Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Archives for July 2012

“Where you runnin? Stop running I wanna talk to you! It’s like that?”

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I was walking home one night and there is this street where there is a broken street light. Unfortunately there were also a bunch of people (mostly men) who were partying and taking up the whole block & street by blocking it with their cars. It was so annoying. All i wanted to do was go home. I had a sudden urge to just run home. Because if i walked then one or all of the men would try to literally stop me and try to grab me and/or try to talk to me.

So I took a chance and ran like hell. One car actually tried to back up and get in my way. I could here one of the men yell, “Where you runnin? Stop running I wanna talk to you! It’s like that?”

This pissed me off so much because it was in my own neighborhood. I am always scared and pissed off because I don’t want to get hurt over some dumb shit like getting assaulted because I didn’t give my phone number to a stranger. It’s situations like that that make me loath being around people. Luckily, I made it home. But it was another reason why I hate my neighborhood and leaving/going home.

– Anonymous

Location: Oakland, CA

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“I was harassed daily from 1997-2004”

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To me, street harassment isn’t a joke and it is a very big deal. In fact, it changed my life in the most horrible of ways.

It began when I was 11 and entering middle school. A boy in my neighborhood liked me. I didn’t like him back, which made him mad. To get back at me, he told the whole school that I, at 11 years old, had sex with him over the summer. This gradually evolved into a rumor that we had sex multiple times. Another boy claimed not only that he also had sex with me over the summer, but he also got me pregnant. He told everyone, “She had an abortion because she didn’t take responsibility for her actions.”

For six months several boys would go out of their way to harass me on my way home from the bus stop. “Show us your tits!” one would say. When I would say, “No,” and, “Leave me alone,” it made it worse. They’d say to each other, “She won’t do it because she stuffs her bra.” I was then harassed every day for stuffing my bra. Eventually, I was worn down. When they trapped me in an alley, I was so ashamed that I just wanted to go home, so I flashed them. I would then go into school and be called a slut.

It was so bad that I was harassed into my first kiss and every sexual experience thereafter, including fellatio and sex. They continued to turn around and blame me. Others would trap me and say, “You did x with y, so you really don’t have a reason not to do it with me.”

At one point, I was harassed into not fighting back when a boy groped my breast. I was twelve. In a note to a friend I did the most I could to control the damage. I said that I eventually said yes. Nothing was more humiliating than the harassment I would face if I said it wasn’t my choice. My friend’s mom found the note and turned it into the principal. I was suspended for 3 days– longer than the boys who assaulted me. The school’s justification was that if I really didn’t want it to happen I would have done something about it, such as hitting them. The only problem was, had I hit them, I also would have been suspended because of a zero tolerance policy.

I could go on and on. I want to be clear: sexual harassment, including that at work, in schools, or on the street negatively effects the self esteem of those subjected to it. It ruined my self-esteem, made me think it was my fault when I was raped, and has caused me to suffer PTSD to this day.

I wish I could say this happened a long time ago. I was harassed daily from 1997-2004.

I also wish I could say this no longer happens in our schools, but that would be a lie. Ultimately, as a teacher from 2008-2011, I watched my female students be harassed every day. Despite my best efforts to report the harassment and associated bullying I was repeatedly told my my administration that “boys will be boys” and I was being “overly sensitive.”

Don’t fool yourself. Nothing has changed.

– AS

Location: Bristol Township, PA

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“I have the right to feel safe in my own neighbourhood”

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One evening I was walking over to a friend’s house who lives about 10 minutes from my house. It was winter so although it was only 7 pm it was rather dark. I stuck to the main street but ended up passing about three men in their early twenties. They were all climbing into a truck when they saw me walking by. They began to shout at me, saying things like, “You’re hot!” and, “You should come hang out with us!” One of them began to approach me and I began to walk faster. As soon as I turned the corner he stopped following me. The whole thing was rather terrifying but infuriating at the same time because I have the right to feel safe in my own neighbourhood.

– Anonymous

Location: Prince Rupert, BC, Canada

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“I don’t exist for you”

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This is in response to the “Stop Seeking Male Attention” post on the Stop Street Harassment website. The entire article makes a great deal of sense to me, and I agree with it. But the last line really stood out for me because I did use the phrase mentioned against a harasser way before this post, and yes, got a STRONG reaction to it!

I think it’s great that this concept of not seeking male attention is being aired and brought to the light. It’s a shame that all females are taught to seek this type of validation from such a young age, but hey, at least now we’re challenging that training. Life without the constant interruption of the male gaze/and or comment can be pretty peaceful. I get to experience this peace only when I visit places that are less urban/metropolitan and that are more about nature and enjoying the land than interacting with people.

