Street harassment
I had an “all aboard the clue boat” moment yesterday.
I was watching an Asian horror movie last night (goddamn I love me some Asian horror, except now I haven’t slept all night, fuck). At some point, a badass lady cop was about to walk home alone. Her rookie partner was all, “Don’t do that! The horror!” and she was all, “Fuck you, I’ll fuck anybody up.” (This is my no-sleep summary). As she walked down the street, I waited for the inevitable creepy guy street harassment scene, which remarkably didn’t appear. The female main character of this movie was presumably too badass, and they didn’t need such a scene to remark upon her badassery — the fact that she walked home alone was supposed to be enough, I think.
As an aside, I am really conflicted about the sheer degree of rape in Asian horror films. Every time I feel like watching a horror movie (which is often), I first have to consider whether or not I feel like watching a rape scene, because I pretty much assume that’s what’s going to happen at some point in the plot. On the one hand, goddamn am I sick of rape in every fucking movie — seriously there are other horrible things in the world, can I see a cat get tortured for a change of pace, maybe? On the other hand, it’s seems contextually valid, and in some ways I appreciate the recognition that rape is a fucking outrageous horror. And I think it reflects reality (as much as horror films can): male characters in a bad situation can be tortured or murdered or outraged in plenty of horrific ways, but female characters in a bad situation are also going to have to factor in the very high possibility of rape in the list of potential horrors.
Most of these movies involve the haunting and eventual death of the rapists (and/or those who assisted, covered for, or encouraged them) in a ghost-vengeance scenario, which I see as an admission of 1) the horror and wrongness of what they’ve done, 2) the rightness of their being brought to justice in some way, and 3) the likelihood that said justice will not be administered by a judicial system. And, in my personal viewing, I find very few of these movies portray rape sexily, as a plot device that symbolically means “horror” but is actually filmed like porn. Usually the depiction of the rape is genuinely horrific to watch, if not one of the most horrific scenes in the movie, and does not seem created to facilitate boners in any way.
I don’t really find that the movies portray very much from the victim’s point of view, though Arang was kind of a refreshing change: one survivor got a chance to deliver her saved-up “fuck you” speech to her rapist at the end (though she didn’t get to deliver it to her rapist, but to somebody who offered to be a sort of emotional stand-in for the rapist she would probably never locate). I’d even give it an honorary Bechdel — the main two female characters didn’t speak directly with each other, but they obviously communicated in some very intense ways, and their relationship was a main pillar of the plot. Anyway, while Asian horror movies are usually using female rape victims as an object — a plot device — I still feel like there’s at least enough comprehension of the reality of the situation. That is, women get raped, and it’s truly horrific, and it ruins lives, while the rapists usually go on happily without consequence (until some vicious unstoppable ghost thing shows up).
That was a long aside and not at all the point of my post.
The point of my post: the badass female cop dismisses any concern about street harassment — because she is too badass to care — and goes tromping off into the night. I thought to myself, you know, it’s been awhile since I got harassed on the street. I wonder what’s up with that? I’ve gotten lots fatter than I used to be, and I am no longer visibly identifiable as a high school student/college student/alternative girl with funky hair. But I don’t figure that matters a whole heap, as I have been harassed when dressed in full winter gear, with my long hair peeking under a cap the only thing that identified me as female. I’ve moved to a different section of town, where most of the men out on the streets during the day are walking with their wives, so maybe there just aren’t that many opportunities for the men in my neighborhood to harass me.
Then, suddenly, the clue boat came by.
When was the last time I walked home?
When was the last time I was on the bus?
When was the last time I was in a public area, alone, for a significant period of time?
I used to get harassed a lot. I also used to 1) not have a car, 2) not always have money for the bus, and 3) be dating a guy who didn’t really want to be around me all that much, so wasn’t out walking with me. I was physically unable to avoid being in public space if I wanted to move from Point A to Point B. And it’s no surprise that this is also the time in my life that corresponded to the highest level of harassment.
I had to take a moment to acknowledge — and honestly be grateful — for my privilege. I have the privilege of no longer being dependent on public transportation. I have the privilege of no longer counting on my feet as a primary form of transportation. I have the privilege of minimizing the amount of time I spend outside, in the public sphere, fending off leers, stares, insults, and aggressive come-ons bordering on violence. I considered my lifelong evolution of transportation to be sort of “natural.” Of course as a young person I didn’t have a car yet, and had to take the bus. Eventually I would get my own car and get to drive myself around. I never considered how much this would decrease the daily harassment I experienced, how much safer I would eventually feel, how much less thought I was able to give to my clothing choices. And I never considered that this is the “natural” path only for privileged people. There are many women who will never have the option of owning their own reliable form of transportation. There are many women who can never escape public harassment.
This also made me start thinking about my internal threshold for “acceptable” harassment, which has changed over time. I occasionally get comments (unpublished) about how insane I must be, thinking that the level of street harassment is so high. Obviously the commenters have had a different experience, and often I’ve wondered how. I don’t live in a “bad” city. I am in the heart of the Midwest, and while the people who live here like to think of themselves as metropolitan, when you stack us up to a big city, we look like a cowtown. And yet, as soon as I turned about twelve, I came to expect and accept a daily level of sexual harassment from strangers. I had a few scary experiences as a very young girl, with men trying to coerce me into their cars, or block my exits so I had to enter an abandoned parking ramp with them (I got out of that one by going completely unresponsive, and after a few tugs, the married old dude trying to drag me away decided it didn’t look too good for him to be yanking on the arm of a comatose-looking twelve year old girl). I had to learn, really quickly, to ignore men in public as if they didn’t exist. To respond to a single catcall — even if that response was simply just looking up to see what all the shouting was about — meant getting dragged into a battle of wills (and occasional physical grappling). I had to learn that “Hello” was more often than not the phony beginning to a catcall. And I had to accept that as normal. If I was going to leave my house, for any reason, I had to accept that this harassment was going to happen, even though I was (I thought) obviously and visibly twelve years old, even though I didn’t even make eye contact or acknowledge the presence of men. I didn’t think that kind of harassment was necessarily “okay,” but right or wrong didn’t enter into it. It just was.
When the bear started living with me, I came home from the grocery store one day and laughingly told him about the three separate times I had been harassed in the parking lot, the three separate times I had been called a bitch, slut, or whore. He was horrified. It wasn’t that he didn’t know women got harassed, and it wasn’t that he didn’t realize how prevalent it could be. But I think part of his horror was my reaction. I wasn’t coming home upset and angry, but laughing about it, because getting called a stupid bitch for walking past a “hey baby hey baby hey baby” with no acknowledgment was probably the tamest harassment I got. I think he was horrified because I acted like that was a normal, acceptable, unremarkable consequence of ever leaving the house. And to me, it was. Remarkable harassment was something that turned physical. Getting called a whore by strangers while going grocery shopping — that was just the absurd comedy of life!
