Archives for April 2013

This is a guest blog post for International Anti-Street Harassment Week, by Alan & Beckie, Florida, USA

“Men, help women feel safe in public spaces: Don’t Harass Women”

“Men, think of your mother, your grandmothers, your sisters, daughters and wife…..Don’t harass Women”

“Saying, ‘Hey Baby’ isn’t a compliment to anyone”

These are some of the many chalk messages my wife, Beckie Weinheimer and I wrote on Sunday on sidewalks in the area of Lincoln Blvd. and Washington Ave. in South Beach, FL.

Sunday was the first day of the third annual International Anti-Street Harassment Week and we decided to make kits including: a piece of chalk, a Stop Street Harassment sticker and literature about ways to address Harassers and what the movement is about.

We live in West Palm Beach, but decided to drive to South Beach because my wife has been harassed on the street many times there and the public there is generally much younger and probably more in tune with street harassment.

We found people to be largely disinterested, focused on their vacation plans, etc.  But as long as one of us was chalking, we had a steady stream of lookers and a few who wanted to engage in the dialogue.

Since my wife’s knees couldn’t take the kneeling and writing, I wrote from a male point of view and was happily amazed at all of the things I came up with for men.

After about an hour, we gave out many of our kits, engaged several people in dialogue and had dozens stop and read!

For those who are interested in doing something similar, here are short videos about what we did: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.

Alan Kearl and Beckie Weinheimer, just moved to West Palm Beach, FL from New York City.  While Beckie has often been the object of harassing comments in public spaces, she mostly just endured it, until a few years ago.  Inspired by their daughter, Holly Kearl, and her Street Harassment research and activism, Beckie realized she could stand up for herself.  Alan and Beckie have become increasingly organized and active in promoting safe streets and bringing attention to the horrible consequences for women of harassment in public spaces.

This article is cross-posted with permission from the Brooklyn Movement Center.

“I said she looks nice today. What’s wrong with that? Why can’t she just say, ‘Thank you’?”

Yesterday, I was at Fulton Park in Bed-Stuy having a conversation with a man about street harassment, and I found myself at a conversational impasse. He said something both logically and socially acceptable that I knew in my gut was wasn’t right. Street harassment is such a normalized function of our male-dominated society that we often can’t discern why it’s just plain wrong.

Most people agree: rape is an abhorrent crime; following a woman home is creepy; grabbing a woman’s arm to make her talk to you is a gross abuse of male privilege. No man will admit to wanting to be that guy who scares and sexually violates women. Everyone condemns the actions of Sexual Violator Guy.

But what about the guy who yells out, “Why you so mad? Smile, you beautiful!,” while a woman is minding her own business? Men — even men who proclaim proudly to never harass women — find the line is a bit blurred there. Well, what’s wrong with smiling, one might say.

Nothing is wrong with smiling. Victims of street harassment are not ardent smile-haters. We are women who, like men, are just going about our lives and are not particularly interested in walking around wearing inane grins for the sake of entertaining our male neighbors and random strangers.

The problem is not that women don’t like smiling. The problem is that Smile Guy, in asking a complete stranger to give him a smile just because he wants it, feels entitled to receive it. The problem is that, sometimes, if you don’t smile, this dude may call you a bitch or spit at you or push you to the ground.

The problem is, when a man tells a woman to smile or “compliments” her “fat ass” or asks her if she likes it doggy style, she doesn’t know if he’s going to turn into the dude that threatens to rape her. Or follows her home and rings her doorbell at odd hours. Or takes off his shirt and chases her through the street. How do we women, walking at 10pm through a poorly lit and empty park, know that Smile Guy isn’t one bad interaction away from becoming Sexual Violator Guy?

A sticker you can give to street harassers, designed by Audrey Wayne.

This is where we need male allies to understand: yes, dudes yelling random things at us is annoying. Most of us are not against street harassment just because we’re annoyed. We’re against it because we’ve been followed, we’ve been raped, we’ve been killed. We’ve met Sexual Violator Guy, and that motherfucker almost always starts out as Smile Guy. Hey Sexy Guy. I Love Your Juicy Lips Guy.

So don’t turn a blind eye to gateway behavior. Don’t shrug, say it’s standard for men to pursue women and that it’s not harmful. It’s not harming you, but you can’t see a woman’s hand clenched around her keys in her pocket just in case she has to clock I’d Really Like To Ride That Ass Guy at 3am on her way home after a night out.

What can you do when you see I’d Really Like To Ride That Ass Guy tell Scared As All Get Out Woman, “Fuck you, ugly bitch” after she doesn’t respond to his advances?

Be Asked Her If She Was Okay Guy. Or even Offered to Walk Her Home Guy. We could use more of these guys holding us down instead of Walked Right Past Her ‘Cause It Wasn’t That Bad Yet Guy.

As Brooklyn Movement Center‘s Lead Community Organizer, Anthonine Pierre looks to bring people together to make Central Brooklyn a smaller (and better!) place. She’s a lifelong Brooklynite, foodie, and enthusiasm enthusiast. When she’s not working at BMC, she’s usually looking for the Wiz with her friends the Lion, the Tin Man & the Scarecrow.

“As a co-sponsor of International Anti-Street Harassment Week, Brooklyn Movement Center held a chalk party at Fulton Park, a public space in Bed-Stuy where women are often harassed. We wrote anti-street harassment messages on the ground and declared it a street harassment free zone! We partnered up with Charla Harlow of Harlow Projects who video-recorded people sharing their experiences with street harassment.” View all of the photos.

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.