Today a husband’s impotence is often blamed on the dominance or carping of his wife. In the sixteenth century, it was usually blamed on the power of a woman outside the marriage.
NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS
ANYONE WHO RAISES LIVESTOCK KNOWS THAT YOU SOMETIMES HAVE to keep males and females away from each other in order to control when they breed. Segregation of male from female humans, in both public and private venues, is remarkably common as well. For all sorts of reasons, legal, religious, athletic, and even choral, we keep men and women, boys and girls, apart. Even the language and symbols of separation by sex and/or gender are routinely presented as if the boy/girl separation were the most ordinary arrangement. The binary physical division by sex is also one of the more taken-for-granted social norms—for example, separate bathrooms for men and women. Recent challenges by trans people, among others, have led to feverish discussions and sometimes new ground rules and legislation, just as gender confusion has fueled these debates in myriad ways.
Protecting women has been the rallying cry of conservatives who wish to maintain and sometimes extend gender segregation. In one sphere after another—from the military to sporting events to separate spaces on public transportation—studies are commissioned, psychologists consulted, and religious texts invoked to evaluate the perils of sex mixing. Central to these discussions is the question of whether women are more or less disadvantaged by segregation from men in different circumstances and whether men are fairly or unreasonably stigmatized by gender segregation in those same circumstances. If we think there is something irredeemable about men and women, that they are like other animals in some inflexible way, such that certain kinds of gender separation are necessary or beneficial, then it is fair to ask whether continued segregation by gender is an admission of defeat and a retreat from attempts to change men’s behavior toward women, and if so, to what extent.
Do you think there is some persuasive reason that men require substantial separation from women? If you’re a man, do you have a strong primeval urge to spend time bonding with your buddies? If you answered yes, then you may be responding to a primordial call of the wild that goes back to before the Stone Age, when men were hunters, and hunters went roaming in male bands of brothers-in-arms. Or, maybe not. Perhaps you dismiss the cranky essentialism behind “male bonding.” But that doesn’t mean you haven’t used the phrase. Deep down, you still may wonder whether men sometimes need to gather by themselves in groups. Don’t all men need time every now and then for a little male camaraderie?
From man caves to bro-outs, it is taken usually as inevitable that men are driven to spend time without women. But a scientific justification for this idea is actually fairly new. It was originally conceived by the anthropologist Lionel Tiger, who argued that men have an elemental impulse to spend quality time carousing, imbibing, and chowing down with other men. None of this would be particularly relevant were it not for the fact that men must now figure out how to respond to the educational and occupational achievements of women. For some men, this means focusing on improving relationships with women. For others, bonding among themselves provides the best prospect for male catharsis and self-protection.
“Succinctly stated,” Tiger offers, “men ‘need’ some haunts and/or occasions which exclude females.” Through such male companionship they experience solidarity with one another. Male bonding, according to Tiger, is a trait that has developed over millennia, a process with biological roots connected to the establishment of the all-male alliances necessary for group defense and hunting, a compulsion that he believes was the same on the African savannah in 80,000 BC as it is wherever you live today. He might have had a point, aside from just one tiny hiccup. Evidence from the bioarchaeological record indicates a remarkable “evolution of hypercooperation” between men and women as well as a “pervasive ethic” of “sex egalitarianism” when hunting and gathering were the main forms of existence for humans. Indeed, there is good evidence that until the advent of agriculture some 10,000 years ago (the dates vary by region), when animals became more scarce, hunting was more of a joint effort by men and women together.1
One of the underlying assumptions in the theory of male bonding, whether rooted in evolutionary theories or not, is that there is something logical and commendable about segregation by sex. In the United States, the term “segregation” reasonably makes us recoil in horror; we think of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 “separate but equal” Supreme Court decision, and all its later consequences. But consider instances in which segregation is widely accepted—such as in medical quarantines, with their separation of the sick from the rest of the population in cases, for example, of tuberculosis; here, segregation is a recognition that the infection can spread and needs to be contained. Segregation doesn’t mean there is no cure, or if there isn’t one yet, that you won’t look for one.