I realized yesterday that my tolerance level has changed. Getting harassed verbally on the street would now bother me, a lot. Getting hey-babied by a stranger I pass by in a parking lot bothers me, a lot. Getting unintelligibly yelled at from passing cars bothers me, a lot. Getting obviously followed in a supermarket bothers me, a lot. I don’t think these things bother me more because I am suddenly Ms. Sensitive. I think they bother me because they happen so much less. My level of “acceptable” harassment is now incredibly low, because I have the massive privilege of avoiding most of the public areas where that kind of harassment occurs. Simply getting leered at is enough to sicken me these days, because getting called an ugly bitch or having strangers demand I suck their cock doesn’t happen on every block anymore — when that shit happened, getting leered at was a kind of pleasant change of pace, because at least a leering asshole was polite enough to keep his thoughts to himself.
That also made me think about other places in my life where I used to have a different standard of acceptable harassment. When I was living with Flint, and hanging out with his friends, my standard for “acceptable” sexism was extremely high. I remember one dude having a Very Passionate Conversation with me one day about how he doesn’t think lesbians can ever be fully sexually satisfied, because they have vaginas, and vaginas need penises. I remember trying very hard to stay calm and convince him with facts and figures, and I remember his horror and utter disbelief when I told him that statistically only 1 in 3 women have an orgasm from penetration alone, so obviously our clits have more to do with sexual satisfaction than our vaginas, if you want to rank it that way. Today, if an acquaintance started that conversation with me, I would get up and leave the room and never talk to them again. If a friend started that conversation, I would shut it down, tell them it was a bunch of sexist shit, and recommend they actually learn something about vaginas before they spout off their half-assed dick theories. But back then, I assumed that all boys were like this, and you had to accept that level of behavior if you wanted to hang out with them. Now I just won’t hang with boys like that.
I’m sure most of you by now have visited the massive thread of doom over at Shapely Prose (shout out to Phaedra, what what), which also spawned the secondary thread of doom, wherein there was quite a conversation about what constitutes harassment. It reminded me of a conversation I once had with Swan. Swan is a social worker, and we were discussing how useful a social worker would have been in my childhood. She was trying to determine why I never disclosed my abuse to anybody. I explained that, at the time, I didn’t know it was abuse. Sure, I knew other people lived differently than my family, but I just thought they were intrinsically different people. My family wasn’t capable of lives like they had; we were unique. I didn’t deserve the lives my friends had, because I was inherently undeserving. I deserved the family I got. It wasn’t abuse to me; it was natural, logical, deserved punishment.
Swan understood that, but was trying to figure out how you could get a child to disclose abuse if they didn’t know they were being abused. She asked, “What if a social worker asked, ‘Do you feel safe at home?’ Would you have said yes?” And yeah, I would have. Safety, to a social worker, meant, “Are you reasonably certain nobody will hurt you?” But to me, safety meant “Is there food? Will I be allowed to sleep?” As I got older, it also meant, “Do I reasonably believe I will not attempt suicide tonight?” Before I could answer the way a social worker would have liked, they would have had to describe what they meant by “safety,” because we would be using two entirely different definitions. I was “safe” as far as my limited perspective of the world went; a perspective that included the assumption that my loved ones would not make concerted efforts to cause me intense emotional pain was some kind of comedic fantasy world. I couldn’t even conceive of a world like that.
Most people grow up with a general, unstated and unexamined belief that there are certain things everybody just “knows.” But other people, who for whatever reasons grow up slightly out of step, they realize that all these things are learned. Not everybody knows how to eat appropriately. Not everybody knows how to hug. Not everybody knows they shouldn’t be hit. Not everybody knows how to clean themselves. Not everybody knows what “safety” means.
I think about this every time internet discussions about harassment, gendered conditioning, sexism, etc. go awry. One person says, “Being taught to act feminine: it sucks!” and another person chimes in with, “But I was never taught that!” And, well, I call bullshit. I think the women who believe they have never been treated badly because of their sex are operating with a different definition of “badly” than others assume. The street harassment I once viewed as completely ordinary is now completely fucking unacceptable. If you had asked me, back then, whether or not I was being harassed, I probably would have said no. I mean, sure, guys yell at me from their cars and this one dude tried to kidnap me from the library, I’m pretty sure, but that’s not what harassment is, right? Harassment is something intolerably bad. And what I experienced was tolerable, because I didn’t believe there was any other way things could be.
Basically, I didn’t have a choice in whether or not to tolerate street harassment, so by default, what I experienced daily had to be tolerable, or I had to not leave my house ever. Once I had a choice — once I could absent myself from the street without absenting myself from the ability to go grocery shopping — harassment became intolerable. And yet, smart as I am, feminist as I am, critical thinker that I am, it took me about two years to realize I was privileged enough to have acquired this choice. It took me two years to realize the harassment had stopped, and that my current experience is not in any way a general experience. When leering is both a rare and disgusting event, that is not a general experience of the world; that is a privileged and wealthy experience of the world.
I’m very lucky to have that experience. I’m also very lucky to have the ability to recognize that such a thing is privilege, even though it took me years to realize that. Not everybody has the ability to experience different perspectives of the world, so that they can (potentially) recognize that their individual experience is not general or normal. As a child, I certainly wasn’t lucky enough to have that ability, and I’m incredibly blessed to have it now.
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another solid post. welcome back!
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thanks for this. i’m currently reading “The Women’s Room” and this reminds me a lot of mira’s realizations about how life as a woman is SO different from life as a man. if you haven’t read it, i think you’ll really appreciate it.
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I’m continually amazed by your perspective on stuff like this. It’s always something I know intuitively, but never thought about long enough to make sense of it. Thanks for another fantastic post.
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Well, of course men can be raped as well. It’s just not an accepted part of our rape culture to depict it in film or the MSM. (Unless it’s an instance of prison rape, in which case it’s either fucking hilarious or a warning to all men who may be considering acting in such a way that could land them in the prison industrial complex.) But I think a lot of what’s behind this absence of male rape from film thing is that it would (gasp) make the villian(s) gay (in our cultural landscape). And we wouldn’t even begin to know what to do with a gay villian, now would we?
Sorry for the kinda off topic comment (had to say it anyway).
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You know, I never connected the fact that now that I own a car–OR more accurately now that I can decide when to utilize public transportation–I am more able to avoid SH. Thanks for that.
I love public transportation. I have real passion for it, a desire to see it blossom in my city (ATL) & I truly believe it is a great thing. But you are absolutely correct. When I think about it, the bulk of the SH I experienced was when I was either waiting on some transport or on that transport.
I mean, really, just look at HollaBackNYC.
Also, my experience of trying to explain to other men that strange men on the street (especially those that approach me) make me rather scared has been overwhelming negative & hurtful. As they usually take it as some attack on their character and then go onto paint my fear as the same as someone who believes all black people to be thieves & middle easterners are terrorists.
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Thanks for your thoughts, as always. Many years ago, walking in New York City with a young man, I was the object of much catcalling and other bullshit. My companion was appalled. I was bemused by his reaction. I thought that always happened – why would he be so shocked? Now I’m glad to be privileged, and glad you called my attention to it.
