By Britnae Purdy, SSH Correspondent
Last summer I had the opportunity to study-abroad through a month-long tour of five European capital cities. It was amazing experience, it changed my life, but blah blah blah – that’s not the point of this story. The point is that I can’t think about street harassment now without remembering one distinct night in Berlin.
Our group was on the rail system coming back from a concert. At the next stop, a few young men got on. They had clearly been drinking already that night, and were shouting, pushing each other around, roughhousing –taking up as much space in the car as they could with their overt shows of “masculinity” and being a general nuisance to the rest of the riders. They proceeded to quite obviously make remarks about the women in my school group. It was one of the few times in my life I’ve actually been grateful not to speak the local language, because judging from the uncomfortable looks of other passengers, they were being quite crude. I pulled an old trick – I “borrowed” one of my guy friends, hanging close on his arm to give the illusion that we were together to try and avoid being a target of the harassment. A couple of stops later the guys disembarked and we all breathed a sigh of relief that the uncomfortable situation was over.
Back at the hotel, a few of the girls in our group made plans to go out on the town and enjoy the Berlin nightlife. I opted to stay at the hotel with some friends instead to catch up on the required readings (nerd alert). As they left, one of the remaining boys made the remark, “I can’t believe they still want to go out, after witnessing that display of what men are like here.”
I was angry before I fully knew why, and replied sharply without thinking, “That’s ridiculous. There are guys like that everywhere.”
Thinking back, I’m not sure what made me more angry – the idea that that particular male could have been so oblivious to the fact that women are harassed on every metro system in the world, or the fact that he thought that the girls should change their plans based on that one encounter.
Women walk a fine line between staying safe and not letting fear dictate their actions. When I want to walk downtown on a weekend night in the summer, I find myself weighing how much I want to wear my cute new skirt against how much I don’t want to get harassed on the street – and then immediately hate myself and the world around me for that even being a matter I have to consider. What’s most worrisome is that, in my personal experience, I find that I sometimes internalize society’s horrid habit of victim-blaming – well, I chastise myself, as the perpetrator roars off in his car, obscenities still dripping from his tongue, blissfully free from repercussion – it is a Friday night. I am wearing heels. It is a dimly lit street. What did I expect?
When I repeat those things to myself, I realize that it’s a weak coping mechanism – if I can identify some “mistake” that I made, I can vow not to let it happen again. It lets me forget for a moment that I’m terrifyingly lacking in power to control how my own body is treated in public.
Of course, those self-chastisements do nothing to explain why I’ve also been harassed on a Wednesday, wearing flip-flops, in broad daylight.
Translating this across the sexes, perhaps a male – such as the one in my group who muttered that off-hand remark – feels that if he can blame street harassment on the actions of some drunken fellows and women who “should have known better,” he can excuse his own complacency in the harassment. He can remain comfortable identifying as a “good guy,” who only has “good guy” friends – he doesn’t street harass, and so in his mind, he need not play a role in stopping street harassment.
Perhaps some of my anger came from the truth in my own anger – yes, there are guys like that everywhere, just like there are men (and women) who deny that street harassment is a problem everywhere.
However, I refuse to believe that they outnumber the decent men and self-respecting women who are also, in fact, everywhere.
Britnae is a graduate student at George Mason University, in Virginia, where she is pursuing a Master of Arts in Global Affairs with a specialization in Security and Conflict Studies. She also writes for First Peoples Worldwide and you can read more of her writing on their blog and follow her on Twitter.