And as gender studies scholars have long recognized and taught, there is nothing automatically unequal and unfair about gendered divisions of labor, with one gender group having more responsibility for certain needs, for example, and another group assigned to other needs. To the extent that these divisions of labor—you do the kids, I’ll do the cooking—reflect not hierarchies and power imbalances but more efficient ways to organize tasks, such as care for the young and provision of food, we talk about gender complementarity.
But what about instances of segregation that do contribute to social inequalities, either because a persecuted sector of the population is separated to make their situation worse (Plessy again), or because segregation in the name of righting wrongs can instead exacerbate problems the separation was intended to confront?
By even considering that male bonding could be embedded as an indispensable male requirement, we create reasons to believe that there are other ways men and women should be separated socially and materially in the modern world. How much we actually know about men’s exclusive communications and male-only enclaves is debatable. We certainly notice male-only spaces for their gender segregation. But simply noticing is not really analyzing why they endure. Is there a relationship between men’s secret houses in New Guinea and men’s clubs in New York City? Chicago taverns and Athens coffee houses? What about sports arenas in Moscow and gay bars in Madrid? Video parlors in Timbuktu and Tacoma barbershops? We are certainly aware of them, but I’d wager we don’t spend much time reflecting on persistent male-only segregation more than to disparage or defend it.
Humans employ gender segregation in a variety of ways for multiple reasons. In the case of patriarchal societies, it is not hard to see why institutionalized support for men-only spaces, such as private clubs, can be tenacious. Only in 1984 did Harvard College sever formal ties with its notorious male-only “final clubs.” For well over a century, young men who went on to fame and fortune in politics, the arts, and business made early and lasting social connections in these semi-secret societies. A list of a few of the notable men to grace these mansions in Cambridge gives a taste of their importance—and if you have to ask who they were, you clearly wouldn’t belong: from the Fox Club, T. S. Eliot, Bill Gates, and Henry Cabot Lodge; from the Fly Club, no less than Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jay and David Rockefeller, and Jared Kushner. (In 2016, Harvard finally announced sanctions against the male-only clubs still in existence.)2
In the United States and other countries, male-only institutions are where important discussions are held and decisions made in private. The idea that such men just need a little downtime with other men once in a while is a fig leaf used to justify the exclusion of women who want access to power. These all-male settings shape and reinforce insidious forms of masculinity. And because the activities in these clubs remain hidden from public scrutiny, they can remain unquestioned (and even unknown) by women and other men who would find them abhorrent. Women are kept out to stifle their attempts to mount challenges against entrenched male dominance.
Whatever the motive—to exclude women from key male domains or to get some me-time with the dudes—such “homosociality” has social and political consequences that can’t be truly understood by looking at nucleic acids and proteins, aka, chromosomes. If we invent the idea that men have certain physiological needs that they do not in fact have, we are basing our attitudes about gender segregation on false premises. Perhaps women don’t need to be protected so much after all, and men don’t need to be protected them from their own bad selves. Biobabble about men and sex, and men and violence, leads to bad social policies, or at least incomplete attempts to resolve serious challenges like sexual assault. To the extent that we consciously or unconsciously buy into the idea that men are controlled by their bodies, that they think with their dicks, that their thoughts and actions are somehow beyond their ability to control—that the way men come prepackaged in fact controls them and how they think—we concede defeat to gender-based violence and a host of other social dilemmas.
In public policies the rubber hits the road in the science of maleness, gender confusion, and beliefs about male animality. In 2016, the North Carolina state legislature passed House Bill 2, or HB2, the so-called Charlotte bathroom bill. Officially known as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, the law reversed an ordinance that had extended some rights to gay and transgender people and nullified local ordinances around the state extending protections to LGBTQ persons.
HB2 had little to do with bathrooms. Instead, it was an assault on LGBTQ communities in North Carolina and nationwide passed by a legislature obsessed with genitalia and sex. For those who know US history, of course, segregated bathrooms are nothing new. And segregating bathrooms on the basis of race is obviously racist. Why has there never been an outcry about separate bathrooms for men and women? We all take this separation as equitable and reasonable, the only real debate being who qualifies to enter the different bathrooms. What is it about urine and feces that is so remarkably different in men and women that their evacuation needs to be done in separate spaces?