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This may not be relevant, or it may be clueless, and if it is either, my apologies. I can’t recall the last time I got catcalls, or whistles, and whether it’s because I drive almost everywhere now, or because I’m over 50, I don’t really know. What I do know, is that when I was younger, having construction workers whistle at me just struck me as really funny. I don’t know why. So I would turn my head and laugh at them, and I never once got called a bitch or experienced any escalation. I don’t mean this in any way that could be construed as prescriptive, I’m just describing what my experience was.
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Great post.
You are so right about sexism being relative, too. It is just down to experience. One woman’s ‘not that bad’ or not even noticed any more, is another’s intolerable.
I don’t even notice street harrassment – sadly, I still have to get the bus – I only realise when I think about it. I ignore it, it’s the only thing you can do, and I think doesn’t give the harrasser the satisfaction of seeing a reaction. (You can be too suspicious, though. On the bus home from work a few days ago, some guy said ‘Excuse me’, I ignored, knowing that such seemingly innocent things can rapidly descend into come-ons as you said. He was only trying to return my earring that had fallen out. I say this purely to make the point that harrassment, making women defensive in public, harms everyone).
Anyway. I thought this had another application. The women’s network at my work had a talk from a very high ranking woman, and she said she had never experienced sex discrimination at work.
Anything less than ‘But we do not allow women to do tasks more demanding than filing, dear, for we are Sexists’ *puffs cigar* *pats behind* doesn’t exist to these women. It does exist. It’s just that they don’t notice it.
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After Congress passed the legislation creating the Department of Energy, charging it with maintaining the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons, the DOE wrote up a charter for itself defining “safety” to mean it really does blow up when you push the button, and “reliability” to mean it makes as big a boom as it was designed for. Those are the definitions it has used ever since.
This is true.
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I dont’ get harrassed ont eh street that often. I don’t know if it’s because Australians are more polite, or better at leering descretely, maybe? But then again, maybe I just do not notice. I know that since the secondary thread of doom (which I started commenting on to say I don’t recall getting harrassed adn then remembered several traumatic incidents that I’d just ignored as stuff that happens and you move on) I’ve noticed how hard I work to avoid any form of eye contact in public, with pretty much everyone. I never catch the bus without sunglasses, now, even in winter.
When I lived in China, I used to get yelled at a lot. People calling me whitey, etc. It got so I didn’t even hear it, if someone was shouting, my brain edited it out. A couple times a friend had to run up and touch my arm before I even realised they were there, despite the fact that they’d been calling my name for minutes. How much is it, like Butterflywings says, just non existent to our brains? We self edit so much.
I sometimes feel guilty for having such a low tolerance of those sort of things. I would love to be the person who explained things to a n00b – because someone should, and sometimes they do learn. But I don’t have the patience with baby steps. I will have the ‘this is more prevelant and harmful than you think’ argument, but not the ‘not, women do not like it, it does not make them feel sexy’ argument.
Also, I absolutely agree about learned behaviours, although I would say I’ve also learnt NOT to act feminine. When you reach a certain age, you are either a girly girl or not, and I wasn’t, I’d rather climb trees than play barbies, so I was socialised differently. Like back in the day, when you either went into the stream that learnt to type or the stream that did poetry, except this was social. At least tehre was a choice, however limiting.
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Yeah, I think it’s fucked up that rape of women is so often used as a plot device, but male rape is either a joke or a taboo. It tells you a lot about how we view both women and men.
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I firmly believe that street harassment is essentially cultural, which is not to imply that it’s restricted to certain societies or ethnicities. Basically, if a microculture implicitly says it’s okay to harass, insult, or otherwise bother complete strangers, people (or, in the case of street harassment, men) will act out.
Harassment was constant when I lived in New York. I started to keep a journal just to convince myself that I wasn’t crazy, that every day I left my apartment I was harassed. Granted, as I plunged deeper and deeper into depression (thanks, in great part, to being treated like a worthless piece of meat), I started leaving the house less. And I was regularly called a stupid bitch or just plain ugly for no reason at all. It wasn’t always a reaction to the harasser’s being rejected. One incident sticks in my mind where I was walking to the subway station in the early morning. There were very few people on the street and this middle aged guy who was crossing my path suddenly stopped, looked at me, and said “ugly.” I guess I was really sheltered as a kid, because that treatment completely baffled me when I moved to NYC. I can understand why someone who has a specific beef with me would choose to insult me, but someone I don’t know at all? But I guess that guy did have a problem with me: my gender.
Anyway, I’ve been living in Seattle for several years now and my experience is very different. I’ve lived in upscale residential neighborhoods, in Seattle’s only black neighborhood (just barely), and now in hipster central. In none of those neighborhoods have I experienced even close to the same level of harassment, which proves that this isn’t an urban thing, a rich privilege thing, a racial thing, a poverty thing. It’s entirely about what people know they can get away with. Harassers never get called out in New York City. In Seattle, those who might be inclined to harass know it won’t be tolerated, which probably explains why, the few times I have been harassed here, the harasser seemed to be mentally ill.
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Interesting. It’s also true for me that I notice harassment much more, and tolerate it much less, now that it’s far less frequent. I can totally relate to the idea that, because you don’t have a choice, the level of what is tolerable goes up considerably. I think you’ve just answered the question I had about women who seem to get harassed and abused even more than I was. They seem normal and well-adjusted, and don’t seem to “mind” what they’ve been through/are going through as much as I do, inasmuch as they perceive this as “normal”… Maybe the latter is more the case than the former (i.e., being well-adjusted). However, what I *cannot* wrap my brain around is the idea that harassment is like some kind of compliment, and some women actually do feel validated by it. What is that??? It’s like the dog feeling neglected because the leash is gone!!
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I will not contradict anyone, but my wife’s reports from her peregrinations differ markedly from those posted here. Whether in San Francisco, Paris, Stockholm, New York, Jakarta, or Cambridge MA, her reports are of two phenomena: One, men muttering, as if half to themselves, “so beautiful!”, or “lovely”, or the like, as they pass, and two, strangers of all description stopping to ask her for directions. She used to get very unpleasant to be around if she didn’t get these sorts of anonymous attention frequently enough. In recent years it has occurred progressively less frequently, and she misses it keenly.
It’s possible the catcalls also go on, and she doesn’t hear them. This is made the more plausible in that she doesn’t hear her own name called, in a familiar voice, from across the room, if she’s not expecting it. However, I have never heard any when I was out with her, despite that I am far from an imposing figure. It can’t be because of where she walks; if she avoids any place, it’s upscale shopping areas.
