Mexico City highlights sexual harassment on subway with new feature: a ‘penis seat’
Mexico has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the Western Hemisphere, with 44 percent of women saying they’ve experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, per a United Nations report.
And one of the main places women, especially Mexican women, face sexual harassment in on the subway. In 2014, a survey found that of 15 world capitals, Mexico City reported the highest rates of women saying they had been groped and verbally harassed on the metro, according to the New York Times.
A new ad campaign between the city’s government and the U.N. is aimed at highlighting those issues and making men as uncomfortable as many women feel while riding the train.
It’s called the “experimento asiento,” or “seat experiment.” It involves a very anatomically correct sculpture of a man’s torso and reproductive system on a subway seat.
According to the ad campaign, nine of 10 women in Mexico City experience sexual harassment and violence while using public transit.
“It’s annoying to sit here, but doesn’t compare to the sexual violence women suffer on their daily trips,” a sign at the foot of the seat reads, per the Washington Post.
Another ad in the campaign projected men’s backsides on a screen for every person on the platform to see, per Reuters.
Videos of the experiments, released by U.N. Women, have been viewed nearly 1 million times as of Friday evening. In them, men and women are seen acting uncomfortable, some of them sitting on the seat only to jump up in surprise while others stand to avoid the seat and stare.
These efforts are just the latest effort in the Mexico City subway to protect women. In 2000, the city introduced “pink cars,” subway carriages generally at the front of the train that are restricted to women and children under the age of 10, per Al Jazeera. The move was successful enough that the city later introduced “pink” buses and taxis as well, per the Telegraph.
The metro system has also distributed whistles, and activists groups have also handed out guns that fire pink glitter, per BBC News.
However, the latest efforts have been met with criticism by some, who say it unfairly stigmatizes all men as aggressors and is pornographic, according to multiple media reports. On YouTube, the “Experimento Asiento” video has more “thumbs down” votes than “thumbs up.”
“As long as there are groups that demonize all men and are labeled sexual perverts, we will never come to the end of the conflict that already exists between genders,” one popular comment reads.
Still, the creators of the campaign say that men becoming uncomfortable by the display is exactly what they wanted.
“In order to generate change, you need to create empathy,” Yeliz Osman, a U.N. Women representative, said, according to the New York Times. “The idea is that men can get a sense of what it is all like. By creating empathy, we hope that this might change their behavior.”
This story was originally published March 31, 2017 at 6:41 PM with the headline "Mexico City highlights sexual harassment on subway with new feature: a ‘penis seat’."