The history of gender-segregated toilets in the world seems driven by the entry of large numbers of women into industrial labor, in Europe beginning in the nineteenth century. With more women in the workplace, accommodations were built for their exclusive use. In many countries today, the “urinary leash” continues to be an issue, meaning that if there are no available bathroom facilities for women in public areas, women are more likely to be bound to their homes. Obviously the vast majority of people in the world, where separate bathrooms are available, have become accustomed to this kind of segregation, and even if they can accept trans people using whatever bathroom they are most comfortable in, there are few people clamoring for everyone to be able to use the same bathrooms.3 Yet comfort and custom here are directly based on nothing more complicated than genitalia and the social strictures that make genitalia a decisive feature, one that comes with its own taken-for-granted restraints.4
There has been similar public debate about occupational segregation, and the arguments in this debate, too, are rooted in competing perspectives about the biological differences between women and men. The furious deliberations in the United States and other countries regarding whether to open combat positions to women in the armed forces, touched upon earlier, are but one example. These debates focus on the question of proximity, segregation, and how close is too close for men and women in uniform. In January 2013, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta nullified the standing policy that did not allow women in units “tasked with direct combat.” Worries persisted, however. One worry was about men and women falling in love in the trenches (apparently it happens all the time); others concerned inappropriate fraternization, or the psychological cost to male soldiers when they witnessed women getting wounded or killed.
Even the poster child for alleged gender equality in the military, Israel, is far less integrated than it might seem at first glance. Israeli women serve shorter stints than men. Although technically they are allowed to serve in 90 percent of the roles in the military, they actually serve in only two-thirds of the positions. Women in Israel can receive exemptions from military service far more easily than men and avail themselves of these opportunities far more often. Furthermore, as one authority on the subject reports, “the Israelis have consistently refused to put women in combat since their experiences in 1948,” because at that time “they experienced recurring incidences of uncontrolled violence among male Israeli soldiers who had had their female combatants killed or injured in combat.” In this instance, “I am, therefore I think” gets translated into men who can’t control themselves from brandishing their innate protect-the-women bona fides if they get too close to women.5
Segregation is a recurring theme not only on the battlefield, but also, of course, in many religious doctrines. Among the more discussed gender divisions are those found in branches of Judaism, especially ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Judaism, where rabbis are always men, women are always separated by a mehitzah partition in religious ceremonies, and various other rules apply to only women or only men among the faithful. Adherents believe this kind of segregation preserves gender “modesty” and assures attention to prayer, and that it is only through the physical separation of males and females, particularly during religious ceremonies, that these aims can be achieved.
These rules have received attention in the press following encounters on international airline flights, especially from the United States to Israel, when some ultra-Orthodox men have refused to sit next to a woman to whom they are not related. Flight attendants and airlines have had to handle these incidents carefully; meanwhile, it can cause flight delays and stir controversy. Not all ultra-Orthodox men insist on such seating arrangements—it’s difficult, if not impossible, for single travelers to arrange ahead of time for a certain seating arrangement, beyond “aisle” or “window”—but enough have insisted on male seating that it has become a periodic news item. Airlines have pushed back against this kind of separation, but the underlying religious motivations remain the same.
Sometimes in these incidents, women passengers agree to switch their seats with another passenger, typically with help from a flight attendant. So I am less concerned here with what some ultra-Orthodox Jews want and why they want it than with these passengers’ decisions to acquiesce. What is involved in the thinking of these generous passengers, who cede to a male’s demand to move so that he won’t have to sit next to them? They are not just showing courtesy, but implicitly condoning the premise that a man, because he is a man, cannot sit next to a woman because she is a woman. If a passenger said, “Because of my faith, I cannot sit next to a Jew,” no one would have a hard time dismissing this person as anti-Semitic and showing him the nearest exit. Why is it different when a woman is asked to move? Is there an underlying belief that it is not so outlandish that a man who is a total stranger could nonetheless react to some irrepressible urge when in the vicinity of a woman? That notion is objectionable, maybe, but not implausible.6
Presumptions about men’s underlying nature don’t have to be particularly complex or grounded in scientific findings. They can still influence our private and public lives in ways we take for granted. Our overreliance on biological explanations for men’s behavior can have significant repercussions. Whether segregation by gender contributes to a problem or is a remedy to a problem is worth debating.