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Basically, I didn’t have a choice in whether or not to tolerate street harassment, so by default, what I experienced daily had to be tolerable, or I had to not leave my house ever
This is such an insight; thank you for this post. Despite the great discussions we’ve had in our threads of doom over at SP, I’ve felt tremendously sad since those discussions, especially when I see new trackbacks to the posts (often from male bloggers who think we’re all just crazy bitches, natch). I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve been craving some followup analysis, but I don’t want to write it myself because our posts attracted so much antifeminist trolling (the internet equivalent of street harassment, IMO) that I am thoroughly exhausted. I’m grateful for your writing, Harriet. Yours is a much-needed voice.
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Thanks for the shout-out, Harriet!
Nathan–I don’t doubt your wife’s experiences, nor do I question that she feels validated by admiration. I think it can be very pleasant to get unsolicited applause. I like it when strangers enthuse over the beauty and charm of my dogs.
But there is a different type of unsolicited male commentary. It seems intended to get a response or acknowledgment, and the only real explanation I can give for it is that it is a power play. The crudest examples (“Hey, babee, suck on this!” or “I wanna hit that ass, honey!”) are the most obvious–I doubt that any one of these men, at any time, have convinced passing women to approach them and commence fellatio. So why the hell would they do it? Well, if they addressed the same phrase to a passing man, the intent would be obvious. It’s a dominance thing. It’s an insult. And that’s the case when it’s addressed to women, too. It’s just safer to yell that sort of thing at a woman, because she’s less likely to start punching.
I think men seldom see the really crude dominance catcalls, primarily because they’re universally recognizable as fighting words. If a guy came up to your wife in your presence and said, “Hey, beautiful, you wanna suck my cock?”, it would be an attempt to antagonize you into a fistfight. No doubt, no question. When it happens to women alone, though, the woman almost always flees, and often isn’t even comfortable enough to respond verbally. If flight isn’t an option, there’s the nervous smile and the weak joke, both ways to signal that the other guy wins–you’re not going to call him out.
Is there any wonder that women find this profoundly creepy and scary?
Less obviously sexual comments are still used by men in order to provoke a response from a woman who is ignoring them or going about her business without acknowledging their presence. If your wife tends to “white noise” out even friendly attempts to get her attention, it’s quite likely that these less-friendly attempts miss her entirely.
Men are often unaware of the way sexual and personal comments are used aggressively against women. A man who is simply admiring may say, “Excuse me, ma’am, but you look beautiful,” without realizing that the acceptable-looking behavior he’s seen in others actually has some scary implications he’s missed. But many women are trained by sad experience not to take those compliments at face value. The first time I was catcalled, in DC, I was vaguely flattered (I mean, I was beautiful! Cool!) until the tone turned hostile and sexual. So it’s hard for a woman to distinguish between what is a sincere compliment and what is going to get ugly quick, and it’s usually wisest for us to shut things down immediately instead of waiting to see what will happen.
It is really good to hear that your wife is not subject to hostile advances from strangers. (Or not aware if she is, which is almost as good.) I would encourage you, though, not to take this as a reason to make unsolicited comments to or about strange women. There are plenty of children who could take candy from strangers all the time and get nothing but candy out of it (candy! yay!) but we nevertheless warn children against taking candy from strangers, and you as an adult should probably refrain from approaching small children in the park with lollipops, as well, y’know? Just because the possibility of harm or misinterpretation is high enough that a lollipop–or a compliment–is likely not to be a gift but a cause of distress. There are better ways to be nice without running the risk of making others uncomfortable.
/hollaback101
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Nathan–
Not that I have any idea whether you are ever inclined to compliment strange women. I just wanted to explain why this is something many women find offensive and scary, when your personal experiences have been so different. It seems a matter that many/most guys don’t immediately comprehend because it happens outside their view and it’s not always the experience of the women they’re closest to.
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Starling: Thank you for your extended and informative reply. (Also, thanks for the RR posting! I wish I could have read it 20 years ago; it took me ten years to figure it all out for myself.) I want to make clear that I am not denigrating anybody else’s experience; I just hoped an additional fact might help lead somewhere useful. Also, my wife is not so benighted, or deaf, as some readers might hope. I am really at a loss to understand the different experience. If we could collect statistics we might correlate it to gait, spazziness, or something even more obscure. (As a side note, I have seen spazziness, real or feigned, defuse more than one tense situation.)
In the interest of completeness I should mention that strangers in Indonesia call out “Mau ke mana?” (tr.: “wassup?”) frequently, but that happens the same to all tourists, male and female, so it doesn’t seem like the catcalling discussed here. She got that the same as I did.
I totally agree that catcalling is a primate dominance behavior. Maybe that observation could lead somewhere useful; people have instinctive responses that can be triggered with the right stimulus. (E.g., I once got an East Berlin policeman to give me helpful directions!) By the way, I have my doubts about the usefulness of the word “privilege” in this context. Generally the people catcalling are very low in any sort of dominance hierarchy, and their hostility is of the same sort that leads them to kick their dog when they get home. Genuine privilege of any sort (“white”, “male”, what-have-you) in the sense of not needing to answer to somebody socially more dominant is really a rare thing. Study of innate primate response patterns (see “spazziness” note above) seems a more fruitful path.
In connection with that, and as a way of saying thank you for RR, I will mention an observation of my own. It seems common in women’s culture to take pride in knowing what other people must be thinking. After many years’ observation, I can say that, at least where men are involved, you, gentle reader, don’t. That is, in any sort of interaction, however apparently clear-cut, your estimation of his thoughts is far more likely to be wrong than right, and you have no hope of doing better. The only hope, instead, is to remind yourself, each time, that your intuitive interpretation is valueless, and to deliberately, consciously discard it, each time. This is equally true of friendly as of hostile encounters. You are better off ensuring that the reasonableness of what you do doesn’t depend in any way on his actual thoughts. This takes practice.
In answer to your implied question, I never make personal comments of any kind to strange women. I have said, with a nod, “I noticed your shoes” when it seemed called for, but pointedly never try to make it the start of a conversation.
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Actually, 30 years ago…
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AHA!
Starling: . When it happens to women alone, though, the woman almost always flees
This just reminded me of why dogs bark at mailmen – day after day they approach the house, the dog barks its threat and gets immediately rewarded as the threat leaves to deliver the mail to the neighbor and the dog thinks it has done its job.
Ignoring harrassers conditions them that we’re safe targets but on the other hand, who wants to be bitten by reacting to it? It’s a long slow process but I figure we can’t really do anything about the harrassers out now but these guys have wives/girlfriends (somehow) who should be maybe more proactive? Ask your guy “you don’t ever harrass women, do you?” and explain why.
Experience with what is right and wrong behavior IS learned but I think most parents don’t think about it. I was harrassed/bullied as a kid and I always wondered what kind of parents these kids have but upon growing up – and there’s more talk about bullies at school nowadays (if it helps) – I realized the parents probably had no idea little Bobby was such a cruel kid when no ones eyes were on him.
Girls can be bad, too, of course, but the harrassing/catcalling is a male thing – an outward expression of bullying that’s more “out there” that is accepable to the type who would do it in the first place. I always thought I had it pretty bad with bullies in school (majority of boys) until I started to hear what boys do to each other – shudder!
