Rebecca Smyth, Spain, SSH Blog Correspondent
It is an immense pleasure and privilege to be able to travel, and it was all the more so in a country as wonderful as Portugal. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t bang on about Portugal all the time. I’m probably going to be That Person now. Sorry.
Travelling alone, and travelling alone as a woman, provides ample opportunity to think, untangle and unravel all sorts. So let’s dive in, shall we?
Street harassment seems to exist in a delightful array of regional variations. In Ireland I’ve found it’s mostly the drunken yelling, in Paris it was the stalking and propositioning on traffic islands, in Italy it’s, well, it’s pretty much everything you can think of – maybe they invented it? – and in Barcelona it’s mostly the good old-fashioned wolf whistle. In Portugal they seemed to be big fans of the lip smacking. LIP SMACKING. I wonder if they realise it makes them look like especially creepy orang-utans. I doubt they care. Their aim, whether they are conscious of it or not, is to re-assert their dominance of public space and of women moving through it.
Speaking of, I don’t think I’ll ever fully know just how much I limit myself and my movements because of my gender. I’ll never forget having a chat with a lovely guy I met on Erasmus. We were talking about how much we loved to wander the city. This is something that has a historical precedent, if you can believe it: flânerie. The French would have a word for it, wouldn’t they? I like to translate it to ‘flanning’ because it makes me imagine a flan happily bobbing about, probably humming to itself. And it totally wears a top hat and monocle.
But I digress. Flânerie became a thing in 19th-century Paris and it’s bound up with the birth of the modern city and capitalism and stuff. Well worth reading about, honest. Significantly, those who flanned, les flâneurs, were wealthy young white men. What was their female counterpart? La flâneuse? Nope, the prostitute. Because a woman loitering or wandering aimlessly in public must be sexually available.
This is something I often reflect on as I flan about. And if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s to flan. For one thing, I keep moving as much as I can. I love to walk, and I love to walk about a new place and discover as much of it as I can, but that’s only part of it. The other, possibly bigger part of it is an awareness that I need to keep moving, because as soon as I sit down for whatever reason there is a significant likelihood that I will be on the receiving end of Unwanted Male Attention. Do any of you feel like that too?
One of the easier ways to combat this is to always have a book handy, although it is certainly not a failsafe measure. It worked really well in a restaurant my first evening in Porto though. I felt kind of bad about it – “Is this seat taken?” “Nope” *sits down expectantly* *I keep reading* *he shuffles on* *I eat my delicious dinner* *I leave*
This probably makes me sound like a big ol’ grump – Ah here Rebecca, what’s the harm in having a chat? Chats are great! Oh I know, I know. Striking up conversations, making small talk, bit of chit chat – I am a fan. Apparently as a toddler one of my catch phrases was, “What’ll we talk about now?” So interacting with other humans is not the issue.
The issue is I clearly want to be left alone but because I am out and about in public there is an assumption that I am desirous of your company, that you are entitled to my energy and focus and attention. And I’m not. Nothing personal, just having some alone time with a good book and a delicious pastry. Go away.
So that’s the first limit – I can’t loiter quite as much as perhaps I might like to. And when I do loiter, I need to at least look like I’m busy.
The second limit is the space itself. I am far from being alone in being safety-conscious, and I am acutely aware that as a straight, white, fully-able cisgender individual I don’t face half the limits far too many other people do in negotiating public space and their place in it. I probably don’t feel anywhere near as hemmed in and unsafe. But I have felt both those things when travelling. And it angers me that that’s the case, and that it’s exponentially worse for so many others.
The final limit, and in some ways the one that gets to me most and I don’t know why, is time. Back to Rémi (sound lad, hello if you’re reading) and our chat about wandering Paris. I can’t remember it word for word because it was three years ago, but I think we were talking about our favourite parts of Paris to wander about. He mentioned how atmospheric it is around Notre Dame at night.
“At night?!” I exclaimed. “Around what time?”
“Three, four in the morning.”
“And you’re not scared?”
“No, why would I be scared?”
I would be bricking it. Maybe I’m just especially nervy, but there is no way I would even wander my hometown alone at three in the morning. And I can’t tell you how much I yearn, how much I ACHE, to wander a big city late at night. But I know it’s just not a good idea. Because I’ve been told it and witnessed it enough to know that.
And look, I know in the great scheme of things there are much MUCH worse challenges facing women and other minority groups. And I care about those too, a great deal. But until the day any of us can walk out the door without feeling the need to take just those extra few precautions, even just in our heads, I don’t think we’ll ever really be free.
Rebecca is currently living, working and stumbling through ballet classes in Barcelona. Originally from Kilkenny, she has a degree in European Studies and a Master’s in Gender and Women’s Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and will be doing an LLM in Human Rights Law in Edinburgh this fall.