In Germany, Korea, China, and other countries around the world there are designated “women’s spaces” in parking garages and elsewhere to help protect women from assault. Women-only subway cars are common in public transportation systems in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta, Cairo, Shenzhen, and Mexico City. In Germany, a regional train from Leipzig to Chemnitz began assigning women-only compartments in 2016; some passengers welcomed the option, while others thought it was a step backward. In several cities with women-only subway cars, feminists have taken to the streets and subway platforms to protest the segregation and to demand that men who prey on women, on subways or anywhere else, be apprehended and punished.
To what extent do our perceptions about maleness and femaleness shape how we think about protecting women from men? To the degree we abide the notion that “men, because they are men, are tempted to assault women on the subway if they think they can get away with it,” we might allow preconceptions about maleness and femaleness to guide public policies. There is no doubt that we need public policies to contend with sexual assaults by men against women on subways. But for many of the cities listed above, the idea of using women-only buses and subway cars, especially during rush hours, as a solution to the problem of sexual assaults on public transportation has been fraught. Cordon men away from women, or at least provide women the opportunity to separate themselves from men: Is it an enlightened decision, or a step backward?
You might look at the cities with women-only subway cars and think, “Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, China, and Mexico. The global South seems to have more problems of sexual assault.” We could also look at the list and think, “Maybe the global South has better solutions to sexual assault.” Gender segregation on public transport in Mexico City, for example, has been popular with transportation planners and women riders, though it has been criticized by some feminists for not adequately addressing the roots of men’s assaults on women. At the heart of the debate is the question of whether men are coded by biology to prey on women, and the most that can be done is to quarantine them away from women, or men can be stopped, punished, or changed. And there is a short-term and long-term discussion as well: some argue that it’s a necessary measure similar to affirmative action in the United States, remedial and necessary for a time, a temporary way to safeguard women until the behavior of enough men is reformed. Others say that such pragmatic policies can too easily detract from the real effort that is needed to fundamentally confront and stop male sexual privilege and assault.
Six out of ten women who ride Mexico City’s public transport system have experienced some kind of physical or verbal assault. Only Bogotá is more dangerous for women getting around the city on buses, subway cars, and jitneys. Perhaps even more extraordinary than the statistic that hundreds or even thousands of women are accosted daily in Mexico City is the debate surrounding what should be done about the problem. The discussion revolves around implicit attitudes toward men and sexual assault and why men do these things. Or, rather, why some men do them. And, in addition, how the authorities can stop them. Disagreements about solutions reveal deeply held beliefs about how to develop transportation strategies in response to men abusing women.
In 2008, the Mexico City government created the ATENEA program, named for the Greek goddess Athena, to prevent, apprehend, and punish sexual violence against women traveling on public transportation. One result was the expansion of a system already in place called “Solo Mujeres,” which included spaces on subway cars and buses designated for women only and children under a certain age. Elderly men are sometimes allowed there, too. As of 2017, the program was still being expanded to incorporate more trains on more lines during rush hour, as well as the newer Metrobus lines in the city.
Although the program hardly resolves the problem of men molesting women on the Metro cars, it was effective enough for many women to take advantage of the opportunity for self-segregation. Yet the program’s expansion has not been accompanied by any developed analysis of what is causing problems of violence on public means of transportation to begin with—whether it is all a matter of men and sexual violence, or humans and violence, or some other mix of unidentified factors. This analysis has not been elaborated because it doesn’t have to be: without needing to be told, we all know what is involved and why, right? We all think we understand the reasons for violence on subways and buses without having to conduct a study. When women complain of pushing and shoving by other women on the women-only cars, it might seem anomalous; we do not equate this, in any case, with men’s sexual assaults on the mixed-sex subway cars. We assume these are not the same kinds of violence.
Women-only spaces on subways and buses help, but they do not resolve the underlying problem of men molesting women on the Metro. Still, despite the shortcomings of these measures, many, and probably most, residents of the capital, women and men, support this kind of gender separation when it is feasible on public transportation. The fact that men can enter women-only cars at Metro stops where there are no police to stop them, and, of course, the fact that separation creates new issues for women who are traveling with men on the Metro, are secondary considerations—frustrating, but not enough to negate what many women see as a necessary measure to protect them. Although sitting in the women-only cars is voluntary for women, and some of them, at least in Mexico City, choose not to use them, the program is of practical importance. It has measurably improved female riders’ safety, and it serves as a symbol and a constant reminder that a problem that could be taken for granted is being addressed.