Oh well, doesn’t excuse them or anything but most harrassers have no idea how badly they are behaving or how it affects women, I think. Lost causes? Maybe… But I think more active teaching of proper behavior is called for for the next generation.
I have wondered how the anti-bully campains have done with their messages – if schools are better now that it seems like bullying is a more open issue than back in the day?
I like to think things are still changing for the better, it’s just very, very slowly…
Thanks for the great posts, Harriet!
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Perhaps this was poorly phrased.
Discuss your own personal experience, thoughts, and feelings all you want. Relating your personal experiences with the world to try and provide additional perspective and information is awesome. Describing your own personal limitations and boundaries is great.
But if you want to tell other people what they do and don’t know, and what they are and aren’t capable of, you need to get your own blog and do it there. This is not the space for telling other people what their experience of the world is.
Also, women’s culture? Dude, we’re half the planet, not a culture.
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And, to defend my own honor, I don’t assume I can interpret what others are thinking based on their conversation because I got the ovary model instead of the dangly one. My ability to 1) correctly interpret meaning and intent behind a conversation, and 2) account for the possibility that my interpretation is wrong, has been honed by ten years in jobs where my ability to do so could mean the the lives of my friends or the safety of national nuclear secrets. Believe me, I know the limitations inherent in reading intent, but I also feel pretty comfortable with the calls I make.
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Whenever I bring up catcalling/street harassment to men I know, they’re always shocked/appalled/outraged on my behalf and I’m always baffled that they never notice it ever. Then a few weeks ago I was walking to a bar rather late at night with my male partner and a “party bus” rounded the corner. I’m on the outside of the street. He’s on the inside. The fellows on the bus shout and act like asses and one leans out and shouts “Hey Glasses – how much?”. My partner makes a comment as to how ridiculous party buses are and when I ask him if he heard what that guy said, he hadn’t noticed, or if he did notice he hadn’t ascribed ill-intent to it. I was just shocked that something that wasn’t even subtle street harassment was so totally missed by him. Blew my mind.
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I hear and obey.
Guilty of overgeneralization. Women of my acquaintance have expressed pride in their ability to educe what others (e.g. I) am thinking. Men of my acquaintance know we haven’t got a clue. There must be some people who are much better than average at it, but I am certain there is very little correlation between confidence in such a skill and its reliability. Probably those who are best at it have no more confidence in their conclusions than I have in mine.
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Thanks for the correction.
As I’ve said a bunch of times, I’m crazy about 12-step stuff. And 12-step stuff is all about only controlling what’s in your personal sphere. I know that when I’m searching for a reason why a person behaves in a certain way, what I’m actually searching for is some way I can change that behavior. I end up thinking that if I know why a person does a thing that they do, I can find a way to change their reasoning, thus changing their behavior. That’s all about control — I want to control the way other people think and feel because I believe by doing so I can control the way they behave towards me. It doesn’t matter if I have really good intentions or selfish intentions or completely reasonable intentions; it’s still an impossible and crazy-making thing to do. The only thing I reasonably can do when I don’t like a certain behavior is remove it from my personal sphere, because that’s all I actually have control over.
So, I can get down with what you’re saying in that way. If a guy acts in a way towards me that I don’t like, all I can reasonably discern about his behavior is that he thought it was an appropriate way to behave. I can make some pretty good guesses about why he thinks that’s appropriate, and the guesses become better and better when a pattern gets established. But it doesn’t really matter why he acts the way he does, or whether I know for certain why he acts the way he does. What matters is that he acts the way he fucking does, and it bothers me. Knowing his reasons doesn’t change the behavior, and the behavior is the problem. I can take the long way around, and try to find a solution by separating his actions from his intentions from his feelings from our past together from the context of where the action is occurring, etc. ad nauseum, because sometimes you don’t want to admit a guy’s actions are unacceptable when you still also want to go to parties with that guy and not have it be awkward as hell. But, again, that’s the long way around, and pretty impossible to achieve. The simple way to avoid a behavior you don’t like is to remove yourself from the vicinity of that behavior. Any extra steps are just bonus ways to drain your energy.
That, obviously, doesn’t work when the behavior is actually physically inescapable, such as being trapped on the bus with a guy who won’t stop creeping at you. The only ways to remove yourself from the intrusive behavior of creepy men in public involve giving up your right to be in a public space, or giving up your right to be in a public space unescorted. Both of those solutions are really humiliating. So I think it’s possible that when you see women desperately trying to work out what’s going on in a man’s head, it might be because they’re up against a rock and a hard place. The effective, useful, and only real accessible option — to remove the behavior from their lives — isn’t always possible without restrictions they’re not willing or able to live with. So the impossible and crazy-making solution comes back into play: if I can just figure out why he does this, and then fix all the reasons why he does this, I won’t have to restrict my life in an unreasonable and depressing way to accomplish the basic tasks of daily living.
Of course, that’s the feminist lens. There’s also the lens that has nothing to do with gender, which involves admitting that people, as a whole, continuously make poor decisions and assessments of the world around them, because people are big fat piles of falliable. The assumption that one can read another person like a book is pretty common among people in general as they stumble about their relationships. But when you live in a society that is so deeply dependent upon gender divisions, so deeply dependent on maintaining the idea that behaviors and feelings and appearances have something to do with genitals — let me start over –
When you live in a society that literally builds gender differences into language, then the people who speak that language are inevitably going to be unable to express themselves in a way that isn’t about gender somehow. So you end up with dudes like you who say, “Women: huge generalization!” when what they really mean is, “I have experienced a phenomenon in my personal relationships and I am curious about the pattern I seem to see and what it might mean about the people I relate with and the reasons I relate with them, and the different life experiences we have had.” We don’t have a lot of ways to talk about the things men and women think and feel without making it about gender when our very linguistic concepts and history of thoughts and feelings are entirely tied up in insane myths about men and women.
Don’t take all that as a direct response to you. I just kind of started talking and then didn’t stop.
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Many of the well-meaning-but-clueless responses to the “thread of doom”, including secondary conversations in other forums, seem to come from men who are baffled as to why women treat them as potential hazards when they’re such nice guys. It’s unfair that they’re being lumped in with evil rapists and such.
Thing is, most guys who cause problems for women look and (up to a point) act exactly like guys who won’t cause problems. We can’t tell you apart until we get to know you better — in a safe environment. Public transit, city streets, and the like are usually not safe environments. For women, anyway.
I’m sorry to hurt the feelings of nice men who just want to chat, but if I can’t tell you apart from the nice men who absolutely adore women and would never hurt them but don’t talk about that one bitch, she was just clueless, I tried my best but damn that was one stupid bitch… y’know, I’m just going to err on the side of “not getting beat up or hassled”. I’ll see you at a good friend’s party, or at a club meeting, or an evening course.
