Stop being reasonable

In the union of the sexes … it is necessary that one should have the power and the will, and the other should make little resistance. Once this principle is established it follows that woman is expressly formed to please the man.

As for Rousseau’s remarks … that [women] have naturally, that is from their birth, independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking, they are so puerile as not to merit a serious refutation.

– Mary Wollstonecraft

SCENE: A MEXICAN FOOD ESTABLISHMENT IN Kings Cross, inner-city Sydney. Approximately 7 pm. Cast of characters: me, exhibiting what Germans call weltschmerz, or ‘world-weariness’. Mark, a nearby man. Another man sitting with Mark whose name I have forgotten and to whom I will therefore refer as ‘Mark 2’. A microphone on a table, as I’m taking a break from recording. A burrito – a big, proper, carby, cheesy burrito thick as my arm and wrapped in foil, the high point of my night.

Brief pause, bite, ill-timed eye contact.

‘I’d let you wrap your mouth round my burrito,’ says one of the Marks.

I had been recording conversations with my catcallers for US radio program This American Life. Men who catcalled women on the street had confused me since I was in primary school and the first man slowed his car on the first corner to shout something that doppler-shifted away before it could be understood. Since then, the assortment of things I’ve seen men say and do in streets seems to map out such a bizarre constellation of graphic sexism and boyish hope that I have never been able to understand it. Is there a single motivational thread connecting whistles to shouted compliments, and compliments to unwelcome grabbings? For weeks I tried to find out. I’d take a microphone and a recorder out at night and walk the nightlife district in Sydney’s Kings Cross, where the sky is lit by neon and the gutters paved with vomit. I’d wait for the inevitable catcalls and then turn around and ask, ‘What were you hoping for just then?’

Most of the men stuck around to give an answer. There was Sebastian, a strip-club enticer whose job was to shepherd passing groups of young men into a nearby gentlemen’s club where they’d sit eagerly in big-spending rows, bursting out of their too-tight shirts like testosterone sausages splitting their skin. When I passed Sebastian for the first time he made a gesture in the air like he was fondling a pair of invisible ghost breasts, and when I asked him if he thought women enjoyed that sort of thing he said he’d met his girlfriend by catcalling her. I asked if I could use his phone to ring her and check this. I could not.

There was Duncan, a Scottish backpacker waiting for his friend to come out of a nearby bottle shop, who whistled at me as I walked past. He was keen for me to know that he had a master’s degree – ‘Never judge a book by its cover!’ – and told me that sometimes when he whistled, girls said, ‘Oh thank you, baby.’ There was the unbelievably high kid whose name is nearly inaudible on the recording because his jaw was busy swinging through the Hunter S Thompsonesque quantity of drugs he had definitely not consumed and who nearly cried when he told me he just didn’t know how to talk to women.

And there were the Marks, one of whom said the thing about the burrito, and who almost immediately started commiserating with me about men. ‘You think we’re bad,’ one of them said as we stood clustered outside the burrito place, ‘then you should meet our boss. He looks like Humpty Dumpty, but he thinks he’s God’s gift to women. The other day I was with a girl, and he came up and grabbed her hips and said, “Hey baby, let’s get a coffee.” She started laughing, but she asked him not to touch [her] again. And he got the point, but … actually he doesn’t get the point. He’s really stubborn.’

I was surprised that these men agreed to be interviewed. I happen to own an especially mean-looking recorder, the sort with an unforgiving red ‘record’ light that stares at you unblinkingly while you speak, so you can never quite forget its presence or its ruthless on-recordification. It looks like the sort of thing tabloid journalists would chase you with if you were a corrupt mayor emerging from a nasty court appearance, so I was braced for the possibility that it would make these potential interviewees scatter like the rats in Ratatouille when the old woman first discovers them in her roof. In fact, that only happened once – a guy yelled ‘Fem-inist!’ and pushed his friends away. But more often, these men gave me a surprising amount of their souls in exchange for the chance to be on air. ‘I love this!’ one told me. ‘I love being interviewed!’

I was surprised, too, by how not-insane they seemed. I had met these men because of their lewd or loud impositions but once we started speaking they were often funny, gentle and easy to talk to. Like Sebastian, the strip club enticer, who grew strangely fatherly as the nights wore on: one night I interviewed four very drunk men who took issue with the project and stood around me in a horseshoe, glaring, while I had my back to a wall, and Sebastian wandered over just close enough for his presence to be felt. Another night he saw me looking worn down and said, ‘You’re doing good work, darling.’ I’d expected more of these men to react like the glarers: ready to erupt, as though I had trespassed just by speaking. Instead the overwhelming majority did not seem unreachable, irrational or as though they were speaking a fundamentally different language to me. I was quietly optimistic about my chances of changing their minds with the power of A Rational Conversation.

