Gentlemen, you can go grab yourself a cup of coffee or skip on to some other post. I need to have a chat with some of my fellow Nashville feminists. Last week, I wrote a post about how our beloved downtown library is suffering under heavy use for which it was not designed and how the behavior of the homeless men who congregate on the third floor is unsettling and off-putting. This concerns me a great deal because I need to use the downtown library — again, a place I love — and I’d like to feel safe or at least safe-adjacent when I’m there.
Most of the criticism of this post that made its way to me came from women, most of whom self-identify as feminists, who felt I was being mean or classist or that I was flaunting my privilege by, I don’t know, expecting to be able to use the library without fear and to pee in said library without worrying whether my tetanus shot is up to date.
I concede that I am an old fart and it is the job of many young feminists to see what old fart feminists are up to and find it not good enough.
But there is a really classist thing going on here and it’s not me. Homelessness is not an inherent character trait. It’s not a belief system or an ethnicity. It’s just a terrible thing that happens to people when life kicks them in the teeth. The suffering that comes with homelessness doesn’t make people virtuous. It just makes them people in a tough situation.
If you walked up to the third floor of the library and saw three men in business suits dart out of the reading room, look at you and two dart back in while the third stood in the doorway seeming to be trying to deter you from choosing to enter the reading room, you would trust your gut when your gut said, “Hmm, Nashville feminist self, those men seem to be up to something hinky they don’t want you to see. Perhaps you have other things to do rather than go into the reading room, don’t you think? You can always come back some other time.”
Even if you were like, “Fuck it. I can go in the reading room if I want,” you wouldn’t blame any other woman for choosing to trust her gut.
All kinds of men are homeless. Good and bad men. Men with mental illnesses and or substance abuse problems. Men just like all other men. I mean, please, the fact that the children’s area is now glassed in and adults without children aren’t allowed to go to the bathroom on the second floor tells you that the library knows all their patrons aren’t going to be good people.
The lectures you give about rape culture and about how women can’t miraculously tell who might be a rapist just by looking don’t cease to be applicable just because the men in question are homeless. I mean, my God, if men could be ripened into dependable non-rapists through the process of losing a place to live, don’t you think we would have kicked all dudes out of the house 4,000 years ago and developed some kind of ritual kicking-out ceremony that lasted down to today?
When you have one set of standards for acceptable behavior of “regular” men and another set of standards for acceptable behavior of homeless men, you’re being a jerk to homeless men. And the idea that they can’t help but behave in ways that make women uncomfortable is condescending as fuck. It’s not compassionate. It’s patronizing. It is, in fact, classist.
And here’s the real rub, the thing that moves me from eye-rolling at you to anger: If men at the library are going to behave like oafs, it makes it very hard for women to go there. As feminists, we should be alarmed that there’s any public place that our tax dollars also go toward, that is ostensibly for the use of everyone that is unavailable for unescorted women to feel safe using.
There’s no “oh, well, if it’s you making women feel unsafe at the library, we’ll just funnel women to other library branches” exception to the feminist belief that women should be able to fully participate in public, civic life in whatever location we want. There’s no “Well, Betsy should have been nicer about how she wrote about her experience and her alarm” exception to believing other women when we tell you about our experiences. Women don’t have to strike the right tone to deserve to have our concerns addressed. We don’t have to earn the right to a public life through good behavior.
That’s basic feminism: Women should be able to fully participate in civic life without men keeping us from it. Making excuses for the men who stand in the way of that is, indeed, a common female pastime, but it’s not a feminist one.