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Thank you for that glimpse of your thoughts. You expressed much better than I did how freeing it is not to try to model others’ thoughts. I also meant to hint that people’s behavior often isn’t directly a product of thoughts, anyhow, so understanding or even changing their thoughts might not produce any desirable result. Numerous examples from zoology suggest effective responses that don’t depend on thought on either side. In addition, humans are uniquely capable of stimulating and exploiting bewilderment, which can be remarkably effective.
My use of the expression “women’s culture” was an attempt at shorthand for the alternative to biological determinism. There’s no question but that women swimming in estrogen, and men swimming in testosterone — both psychoactive chemicals — will have different experiences, and different innate responses to those experiences, in addition to all the direct anatomical consequences of each, and environmental consequences of those. How we, collectively, process the various differing but common (per sex) experiences is what I mean by “culture”. Culture isn’t determined by biology, because it’s also a product of history and ideas. We’re each a member of lots of cultures; most immediately, for example, blogger culture. When I note the behavior of women around me, as distinguished from the men, I can only deduce patterns of the cultural response, not of whatever biological or environmental stimuli might (or might not!) be driving it.
If street harassment is not really a product of thought, then maybe Jennifer’s partner was right not to have parsed out what the louts on the party bus actually said. They’re literally no different from bird calls or cricket chirps, just modulated through partly-functioning human cortex.
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I sort of get what you’re saying here, but don’t set yourself up as an impartial observor. The patterns you think you see are informed by men’s culture. The things you notice, the things you don’t notice, and whether or not you attribute them to gender has everything to do with the culture that has formed your ability to think and observe. You may be not be seeing something women do so much as you are seeing something that men believe. Every conclusion you choose to make (because when you’re observing about social behavior of complex animals, you’re choosing your conclusion — there’s no empirical, proven, objective conclusion) says more about your own beliefs, your own patterns, and your own culture, than it does about the subject.
No. Absolutely not. Lay off the biology bullshit; your biology isn’t objective, it reeks of “men’s culture.” Example one: You. Do you do this? Do you shout at women on the street? No? Then this is not a biological need to fulfill a biological purpose. It is a chosen behavior that fulfills a social need that does not have to do with acquiring sex or companionship, because it does not result in either of these things.
Comparing harassment to animal mating calls isn’t acceptable. Harrassment doesn’t get men laid. Harassment frightens and angers women, and makes them feel unsafe and humiliated. Bird calls don’t make other birds hide in their nests. Cricket chirps don’t make other crickets hop around with escorts, or cover their bodies, or back away slowly. Animal mating calls don’t result in angry blogs with comment threads that crash servers as women scramble over each other to relate their own personal tales of humiliation. Harassment is not a viable reproductive strategy. It has a purpose outside of reproduction entirely.
I’m not going to get into arguing about the intent of street harassment, but the effect is visible and easily heard, if one is willing to listen to women’s experiences. And when the effect is so easy to discover, and harassment continues, it indicates that the humiliation and lack of safety for women in public is either the desired effect, and/or not of concern to the harasser, or to those who support him. Harassment, perhaps, serves as a way to display masculinity, like a peacock’s plumage, but they’re not displaying it for women. Harassment is not an enticing display to a woman, and doesn’t fulfill any need the harasser might have to relate to a woman. Harassment is a masculine display for other men, a way to affirm the dominance of men in the public sphere over women, or weaker men.
On that note, I understand other men “not hearing” harassment directed at women they’re with. If you heard it, you might feel obligated to do something about it, because it’s tantamount to a spoken threat. That might put you in a violent situation (welcome to the world of women). So it’s easier to “not hear” it, and be ostracized from the homosocial bonding created by that display of masculine dominance. It’s not very different from what women do; we try to “not hear” it, too, except when we “don’t hear” it, we might get harassed more for refusing to acknowledge that we are submissive objects, and when we “do hear” it, and react positively, we don’t get rewarded with homosocial bonding; we get rewarded with further harassment.
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Nathan–
I don’t know that what people say they understand really correlates to what they do understand. The monster threads Harriet cited in her post include a number of comments from posters who identified themselves as male and said, essentially, “I don’t pick up on this stuff, because I’m male.” To which the women responded, “Well, that’s why we’re giving you a heads-up!” Some of the guys responded, “But I don’t HAVE to understand and pay attention to this stuff, because it doesn’t do me any good, and it might require I limit my behavior. So, whatev!”
That’s not innate biological conditioning. Insofar as it’s cultural conditioning, it’s the way that a group that is commonly less advantaged needs to watch their step and pay attention to signals, while the group that is commonly more advantaged doesn’t see a need to do the same thing. At least as it relates to the less-powerful group. So when men say, “I don’t get women,” or “Women are all complicated and hard to understand,” or “I don’t see what pissed her off, maybe it’s PMS?”, what I hear is, “Eh, women fuss, who cares?”
Not the whole story, of course, but I do think it’s part of the reason men are conditioned not to think of themselves as being able to read the mysterious lady-brain, while women are more inclined to be trying for ESP. Success is, of course, a function of training and practice, but there is something really dismissive in saying, “Oops, no idea, I’m a man, can’t figure it out, so just work around me!”
Hmm. You may have hit one of my pet peeves. So I’ll keep myself from speculating on your intent and just speak to your statement: women traditionally need to analyze and respond to men much more than men need to analyze and respond to women, since men traditionally control a disproportionate amount of power and resources. So I see men’s stated inability to “get” women as an exercise of privilege rather than a recognition of the limitations of interpersonal understanding.
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Backing you up to say there is an inherent privilege in what a person does and does not have to “get.”
If I had never had to take a job to survive in life, I would not have to “get” my boss. I would not have to understand what it is to be subservient, respectful, and sometimes just outright stepped on. But I don’t have that privilege. I have to work. So I have had to “get” a lot of things about swallowing my pride and being treated like shit by customers. If I’d shown up to my first job and said, “I can’t wipe that table or bus those dishes, and I can’t let this customer tell me I’m stupid and slow; I don’t get how to do that.” I’d have lost that job my first day. But because I didn’t have the privilege to avoid work, I had to learn a lot of things that were unfair, difficult, and shitty. And I learned a lot about work ethic and respect for others in the process.
Not “getting” a concept has nothing to do with the concept; it has to do with how much you want to get the concept. And how much you want to get the concept is a direct reflection of how big an impact it makes on your life. If you can sail through life never “getting” what a work ethic is, it’s a direct result of your ability not to work. If you can sail through life never “getting” the differences between the ways women experience life and the ways men experience life, it’s a direct result of your ability to ignore one whole gender without losing anything significant to your livelihood. Men have that option. Women don’t.
The only way you can’t “get” the experience of another person — or a whole group of people telling you the same thing over and over — is if you don’t want to and don’t have to. Women don’t have the luxury of not “getting” the experience of men. Just read any of the five thousand “rape prevention” tactics women are supposed to use to protect themselves; they’re all about predicting the behavior and intent of men. Rape prevention tips pretty much just say, “Ladies: remain constantly aware of the presence of men at all times, because the minute you let your guard down, one of them will rape you.” Women cannot maintain their safety and ignore men at the same time. If they could, rape prevention tactics would be about men’s behavior, instead of women’s failure to develop male-focused omniscience. That’s a huge privilege you have that I never will; you can ignore how I feel and what I say without any fear that I am going to attack you (and very likely get away with it) as a result.
