Originally Posted by sbhikes
You do pick up on something the others completely miss.
However, trying to measure the severity of the harassment, or rank it on a scale from bad to worse to deadly is missing the point entirely. Harassment is a common occurrence out there for cyclists of all genders, and for some cyclists of either genders, one instance is often one too many.
The simple fact of the matter is you get less harassment when you are not in the way. But as many of you say, staying out of the way reinforces the belief that you belong out of the way. How are cycling advocates going to address this issue in a meaningful way?
This issue seems to be a major hole in the VC mindset because the VCers say that it's your problem if you let threats to your personal safety bother you. This is unacceptable to most people. It's probably one of the reasons that VC hasn't caught on.
No, the major reason it hasn't caught on is most cyclists think it's too scary or odd to even try it, assuming they are even aware of it. If they did try it, they would soon discover that they would be subjected much less often to the very treatment that they wish to avoid.
Edit: I did not address this point directly: "you get less harassment when you are not in the way." That's not true. The only time I ever got physically harrassed was before I read EC and so before I adopted Advanced VC practices: I was riding in a bike lane between intersections, when I got an egg thrown at me. Hit me in the leg.
Anyway, I never got much harassment in the past, but I'd say I get even less now, though by all rights I'm "in the way" much more often now. I think the key is to be able to pull off making it look like you belong there, like you're supposed to be there. And the first step to pulling that off is to believe it's true, inwardly. And, of course, it also means that you're not in the way when you're not supposed to be. So much of it is about knowing when it's appropriate and when it's not.