The residents of these cities do not necessarily think about the problem in terms of whether men (and women) are controlled by their bodies, or whether men’s thoughts and actions are ultimately reducible to biological, chemical, and material processes functioning in their brains and genitalia, or whether someday we will be able to predict people’s ideas and actions through the physics of their brains, and perhaps prevent those brains from causing bad things to happen. And yet what is really being disputed is the extent to which we as societies are in a profound sense controlled by the ubiquity of men’s bodies and their influence over societal decision making and policies in ways large and small, in everything from government to business to family matters. If men’s bodies hold these particular threats without even trying, then whether you call it the Realm of the Y Chromosome or the Estate of Testosterone, it spells trouble for societies until it is recognized, accepted, and contained.
The Solo Mujeres program entails more than providing women with separate spaces and preventing men from entering those spaces. The alternative to mixed trains also conveys a very pointed message each time a woman gets on the subway at rush hour. Walking by signs, or even by a walled-off corridor, a woman is plainly reminded that she can receive certain protections from men clawing at her, making rude comments, and threatening her. Simultaneously, however, the separation sends a message to men: you are forbidden from entering those cars. Every time a man gets on the subway at rush hour, he is visually and tangibly reminded that he is not to go on specially marked cars, and why he may not enter those women-only havens. If he has half a wit about him, he is compelled to think again about the reasons for the separation of men from women, to consider what actions could have led to isolating men from women, and perhaps even to determine whether it is women being sequestered away from him, for their own protection, or him being quarantined off from women, because as a man he might be dangerous.
There is a contradiction latent in the fact that in case after case around the world, men’s desire to segregate themselves from women is most often aimed at enhancing men’s own pleasure and prerogative. When women are segregated, whether by their own choice or by social edict, it is more commonly aimed at protecting women from men.
The ATENEA program in Mexico City has always sought to provide safe, comfortable, and inexpensive transportation services for women, and its public announcements promote free service for pregnant women, the elderly, and those “with different capacities.” When I interviewed Martha Delgado Peralta, the former secretary of the environment for the city, she admitted that ATENEA still had not yet been able to resolve the core problems: the groping, pawing, and need for child protection on the Metro system. She drew two diagrams for me, one showing everyone stuffed onto the same car, and the other with separate cars, one for men and one for women and children. She added a timeline, arbitrarily choosing a five-year endpoint in the future. To meet that target, Delgado told me, men would need to change to such an extent that women-only subway cars and similar kinds of gender separation on public transportation would no longer be necessary. In other words, gender segregation on public transportation should not be a long-term situation, she said; it was an expedient measure she hoped and expected would not always be necessary.
The biggest challenge Delgado and other authorities face, however, is not setting a deadline, or even developing an agenda to raise public awareness of the problem of sexual assaults on public transportation—no one who regularly uses the subway could possibly be unaware of the concern. The bigger obstacle is ingrained thinking about men, temptation, and access, and whether anything can be done beyond trying to prevent men from doing what comes naturally.
What measures would Delgado propose that could be instituted to change men? Here she seemed less convincing. Could we only hope to change the expression of men’s urges? She raised the idea of vigilance: riders could report problems to Metro teams, and teams could then nab molesters red-handed. She was optimistic that men could be changed, though, because—here she stopped to point to a bicycle behind her in her office—hadn’t she changed the mindset of residents of the capital when it came to biking? Hadn’t people warned her that there was too much dangerous traffic in the city, and no bike culture in Mexico, and that biking would never catch on? Well, she informed me, there were now bike lanes all over downtown Mexico City and new bikers all the time, thanks to her efforts to change people’s attitudes and practices around biking. Changing men so they would not assault women would be a similar challenge, tough but achievable.
I talked at the end of 2014 with another city government representative, Saúl Alveano Aguerrebere, who had coordinated the program to integrate Mexico City’s transportation systems. He thought maybe people were overthinking the problem of men accosting women on the Metro. If we treated men more like the children so many of them still are, we could cope better with the problem. Just separate them from others, exactly the way one does with fighting children. He wasn’t kidding, either. When a responsible government functionary says the solution to the problem of sexual assault by men against women in any context is to treat men like children, the message is akin to boys will be boys. An offhand quip becomes state policy. That’s shocking, but what is worse is that our reaction to it—when we hear that a government official has said we need to treat abusive men like children and separate them when they fight one another—may be to concur with a resigned nod of agreement.