But when I asked them why they catcalled women, they gave an inconsistent recitative of motivations, each one sitting uneasily with the one before it:

‘A guy just does it for attention.’

‘I’m looking for a reaction, any reaction.’

‘I’m looking to meet someone! Start a conversation, try to see if she’s into it.’

‘To be honest with you, I don’t really think a guy has “motivation”. I think it’s just pack mentality.’

Over several weeks I had dozens of conversations with catcallers and almost every one began with this strange mash of motivations. It was frustrating: you can’t change people’s minds if you can’t even work out what they think.

Eventually, thanks to the editorial skill of Neil Drumming and Ira Glass at This American Life, I learned to ask a different question: ‘Does it matter to you if she enjoys it?’ Duncan-of-the-master’s-degree nodded vigorously. His friend emerged from the bottle shop in time to ask what we were chatting about and added, ‘Oh yeah, I don’t think Duncan’s hustling at women in a disrespectful way.’

A different night, I met the best man on a bucks’ night, and when I asked him the same question, he said, ‘A hundred per cent! It’s like teasing, they love it.’ He told me he’d ordered hi-vis vests and hard hats for the party so his mates could ‘dress up like misogynistic arseholes for the night’, but his friends had announced, ‘We’re not wearing that shit.’ (It’s worth mentioning that many construction companies around the world have immediate and severe penalties for workers who engage in street harassment, but stereotypes die slow.) Despite not ‘dressing up’ as a misogynist, the groom-to-be still hobbled over wearing an inflatable ball and chain on his ankle to ask if I’d come out with them. He did a helpful mime of a blow job on the microphone so I got the point.

‘See, it’s funny!’ said his best man, doubled over laughing.

When I asked Sebastian the same question, he was emphatic: ‘It’s nice! It’s nice when a man says hello!’ He flashed a kind of ‘Certified Non-Sexist’ badge to prove he wouldn’t do it if he didn’t think women liked it. ‘If I see anyone around here hitting a girl or anything like that, I stop him,’ he said. ‘I protect women. I’m a gentleman.’

In my regimented brain the strategy was simple: find out what made these men believe that women enjoy being catcalled, and replace it with me saying: ‘We don’t.’

First: what evidence did they have? Most of them cited the reaction they got from the women they spoke to or touched or whistled at. Actually Sebastian just said that women ‘have to love it!’, as though it was a determined metaphysical truth revealed by the laws of nature, but most of them went with the reaction thing.

Nowhere was the belief ‘smiling is evidence’ more strongly held than in the minds of two friends named Zac and Mike, who I met walking past a burrito place – no, not the same one, and yes, I ate a lot of burritos on this story. As the pair of them crossed the alleyway diagonally in front of me Zac shouted something out about lips and kisses. When I went over to talk to him, he noticed the fluffy windshield I had on my microphone to stop some of the whoop-whoop-whoop wind noise you get recording in narrow alleys between tall buildings. ‘This wouldn’t by any chance be symbolising anything about you, would it?’ he grinned. ‘Not saying there’s anything wrong with that! I’m down for a ticklish encounter, but I would prefer skin to skin. If you were asking.’

‘Alright – come here, come here,’ I said. ‘We just met. And you just yelled something out at me. And I’m walking around trying to find out why guys do that. So what was it? What were you hoping for?’

Mike spoke first.

‘To catch the lady’s attention! I could have just walked past you and thought, “Oh, there she goes. She looks gorgeous, but I’m never gonna see her again.” But you throw a chance out there in the water and you might get a bite.’

Zac did a little fishing-rod pantomime and an alarmingly good impression of the reel-’em-in noise. He agreed with Mike. They had a sort of double-act rhythm worked out where a single thought or joke would volley between them so that you had to look at Zac and then Mike and then Zac again to get its whole delivery, as though you were watching a ping-pong match.

‘Just you coming and talking to us right now, that’s a win!’ Zac said. ‘You’re not looking away, walking the other way – you’re engaged with my presence, with my mate, and it’s all come from me shouting shit at you! I want her to get enjoyment out of what I yell at her. In no way do I want her to feel insecure or uncomfortable. I’m never gonna say anything rude or abusive. I’m yelling complimenting shit – I want the girl to think she’s important for the night. Even though it might just be two seconds, at least someone’s acknowledging that she looks good.’

‘So you think that girls like it?’ I asked, trying to be as explicit as possible about the thing I knew I’d need to disprove.

