Fines for catcalls? Now, that’s the ticket

French plan to crack down on street harassers would shift the shame to where it belongs

Catcalling, or street harassment, as it’s officially known these days, doesn’t usually find its way onto many lists of “Planet Earth’s Most Pressing Problems.”

This is probably why whenever a feminist complains in the press about some guy yelling obscenities at her on a city street, she is met with an army of eye rolls that seem to say: “Aren’t there more important causes you girls can focus your efforts on?”

To which this feminist would like to respond: no, not really. After all, what’s more important than a person’s right to a pleasant stroll down the street? Equal pay for equal work doesn’t count for much if you can’t walk to your job unmolested by leering creeps.

American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson is often credited with writing the popular inspirational quote sewn onto many a throw pillow: “Life’s a journey, not a destination.” But it’s obvious that Emerson, a man, was never a victim of catcalling.

Because when you’re a woman — i.e., when your walk to work, school or the corner store is, at some point in your life, invariably interrupted by a guy hollering, “Suck it beautiful!” out of a car window — it’s the destination, not the journey, that you celebrate.

All this is to say I wholeheartedly support French politician Marlène Schiappa’s new campaign to target street harassers and catcallers in France.

Schiappa, France’s secretary of state in charge of equality between women and men, and the youngest member of President Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet (she’s 34 years old), would like to see French authorities apprehend street harassers on the spot and issue them a steep fine. In other words, she’d like to see street harassers and catcallers — overwhelmingly men who shout at and follow women on the street — publicly shamed in a fashion similar to shoplifters and people who refuse to pick up after their dogs.

Schiappa doesn’t appear to have worked out the details of a policy targeting street harassment (for example, how it will be written so as not to infringe on free-speech rights), but the general idea behind it is a promising one: Shift the shame and embarrassment women feel when they are catcalled back onto the guys doing the catcalling.

Not only would such a policy give street harassers a dose of their own medicine, but the threat of a stiff monetary penalty might dissuade them from harassing people, even if such a penalty was rarely doled out.

With any luck, it would also help dispel the myth that street harassment is no big deal and that women need to toughen up. This is a myth I once believed myself, because I was a) insensitive and b) extremely lucky.

Most of the crude dudes I’ve stood up to in my life were pretty easy competition: teenage boys who became immediately bashful and remorseful when confronted about their inappropriate behaviour and idiots shouting from cars who disappeared in an instant (my profanity-laced retorts a distant echo in their ears).

But I’ve since come to realize that not all catcallers fit neatly into the category of all bark and no bite. Some get angry when rejected. Others follow you. Some, practically foaming at the mouth, call you a f---ing dyke after you refuse to give them your phone number outside a Pita Pit at 1 o’clock in the morning (true story).

Others follow you, egged on by a group of their rowdy peers. This latter scenario is one all too familiar to Schiappa herself. The politician told NPR recently that as a teen in Paris, she and her sister “took alternative routes” to avoid “bands of boys” prone to catcalling women on the street.

With any luck, a fine would also help dispel the myth that street harassment is no big deal and that women need to toughen up

In the end, the French leader’s proposal to crack down on street harassment in her nation may amount to nothing more than a series of debates and columns like this one.

And, no doubt, backlash from conservatives who demand to know why a feminist in a first-world country is complaining about men making lewd remarks in a jewel of a democracy like France when she could be fighting to end the far worse subjugation of women in the Middle East (that a feminist is capable of doing both of these things at the same time conveniently never seems to cross their minds).

But Schiappa’s proposal will be successful even if it changes no laws, because it will redefine street harassment in the public conversation, from an inalterable fact of urban life to a problem that can and should be corrected. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.