In Mexico City, as in other cities across the globe, when faced with the crisis of sexual assaults by men against women on subways and other means of transportation, a major social problem, government authorities came up with a partial way to address the problem, and then set to work implementing the stopgap solution. Who besides abusive men could oppose this arrangement? As it turns out, some feminists. Their reasons speak directly to the question of our underlying assumptions about men, sexuality, and violence. Even for people who don’t call themselves feminists, there are some thoughtful concerns about the women-only spaces.
The politics of the women-only Metro cars on the Mexico City subway are manifest in the language employed to describe the problem these cars seek to address. My friend the radiator repairman, Roberto, lives an hour and a half from his workshop in the neighborhood of Colonia Santo Domingo, where I used to live. He spends most of his three-hour-long daily commute on the Metro. I asked him about men, women, and sexual assaults on the subway. Roberto suggested that we distinguish between “assault” and “touching.”7 I told him I thought he might be missing the point.
If the former meant harassment, molestation, and assault, whether physical or verbal or both, the latter for Roberto meant simply to touch, to come into physical contact inadvertently, an action that invariably happens on a crowded subway car. Touching happens because of circumstances beyond anyone’s control, but assault is caused, he believes, by “culture” and “education,” meaning here not so much formal education as upbringing by parents. Roberto was sure that better child-rearing could significantly reduce assaults on the Metro. He agreed that it makes a difference whether one is pushed by a man or a woman, and whether it was a man or woman getting pushed. For a woman, even if you are getting crushed by others inadvertently, it isn’t fun, but it’s not the same as when a guy pushes against you with his shrimp. Words to live by.8
Although I have some middle-class friends who use the Metro, by and large the Metro is for working-class riders who may not have an alternative means of transportation. But even for those in the working class, the subway is not for everyone. I met my old friend Delia when we were first neighbors on Huehuetzin Street in Colonia Santo Domingo, a rough-and-tumble area deep on Mexico City’s south side. She and her family were among the squatters and land invaders—the local word is “parachutists”—who descended on the area beginning in September 1971. Like her husband, Marcos, Delia worked for decades cleaning up classrooms, hallways, and offices at the nearby National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM. Both Marcos and Delia are used to physical challenges, including the gangbangers who are as much a part of the fabric of the community as they are.
The words they use to describe violence of various kinds, the people they hold responsible, and the situations they describe shed light on popular perceptions of how much about violence can be tied to men and maleness, and how much to poverty and hustle, or to infrastructural factors that are present in Mexico City, such as overcrowded subway cars. Their language of engagement with social problems, including violence, reveals underlying assumptions about causes and solutions, too.
But when it comes to the Metro, Delia says, she’d rather not even go. She’ll squeeze into surface road jitneys and buses instead. “The Metro scares me,” she told me. I admitted that, despite the injunction above the doors in subway cars—“BEFORE ENTERING LET PEOPLE EXIT”—I, too, have been scared of the scrum getting on or off the train at certain stations. The question then arises again as to the difference between violence and gender-based violence. Should we distinguish between these categories, and if so, how? Women like Delia may see violence as pervasive in the world, and they will want to do whatever they can to avoid it no matter who is inflicting it. But they also may have trouble seeing the women-only cars as a significant step forward. Riding the Metro still often requires sustaining bruises and worse from women riders. For a woman who has seen her fair share of men beating women, Delia is never reluctant to pin blame on men when it’s due. But her frightened assessment of the Metro is of a generalized violence rather than an especially gendered violence.9
The point is not to provide travelers’ advice, a guided tour to the troubles and violent tribulations of the subway system in Mexico City, but to ask how violence is described, understood, and adjudicated in the minds of citizens in that city and others like it. For Delia and other women, men are animals sometimes, but so are women. For her and others in her neighborhood, violence is extensive and relentless. But she would say it stems as much as anything else from scarcity and hardship on the lower rungs of society. This view might be something to consider, especially in contrast to the more gender-based rationales for the women-only subway cars and buses. If this alternate view seems like a description and explanation that blames the poor, Delia might agree.
