Whenever a book sets out to be critical or “radical,” there must be a million people lining up to discuss why it doesn’t go far enough, how it ignores marginal groups, or how it takes on too much and dilutes its argument by trying to please everyone, etc. I admit, I’m one of them, but I’m going to try to take a different tack this time around. Instead of being critical, I’m going to try to be productive, by adding new knowledge to a topic that this book has stirred up interest in. Leslie Kern's book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World is a slim, readable summary of the ideas of feminist geography and urban planning, which seek to account for women’s needs in cities that have often been designed to cater to an idealized man. Her work has introduced a broad swathe of people to the concept of feminist geography, and it should be commended for that. She relies largely on her own experiences while trying to incorporate research from a wide range of areas, and since she does stick largely to her own experiences, she is limited to writing about cities in Canada, England, and the US.
The East Asian metropolis embodies some of the best hallmarks of the feminist city. Cities like Taipei and Tokyo have, in the past, faced sensational urban crime waves and cities like Taipei, Seoul, and Beijing have faced or are still facing tyrannical governments that instated curfews and other controls over public life. Due to this history, their provisions of safety for the woman in public cannot be explained away as “cultural” reasons. Most of the features that make them friendly toward women today are replicable. However, the wide net of surveillance that makes these places safe – with comparatively lower rates of random acts of harassment, violence, and theft – would be considered unpalatable to the American sensibility. Despite the fact that the Nordic states always top the metrics on gender equality, the fact is that the modern, woman-friendly city is not a place in Euro-America.
Although not formally states (and therefore excluded from many statistical analyses), Taiwan and Hong Kong have frequently topped the charts for gender equality. The UNDP’s 2020 chart ranked Hong Kong fourth place in women’s level of human development,[1] and Taiwan’s government used those metrics to rank itself 6th place in 2022.[2] These rankings place them as the highest in the world and the highest in Asia for gender equality. In my experiences living in an area of urban sprawl in the US and in Taipei for several years, and spending months in Tokyo and Hong Kong, I found that these places offered me a dramatically greater level of individual freedom to be out alone in the city than my home ever did. I want to address a few of her points.
Getting Around
In buses, subways, and trains in the US, the single woman will be accosted by men who try to get her IG, number, the type of men who just need to do something to a single woman because they’re worried that they’ll “miss every shot they don’t take.” It’s also a machismo thing that they perform for other men, which is why they can get angry if a woman refuses them in a way that publicly humiliates them. Rarely charming, this behavior can be annoying, and in worse case scenarios, truly threatening. It's worse for single women with children, since they aren't able to flee the scene quickly, either.
“Mostly, those who run mass transit systems have shown a willful ignorance about women’s needs. When a pregnant commuter traveling to and from work in London in 2014 was forced to sit on the floor when passengers refused her seat despite her direct request, she complained to the rail company. They suggested that if she felt unwell she could pull the emergency cord or simply avoid travel during rush hour.” (Kern 2020: 37)
But almost all of the problems Kern outlined have already been solved in Taipei. Because the first line appeared in 1999, so it doesn’t have the problems that the antique Parisian or the New York subway have; they were able to plan for more accommodations. There are elevator entrances to every station. If you have any issue on the subway, the staff at every station will listen to you and do something. There are priority seats for the elderly, pregnant, disabled, and families with kids, and those priority seats are respected. There are rooms at most of the larger subway stations called breastfeeding rooms which are quiet spots with a couch, hot water dispenser, bathroom, and changing area. The case Kern talked about in her book where no one would yield the seat to her because she didn’t look pregnant or no one cared could happen in Taipei, too, but the difference is that she would have recourse. You don’t just need to take it. A lot of social shaming is required to keep this standard, but Taipei's MRT lets you keep your dignity intact.
Perceived Dangers
“Fear restricts women’s lives. It limits our use of public spaces, shapes our choices about work and other economic opportunities, and keeps us, in what is perhaps an actual paradox, dependent on men as protectors” (Kern 2020: 147)
I’ve been guilty of using the “boyfriend as deterrent” strategy, and I’ve been harassed and felt scared in Taiwan, the same as in the US, but the difference was that I knew I could turn to authorities and even strangers to help. People didn’t just brush it off. In the US, there’s no follow through. That was one of the most refreshing things I experienced in Taiwan, the willingness for women to report and expect a reaction from authorities when they faced harassment (domestic violence is a different story, however).
