, I nonetheless think a regime like this is probably better than any attempt to impose uniform legal rules or social norms on one polis. It is far better to know that walking from 96th to 110th street means confronting a concentration of come-ons than to have the same folks distributed randomly up and down all of Broadway. This helps both the brassy and the uptight order their lives as they like.

Put differently, while I, like Amanda think that street harrassment might be a sign of "fray" in a community, different communities within the same city might reasonably tolerate vastly different degrees of fray. It doesn't bother me that the homeless guys urinate on Sunday mornings in Farragut Square so long as they don't do the same thing on the Mall.

UPDATE: The categories each Crescatter picks for their own posts are typically inscrutable but I note with amusement that PG, Amanda, and I have filed our posts into three different categories-- New York, Feminism, and Urban Policy-- that may say quite a bit about our outlook here.

(Guest co-blogger PG's post is partially about that topic, but her musings are under the fold).

Street harassment. Lord I loathe it. PG writes:

Street harassment is more an issue of discomfort than fear for me. . . Having a stranger approach you sexually, even if it's something you know he does routinely and with no malicious intent beyond exercising one of his few "privileges," does make one feel fractionally less safe; it highlights the degree to which one is exposed and vulnerable.

I like to think that, despite my small stature and lack of obvious means of defense (there is a leatherman in my purse, but that's not very practical). I can tell someone to f* off and he will obey; successfully getting an obnoxious man to turn tail and walk the opposite way down the street from following you (well, me) is about the only good feeling in the encounter. If he doesn't, though, my back-up plan is pretty scanty; it consists primarily of calling for help and relying on the community to aid me or disperse him.

But street harassment is already a sign that the community has frayed---that a person is publicly acting in such a way because the risk of retribution is too low (and by 'retribution,' I mean social ostracism, not duels)---and that the person is unwilling to abide by normal standards. That's where the fear enters: in not knowing at what point of harassing the person will cede violating standards and quit posing a threat to me. Is it at talking so long as I'm within 10 yards of him? Is at refusing to quit touching my arm no matter how insistently I move away? Is at following me down the street, grabbing my waist and slapping my butt? I don't know. Yes, most men will end at the wolf whistle, but experience has taught me that all three of the above are also possibilities.

(As for mice, I never did quit giving small screens when one would dash out from along the floorboards of my Chicago apartment, and hated the idea that they'd probably found their way into my roommate's unclosed 50 lb bag of rice. I submit in my defense, though, that my scream was primarily directed at the sudden movement---I'd do the same if a chunk of plasterboard scurried from behind the couch to the corner).

Nowadays "Yarrr!" strikes me as more presidential candidate than pirate.

Anthony Rickey asks why atheists get so worked up about non-coercive government establishments of religion. In the course of his discussion though, he gives Barnette and Gobitis as examples of harms that he thinks are real (forcing Jehovah's Witnesses to recite the pledge). But those cases are different from the Newdow flap not just because of the faith of the plaintiffs.

As I understand Newdow's case, it is conceded by all that the students are not required to recite the new-and-improved Pledge the way that the Barnette/Gobitis plaintiffs were. The complaint is that even though the atheist students may sit down or whatever, the school-sponsored classroom recitation of an invocation of God is unconstitutional like the prayer in Lee v. Weisman.

If an atheist were forced to pray to a God he didn't believe in, I hope Mr. Rickey would concede that there was a clear "injury in fact". If not, there would almost never be standing to bring a compelled speech claim under the constitution. But since the plaintiffs are not being forced to pray, the previous Pledge cases are unhelpful.

So the claim against the Pledge is more like the general claim against opt-out school prayer. But if that's right, why does an atheist suffer any less of an injury than a Hindu? Both of them wish to attend their graduation ceremony without seeing their government invoke God, but neither one of them is being forced to commit idolatry or any other sin in the eyes of their own faith. So far as I know there is no tenet of Hinduism that one must not stand around quietly while other people pray.