It is not just Delia: many of her neighbors also trace the causes of violence not so much to every man’s predisposition as to other social factors. And some of them look farther up the ladder of social success and power. When I asked Doña Fili, my oldest friend in the neighborhood (we met in the summer of 1991) what she thought of the women-only Metro cars, she spoke as if the subway system had a mind and body of its own, “El Metro es agresivo, Mateo,” she cautioned me: the Metro is aggressive. The aggressiveness of the subway stemmed not from a male-only problem, in her view, but was a product of too many people being forced to cram into too few spaces. For Fili it was a matter of class oppression as much as anything: the poor ride the Metro because they cannot afford cars as easily as the better-offs. And the Metro capacity is nowhere near sufficient to serve the needs of the poor. If there is violence and aggression, it comes from those in government, the financial sectors, and other powerful entities who make the decisions that affect how the poor will live.
If you ask her, Fili will tell you that she is opposed to splitting up men and women on the Metro. In fact, she is dead set against it. Fili, a community activist in Christian base communities, in neighborhood associations, and in citywide political movements, sees the mere existence of gender separation on the Metro as tacit acceptance of male assaults, the authorities essentially giving up the struggle against a widespread social ill. If men prefer to stand in solidarity with women and in opposition to men who assault women, Fili wonders, how does separating the men from the women help? For her, masculinity is not a congenital disease.10
The sharpest critics of women-only subway cars are Mexican feminists, who argue that to endorse this kind of separation by gender on the Metro cars is to capitulate to bad behavior, a declaration that the government officially believes men can be restricted but not changed. It does nothing to address the root causes of men sexually abusing women. After all, the city would never have a special car for riders who wanted to be free of pickpockets—they prosecute other types of crime, so why not this one? These social critics insist that men who are abusive must instead be stopped and punished, not simply separated from women.
Doña Fili opposes the women-only subway cars because she thinks men can change. Fixing the problem, for her, is a matter of changing men’s attitudes toward women, and she believes that needs to start at the top. Once, in 2000, when she attended a presentation for a book on what it meant to be a man in Mexico City, Fili stood up and challenged the mainly academic audience not to think machismo was something just in poor families and neighborhoods. Look at the political party that had ruled Mexico for some seventy years, she insisted. That’s where you’ll find the real machos!11
For many people, if not Fili, the women-only subway cars and other measures, such as capturing and prosecuting offenders, can happen hand in hand. Would women feel safer as a result of both measures? Informal surveys indicate that most would. The central concern must still be less about the immediate, most apparent causes of sexual assaults on public transport, less about the local debates, and more about a fundamental issue in Mexico and across cultures worldwide: What do we expect of men, and how do we meet those expectations? What spaces should they be allowed into, and where should they be excluded? Unless we understand why men assault women, we may be appalled, but we will not be surprised when it happens on public transportation and people continue to assume that we cannot hope to change a thing about it.
As part of a campaign against sexual assaults on subways in Mexico City, UN Women (that is, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) and the Mexico City government launched a campaign, #NoEsDeHombres, in 2017. The advertising agency J. Walter Thompson beat out forty competitors to win the bid to raise public awareness around the issues. In one sensational intervention, a subway car seat was transformed so that it resembled the front of a man’s body, modeled in such a way that if you sat down on it you were forced to sit on the man’s penis. A plaque on the floor in front of the model read, “It’s a hassle to travel here, but it’s nothing compared to the sexual violence that women suffer in their daily travel.”12
In addition to the penis chair, there was another avenue of attack through videos, including “Experimento Pantallas,” with tight shots of men’s derrieres displayed on public screens for all to see. The idea was to force men to see what it feels like to be leered at. The bottom line for the campaign overall was that men were the problem, and that women already knew this, so what had to be addressed was men’s resistance to acknowledging their complicity in sexual assault against women.13
For those in favor and those opposed to the women-only cars, the larger issue raised is whether you want to treat the symptoms of male assault or actually want to cure the illness, says a young man I know, Miguel. I’ve known Miguelito almost as long as I have known Doña Fili, since 1992, when he was four years old. As we talked about the women-only subway cars, he told me that for him, the main issue was whether we could preach tolerancia when it comes to men who assault women. We could not be forgiving of these men. They had to be reeducated about why assault was wrong. Miguel had grown up in a family of strong women, in a neighborhood with strong women leaders. He could not accept that tolerance approach. To do so was to say that we had to accede to prevalent ideas about men and sexual assault, that there was something normal about sexual assault. Miguel seems constitutionally opposed to that approach.