I’ve walked home alone, drunk, after midnight, in several of the world’s finest cities. The experience doing this in Taipei was one of the most pleasant. In ancient times, people judged the effectiveness of a king by how safe the streets were for transport, whether merchants could transport goods between towns without getting robbed. I use similar criteria. Taipei and Tokyo were both great for this.
Going Out
“A woman dining alone feels out of place, on display, and kind of sad” (Kern 2020: 92)
What I always enjoyed when I visited and lived in Japan and Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Vietnam, was the number of shops, restaurants, cafes, events, bookstores, stationery and craft stores, and other places that were obviously meant to appeal to girls and women. There was a women’s world that existed inside of the city, and girls who went on weekend trips would be armed with magazines that showed them which places these were. I remember a trip to Tainan with three friends, visiting stationery stores, cafes, dessert shops, drink shops, restaurants, and bars that felt like they were all made to appeal to me. Owned and staffed by women and selling stuff to them, places solely made for leisure and aspiration. I never felt freer than when I was going out in Tokyo and Taipei, alone, to a place that I had heard of through a friend or online. There was no awkwardness in going out alone. There were a lot of places that even catered to that: restaurants and cafes with counter seating by a window on a high floor, so you could look out without attracting notice. That’s my city dream.
In contrast, when I came back to live in a smaller city in America, places like that were rare. Most trends still catered to men, such as the brewery fad. This is kind of over now, but there are breweries everywhere now in my hometown and every single one of them has the same masculine industrial theme because everyone knows that beer is for men. There are always filled with dudes as well. Kern argued that gentrification is feminization of the urban space, but it’s a very selective feminization. Places “that catered to a mostly male, working class clientele were gradually replaced by yoga studios, nail salons, cafes, and organic grocery stores” (Kern 2020: 103). But these expensive boutiques and pilates studios are not places to hang out and meet people, and they are places that only an elite stratum will frequent. In most of my outings in my hometown, I often feel like a minority just for being a woman. It’s not that I feel unsafe, but just out of my element constantly.
Conclusion
I found the feminist city in Taipei. Although an imperfect place, as is everywhere, it was worlds closer to the ideal discussed by Kern than any European or North American city I’ve been to. It was a place where I felt safe to walk the streets at any time of day, where I didn’t have to be on my guard all the time against men trying to get something off me or do something to me in order to increase their status with other men, and where I could find places that tried to appeal to the cute and girly side. It was easier to go places with kids and the gear you need to transport them, and there was also a widespread general understanding of women’s cycles and biological needs.
There are negatives in Taipei and Taiwan in general that don’t exist in many of those highly rated, expensive European cities. Mostly, it is due to environmental pollution, destruction, and a winner-take-all wealth inequality despite Taiwan’s status as a high-income economy. However, those highly rated European cities are unaffordable for the average woman, so what good are they to us as examples, anyway?
Taiwan is no utopia, but compared to every single other surrounding Asian county, and compared to almost every North American and European locale, the experience of being a woman is far, far better. I’ve never seen so many women in a city who wear no makeup and don’t shave their legs, and not as a social statement but merely because that’s not an expectation. It’s not “cultural” because women there fought for that not to be an expectation. It’s not like the careful, disciplined cultivation of femininity in Japan or brutal surgical enforcement of it in Korea. In Japan, women are pushed out of office work and encounter a lot of resistance in developing their career due to a long legacy of lifelong employment policies that favor a non-working spouse.
In Taiwan, I felt that women are treated as human beings first, and their gendered identity isn’t policed as heavily. This is largely the result of a continued legacy of feminist movements and a strong feminine consciousness in the public sphere (but which is absent in the media and the technology industry). It may have something to do with their pioneer spirit too, that allows hardworking women in Taiwan to continuously sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of the next generations.
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