Bystanders Reluctant to Help Woman Dressed "Provocatively"

ABC News recently ran a segment of its series "What Would You Do?" in which hidden cameras filmed customers in a restaurant to see how they'd react to an obviously battered woman being pushed around by her boyfriend. The series judges people's reactions to various staged different situations: a bike being robbed in the park, a clerk giving a blind customer the wrong change, etc.

In this case, most people moved to help the woman being harassed by her boyfriend ... unless the woman was dressed "provocatively," which in this case meant in a short black dress with straps, the kind easily seen on handfuls of college girls heading to campus parties on a Friday night. The ABC clip is horrifying — customers step into the situation in outrage when the couple is dressed conservatively, sometimes physically separating the man and the woman — but when the woman is dressed in the short black dress (the man, on the contrary, is in a suit), no one moves.

Some customers shake their heads in disgust or purposefully look away. No one comes to the woman's aid, despite the obvious cuts and bruises on her face and the man's constant physical harassment. Instead, female customers joke about the woman being a prostitute (because it's horrific when men beat conservatively dressed, "nice" women, but funny when they beat prostitutes!) and a male customer tells the man that the two are "embarrassing themselves as a couple." Yes, you women in your miniskirts, stop embarrassing us by getting harassed while we're eating!

ABC deserves props for addressing this issue and for laying bare the abhorrent prejudices and victim-blaming women face in this society. This segment reveals that beating and harassing women is only seen as wrong if the women are of a certain class and dress according to incredibly hypocritical standards of "innocence" and "purity."

Never mind that in our society the vast majority of commercials, advertisements and pop stars promote sexiness in leather, lingerie, and miniskirts, as if sexiness were the ultimate achievement and empowerment of women, and never mind that ours is a society that markets pole-dancing kits to pre-teen girls. If these girls actually follow the examples of, say, Paris Hilton lathering up a car in black lingerie, if they buy into the message of all of these images dominating our media that a-woman's-role-is-that-of-sex-object, they'd better accept that if a man slaps them around, it's their fault.

Apparently, he only thing separating sympathy from blame is a cardigan.

Photo credit: Ghetto_Guera29