Political theorist Wendy Brown has written effectively about the same word Miguel used, “tolerance.” Usually in political discourse this term is associated with liberal thought. But Brown notes that although many liberals hold tolerance in the highest esteem as demonstrating an openness to the ideas and habits of others, there are limits to this philosophy. If tolerance is your highest goal, and the most accommodating approach you can think of is to incorporate and accept a wide range of beliefs and behavior, you can inadvertently foster forms of discrimination that you mean to oppose.14
No one, least of all Wendy Brown or Miguel, is saying we should tolerate sexual assault. But to the extent that we think we have effectively regulated sexual assault on women by providing them with separate subway cars, we might also be implicitly tolerating sexual assault in other contexts. For instance, it might seem to be acceptable on mixed subway cars, in packed escalators, on stairs, and in the corridors of the Metro stops. In other words, Miguel might have been closer to the truth than he realized when he criticized the idea that we should show tolerance toward men who assault women. Even if we support safe-space cars for women on subways as a good move, we need to caution against the tacit message that any woman who chooses to ride in a mixed car must accept the risk of sexual assault.
Public policies always aim to improve the delivery of effective social services, including addressing needs that arise from gender inequalities, abuse, discrimination, and the like. When policies relating to gender inequities are developed in one locale or another, one state or another, or one country or another, implicit assumptions about men and women invariably creep in with little or no open debate. Gender segregation may seem like a good way to attend to matters of women’s safety day to day. Yet at what cost do we build such policies without taking a more critical view of how our premises address the needs of men and women? The cost of not asking the deeper questions—or, really, of continuing to develop policies based on our faulty presumptions, with respect to sexual assaults on women, for example—is to slip into the problems Wendy Brown calls out.
Many people take it for granted that men and women should be separated in particular places and times. Consider the example of bathrooms again. When we take the seemingly innocuous division of male/female for granted, what happens is that people—and in the contemporary world, that means especially trans people—get hurt. Tolerance is beaten back with specious legal rulings. Or consider again religious practice that involves gender segregation. It’s one thing to say that membership in a religion is voluntary, and thus people accept such separation as part of participating in the organization. But when the requirements of religion spill over into public space, things become more complicated. Even the kindness of strangers on planes can contain seeds of unavoidable collusion with certain ideas about men and their primal urges when they are around women.
Seen from this perspective, we can look once again as well at our earlier discussion of conscription. In addition to essentializing the violent tendencies of men, the continuing practice of registering and/or drafting only young men can be seen as another instance of a public policy based on fallacious beliefs. These beliefs about men—that they are violent, and more suited than women to war—remain unexamined and unchallenged, and instead simply and uncritically accepted as reasonable and ordinary. If we see analogous patterns in other policies, relying on similarly unquestioned assumptions about men—say, concerning men in business, or men in tech companies, or men in government—it will become apparent that such policies are not just rooted in local ideologies and cultural practices but grounded in more widespread tenets of faith about men-as-men.
Why is there virtually no opposition to regulations about young men alone being registered for a possible future draft? Perhaps it is because we are perfectly comfortable accepting that young men and young women are by nature fundamentally different when it comes to violence. Why is segregation by some religious groups broadly accepted, or at least ignored, but segregation by other religious groups vilified? These differences show how gender separation ultimately reflects social and political standards more than anything intrinsic to male and female bodies. Whether in public or private, the exclusion of one group or another carries a language of division and difference. Though these may not be bad in themselves, it is certainly worth considering whether the separation is justified or might perpetuate inaccurate representations.
If physiological male/female differences are the motherlode of pseudoscientific thinking about sexual assaults, sexual temptations, and gender segregation, then the evolutionary El Dorado is the range of behavior shared in common by all animals: parenting. We all know parenting is as social as it is individual, that parenting styles and values vary from family to family and culture to culture. What we think about fathering in all its guises and disguises will reveal a lot about what we think about men, evolution, and maleness.