Slut shaming of female passengers in crowded buses in quite common, especially if the bus has a lot of riders and women who complain of sexual harassment are taken to task for wearing provocative attire.
However, inside a bus in Jinan, Shandong Province, the situation was reverse. A female passenger sexually harassed a male rider by touching the man inappropriately. Han, the bus driver, recounted that he saw the incident from his rearview mirror.
The male victim was heard shouting, “What are you doing?” Han stopped the bus and checked what was happening. The man complained of sexual harassment, so Han asked the woman if the accusation was true. But she kept quiet, so the man instead moved to a front seat and went down at the next bus stop.
However, another bus passenger witnessed the incident, recorded the scene and posted it on Weibo. What followed was female readers got even and even slut shamed the male passenger which is what happens when a woman was the victim of sexual harassment.
A sample of the comments is this: “This man must be walking around with revealing clothes on so he deserves to be touched. Why doesn’t anyone else gets touched? Next time, just wear more clothes and don’t go outside by yourself,” quoted What’s on Weibo.
Another Chinese netizen wrote, “Shameless! Skimpily dressed just to seduce women! No wonder you were harassed; be thankful that you were not raped!”
But Fu, the manager of the drivers’ team, debunked that the man seduced the woman. He said that the woman passenger is notorious and had been reported to have previously harassed other male passengers on bus lines K55, K93 and 165. Fu believes the woman is emotionally troubled.
However, some netizens explained that the slut-shaming comments were made in jest but intends to hit male chauvinist pigs who slut-shame women that complain of sexual harassment.
Ironically, one the same day, What’s on Weibo also posted an article about a drag queen who was scantily dressed while shopping in a Shenzhen supermarket. Within 48 hours of posting, the images – which showed a gay man in high-heeled boots and black bikini which showed his buttocks – was shared more than 4,000 times on Weibo. It also triggered a lot of discussion if such a kind of attire should be condemned as indecent exposure or be accepted as part of transvestism.