Necessity is the mother of invention and the latest horrifying example is the “subway shirt”. This is a baggy top that women temporarily put on over their summer outfits when on public transport to avoid being harassed while travelling. The majority of UK women (55 per cent) have been victims of unwanted sexual behaviour on public transport, according to a 2020 YouGov study, with the most common incident being a stranger deliberately pressing against them. Reports have suggested this has only got worse since the pandemic.
Until 48 hours ago, I had never heard of a subway shirt but within five seconds of finding it on TikTok, it made total sense. To be clear, clothes do not cause or justify rape. Just as a lack of clothes is never an invitation, a winter coat is not a suit of armour. Women are sexually assaulted because of male power, male entitlement and a desire for control, it’s as simple as that. But in a society often unwilling to have that conversation; when we still insist on placing responsibility on women’s shoulders – women are forced to get inventive.
For example, women know why other women carry their keys between their knuckles or why they walk down the middle of a dark road instead of on the pavement near the hedges. Women are taught early – and repeatedly – to exist within impossibly bleak contradictions. They know that their clothing or how they carry their keys have no real way of stopping them becoming a victim – but they are forced to consider them anyway.
How could we not? The messages about personal responsibility are constantly reinforced. By society, by men, by the legal system, by our culture. This is particularly true when it comes to the clothing we choose to wear. In a 2019 survey conducted for The Independent, 55 per cent of men still believed that the more revealing a woman’s clothing the more “likely it is that she will be harassed or assaulted”.
Clothing is used as a get-out-of-jail card in the legal system: in March 2008, at the trial of a 24-year-old man in Perth, Scotland, who was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl, his lawyer told the court: “I don’t think it is fair to say this was a very vulnerable person… the complainer was wearing shorts, black boots and a white top. She was trying to dress older than her years. She behaved as if she was over 16”.
More recently, in 2018, a lawyer in Cork, Ireland – tasked with defending a man accused of rape – said of the 17-year-old complainant: “You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.” The defendant was unanimously acquitted following jury deliberations lasting 90 minutes. The same year, at a high-profile trial in Belfast of Ireland rugby players, the victim’s bloody thong was passed around the courtroom. The accused also walked free but there were widespread protests bearing the slogan #ThisIsNotConsent.
These examples echo the horrifying outcome of a 2001 trial in Ayrshire, Scotland, when victim Lindsay Armstrong, 17 (she was 16 at the time of the attack), was asked in court to hold up the knickers she was wearing when she was raped. She was then asked to read out loud what was written on them, two words: “Little Devil”. Although the person who raped her was convicted, Lindsay died by suicide three weeks later. Her parents said nearly 20 years later that the Irish examples showed little had changed.
Indeed, just as Adam said to God, Eve tempted me, the legal system has shown us that men can claim diminished responsibility for abhorrent and illegal behaviour because of how a woman is dressed. But, because women can never win, they can also be considered “unrapeable” in certain types of clothing too.
In 1999, the Italian Supreme Court ruled that a woman wearing jeans could not be raped: a driving instructor had his conviction overturned because the court agreed that his 18-year-old pupil must have agreed to sex because he could not have removed her jeans alone. A decade later, in 2010, a man in Australia was also acquitted of rape on the same premise that the woman would have needed to help him remove her skinny jeans. If short skirts mean you asking for it, we are simultaneously told that wearing jeans means you are unrapeable.
In this perverse bind that women find themselves in, it makes sense that women grasp for comfort blankets like a subway shirt, knowing that society expects them to “exercise personal responsibility” for something that is entirely outside their control (and knowing the narrative if they fail to do so; “WHY did she walk there/wear that/get that drunk?”).
The women who choose to forgo a subway shirt this summer – saying, fuck that, and wearing the miniskirt and the bikini top and the high heels – are not doing anything wrong, or inviting any degree of harassment. Dressing how you would like to dress should not be a risk to your personal safety, just as wearing a cover-up is no admission of any personal responsibility. Women on both sides are simply trying to get by in a violent society that is always pointing the finger of blame in their direction, rather than at those really responsible – men.
