Newly released this week, check out Ness Lyon’s spoken word piece “I Smile Politely,” performed by actress April Hughes. Director of Photography & Editor: Luke Bartlett.
Ness wrote about the back story for The Pool, here is an excerpt:
“I’d been harassed in the street personally as a young woman, and professionally I’d handled sexual harassment cases as an employment solicitor, but it wasn’t until I experienced street harassment in my role as a mother that I felt compelled to publicly speak out.
Last year, on a family holiday in Southeast Asia, the part of the world I grew up in and which I adore, a man in the street made a sexual remark to my 10-year-old daughter that left her feeling terrified. I asked her how she reacted to the man’s comment and she answered, ‘I just smiled politely and quickly walked away.’ I felt a surge of anger: how dare that man make my child feel she had to respond to being sexualised with a polite smile. I told her that if someone made her feel uncomfortable, she shouldn’t feel she had to smile. But then I hesitated, remembering the times in my teens and twenties when I’d been subjected to humiliating, provocative and threatening comments by strangers. Sure, sometimes I’d sworn or glared in response. And on one memorable occasion, merely responded with a look of pure disbelief when a man shouted at me to “smile love for God’s sake, it might never happen’…. when I was in a hospital. ON CRUTCHES. But a lot of the time, I too had simply smiled politely, not wanting to offend….
I wanted to explore this issue the best way I knew how: by writing about it. I started by having lots of conversations with a diverse group of women, hearing about the various ways they all ‘smile politely’.
I wrote a spoken word piece about it, performed by actress April Hughes (at WOW Festival and in a video to mark Anti-Street Harassment Week)….
My daughter’s phrase of ‘I smiled politely’ was a refrain echoed by nearly every woman I spoke to about street harassment. I want us to change that conversation: why, when we talk about politeness in these situations, is the word usually in relation to the woman in the scenario, and not the man? Instead of expecting us to simply smile, men need to learn to ‘speak politely’.
