This blog post is cross-posted with permission from Aspiring Yogini.
This week is International Anti-Street Harassment Week. A time to talk about and fight back against what is most likely the most prevalent form of sexual harassment in the modern world.
I was thrilled when my friend discovered that this Week exists. We found out about it after we had launched our anti-street harassment awareness group, Calling Out Cat Calling. It motivated us to work even harder to join the movement to fight back against the mentality that makes so many people (frankly mostly men) think that public sexual harassment is OK.
The Week is run and organized by the world’s largest anti-street harassment group, Stop Street Harassment. Activist Holly Kearl heads up the entire operation.
It genuinely confuses me why so many men feel like it’s OK to openly insult and verbally abuse women in public. I’ve been street harassed so many times that I’ve lost count, and I was first publicly harassed when I was about twelve years old. What is the mentality that makes men think it’s perfectly acceptable to make kissing noises or to call passers-by ‘baby’? Worse, why do so many men persistently harass women and refuse to take no for an answer? Why is harassment so common in the developed world in the twenty-first century?
The series of answers to these questions are long and complicated. Words and phrases that frequently get thrown around are Rape Culture, Patriarchy, Sexism, Male Entitlement etc.
What I want to emphasize this week is the importance of not letting the words and phrases above lose their meaning. All of them are contributing factors to the prevalence of street harassment and all of them merit discussion.
I’m excited to put up posters (examples are the pictures above) around the city of Toronto this week, to keep the conversation alive on social media. And to blog blog blog until my fingers fall off.
This week I will be writing about all of the concepts listed above, and I will also be discussing what motivated me and my friends to start a group against cat calling in the first place.
This year we will get one step closer to taking back the streets! And in my lifetime I hope to see the end of this far too prevalent form of verbal abuse.
By Rachel Kellogg is on the admin team of Calling Out Cat Calling a Toronto-based anti-street harassment group. Join the conversation.
