I have been dealing with street harassment since I turned 12, when suddenly my body became a thing that men noticed and felt obliged to comment on. I was living in Louisville, Kentucky (my hometown) and by 13 I was jaded. I didn’t trust men of any kind or age. It was difficult for me to treat male authority figures with respect when police officers and teachers were among the ones that felt entitled to comment on my body.
I think it was when I moved to Chicago for college that I realized how big the problem was: on some naive level I thought maybe it was just a “Louisville men” thing. But it wasn’t. I discovered Hollaback in college and realized that street harassment was a disease that plagued every city, every state, and (I learned) every country. Patriarchy is a global blight, and thus street harassment is also.
I wrote this poem after an experience on a city bus in Chicago, when I was on my way to work and a man, taking advantage of the crowd, pressed himself against me and groped me. It was the first time I screamed in public. I shouted him off the bus and received support from other passengers. They had seen what he was doing, but only felt empowered to comfort me, not confront him. It was then that I realized ending street harassment and rape culture needs to be done OUT LOUD. It needs to be written about, cussed about, cried about, blogged about, tweeted about, discussed, decried, decoded.
Olivia Cole is a writer (poetry and fiction) in Chicago. All of her art reflects the female experience: the pieces of our lives that we all share that men don’t always want to hear or see. She recently finished a dystopian novel (set in Chicago) in which a female protagonist combats a city of psychopaths hellbent on her destruction, which is often what it seems like as a woman in America, especially for women of color. She hopes to continue making art that injects these issues into mainstream consciousness. Follow her on Twitter.