Establishment clause standing jurisprudence is a riddle of its own (and, in my opinion, provides a good reason to think the Court is simply quite confused about what it calls the Article III limitations on standing). But there is nothing unique about atheism here. Everybody has standing to sue when they are themselves compelled to speak or pray-- on religious matters or irreligious ones-- as a very consequence of recognizing that compulsion to speak is a harm. And many religious establishments that are nowadays challenged in the federal courts do not force anybody-- believer or un- -- to actually violate a tenet of faith. Atheists and others have standing to challenge them, but neither suffers any greater "harm" than the other.

Metaphysically and legally, atheists are and ought to be just like everybody else for establishment claims.

UPDATE: To be clear, some of the above post talks right past Rickey's. We both agree that injury-in-fact as supposedly required by Article III of the Constitution is much different than the colloquial sense of injury in which we all wonder why Newdow has gotten so upset about this. On the other hand, I think the suggestions throughout Rickey's post that there is anything substantively different about atheism and theism here are all wrong. In the case of non-coercive establishments of religion like the ones actually at issue, the "harm" of being made a religious outsider by one's own government is exactly the same for the believer and the non-believer. No Jehovah's Witness would be committing idolatry by being forced to let others recite the pledge.

And in the case of the compelled speech cases-- which are not at issue-- nonbelievers are hurt too, unless one believes, contraconstitutionally and counter to any reasonable sense of enlightened freedom, that there is absolutely no harm done when the state forces people to profess belief in things they find abhorrent.

For those not already in the know, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I'll let ye land-lubbers follow up this sheer madness here.

Last year, The Onion mocked the ever-increasing number of blades on handheld razors with its article, "F--- everything, we're doing five blades." Now Gilette is indeed putting five blades on its newest razor. It is almost enough to make me switch to disposables.

[The first link was once via Toby Stern, the second link is via Craig Newmark.]

Somehow the last ten hours have recurrently raised the idea of fears peculiar to New York City in my mind. While waiting in the sub-basement, to which only one of the elevators in the building can travel, I heard a persistent rustle in a recycling bins and thought it might be a rodent* of some kind. Being alone with a possibly disease-carrying, biting-inclined animal made me a little nervous, and once I got on the elevator I mentioned to the other occupants that there might be an infestation problem of mice or something. The deliveryman scoffed, "Mice are more scared of you than you are of them."

"What about rats?"

"Oh, rats are different. If it's a rat I'll be running just as fast as you are."

I couldn't help imagining a little too vividly how horrible it would be to have a rat chew through the recycling bag, get on the floor and come toward me with its teeth bared. Perhaps one shouldn't re-read the end of 1984 when living here.

My friend Jen who's looking for a place to live was in town today to scout housing, and at dinner she and I discussed the real estate options of the city. Though she'd been hunting mainly in Brooklyn, she was thinking about her northern Manhattan options as well, but concerned about the safety of the areas above Central Park (the unaffordable Morningside Heights neighborhood excepted). It's a concern that circumscribes many people's options just as much as their budgets do; a classmate of no mean physical fitness who moved to 125th St. is only half-jokingly afraid of his new surroundings.

After Jen went home to Baltimore on the bus, I met another friend for dessert, and as we walked out of the restaurant she began to remind me of the nearest subway stop. I said that it was such a nice night that I was going to walk home, which idea she approved except for "that sketchy area between 96th and 110th." Striding down Amsterdam Avenue, I encountered nothing worse than a few inept come-ons. Paradoxically I find that particularly annoying when I'm conscious that I don't look very attractive, perhaps because it points up just how routine and unseeing the whistles and "Hey mamas" are.

Still, I understand why street harassment is deemed a serious problem by many people, though for once I agree with someone from the Independent Women's Forum: "It's not a legal or employer problem. It's a social problem and that tattletale approach will only exacerbate the problem." As to whether the problem actually is more severe in Washington, D.C. than NYC -- well, I was street harassed when I was in Dupont Circle Wednesday night.

Street harassment is more an issue of discomfort than fear for me, but I ignore it as I ignore many of the other obnoxious aspects of walking down the street in New York: piled garbage, urine odor, exhaust fumes. Yet it's nonetheless a psychological stress. Having a stranger approach you sexually, even if it's something you know he does routinely and with no malicious intent beyond exercising one of his few "privileges," does make one feel fractionally less safe; it highlights the degree to which one is exposed and vulnerable.

* Rabbits, incidentally, are not rodents; they belong to the order Lagomorpha.