Or, think of it this way: in the vast majority of businesses in this country, if you ask to speak to the manager, you will be speaking to a man. Which means there’s a whole laundry list of things you won’t have to worry about when speaking to the manager that I will. You won’t have to worry about whether he’ll ignore you because your shirt is cut too low. You won’t have to worry about whether getting visibly upset will make him dismiss you, because you’re hysterical. You won’t have to worry about whether or not he’ll dismiss you because you wore too much make-up, or too little, or you weren’t attractive enough, or you were too attractive. You won’t have to worry about hearing insults about your weight. You won’t have him ask you to smile. You won’t have your voice, or demands, described as “shrill.” You won’t have him assume you don’t understand words/figures/documents/spreadsheets/critical thinking skills. You won’t have to worry that if your wife or a female friend is present, he will only speak to them and refuse to address you.
A woman does have to worry about those things, which means if a woman is required to speak to a man in authority in order to acquire something she needs to survive or go about her day in peace, she has to think very carefully about that man’s experience, feelings, needs, and wants. She has to “get” men. The majority of men will never have to do this with the majority of women. Which means they don’t have to “get” women in order to go about their daily lives. Which means refusing to make that extra effort to “get” women when you don’t have to is an admission that you believe the experience of the entire other half of the planet is pretty much irrelevant, precisely because they can’t make you care. Which says a lot about your ability to care, if it pretty much doesn’t exist in the absence of coercion and force. Who gets to dismiss the existence of billions of people except the very, very privileged?
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That conversation you had with Swan, and the conclusions you came to?
“Not everybody knows what “safety” means.”
Gold. GOLD. Brilliant. It deserves big neon lights and cartoon arrows, because it is so surrounded by awesomeness it could get lost.
And that comment you made just above. I heart that.
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That’s a great insight about how you can become more sensitive to something the less you are exposed to it, and how what’s “normal” is a function of one’s daily reality and not some objective standard.
I’ve had a similar experience of harrassement trailing off with time; it’s a combination of moving to a place where harrassement is considered less acceptable, getting older, and absenting myself from all kinds of places where the worst harrassement occurs through changing habits and circumstances.
An interesting side effect for me is that while these days I notice harrassement more, and react to it more, for some reason I fear it less. It’s like I’ve forgotten all of my avoidance and defusion skills. On the rare occasion I get catcalled or hollered at, I respond to it as a man would – with aggression to equal and face down the original aggressive intent.
Last time this happened, I was walking with 2 other girls and we got catcalled from a car by a group of young men. When giving them the finger and telling them to fuck off just made them laugh, I got so angry I ended up runnig after the car, shouting “come back here and say that again if you think it’s so fucking funny, assholes!”. Or something to that effect. Which must have been a bit surreal for the casual onlooker…
Those guys just drove off, but this one other time when I started shouting at a bunch of fairly drunk lads, explaining how small I thought their peninses must be to make them harrass strange women in the street, they were kind of taken aback and started trying to calm *me* down, being all “alright, love, no need to be like that”.
What I’m tring to say is that I would have expected my behaviour to be dangerous – I still can’t really shake off the feeling that I’ll get the stuffing knocked out of me one of these days – but it seems as if, counterintuitively, the sight of authentic female rage is something these harrassers can’t really handle very well, and it makes them back off much faster than any of the traditionally feminine strategies.
Still, don’t everybody go and try that at home or anything. It’s just the curious way that I happen to react – wouldn’t want anyone else to put themselves in a potentially dangerous situation…
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I often think it’s the shift between treating a person like an object (a thing that you act upon, whose existence you acknowledge only when you are acting upon it) and treating a person as a person (a thing that interacts with you, and will potentially continue interacting with you even though you have attempted to cease acknowledging its existence). The former is a safe and known quantity, while the latter could potentially chase your goddamn car.
I think men make an assumption that women are more accustomed/more accepting/more deserving of being treated as objects, and won’t react as people. And when a woman forcefully reacts as a person, all the social rules for how to treat objects go away, and they shift into the social rules for how to interact with a person. Which is how you get that confusing, sudden shift between, “How about you get in the car and suck on this, you sexy bitch?” and “I’m just being friendly, ma’am, I certainly don’t mean any harm, I’m sorry if I bothered you.” It seems like one of those sentiments has to be false for the other to be true — one can’t feel it’s appropriate to verbally and sexually harass a woman and be a friendly person who means no harm. But I think both sentiments are entirely genuine and honest; one is a genuine and honest way of interacting with an object, and one is a genuine and honest way of acting with a person.
Thinking of it that way, I think the big issue here is that women on the street are considered to be objects until proven otherwise, which is something men don’t have to prove every time they want to go to the laundromat or corner store.
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I have an anecdote about male obliviousness:
One day I was out walking with a male friend of mine when we stopped at a corner to wait for a cable car (I’m in San Francisco) to pass. Some dude sort of hanging on the side of the car shot me a “how you doin’?” ala . My male friend looked a little baffled and waved at the guy and said “I’m doin’ fine. Thanks for asking!” He honestly thought the guy was addressing him.
It was pretty hilarious at the time, though I couldn’t share the hilarity with my friend because I knew from various experience that if I’d pointed out to him what had actually just happened, he’d roll his eyes over how conceited or arrogant (or whatever sexist trope about women being vain and leering being a compliment that you prefer) I was being. Due partly to that various experience, I don’t hang out with that guy much anymore.
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Harriet, this is a truly complex idea that rings so true and now I want to try to observe the world this way for a little bit every day, just to see what I see. Thank you for your amazing mind!
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Yeah it’s interesting how a lot of them back down when you confront them. And by confront I don’t necessarily mean get all ragey like TheLady, though I’ve gone that route myself and am not knocking it. But even just looking them in the eye and/or responding to what they’re saying like you’re an actual person who can see and hear them.
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I had a similar experience once in New Haven, when I was at a law-student convention with a couple of male classmates, one of whom had a very sheltered upbringing. Some fuckmuppet yelled “Nice legs!” out of a car as it drove by. For days, I had Mr. Sheltered convinced that the car guys had been yelling at him.
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Here’s one for the Fucked-Up Patriarchy Files:
When I really stopped putting up with street harassment was when I worked in the sex industry. Because suddenly, putting up with leering, comments and catcalls was something I did for work, something I got paid for. And groping? At work, that meant three guys who could have been named Bruiser would say “Sir, I think you need to leave now” and they had about five seconds to get beaten to a pulp.
So street harassment wasn’t just irritating or threatening. It was some fuckbag trying to rip me off. And, weirdly, that made me a lot more hostile and aggressive and confrontational. Looking back, it was probably more patriarchal bullshit: it’s not OK for a woman to defend herself from a harasser, but it’s certainly OK for her to defend herself from a thief.