‘One hundred per cent,’ Zac agreed.

‘What percentage of the time do girls come over, or say they really liked it?’ I asked.

‘I’d say you’re the one per cent, so I’d say about ninety-nine per cent don’t,’ Zac admitted.

‘So [then] why do you think girls like it?’

‘Because of the smirk, and the smile on the face … I’ve done ruder things, like I’ve gone along to groups of girls on the street and smacked one of their arses. I slap the arse of one girl and all the rest are fixated on, like, “Oh my god, why was her arse slapped?” And she, in front of all her friends, she feels like, “Oh my god, my arse was slapped by a complete random!” It’s the singling out. It doesn’t actually matter if it’s the hottest arse in the group …’

‘What did the last girl you did that to do?’

‘She pulled her thigh and butt cheek away, like “Ahhh!” and then all her friends were like –’

Mike demonstrated what all her friends had been like with an impression of a girlish giggle-laugh.

‘Exactly!’ said Zac, gesturing at the space Mike had giggled into with a magician-like sweep of his open palm. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong,’ he concluded. ‘I’m complimenting a girl’s arse in public.’

‘You think that smacking a girl’s arse in public isn’t doing anything wrong?’ I said, almost laughing too.

‘No. I judge it, I judge the situation, whether an arse slap would be … complimenting or not.’

‘Okay. And am I the first person who’s ever come over to you?’

‘Yes! You are!’ Zac said. ‘You’re the first that’s actually come over and gone, “Hey, I have appreciated your comment.” ’

Mike stifled a laugh with his fist. ‘She didn’t even say that.’

‘Oh yeah.’ Zac turned to him, laughing back. ‘She didn’t even say that, hey.’

Zac and Mike told me more stories about how girls reacted, every story accompanied by an impression of a sort of prom-night shriek that sounded exactly like Fran Drescher’s big-hair-big-attitude character in The Nanny.

‘Oi, you know what he does,’ Mike said, nodding in Zac’s direction. ‘We’ll be out, and if there’s a group of girls he’ll go up to them, right, and he’ll say, “My mate thinks I can’t pick you up.” And then he picks them up! And throws them over his shoulder and spins them around. And they’re always like –’

He made a drawn-out eeeee sound, like the noise a rapidly deflating balloon would make if it saw a cute puppy, and flapped his hands around in that drying-my-freshly-painted-nails type motion. ‘They love it!’ he said triumphantly.

As evidence goes, this should have been easy enough to discredit. You know and I know that there is a fair amount of inferential space between ‘I see women smiling’ and ‘I’m sure they’re enjoying themselves’ because women often smile and laugh out of nervousness, or fear, or even just as a way to get out of a social situation with as little friction as possible. I said this to Zac and Mike: that the smiles and laughs might in fact be evidence that women are uncomfortable.

‘I actually kind of feel a little bit bad now,’ said Zac. ‘Not heaps, but a little bit. That’s a sad thing that exists in our society, isn’t it, that an arse slap cannot just be taken as a compliment. Which isn’t the way that it should be, but I can understand that it happens. But I’m not going to say that I’m going to stop slapping arses.’

‘Why aren’t you going to stop doing it?’

‘Because when I do it, it’s in the friendliest way possible. I’m all smiles, they’re all smiles, and it’s kind of like this celebration that we all share. I’m having a mad night, they didn’t know that they were having a mad night, but now’ – he windmilled his hand down in a slapping motion – ‘tunk! They are.’

‘But that’s what I’m saying to you … you have no way of knowing whether the smiles and the laughs are genuine, or whether they’re –’

‘Aw, boohoo,’ interjected Mike. ‘He didn’t slap your arse and then grab your wrist and try to take you around the corner – he slapped your arse and then [it’s done]. It’s like you step out on a kerb and you see a car and you go, “Oh shit, I’m scared” but then you step back and it’s all fine again.’

‘But if you’re the reason that someone has that moment of feeling scared, why do you think that’s an okay thing to make people feel?’

‘But what should we do, honey?’ Mike said, sounding genuinely confused.

‘People can’t base their lives on this small percentage shit!’ said Zac. ‘Yeah, a bunch of cunts do the wrong thing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. The majority of people want to do what we’re doing, have fun, slap arses, say things across the road, and it goes no further.’

I tried again. It isn’t about what they’re trying to do, I suggest; it’s about how they come across.

‘But you can’t speak for all girls!’ Mike protested.

‘This is all subjective,’ Zac added. ‘I’m sorry that what I said may have brought around those feelings, but it’s individual. It’s an opinionated view of men screaming at them. Okay, you don’t like it – I’m not saying everyone likes it – but I’ve seen the reaction in a lot of girls and it’s a short moment of, like, “Ha ha!” It’s just a boost of confidence.’

