Letters to the Editor
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ANY social interaction in which a man AND a good looking woman are participants CANNOT possibly fail to intoduce such a huge bias
as to render the results almost totally meaningless when generalized to a situation where this is not the case.
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men are as worried about sounding stupid as women if not more so, the point is that they have NO CHOICE but to TRY
and put themselves out if they ever want to have sex.
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pb on moms and relationships
If you want to engage women on the street, present a problem about a relationship. Not "Is Hillary Clinton a monster," but "I saw that Chelsea's been campaigning for her mom. I wonder whether she feels torn between defending her dad or backing her mom."
Ugh. This is what I mean.
Why should women be expected (or expect themselves) to only be able to offer a competent opinion about relationships? Or only interested in questions concerning motherhood, for pity's sake?
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Afraid of being misrepresented
My single experience with a "woman on the street" interview left me a bit gun shy about doing this sort of thing again.
The "lead-in" mischaracterized who I was and the way my interview was cut altered the meaning of what I had said (Fox News-fair and balanced). So, it doesn't suprise me that many women don't want to open themselves up for potential abuse, particularly on the web where people can post sometimes vile comments anonymously.
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@Amity "in relation" not "relationships"
Hmmm, maybe using the Hillary/mom example wasn't a good idea. I should say that women are more likely to answer questions about the relationships among things (people, concepts, buildings) rather than answer questinons about the things themselves.
The point was that Lindsay Campbell asks bad questions. Whether she does it intentionally or not they're the yes/no questions without any context. Many of them are opportunities to question the respondent's intelligence or awareness.
"Can I ask you a question?"
This is a red flag no matter who asks it. It's the crazy/creepy person's standard opening gambit. Try this on any street in any city. Men will slow or stop warily if at all. Women will ignore it or walk away as quickly as possible.
"Is Hillary Clinton a monster?"
The only plausible answer to this question is "Are you OK?"
"Do you understand the delegate system?"
"Are you following the election?"
There's no context for these questions, and they only serve to assess the respondent's knowledge.
"This week marks the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war. Do you have a comment on that? / You have to be American to have a comment about it?"
The respondent answer "no" and gave Cambpell a plausible explanation (a polite brushoff) for why she didn't. Campbell's response? "What, are you STUPID?"
"[inferred] What news show do you watch?"
No context.
"[services to Native Americans] should it be vetoed or should it be funded?"
This was brilliant. The respondent just didn't care! Cambpell thinks this is outrageous.
Put context around any of these (except maybe the Hillary/monster question) and you may get answers. Put the question in relation to the respondent (or almost anything else) and you may get answers.
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I hope Campbell gets sued by the people who clearly didn't want to be filmed whose film she used anyway
Also:
"Or maybe, growing up watching American television and advertising, women are just more conscious of the way their image can be exploited: concerns that are pretty well proven by the video itself. Despite these women's obvious desire not to be on camera, footage of them was cut together to make a point about their alleged inferiority."
Bingo.
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Hard to respond in the first place
OK, it is incredibly regrettable that the one woman on the street's response was "I don't care" -- but how does one answer the question, "The president wants to cut Indian Health Service. Should it be cut?" If I have a knee-jerk reaction to the terms "cuts" or "Indian," what does my opinion really contribute anyway? I hope if Lindsay were to stop me on the street with such a question, she'd indulge the questions I'd need answered (how is the money currently allocated, what are the prez's objections to its continued funding, what does he want to do with the money instead? to name a few) to be able to give her a real, informed response. I assume, tho, that she would want me to be knee-jerky and stick to the "man on the street" plan rather than turning it into "on-the-street lessons in legislative spending."
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Some thouhgts on NYC
Being a New Yorker myself, let me try to add some perspective here.
First of all, NYC is filled with people on the street that want your time, beggars and folks handing out flyers are the most common. City-dwellers tend to ignore these folks, as eye contact is an invitation to a time-wasting hassle. So I don't think that people unwilling to talk should be viewed as less outspoken; just less patient. This makes me skeptical that women are shying away based on the content of questions being asked; they had probably done their routine fight-or-flight calculation before even registering the particulars of the encounter.
Second, looking at who is likely to be on the streets of Manhattan during work hours, you're gonna see more working-class men than working-class women by far. Construction workers, street vendors, and folks unloading trucks are almost all men, and there are a lot of them. It's possible that the people who shy away aren't women so much as the middle to upper-class.
I'm not sure what ot make of all of this myself, but I'm willing to bet that the impetus of this disparity has more to do with the specifics of the city (and city life in general) than it does with a more universal female vs. male experience.
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It's the camera.
It's not the interviewer, it's not the question, it's not the street, it's the camera.
How many times have you pulled out a camera in a room full of friends, and then watched most of the women leave the room or cover their faces?
There's an obvious experiment that needs doing here and I'm sure it's already been been done. Get two interviewers, a beautiful man, a beautiful woman. Have them ask the same question, same time of day, maybe a block apart, same pedestrian flow. See who stops to talk to whom.
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Sounds like woman-blaming
I found myself more bothered by the woman-blaming tone of this piece than anything.
Yes, there probably is a statistically significant difference in the way women respond to her compared to men. But that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Many of the women she's slamming for not being opinionated enough, are in fact behaving very assertively.
Instead of trying to objectively analyze the reason women might not be prepared to stop and answer her questions, she just seems intent on whining about how they make it difficult for her to do her job.