By: Taylor Kuether, Minnesota, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
Glamour magazine is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. Not quite as insipid as Cosmopolitan, nor as unattainable as Vogue, the magazine is a happy medium. When I read things inside its pages I find incongruent with feminist ideals, I can shrug it off – it doesn’t claim to be a feminist magazine, like Bitch or Ms.
So when I gleefully tore into the September issue – the thickest, most important issue of the year – I was startled to find the following on the magazine’s recurring “Hey, It’s OK!” page, usually a collection of quirky things many women do and shouldn’t feel bad about: “If catcalls offend you one day and make you totally happy the next.”
Hey, that’s not ok. If we’re going to fight street harassment, we can’t be “ok” with being objectified as we go about our day. It got me thinking: do women really find catcalls flattering? Do they really take street harassment as a compliment? I posed the question to my female friends and it turns out that, yeah, they do.
One friend confessed that, before she took a women’s studies class in college, she used to feel flattered upon hearing a catcall directed at her. She’d think, “Hey, I guess I look good today.” She described walking to campus, about a six block walk, and hearing everything from wolf whistles to horns honked to words like “slut” tossed at her. As time passed, she said, she went from feeling confident, to feeling bad about “feeling good” about the harassment, to finally feeling downright disgusted.
I appreciate my friend for allowing me to share her story on the blog, because I know she’s not alone. She’s not the only woman in the world who feels good about herself after being catcalled at. The feeling good part isn’t what’s problematic; it’s the source of the validation. That’s what we need to change.
We live in a society that raised us to seek external validation. We were raised to make ourselves attractive to the opposite sex. When we hear that positive reinforcement, be it anything from a friend telling us we look nice to a lewd comment on the sidewalk, we believe we are attractive. In this paradigm, a catcall is praise. A catcall means we’re doing it right.
I say screw that. Make yourself look the way you want to look for YOURSELF. For as long as we feel complimented by catcalls, we are losing the battle. The bigger compliment should be our ability to walk down the street in peace, knowing we’re fabulous and not needing a honk from a passing car to prove it.
Taylor Kuether is a senior journalism student at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in northwestern Wisconsin. She has previously written for The Washington Post and Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, worked as a reporter at her city’s daily newspaper, The Leader-Telegram, and its arts and culture publication, VolumeOne, hosted a local-music centered radio show on Wisconsin Public Radio, and worked as Editor-in-Chief at her student newspaper, where she enjoyed writing biting, slightly rant-y columns about feminist issues.