‘Every girl has a different level of sensitivity, and I’m feeling from you that your sensitivity is way high,’ Mike said to me. ‘Every girl’s different, so we might have said something that offended you. Let’s move on.’

I got the same reaction from other men when I told them that the smiles and laughs they saw might not be proof that women enjoy it.

‘Nah, nah, I’m not frightening anyone, with a face like this? Naaahhh,’ said Sebastian.

‘No, no, they love it,’ said the bucks’ night best man. ‘You have to see it.’

I have to see it? I’ve done it. I feign amusement or attraction or wide-eyed admiration all the time in the company of men I don’t trust. An unseen something sits down at my cognitive controls and drives my voice up two octaves and winches my smile an inch too wide. But somehow these men didn’t seem to register that I was a woman, and that I therefore had better knowledge than they did about the sort of person we were trading hypotheses about. Instead they disagreed with me as though they were speaking from a comparably good vantage point, like we were all scientists peering down at these mute, female creatures. When Simone de Beauvoir wrote her seminal work The Second Sex, she spent considerable time dissecting the myth that women are mysterious and hard to read (which came as a surprise to her publisher in the US, who had picked up her work expecting a zoological treatise on sex). The feminine mystery ‘permits an easy explanation of all that appears inexplicable,’ she wrote. ‘[The] man who “does not understand” a woman is happy to substitute an objective resistance for a subjective deficiency of mind.’ I like to think de Beauvoir would have laughed at these conversations, the photonegative of the phenomenon she had in mind. These men saw no possibility that there could be something they did not understand:

But the girls laugh.

Those laughs are designed to mislead you.

No, trust me, they’re not.

It was as though everybody in The Truman Show had finally revealed to Truman that his whole world was a TV production set and instead of taking this as new information he calmly told the set designer they were wrong. What? thinks the set designer. I helped design it. How can you know better than I do whether it’s real or not?

I should have tried yelling ‘I AM A WOMAN,’ but if I’d done that they would have just told me what they told me anyway, over and over again: ‘You can’t speak for all girls.’ And besides, then I’d have been in trouble for yelling.

I spoke to Zac and Mike for close to an hour that night. For nearly half that time we stayed stuck on the question of whether girls liked being catcalled.

‘But you can’t speak for all girls! You can’t – it’s not …’ Mike said, over and over, as confused by our impasse as I was. Then they had to go; they had a gig to get to.

‘You have made me more aware of the ways girls think,’ said Zac, ‘and I completely understand that. But it’s not gonna make me change anything.’

We exchanged numbers in the alleyway and as Zac typed mine in he sang, almost to himself, ‘Elea-nor, Elea-nor, do not ignore, Elea-nor.’

‘Is there anything I could say to make you change your mind about yelling this stuff at girls?’ I tried, before I let them go.

‘You could say you’ll spend the night with us,’ said Mike.

There is widespread confidence that the best way to defeat noxious arguments is to face them head-on and prove them false, ideally in front of an audience. That confidence was there in seventeenth-century England when parliament’s licensing restrictions meant only certain works could be printed and John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, argued against those restrictions in part by saying that defenders of truth should welcome the chance to hear and refute rival views: ‘Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’ That confidence was there when John Stuart Mill wrote two centuries later in his treatise On Liberty (1859) that interpersonal argument was a crucial part of our progress towards truth:

[Man] is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion … Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.

These are the founders of the free speech tradition from whom we inherit many of our ideas about discourse and debate, so it’s little wonder that the same confidence in discussion was there in 2017 when the New York Times responded to reader criticism of its profile of a white nationalist by saying, ‘What we think is indisputable … is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them,’ or that it was there when Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far right front, gave a heavily protested speech at the Oxford Union, and students responded to protestors by saying, ‘We need to listen to her … We should engage with her on a rational level and ask her some intelligent questions.’ That confidence was also there in 2009 when the BBC’s Question Time booked an appearance by Nick Griffin, then-leader of the far right British National Party, and the prime minister at the time Gordon Brown said ‘It will be a good opportunity to expose what [the BNP] are about … anybody who listens to what they are really about will find that what they are saying is unacceptable,’ and it was there in 2014 when the co-founder of Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas scheduled Uthman Badar’s talk ‘Honour killings are morally justified’, and responded to protests by arguing that ‘dangerous ideas are best exposed to the light of reason and discernment’. The Festival, the co-founder said, aimed to allow people to ‘calibrate their own thoughts about the issues that they encounter, knowing better the character of the dangerous idea that they hope to defeat’. The thread of philosophical thought is clear: the rigorous clash of argument will bring us closer to the truth.

