This is why you shouldn’t stare at women on the Tube (I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation)

Have men gone completely mad? First, we had the revelation that some 56 MPs are under investigation for sexual harassment. Then, we had the outrageous comments about Angela Rayner in the Mail on Sunday. Rocketing straight out after that was the allegation about a senior Tory MP, watching porn in the House of Commons. And now, an article in The Spectator, by a man confessing that he went on an intentional mission, “for research” (a problematic excuse, if ever there was one) to stare at women he didn’t know on the Tube.

The prompt for this great frontline journalism experiment? A new campaign by Transport for London to combat what it calls “intrusive staring”. You may have seen the posters warning that “intrusive staring is a form of sexual harassment and will not be tolerated”. You may have heard the headlines about a man sentenced to 22 weeks in prison for refusing to stop staring at a woman on a train in Berkshire. Or, if you’re a woman reading this, you’ll know exactly what it means. Nobody needs to mansplain “intrusive staring” to us.

We’re not talking about a bashful glance or a flirty eye-flicker here; we’re not talking about a shy smile or exchanging a couple of words about the weather. Don’t do women a disservice by assuming we’re incandescent harpies waiting to flay any man who looks in our direction, please.

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We’re talking about those guys, and we all know them: the ones who make eye contact and don’t (won’t) break it, no matter how far it strays out of the socially-acceptable strata of intrusion into someone’s personal space. The guy whose gaze lingers on your breasts, or at your hem-line; the one who stares at your legs like he’s watching cabaret; the guy who nudges his mates or makes an asinine comment that’s probably something like, “smile, it might never happen”. It’s not that these guys don’t get social nuances, not all of them. The ones who do it intentionally and repeatedly, the ones who do it brazenly and unapologetically know their staring makes you uncomfortable. That’s exactly why they do it.

I can understand, to some extent, the crusade of certain sections of the right-wing press to combat what they see as a crackdown on civil liberties – can almost hear, already, the defence of, “you can’t even look at a woman, anymore!”; just as we heard the wilful obfuscation of “you can’t even ask a woman out, now” in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

If I really squint, I can appreciate that to certain men, women being “woke” is frustrating, because we’re getting a bit lairy, now, aren’t we? It’s the straw man argument of feminism gone “too far”. Well, women are “woke” because we are fed up: we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more. Sorry about that. And the irony is, this has absolutely nothing to do with being “woke”, anyway. It’s to do with not being a sleaze on the Tube.

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The idea that women don’t experience discomfort when we are stared at insistently by a stranger on public transport – and according to the latest data available, between 2019 and 2020 there were 1,884 sexual offences reported on London’s transport network, the vast majority of which occurred on the Tube – is a fallacy so outrageous that it’s hard not to laugh. But, then, us women are good at that.

Just yesterday, I wrote about the ridiculousness of the argument that Angela Rayner must have been “okay” with comments comparing her outfit and behaviour at PMQs to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, because she “laughed it off” in a podcast – something that fails to take into account any understanding of the way women navigate the world of men.

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It fails to recognise that we laugh along because we don’t have a choice; we laugh along because we’ve been socially conditioned our entire lives to be “nice” and “quiet” and “sweet” (compared to “brave” and “bold”, as we teach to little boys). We laugh along to keep the peace, because we’re frightened, because we don’t want to make things awkward, because we don’t want to escalate a situation and put ourselves in danger. So, too, with being stared at.

For a man to write a piece, however virtuously or well-intentioned, intentionally rebranding himself as some kind of Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo-journalism hero out in the field to see whether or not women are intimidated with a self-confessed “pervy stare”, isn’t, actually, doing anyone a favour at all, is it?

It’s making yourself part of the problem. It’s wrong. It’s creepy. Particularly when you openly admit that you “look at attractive women on public transport regularly – and sometimes a look probably lingers a bit too long”. Way to “out” yourself to the BTP.

And for all the women who didn’t look up while he was conducting this grand social experiment because they were “too busy staring at their phones”, well I’ve got some insider info: that’s precisely what women do when we feel uncomfortable and want to avoid the weird starey man on the Tube.

But then, you’d know that, if you weren’t so wilfully distracted by the “gravitational pull” of our faces.