That phrase “I don’t exist for you”? It tickles me to see that printed in the above referenced article because it is EXACTLY what I said to a really aggressive harasser trying to demand my attention at a bus stop recently. I had already responded to his initial leering (he started the nasty “evaluation staring” from way down the block as he approached) and comments about me to his buddies with my patented, “I will kill u, you a**hole” look and also told him to leave me the hell alone.

When I said “I don’t exist for you! Keep walking!” he got livid! He didn’t know how to respond but was mad as hell! He and his buds did walk away (after standing there staring stupidly for a few more seconds), but when the bus came he was back and defiantly trying to look through the bus window to see me and show me that he was going to assert his right to “own me visually” regardless of what I said. I guess it took a few minutes for him to figure out what “I don’t exist for you” really meant. Once he did, he came back and really tried to fight my assertion, even if he had to do it in the silliest way. He looked absolutely ridiculous craning his neck from the sidewalk trying to see where I sat on the bus to try to still harass me. Crazy!

But, yes, “I don’t exist for you” is powerful. Many men don’t even begin to have that thought in any corner of their brain. It goes against everything they’ve been taught in regards to women. I will say it constantly now! 😉

– Yvonne

Location: 60th St and 5th Ave, Manhattan, NY

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Stop seeking male attention

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Sociological Images is publishing a four-post series on sexual objectification this week. In the third post, author Caroline Heldman gives advice about how “girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects.”

The first suggestion is “stop seeking male attention” (full excerpt below) and that directly relates to street harassment and one of its complexities. From a young age, women of all sexual orientations have been taught that there is no higher compliment than male attention and being desired by men, and as a result, some women feel flattered by street harassment, even if they also feel upset, scared or annoyed by it too.

The belief that male attention validates you as a woman is why some older women tell younger women, “you’ll miss it when you’re older.” What a sad statement about their self esteem and what they’ve been raised to believe their self-worth is if they miss random men on the streets yelling out evaluations of their looks, grabbing them, and following them, right?

But these cultural messages are really engrained and it can be hard to break those beliefs, as I know from personal experience.

The message that male attention was the be all/end all surrounded me growing up. I was raised in a religion that had a preoccupation with prepping girls for an early marriage and large family with the male patriarchs we would marry. I remember being as young as in preschool when my aunts started asking me if I had a boyfriend yet. And, then like every other girl, I was surrounded by tv shows and movies and even songs on the radio where the narrative focused on girls/women finding a boyfriend/prince/husband/true love. I had a hard time envisioning a life after that point because I was so rarely given a glimpse of what it looked like.

I clearly remember the moment when I was 16-years-old, browsing through feminist literature at a local bookstore one weeknight after I received my driver’s license, and I had the epiphany that my life didn’t have to revolve around what boys/men thought of me and my end goal in life didn’t have to be getting married. It is sad how revolutionary that thought felt at the time.

So I get how hard not seeking or wanting random male attention is when male attention is what we’ve been told validates us. But I also believe in the importance of trying to stop. We are SO MUCH more than what random men on the street think of us…and honestly, many of them don’t even see what we look like as they’re zipping by in cars. They just see we look female-ish and so they yell stuff at us. We are also SO MUCH more than just our relationships with boys/men (and many of us have no desire to even have relationships with boys/men)!

So, without further ado, here’s what Caroline has to say on this topic:

“1) Stop seeking male attention.

Most women have been taught that heterosexual male attention is the Holy Grail and its hard to reject this system of validation, but we must. We give our power away when we engage in habitual body monitoring so we can be visually pleasing to others. The ways in which we seek attention for our bodies varies by sexuality, race, ethnicity, and ability, but the template is the “male gaze.”

Heterosexual male attention is actually pretty easy to give up when you think about it.

* First, we seek it mostly from strangers we will never see again, so it doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of life. Who cares what the man in the car next to you thinks of your profile? You’ll probably never see him again.

* Secondly, men in U.S. culture are raised to objectify women as a matter of course, so an approving gaze doesn’t mean you’re unique or special, it’s something he’s supposed to do.

* Thirdly, male validation is fleeting and valueless; it certainly won’t pay your rent or get you a book deal.  In fact, being seen as sexy hurts at least as much as it helps women.

* Lastly, men are terrible validators of physical appearance because so many are duped by make-up, hair coloring and styling, surgical alterations, girdles, etc. If I want an evaluation of how I look, a heterosexual male stranger is one of the least reliable sources on the subject.

Fun related activity: When a man cat calls you, respond with an extended laugh and declare, “I don’t exist for you!” Be prepared for a verbally violent reaction as you are challenging his power as the great validator. Your gazer likely won’t even know why he becomes angry since he’s just following the societal script that you’ve just interrupted.”

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