But the promise that debates defeat falsehoods will be in trouble if it turns out that words do not work the same way for everyone. What use is all that legislative protection of your right to speak if, when you do speak, you’re not even heard? Words are not just vessels for ideas to enter the colosseum of argument. Words are attached to people, and some people arrive in debates pre-flattened by their opponents’ expectations such that they are mistrusted before they have even spoken, or assumed unintelligent before they have made their case. What chance does rational debate have to defeat falsehoods if it is possible for the people with the right idea to mount their argument perfectly well but then, as they turn to see their words appear on the Debate Scoreboard, find that their words have simply disappeared?

The truth is that if our policy makers and public intellectuals paid half as much attention to contemporary philosophy as they do to the philosophy of 300-year-old Bewigged Gentlemen, they would know that this phenomenon isn’t just possible but common, and that it is woodrot to the foundations of rational debate.

Philosophy professor Miranda Fricker noticed this phenomenon in a recent work on what she calls ‘testimonial injustice’, which is a professorial way of saying ‘the bullshit when people dismiss your words for no good reason’. Fricker is a British philosopher who spent years working in ethics, feminist philosophy and the study of knowledge, before combining them all into her foundational work ‘renegotiating the border’ between these usually separate sub-disciplines. She does this by asking how we get knowledge from each other, and what injustices might live in the cases where we don’t. Fricker argues that people suffer an injustice when ‘receiving deflated credibility from [their] hearer owing to identity prejudice on the hearer’s part’, as when defendants of colour are dismissed by police because of their race, or when women’s reports about how much pain they are in are dismissed because of their gender, or when a speaker with an accent is taken less seriously because of what their accent implies about their regional background, class and education. These prejudices, Fricker argues, ‘will tend surreptitiously to inflate or deflate the credibility afforded the speaker, and sometimes this will be sufficient to cross the thresh-old for belief or acceptance so that the hearer’s prejudice causes him to miss out on a piece of knowledge’.

We know these patterns from life, and from fiction as well: Fricker turns the lens of testimonial injustice onto the trial at the end of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, in which white woman Mayella Ewell has falsely accused African-American man Tom Robinson of rape. To put it mildly, it was not the strength of Ewell’s story that persuaded the jury. It was the way Robinson’s words arrived in that court-room pre-flattened and discredited by his race before he had even spoken. In other words, there was a ‘credibility differential’ at work here. In his work on resisting these sorts of injustices, philosopher José Medina develops the point, arguing that the problem is not just explained by Tom Robinson’s lack of credibility but Mayella Ewell’s surfeit: such credibility differentials were ‘already in place even before the defendant and his accuser walked into the witness stand … In fact, I would say that in the trial proceedings of To Kill a Mockingbird, there was an entire hierarchy of credibility presumptions at play.’ Medina, by the way, is a tenured professor at Northwestern University and formerly International Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at Carlos III University, Madrid, but before he was quite so recognisable on the Northwestern campus, students arriving early in his lecture rooms would sometimes see him and mistake him for a janitor. An entire hierarchy of credibility presumptions was already at play.

It should not be surprising that our credibility allocations might disadvantage the people we always disadvantage – people who are too dark, or too feminine, or who don’t seem like they’re from around here – and indeed it isn’t surprising, not if you’re used to having your word dismissed by strangers, doctors, law enforcement officers or any of the other people you have to answer to. But somehow it manages to surprise our ideal of rational debate that some words, like some speakers, are created less powerful than others. Speakers not thought to be sufficiently credible can enter a debate and advance a point, but find their interlocutors react as though they had not spoken at all:

I have good evidence that women like it.

There’s reason to doubt that evidence.

No, I have evidence that women like it.

Or, stranger than just disappearing, words can warp. One of the consequences of thinking your inter-locutor isn’t able to give you information is that you have to bend yourself in cognitive loops to find a different story about what they’re trying to do with their words. Instead of thinking that they’re making a point, you reach for explanations that seem more plausible to you, and react to that thing instead. The problem when that happens isn’t that the words go missing, but that they get bent into something totally unrecognisable to the person who spoke them and then that twisted new creation goes on the Debate Scoreboard instead of what they meant to say. One night, in a fluorescentlit doorway outside a hostel ominously advertising ‘real beds’, I met Brian, who didn’t technically catcall me but asked what I was up to when he saw me recording some other guys. He told me he yelled out at women now and then, and I did the usual spiel. He protested: ‘I’m not like that!’