(It probably didn’t hurt that by then I had leg muscles that would let me kick a hole in a door. But still.)
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I have never received any of the “worse” street harassments, and I’ve never been stalked or made to feel particularly afraid. But even the really light (and infrequent) sexual harassment that I have received has affected me a lot.
To me, any stranger saying “Hey, girl” to me on the streets feels like sexual harassment. Like Harriet Jacobs said above, any sexual harassment makes you feel like you are an object and not a person. The worst thing that has been said to me by a stranger was probably, “give you $10 if you kiss me?” (when I was busking). That intimidated me and made me feel so insecure that I finished busking early and went home.
Until I was about 13 the only verbal interaction I had had with adult male strangers on the street had been very respectful (eg. asking for directions, or chatting to me while we waited for a bus), and I had felt treated like a person.
When the interactions with male strangers turned into sexual harassment I was really caught by surprise, I didn’t expect it. At first I would naively turn around when some guy called out to me, thinking that he just wanted to ask me me for directions – and I’d see him grinning at me. I’d feel humiliated, angry and embarrassed.
I slowly learned not to turn around when somebody called out to me. I learned not to smile easily, not to meet men’s eyes, and to keep myself guarded when walking in public or waiting for a bus. I learnt to be distrustful or male strangers. I learnt to expect a sexual harassment comment when a male stranger spoke to me.
A man started talking to me the other day while we were waiting for a bus. I was polite but very guarded. I enjoyed talking with him, but I kept our conversation short. I didn’t smile at him much because I was scared that he would see that as an ‘invitation’ to follow me or something. He was a perfectly decent, friendly man. He did not sexually harass me. He treated me respectfully. Yet I kept my guard up the whole time while I was talking to him.
I feel angry that the handful of times that I have been sexually harassed has taught me to keep my guard up on the streets and to not trust any male stranger. When I was a child I made myself smile a lot (because I wanted wrinkles at the corners of my eyes like my Dad had). I smiled at strangers, I smiled at all men; I smiled at everybody, and I trusted everybody. As soon as I turned into a teenager I learned that my smile was read as an invitation for sexual harassment, so I learned not to smile at – or be friendly towards – strangers.
I wish I felt like I could give more of myself in my interactions with people every day. I wish I could smile at random men (as I do with women) when we make eye-contact, and be warm and friendly. I know most men don’t sexually harrass strangers, so it makes me angry to think that I have changed my behaviour – and learned to be distrustful – simply because of the actions of a few men.
I was waiting at the bus-stop the other day. I had dressed up a slight bit more than I usually do (I was wearing nice jeans), and as a result my fear of being sexually harassed was heightened and I felt much more wary. A man drove past me, and slowed down so that he could get a good look at me before driving on. He had his 6-year old son in the seat next to him. The man didn’t say anything, but I felt like I was on display for him. He was treating me like he might treat a woman in a strip-club. I felt intimidated, insecure, embarrassed and angry.
The clothes that I wear every day are quite plain. I really don’t want to stand out. What I wear makes me feel plain, but it also makes me feel safer from sexual harassment. I feel much more insecure and wary when I try to look good in what I wear.
I am wary of any group of men that I walk past on the streets. When I walk past a group of builders etc, my train of thought stops and I just sort of hold my breath until I am past them. I wear my headphones, even if I am not listening to music, so that I can pretend that I didn’t hear if I am sexually harrassed.
When I was a high-school kid I walked to and from school, and I would often pass groups of builders on their lunch breaks, standing in a line on the footpath, leaning against a fence. The footpath was really narrow. They would watch me as I approached them and walked past them. They never called out anything, they just stared. I felt very intimidated, anxious and insecure every time that I walked past them. Sometimes they called out to my friends.
A couple of weeks ago me and my friend walked down to the local beach. On the way down we passed three guys hanging out by their car. The youngest one (aged about 10) stared hard at us as we approached. He didn’t say anything, but when the others noticed us they started calling out to my friend. It really angered, scared and upset her (and me). It felt more hostile than most cat-calling I have ever received, it felt like they hated us. We got to the beach, but it was pretty isolated, and we didn’t stay long. My friend told me of other times that she had been sexually harassed and felt really afraid. One night, a drunk man had told her and her friend that he would kill them. She also told me that the bus stop near her tertiary institution was near a homeless shelter, and that there were always a bunch of drunk men hanging about as she had to wait for a bus home. They would always sexually harass her, and she became so scared that she has started catching a bus from a less convenient bus stop. She also plans to take a self defence course soon. A few friends of mine were stalked or approached when they were young (12 or 13) – they managed to get away, but it terrified them.
What men don’t seem to realize is that, if they are strangers, they all look the same to us girls/women. We don’t trust any of them. We have our guard up against all of them. If they talk to us, we expect them to sexually harrass us – not ask us for directions. We don’t know how they’ll treat us, so we prepare ourselves by expecting the worst. We don’t want to be caught off guard and humiliated (eg. turning to look when a man calls something out at us). We have learnt that IF strange men interact with us on the streets to expect some form of sexual harassment – they might just stare hard at us, they might say “hey, girls”, they might proposition us, or they might follow us.
I have a father and four brothers. None of them have any idea how “on guard” I am when I am on the streets (eg. waiting for a bus, walking past builders or other groups of men). When boys become teenagers and young men their level of trust in strangers doesn’t fluctuate. When girls become teenagers we suddenly learn to not trust, to have our guard up, to be hostile. It is a very sad thing to learn. It doesn’t matter how small the sexual harrassment is that we receive, it all contributes to making us distrustful.
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Harriet, great post as usual. But I think you gave Nathan (The World Is My Classroom) more attention than he warranted. I hope he will stop using the word ‘spazziness’ in future, because that’s even more stupid and offensive than the rest of his ramblings.
What I dislike about some feminist blogs is that they let pompous dudes dominate the discussion with stupid pointless questions and observations. Yours has been refreshingly free of that up to now. Long may it continue.
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Some days I’m in the mood for a tussle, some days I’m not. Some days, I find that forcing myself to explain in a very basic, elementary, way the concepts I take for granted as true helps me solidify them and understand them from new angles that really advances my thinking. Some days, it’s just a waste of energy. I’ve just come out of a month or two of “no tussle, no energy, no responding to anybody” and now I’m in a tussle place again.
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Hi Harriet,
Thanks, I understand. I’m sorry, I was being unfair. It’s just that I love your blog and think it is so fantastic, I’m maybe overly fearful of it going the way of some I no longer want to read.
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Hey Nathan, heads up.
Saying “I hear and obey’ like that sounds, well, condescending? Patronising? What’s the word I’m looking for…
What the hey, either of those will do.
Maybe that’s not how you meant to sound… but you’re coming across as ‘here is my superior theory, it trumps yours but since this is your blog I’ll deign to pretend that your words matter.’
Fake deference is not the same as respect.
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I just wanted to stop and say that this post is made of win, major win, Harriet.
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