I tried again. ‘I’m sure you’re a good guy, but we can’t tell from the outside who’s a good guy and who we should be scared of.’

He frowned kind of paternally and said, ‘Not being very nice now, are you?’, as though the only way to parse what I was saying was as a personal accusation.

It took me a long time to see this pattern, but I think a similar thing happened when Mike told me my level of sensitivity was ‘way high’. I said women sometimes smile out of fear, but since he genuinely did not think I was in a position to know that, he had to come up with a different explanation for what I was trying to do by speaking, and against a host of background commitments about what women are likely to do, his brain threw up the answer: ‘Being emotional!’ If I wasn’t reporting what I knew, I must be reporting how I felt.

But I hadn’t said I was sensitive. I hadn’t said I was insecure. I’m conscious that because I’m retelling this on the page, Mike’s remark might have made you think that I was talking to these boys tremulously, through mascara-streaked tears, reciting My Feelings On Violence Against Women. I’m conscious that even here, in my own damn book, Mike’s account of how emotional I was might be more believable than mine. So it might help to know that the reason I didn’t say I was emotional was that I genuinely wasn’t. Catcalling can be a bummer, but in the scheme of the universe I find it hard to feel much more than an internal eye-roll about it, a sort of bemused flatlining. I even felt like it was prudish and a little unkind of me not to laugh when Zac made his pubic hair joke about the fluffy windshield on my microphone. I wasn’t emotional – I was glad for the recording.

And it might help to know that during the entirety of my conversation with Mike and Zac, I did that auto-pilot too-wide smile I talked about earlier. I didn’t mean to. I only found out that I had afterwards when I listened back to myself and heard my own jovial smile, and heard how many of Zac’s jokes I laughed at, and heard the thing I didn’t tell you about earlier: that when Mike told me that Zac picked girls up, literally, Mike demonstrated by picking me up and throwing me over his shoulder, and I laughed, sotto voce, in exactly the way you’d expect of someone who flaps their hands a lot like they just got their nails painted. I hate listening to it. That was the person whose level of sensitivity was way high: someone who laughed when they were alone with two men in an alleyway and one threw her over his shoulder. My words had warped in the common ground between us until Mike could understand them, as the worked-up reactions of a probably traumatised outlier.

I had felt an unusually sour frustration after my conversation with Zac and Mike.

Neil Drumming, producer at This American Life, suggested texting Zac to ask if he’d meet me again – during the day this time, and without Mike. Zac said he would, and we met on a weekday evening when both of us looked markedly different. Before I set out to meet him, Neil suggested I take backup: empirical research to verify what I was saying. I found surveys of women’s attitudes to things like catcalling or being touched on the street and loaded them up as screen-shots on my phone as I parked and walked over to where I knew Zac would be waiting.

‘Let’s talk about it, then,’ I said, after some of the strangest small talk I’ve ever made. ‘It’s not just me who doesn’t think it’s fun – the girls that I spoke to out here say they find it creepy. [Even] you told me that you’ve never had a woman turn around and be like, “That was great, give me your number.” I have some stats, too. Sixty-seven per cent of women think that an interaction in the street is going to escalate.’

‘Wait – sixty-seven per cent believe that it’s not gonna escalate?’

‘No, sixty-seven per cent believe that it will escalate.’

‘To, like, something bad? Fuck, that’s fucked. That’s really bad.’

‘Eighty-five per cent feel angry, seventy per cent feel nervous. It’s not just me. Most of us hate it.’

‘Well, far out. I’ve never heard any stats. I’ve kind of just gone off face value. If you’re asking me if I feel bad … yeah, I feel bad if I’ve made anyone feel anything other than complimented. I just kind of embrace the opportunity that is arising. But maybe it’s not arising, and that’s where I’ve gone wrong.’

Even now when I listen to this conversation, Zac sounds so genuinely sad that I almost can’t stand it. He wasn’t chasing punchlines like he had been in that alley. But as quickly as it appeared, the moment dissolved back into ‘you can’t speak for all girls’.

‘I’m imagining, like – a girl who’s gone out on the weekend,’ he said, back to his regular patter-pace. ‘[She] works in the nail salon – nothing but female contact all day. She’s been looking forward to the weekend, and a guy is saying that she’s good-looking! She might feel like her hair can finally come down, because she’s been appreciated by someone she doesn’t even know. Some girls might actually even yearn for it, go out on the streets, just walk around – I don’t actually know of any stories like this actually happening – but they might go around somewhere here like the Cross and not even go into any clubs, they just want to walk around and get complimented. I’m sure that happens.’

‘Why are you sure it happens?’ I asked, at this point just genuinely confused.

‘Because I know dudes would be like that.’

There was a long pause.

‘We don’t do that.’

‘But you can’t speak for all girls! You can’t speak for all girls.’

‘What I’m trying to say to you is: trust me, and my report of what it feels like, and women, and women’s reports of what it feels like, rather than your imagining of what you think it might feel like. I’m giving you the evidence that it doesn’t feel like that.’

‘It is – it’s a very obnoxious thing to do, to just yell out, but that’s just the way that dudes are, unfortunately.’

‘Is it the way that you are?’

‘No, no.’

After another hour of conversation, I got him to agree that he would stop slapping arses. We shook hands on it. ‘But compliments, I think I’m still gonna do,’ he said.

I’m still not totally sure whether he said it just so I’d leave him alone. I’d taken up a lot of his time. If you want to work out whether he meant it, you can hear his arse-slapping promise and almost all of that second conversation online at the This American Life website.

When I headed out to speak to Zac the second time, I knew I needed to stop my words from disappearing. I hadn’t realised what I know now: that the whole problem when your words go missing is that it’s very difficult to argue them back to life. What can you use to do that? More words?

At the time this was all just very confusing. I’d tried to say something about the limits of the evidence but all my interlocutors had seemed to hear was a kind of weepy charge that they, personally, were rapists. My brain was too scrambled from cascading loss of faith in our model of rational persuasion and too many late nights spent pacing Kings Cross to diagnose what had happened. But months after This American Life aired the complete piece – featuring my conversations with Zac alone, Zac and Mike together, and a handful of the other men – I found myself standing in a bookstore near my home in Princeton leafing through a copy of Kate Manne’s book on misogyny, aptly titled Down Girl, when I was surprised to see my own name in a footnote. Manne, an Australian feminist philosopher, academic and columnist, wrote that those interviews with catcallers were evidence of ‘the phenomenon of men’s rewriting women’s minds, notwithstanding their explicit stated feelings and preferences’. Reading that, I felt like I finally understood what had happened. Words do not work in the same way for everyone. And when words are the currency of rational debate, rational debate does not work the same way for everyone either.

Look at the way the act of ‘rational debate’ seems a lot less fun for some people than it does for others. If some people’s words routinely go missing, or get bent into shapes that better match certain stereotypes, then you might predict that those people would find less joy in recreational sword-clashing than people for whom words work the way they’re meant to. Sure enough, our current climate seems to have birthed a strange sort of creature who finds the act of ‘rational debate’ fun for its own sake. Take US conservative media figure Glenn Beck, who has turned guns-and-free-speech-style conservatism into a personal brand worth $250 million by monetising everything from fan meet-and-greets to a children’s book about the true meaning of Christmas. Beck has used his radio program to compare Jews to ‘radical Islamists’ and to call climate scientists ‘Gore-worshipping psychos’. He also told Forbes Magazine he couldn’t give ‘a flying crap about the political process’, and has said, ‘if you take what I say as gospel, you’re an idiot’. Or take Rush Limbaugh, who has amassed a net worth considerably more than Beyoncé’s by spending forty years at the helm of a US radio program that serves decibels and far-right views by the dozen, who once said on air that women who wanted health insurance for contraception should make their sex tapes available to the public in return. Limbaugh told Today that most of what he did was ‘to satisfy the audience so they come back the next day … I know how to yank [the media’s] chain. I know how to make them spend the next two days talking about me.’

It feels like an ad hominem argument to point out that this debate-for-its-own-sake sort of person tends to be white and male, but perhaps I shouldn’t let that stop me, since they don’t seem to think it’s comparably underhanded to describe women as ‘women’, or Muslims as ‘Muslims’, and so on. It can’t be that describing people by race and gender is just a neutral description of the facts until the label reads ‘white man’, at which point it’s rude and irrelevant. In any event, we live now in an era of stunt-pilotry ‘rational debate’ as a hobby for people whose words have never betrayed them, people who do not intimately know the frustration of their words being misheard, mistrusted or altered by their audiences. When words reliably do what you want them to, why wouldn’t you take them for a spin? The very act of debate, like the act of speaking, is more fun for some people than for others.

And rational debate isn’t the only casualty of the discovery that words do not work the same way for everyone. At the serious end of the spectrum, losing control over your words means losing control over what you can do, because words are not just ways of imparting the truth; they are ways of exercising our authority as people. It was 1955 when British philosopher JL Austin delivered his lectures How to Do Things With Words to audiences at Harvard and observed that language does far more than simply describe the world: it also allows us to do things like make promises, get married, give orders and so on.

It was even later still when Rae Langton, now a Cambridge University philosophy professor, noted that not being able to use words the way everyone else can amounts to not being able to perform the same actions that everyone else can. I vividly remember the first time I encountered that point in Langton’s paper ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’. It was as though someone had struck a bell in my head: governments can subjugate people, Langton explained, simply by making sure certain people’s words do not function in the same way as other people’s. A black South African living under apartheid could have done all the right things for the speech act of voting, but the government’s rule would have disabled that power simply by legislating such that those words, from those people, did not ‘count’ as votes. Before Australia’s same-sex marriage postal survey, same-sex couples were bound by legislation that meant that their words did not work in the way that everyone else’s did. They could stand at an altar like anyone else, hold hands and say ‘I do’, but those words would not have been a marriage because the rules said that those words, from those people, did not ‘count’. And if women’s words do not always work the way they are supposed to, then neither does our capacity to authorise or prohibit how other people may treat us. Langton’s imagined case of sexual assault is as horrifying as it is plausible:

Someone … might not even recognize an attempted refusal. ‘Coming from her, I took it as consent,’ he might say. … [The woman] means what she says. She intends to refuse. She tries to refuse. But what she says misfires. Something about her, something about the role she occupies, prevents her from voicing refusal. Refusal – in that context – has become unspeakable for her.

If you doubt that this is possible, consider the much-publicised case of Luke Lazarus, the Sydney man who met eighteen-year-old Saxon Mullins in the club his father part-owned and took her outside to the alleyway that happens not to be far from where I stood speaking to Zac and Mike. When Lazarus later went on trial for rape, there was strikingly little disagreement between him and Mullins about the facts. They agree that they kissed on the dance floor. They agree that they held hands and walked away from the dance floor, and that after he opened a door to the outside alley, she said she needed to go back to her friends. They agree that he told her to put her hands on the fence. They agree that he removed her underwear, and that she did not physically stop him. They agree that he did not ask whether she wanted to have sex, that he told her to get on her hands and knees. They agree that she did not say ‘yes’, and that he had anal sex with her. What they disagree about is whether he knew he was acting against her will.

Lazarus was initially found guilty of rape, but he appealed and a mistrial was called. At retrial, he was found not guilty: the judge found that Mullins ‘in her own mind was not consenting’, but that Lazarus had ‘reasonable grounds’ for a ‘genuine belief’ that she was. A further appeal found the judge should have considered what steps Lazarus actually took to ascertain consent, but that it wasn’t worth a third trial.

Of course one hypothesis is that Lazarus could not possibly have believed Mullins was consenting, in which case Sydney broadcaster Ben Fordham was right to say this to Lazarus during a 2GB radio interview:

My impression of you, from a distance, is that you are a rich kid, you’re spoilt, you’re powerful, you’re someone who took advantage of a young eighteen-year-old girl who was drunk, who was a virgin, who didn’t want to lose her virginity by having anal sex with a stranger in an alleyway … you pushed this on her, you knew you were doing the wrong thing.

But another hypothesis is in my view no less frightening: that Lazarus is sincere. That he looked at a woman who had kissed him earlier, who then fell silent and said she needed to go back to her friends, who told him she was a virgin and said nothing while he had sex with her, and that he was able to see someone who was ‘as happy to be there as he was’. That her words and actions arrived to him so panel-beaten by his expectations of women that he looked at her and saw consent.

Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think words have the same value out of anybody’s mouth, but if you do think that, at least do what our ideal of rational debate demands and question whether you might be mistaken. Too many studies to count have established that the same action can look different depending on who does it. When women occupy exactly half the airtime of a classroom or panel discussion, the other people in the room will feel dominated and will believe that women have unfairly taken up most of the available airspace; when women and men read the same weather forecast out loud the men are far more likely to be thought of as showing ‘expertise’; when young black men try to cut the chains off a bicycle, onlookers will immediately phone the police, but when young white women do the same thing passers-by will offer to help with the boltcutter. Why wouldn’t words, too, look different depending on who says them? And if you’ve never seen that happen, might that reveal more about what you see than about what is actually happening?

We built our landscape of public debate on the premise that words were tools that anybody could use, and that the clash of ideas would help us change each other’s minds and bring us closer to the truth. But what if it turns out that discourse itself is as vulnerable to power imbalances as the problems we are trying to solve with it? Weeks of twisting, unproductive conversations with catcallers taught me to be sceptical of the idea that lays the bedrock for our ideal of persuasion: the idea that words have standardised value. If the very bedrock of our ideal is shaky, what else might we have wrong about how to rationally change our minds?